The sight of
the sun going down, which brought with it the realisation that they
were soon going to be heading off for the first night of freshers’
week, leaving me here on my own, was what finally dragged me,
kicking and screaming, into action. I made a quick check of my hair
in the mirror, which inevitably turned into a lengthy staring
contest with my own face, and then slowly, cautiously, opened my
door and followed the sound of laughter down the corridor, towards
what turned out to be the kitchen.
Throughout my
reluctant approach to party central I was trying to come up with a
witty line with which to introduce myself, and preferably one that
also explained why I was turning up so late, but all that escaped
my throat when I rounded the corner was an abortive ‘
Ah!’
Thankfully, no-one heard my first failed attempt at communication,
because the kitchen door was shut. A pair of rather tall men were
leaning with their backs to the glass pane, blocking out any sight
of me, so I just stood there for a moment debating between knocking
and opening the door myself. I went for the knock.
The big guy on
the right looked around himself as though he couldn’t work out
where the sound had come from. I’d already embarked on another
internal debate - more angrily argued, this time - about whether to
chance a second knock or go back to my room when the door suddenly
swung open, and the tall bloke’s head was there in the crack
between the door and the wall. He’d hunched himself down, trying to
get down to my level and not quite managing it. I could smell the
Sambuca on his breath. The bottle hung in his hand. His expression
was quizzical.
‘Alright mate,
can I do summat for ya?’ he asked.
‘Ah - um -
I…I, um…’ I replied, as eloquently as I could. My frantic gesturing
somehow managed to convey the point that my vocal chords couldn’t,
because he suddenly assumed a penny’s-dropped kind of face, and
exclaimed:
‘Oh, are you
on our floor? Sorry, I thought we were all here already! Come in,
fella, come in. What’s your name? What course you doing? I’m Tim,
by the way.’ I stutteringly answered both of these questions,
squeezing in and finding myself a free spot in the toilet
cubicle-sized kitchen. The only such spot available was wedged
between the freezer and the wall, near enough out of sight.
‘Cool, man;
don’t think we’ve got any of them in our collection yet,’ Tim
replied. ‘Dom’s a medic, James is a mechanical engineer…Rob’s a -
sorry, what are you doing again? - oh, yeah, linguistics…’ He went
through the names and courses of the twelve guys packed into the
tiny kitchen, and pointed the corresponding face out as he did so.
I tried to keep up, but it all quickly turned into a soup of
disconnected syllables and mental passport photos, floating around
inside my head. ‘…and this is Gavin, who’s doing theatre studies,
for reasons that I’ll never understand,’ he finished, before aiming
a cheeky grin at the last guy he pointed out. ‘Although that’s
probably because I plan on actually getting a job in later
life.’
‘You’re one to
talk!’ the other guy retorted. ‘A bio-med degree is just a polite
way of saying, “I didn’t get good enough results to do
medicine.”’
‘Touché,’ Tim
said, as he clutched his heart sarcastically. Then he added: ‘You
know. I think this might be the start of a beautiful love/hate
relationship.’
The other guy
raised his glass as if to agree, and pretty soon the conversation
they’d put on hold after I butted in - about their respective
tastes in women, sport and movies, their claimed alcohol
tolerances, their disappointment at the shitty nineties’ throwback
act that had been booked for Friday night, and suggestions of
better places they could all go to instead - began to regather
momentum.
‘
I’m from down
South, myself,’ I say. ‘Sort of near London, but not near enough to
really say, “I’m from London,” you know? I’m pretty into sport, as
long as no-one asks me to play it -’
[Laughter]
‘
What sports you
into?’
‘
The old standards,
really. Football’s the big one, obviously, being from England and
everything, but I like a bit of tennis and F1 on the side…’
‘
Who do you
follow?’
‘
Leeds, and I’ll
never forgive my dad for it. How about you?’
‘
Toon Army all the
way. Anyone else base their choice of university solely on
football?’
A couple hands go up.
Feeling courageous by that point, I ask:
‘
Sorry mate, what
were you called again? I’m fucking useless with names.’
‘
Dan. Don’t worry
about forgetting it; I never even heard yours in the first
place.’
Everyone laughs.
I did briefly
think that everything was going rather well until I remembered that
this whole vignette had gone on inside my head, and in reality I’d
just been standing there, silently and awkwardly grinning to
myself, for the previous twenty minutes.
