Man Of Few Words

Chapter 33

Alright, so I am going to pay them a visit. It's all arranged. Next week on... um... I did write it down. Somewhere.

Well, it doesn't really matter if I forget. Hat 'n' Mat are coming to pick me up and take me to Pearford, so as long as they can drag me into the car, it doesn't really matter if I'm ready. Or expecting them. Or...

Look, I'm sure they'll let me know when they're on their way. It's not like I'm going to double-book or anything, is it?

I'm going to ask them, my parents that is, about... them. I'm going to ask them together about how they met, and hopefully separately about their lives before they met. And I'm going to pay attention too. Even if I'm not really interested, even if they're droning on and on in that way they do, I'm just going to remind myself, "Material for the book... material for the book... material for the book..."

But I should find some material for the book in my own life too. I've touched on my childhood and adolescence. I guess university would be the next major stage of my life. So, what else did I do apart from writing for the student magazine?

Well, I certainly slept a lot. And I drank. I very occasionally read a few carefully selected pages of books. And I attended lectures and seminars, but rarely paid any attention.

The actual university part of going to university was largely forgettable. The things I remember most clearly from that era relate to home life. Studying at university isn't so different from studying at school. But living with a handful of other students is a world away from living with your family. And everyone copes in their own way. Me, I was a note writer. No ordinary note writer though, I tell you. I'd like to think I was one of the greatest passive-aggressive note writers that ever scraped a 2:2.

I started experimenting with the form during my first year, when I lived in halls. I quickly learned that I just wanted the fifteen fuckwits I shared a floor with to leave me alone at all times. A large note placed on the outside of my bedroom door simply read "NO".

It was effective. Sort of. I was almost never disturbed, and miraculously the same note lasted the entirety of all three terms without being torn off once.

The only side-effect was that occasionally small groups of drunk girls would gather outside my bedroom door late at night and attempt to outdo each other screaming "YES!" at my "NO" as loudly and orgasmically and as hysterically as possible. I quite liked that though.

After the... I think it was the fourth time someone set off the fire extinguisher in the hallway, I snuck into one of the girls' rooms and stole a teddy bear. I taped it to the wall next to the fire extinguisher using a thoroughly wasteful amount of parcel tape. A note above it read "This is a toy" and another above the fire extinguisher read "This is not a toy".

They still couldn't tell the difference and, perhaps inevitably, the fire extinguisher was set off a fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth time before the year was out. Some might argue that the eighth time didn't count though, seeing as something was actually burning at the time it was set off.

Yes, on that fateful night, one of the co-habitants of floor 3 of St. Peter's House – let's call him Toby – came home from the pub feeling a little peckish. He went to the kitchen and began boiling some rice on the stove.

About an hour later, two more lads arrived home from a different pub and immediately noticed a burning smell in the hallway. They opened the kitchen door and, reacting quickly to what they saw inside, dashed to the hallway and retrieved the fire extinguisher, pausing only for one of them to slur, "Jus' gonna b'row 'iss f'r second, mate," to the teddy still affixed to the wall beside it.

They rushed back to the kitchen and, in the nick of time, unleashed the full force of the fire extinguisher into...

...Toby's face!

He was sat at the kitchen table, his head slumped against the wall behind him, fast asleep.

"Wakey, wakey! Dinner's ready!" the two would-be firefighters howled and cackled as Toby spluttered to his feet. Then they ran away.

The next day, I scraped the former rice out of the pan in which it had first boiled dry then burned to a solid black lump, and into a large glass jar. Then I taped a piece of paper with 'RICE' written on it onto the side of the jar and put it in the cupboard alongside various packets of pasta, pots of instant noodles, tins of beans and... well, that was pretty much all that was ever in that cupboard, actually.

Anyway, the eighth time still counts if you ask me.