A Year in Fife Park Read Online Free PDF

but it was empty. And not like because you didn’t mean it. That’s why it was sad. Because you really did mean it, but it didn’t matter.’
    ‘Well,’ she said, eventually. ‘I’m sorry our break up was so traumatic for you.’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘It was.’
    ‘Well,’ she said again, more lightly, ‘It’s not all roses, all the time.’
    I grinned. ‘I may never love again.’
    ‘Hey, you had your little crush back then, do you remember?’
    That brought the colour to my cheeks.
    ‘Remember?’ I said. ‘I was wearing a fucking blouse.’
    I raised the tea to my lips, and got the cold dregs of the mug. How circular life is.

Thunderballs
    The James Bond Ball, a.k.a. Thunderball [Ha fucking ha] in First Year was the single worst night I had in St. Andrews. I don’t blame the organisers, although it was a bit lacklustre. I don’t blame the venue, although the Younger Hall could suck the life out of an orgy with extra tits. No, I blame myself, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to do so. I should mention that I also slightly blame Craig and McQueen for being such pricks about it all. Later on, I threatened to kill them.
    But, if it wasn’t for that night, I might never have realised what a precipitous gulf so obviously separated me from adulthood. And I’m not talking about sex or money, here. Those chapters come later and, fortunately, separately. I’m talking about your obvious, usual, common or garden goddamn motherfucking social graces.
    At that time I was into a medic called Vikki. She was cute as a button. Button nose. Round cheeks. Wide smile. Really pretty. I really didn’t know her at all, but fuck it all, I was still a teenager. I was also an emotionally-stunted idiot.
    I had my one big falling out with McQueen over Vikki. It was an old chestnut, thoroughly roasted; McQueen knew that I was into a certain girl, and he wasn’t. But when she went for him, he returned the favour. For the fuck of it, I guess, because he unceremoniously dumped her a week later. Just long enough for it to feel insulting both ways.
    ‘The problem is not me,’ McQueen said. ‘The problem is you.  You’re the one who made this into something.’
    ‘But you didn’t even care ,’ I said.
    ‘And you don’t even know her,’ he replied. ‘So how could you?’
    I can’t even remember how I followed up on that, but I did. I must have, because it didn’t end there by a long way. I didn’t listen to Frank. He didn’t listen to me. But I don’t think we could have understood each other even if we’d been trying.
    Of course, for some reason that obviously didn’t seem like a double-standard at the time, the logic about Frank not interfering with my potential love interests did not apply the other way around, to myself and his previous ones. I know this because I was still inexplicably determined to make it with Vikki, around the time of the Thunderball. And hell, I reasoned, she was single. Again.
    This is what I’m talking about. Who would not just give it up as a bad job by this point? Who would not, for the mere avoidance of awkwardness, drop a stupid and uninvested crush like a hot stone the minute it became inconvenient? All I can offer is that sudden, ridiculous, capricious and unrealistic infatuations are the mark of a young man. If he is also a cunt.
    So, the morning of the ball, I went down to the Oxfam on Bell Street, rounding the corner with a spring in my step. Bell Street is possibly my favourite street in St. Andrews. I have no idea why, other than that Aikman’s used to be on it. I just always feel a bit brighter on Bell Street. Oxfam on Bell Street was one of my prime haunts for shirts of mass destruction.
    I had a thing for shirts that were unorthodox, garish, tasteless, loud, psychedelic, frilly, or whichever combination of the above most narrowly trod the line between ‘quietly assured eccentricity’ and ‘offence punishable by law’. I recognise that this is a character flaw.