A Year in Fife Park Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m told that it’s the guilty pleasure of many who crave just a bit of attention, but can’t offer a compelling reason for anyone to give it. It was a sort of game, and I called it Shirt Attack. That was a stupid name. Orwell would have called it “EyeCrime”.
    [That would also have been a stupid name, but at least he would have been able to claim it was satirical.]
    Nice place, St. Andrews. But apart from the students, virtually everyone there is pensionable. You can see why; it might be a lovely place to study or to retire, but St. Andrews holds about as much excitement for your average adult human as a soggy Ryvita. Because of this, the town has a population that consists almost entirely of people who get up at noon, take up interminable residence in coffee shops, and are permanently strapped for cash.  Charity shops have flourished. And so did my wardrobe because, frankly, you would be surprised at how much stuff in places like that might set alarm bells ringing in most airports.
    [It’s a commonly held misconception that old people love charity shops, but I’ve never found that to be the case. Old people shop there out of necessity. Virtually everything in a charity shop belonged to somebody who was old, and is now dead. Nobody wants to shop in that kind of environment. Imagine if Sainsbury’s did a 2-for-1 on soap, with the slogan ‘maybe you’ll be dead before you need any more soap’. That would have to be some seriously cheap soap, on a day you really needed more soap.]
    Don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t just wear any old tasteless thing. It had to be special. In second year, I found a shirt that looked like it was made of glitter and mother of pearl, and held together by the silvery excretions of an excitable pixie. That became a staple for a while. My first year favourite had been in orange and blue, and looked like one of Picasso’s ‘angry period’ works. It met a grim fate the night I fell down a nightclub’s biggest flight of stairs to what was very nearly my death. I was drunk and arsing about. [My greatest regret is that the scar under my eye has such a worthless back-story.] It was a narrow escape from a fairly typical first-year fatality. The shirt was not so lucky, sustaining a mortal wound that unthreaded it wear by wear until it simply fell apart some time after the start of second year.
    Oxfam on Bell Street was also where Vikki did her volunteer shift, which was cynically calculated on my part and, looking back, a bit creepy. I saw her at the checkout on the way in, and almost tripped over my own feet like the suave motherfucker I’ve always been. I went straight to the shirt racks, and collected myself while browsing through. As usual, a Geiger counter would have been useful. I found some kind of green, blue and violet paint-splashed nightmare of a shirt [it was pretty rad, ba-dum tish] and, hoping it would be a talking point, I took it up to the checkout.
    ‘You going to the ball tonight?’ I asked.
    ‘The James Bond one,’ Vikki said. ‘Yeah.’
    ‘I think it will be a lot of fun,’ I said, in what would turn out to be the least accurate prediction of the day.
    ‘Hope so,’ she said, disinterestedly. ‘You getting this shirt for tonight?’
    ‘Yeah, I think it will go with my suit,’ I said, in what would turn out to be the second least accurate prediction of the day. Vikki didn’t even look at it. 
    ‘That will be three pounds, please,’ she said. I handed it over.
    ‘Thanks,’ I said. Then the conversation was over. I had been looking forwards to it all morning, and it was just a brutal transaction. I walked out of the shop in a daze. The door jangled on the way out, just like it does on the way in.
    When I got home, I tried the shirt on. The buttons were all on the wrong side.
    ‘That’s because it’s a blouse,’ Craig said. ‘They button up differently.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Yeah, girls button up everything the wrong way,’ McQueen confirmed. ‘What