A couple of
days later I was wandering confusedly around the Student Union,
walking on tip-toe in an attempt to see over the other people in
the crowd and hopefully catch a glimpse of the guys from my floor,
but to no avail. You’d think that a group of twelve lads, three of
whom were freakishly tall, wouldn’t have been the most difficult
prey to track down, but even after four laps around the three rooms
of the Union’s basement floor I couldn’t find any sign of them. I
was feeling depressingly sober by comparison to the rest of the
people in here, but that was self-imposed. On the first night of
freshers’ I had decided that the cure for a lack of social skills
was to drink six double-vodka and lemonades in quick succession,
whereupon I promptly threw up all over the bathroom floor after
having to be put the night bus back to the halls of residence. I
was finding it a difficult line to walk; to get drunk enough that I
wasn’t too scared of saying something stupid to say anything at
all, and not to get so drunk that I announced that I wanted to fuck
Tim’s mother - I think I was trying to be funny, but it didn’t go
over very well - and left my regurgitated dinner in a puddle next
to the shower.
I figured I
was well on the sober side of the line at that point, so I decided
to go and get a beer, then hang about around the bar in the hope
that one of the others would happen to be getting another round in
while I was there. Of course, it had occurred to me that my new
floor-mates had intentionally given me the slip and were now
intentionally avoiding me - it hadn’t stopped fucking occurring, in
fact - but I tried to tell myself that paranoia, even pretty
well-justified paranoia, would get me nowhere, and they were bound
to let me have a mulligan for the first night as long as I didn’t
make an arse of myself again in the next couple of months.
I spent eleven
minutes leaning against the bar, all in a panic, looking anywhere
except at the staff, searching for the rest of them. Again, to no
avail. It was starting to look increasingly likely that I’d been
ditched.
‘You’re never
going to get served if you keep acting like a meerkat,’ I heard the
person next to me say.
‘Sorry,’ I
muttered in reply. ‘Just looking for some people.’
‘Let me guess;
it’s turned out you’re stuck in a flat full of smokers as
well?’
‘
Smoking
area…
’ I whispered to myself. ‘
I hadn’t thought of
that…
’ I was just about to scarper off to follow this new lead
when I heard the voice in my ear again, closer this time.
‘Sorry, the
music’s quite loud; what did you say?’ When I turned to face her, I
suddenly decided against repeating my previous answer.
‘Er… yeah.
Yeah I am. You as well?’
She
smiled.
‘Apparently
so. Fancy keeping me company until they show up again?’
‘I guess I
could do that,’ I replied, with a slightly unsure smile of my own.
‘Can I, er…can I get you anything to drink?’
‘I’d better
take charge of that part of the operation; if you’ve been at a
nearly empty bar for fifteen minutes and they still haven’t served
you, I think it’s about time you took the hint.’
‘Mine’s a
single vodka and lemonade, please. It was –ah – a good point, and
well made.’ I was glad the lights were low, because my face went
beetroot red as I said it, but fuck it - at least I said something.
After three days of being essentially mute, I was engaging a real,
breathing human being in conversation
.
‘I hope you
realise you’re still the one that’s paying for them.’
I quite
happily dug a tenner out of my wallet and handed it to her.
As I’d
expected, one glance from her made the barman throw down the tea
towel he’d been using to wipe up spilt trebles and come rushing
over to take her order. She told him it, he poured them out, she
took them, he told her how much it was, she handed over the money,
he handed over the change, she turned to me, passed on the change,
and said:
‘One vodka and
lemonade. Want to find a seat?’ I nodded and we set off towards the
upstairs section, me following behind her. Where everyone else was
stumbling into one another, trying to dance and drink at the same
time and spilling sticky booze across the floor in the attempt, she
seemed to float effortlessly through the crowd. I was having a hard
time keeping up with her, but I was determined that I wasn’t going
to get left on my own again, even if it meant I got a
couple-hundred people’s drinks spilled over me in doing so.
I can’t recall
anything we talked about that night, as we sat on the sofas tucked
away in the corner of the Union, but I can’t remember many awkward
pauses either. All of the questions, all of the jokes, all of the
stories which I’d been mentally writing over the previous week -
the previous summer, even - but hadn’t worked up the courage to say
suddenly found an outlet, and yet none of them had to force their
way into the conversation. Even when I’d burned through it all I
found myself with a whole raft of other things I wanted to ask her,
wanted to find out about her, and wanted to know her opinion about.
It only was after an hour, maybe even one and a half, that either
of us remembered our housemates.
‘Jesus, how
long does it take to give yourself cancer?’ she wondered out loud.
She didn’t seem overly concerned about going and finding them,
though.
‘I know; it
kind of makes me wish I was a smoker.’
‘Well thanks a
lot!’ she retorted.
‘Oh, fuck,
no-no-no-no, I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean that it’s
going to be a bit of a burden to find someone interesting like you
to hang out with
every
time they go for a fag.’
‘Not a bad
recovery. Bit saccharine, though, if I might venture a criticism.’
She smiled, thoughtfully, then suggested: ‘Would this be a sign
that you’re studying something either artsy or fartsy, by any
chance?’
I dithered
over my answer for a couple of moments, and she used this a chance
to re-phrase her question:
‘Just a
second, actually; if we’re going to break off this natural and
spontaneous dialogue to do the obligatory, getting-to-know-you uni
introduction, we need to at least do it correctly.’ She offered her
hand in a mock-dignified fashion. ‘I’m Liz, and I do the
paradoxical pairing of modern foreign languages and English
medieval literature. And who might you be?’
At that point
in time I was still fairly certain that after tonight her and I
would part ways, never to bump into each another again, so I said
this:
‘I’m Dorian,
and I’m doing creative writing and film.’
Neither of
these statements was true, and to this day, I’m not quite sure why
I said them. Maybe it was the fact that she was wearing chunky
plastic Austin Powers glasses.
‘Interesting!’
she replied, looking relieved that I wasn’t doing statistics and
data management.
It was at that
moment that I spotted Tim’s head poking out of the indeterminate
mass of people downstairs. Letting my eyes drift down past his
shoulders, I could recognise at least six or seven of the people
from my floor standing with him.
‘I think the
smokers might have returned,’ I told Liz. ‘I’d probably better get
going before they disappear again.’ I held out my hand. ‘Been nice
talking to you, Liz.’
‘Oh. Right.
Cool,’ she replied, not shaking it in the jokey way she had done a
few moments previously. ‘Catch you later.’
I hurried off
down the steps, but after about three of them I caught Tim’s eye,
and saw the utter indifference etched into his expression. Feeling
like a switch had suddenly gone off my head, I turned around and
jogged back up to where I’d just been sitting. Liz was still there,
quietly finishing her drink. She looked up at me.
‘Not them
after all?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, it was
them,’ I replied. ‘But I was just wondering…erm, if you weren’t
bored of my company yet…Whether you fancied another drink?’
‘Yeah,’ she
smiled. ‘I’d like that.’
‘Cool,’ I
grinned. ‘It’s your round, right?’
Let’s skip
forward again, to the final month of my first year. It was the
run-up to exam season, but no-one was doing much in the way of
studying, because - medics aside - first-year exams count for
something in the vicinity of ‘fuck’ and ‘all’. The first twelve
months at university are essentially a social experience rather
than an academic one, and I spent most of them socialising with
Liz. Instead of being locked in the library revising everyone on my
floor was in Tim’s room, crowded around a novelty hat he’d bought
for Halloween, which had thirteen bits of scrunched-up paper in it.
This was, apparently, the only fair way to decide who would be
living with whom in second year; deals had been bargained for the
renting of two separate houses in the most student-friendly area of
the city - i.e. the place with the highest number of bars - and
everyone had gotten along so famously well during our time in halls
that rational debate would be useless as a tool for finding an
arrangement that didn’t leave at least
someone
feeling as
though their Siamese twin had been forcibly detached from them.
There was one hitch, however; one that had injected a hefty dose of
tension into proceedings. Seven-bedroom houses were damn-near
impossible to find anywhere within an hour of Newcastle city
centre, and absolutely impossible to find for a less than obscene
monthly rent, so the two houses being vied for were six-bedders.
Six plus six equals twelve. There were thirteen of us gathered
around the hat. There were thirteen pieces of scrunched-up paper
in
the hat. The thirteenth piece of paper had a skull and
crossbones drawn on it. Whoever pulled that one out would have to
find some other company to keep during their last two years at
university.