Polystyrene

Although I’d expected everyone to be ill this morning, they were all up bright and early, feeling fine. It was a fairly boring Sunday and warm again.

In the afternoon the sky grew black, glowing dark and vaguely yellow across towards Gaunt’s Hill. Lightning cracked repeatedly overhead and a tremendous hail storm came whooshing down, with hailstones ¼ inch wide, covering the ground with drifts of what looked like polystyrene balls.

Canto eighty three

Another hot and sticky day. Shelley, Susie and I went for a walk up Gaunt’s Hill: the heat was suffocating and oppressive. I was desperate for a drink but had to make do with an ice-lolly. We lounged atop the hill in the haze while Shelley made daisy chains and decked herself out with buttercups before wandering back through the woods. I had a headache.

In the evening most people went across to the marquee behind Wollstonecraft for the Tenant's Association carnival Drink Yourself Silly event. The entrance fee was a fiver but a few people managed to con their way in for nothing.

Stu and I were marooned back in Wollstonecraft Hall, our vow to work hanging around our necks, and we stared across at the marquee, lit by occasional flashes of lightning and echoing to the distant sounds of drunken fun. Lindsey was having a night ‘in’ too. Her arms were sore with sunburn after a bicycle ride earlier and she moped about painfully. I even went back to bed at one point, but Shelley’s breathless voice at my door got me up again. She was drunk, as was Gareth who had spare tickets for Stu and I.

I hurriedly got dressed, grabbed my dope, and rushed over to the marquee.

A scene befitting Dante’s Inferno greeted us. A long trestle table which served as the bar stood at one end of the marquee. Booze was free with the paid admission and the hapless bar staff sweated and slogged endlessly back and forth with ever-empty glasses. The ground was a sodden mass of shards of plastic, mud and grass. Around us sweat drenched people writhed seductively, their hair and clothes limp with the heat, or wandered to and fro clutching spilling drinks. Couples wrapped themselves around one another, mouth to mouth, arms entwined; others danced in the red throbbing light. Shelley swayed and squirmed to the music, smiling drunkenly, Guy seemed pissed but wasn’t, and Gareth was completely out of his brain. He waved an eye-liner pencil around and tried to draw on us with it, catching passersby and snaring Rowan’s Katie. Soon they were dancing face to face while Stu and I stood there disbelievingly. “It makes me feel like a Christian,” said Stu.

All about was a sexual sweat-sodden frenzy. Couples were fucking behind the marquee, others were throwing up, still others openly took a piss. The riotous abandon was amazing and it seemed as though everyone had quite literally gone berserk. Stu and I shared a joint, but really we felt totally out of it. There’s nothing worse than being sober when everyone else is drunk.

We left, partly because we weren’t drunk and it was no fun standing there, and as we walked back across the muddy grass, Gareth caught us up and cadged the rest of my dope. Soon after, they all came streaming, screaming homewards, and campus was awash with manic drunkards, screeching and wandering in the road and destroying things.

Gareth was as drunk as I’ve ever seen him; he rushed frenziedly from room to room, singing continually and chanting at us, before collapsing on his bed and throwing up out of his window. Shelley crashed out in the toilet, whimpering feebly at the thunder which continued to rumble. She stayed locked in there for two hours before we managed to persuade her to come out. Susie had a man in her room, some bespectacled bloke I’d seen her chatting up in the coffee shop a few days ago.

Thus the evening crawled out to its dark and depressing finale, my room an oasis of sobriety as downstairs the foyer was wrecked, ash-cans thrown everywhere, posters ripped down, and the lightning flickered menacingly across the sky.

Transparent

Shelley and I walked all the way into Watermouth; it took us just over an hour. We had a sandwich and cider at The Wagon & Horses before going to the Common Good Bookshop, where I ended up buying Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, Literary Theory (a brand new intro’ by T. Eagleton), and Richard Wright’s Native Son, which I was supposed to read for yesterday’s Black Americans seminar but didn’t. I almost bought a biography of Coltrane too but resisted the temptation and was glad I did.

Shelley went to meet Penny outside Boots at three. I wandered about town, buying pumps and a T-shirt and browsing idly through record shops: at six I met up with Shelley again, in The Frigate this time, near the clock tower.

Soon everyone else rolled up—Barry, who’d hitched in on the back of a motorbike, Guy and Susie, Lindsey and Penny. After an hour or so I went up to the off-license near the station and bought a bottle of vodka, agreeing with the others to meet up down on the beach. I bought Arctic rolls and Scotch eggs, but on the way I dropped the vodka—it slipped through a hole in my coat pocket & crumped onto the pavement—so I had to go buy another bottle.

It had been another hot, sweltering day and was still quite warm. A few people sat about amid the pebbles enjoying the evening.

We settled down with our bags of bottles and started drinking. Occasionally a chilly wind crept across the beach so I lent Shelley my coat. Guy supped from his ½ bottle of whisky, berating me from time-to-time for smashing the vodka. He complained the booze wasn’t having an effect on him and every so often he threw pebbles at us (more often than not at me).

Barry was being surly over political issues once more, patronizing me with comments like, “You’re so transparent, I can see right through you: you’re a classic case of misplaced class consciousness . . .” and so on. He started to get very prickly and hard edged, almost a replica of Carl Cotton and co.

All of a sudden, the whisky seemed to hit Guy, and he stumbled off across the pebbles, waving his arms like a mad windmill and stamping his feet, then running into the dusk to the other end of the beach, a tiny figure falling down once but picking himself up, running further and further until he reached a concrete jetty a few hundred yards away.

Then he came running all the way back and collapsed in a breathless and insensible heap at our feet. Susie fell asleep, as did Shelley, who was hidden beneath my coat. Barry wasn’t very drunk and neither was I. Lindsey sat apart. . . .

Only Guy flailed helplessly about, sliding to his knees, lying on his back, then staggering upright once again, swaying uncontrollably across the pebbles. Then he hunched over his knees and threw up. It was dark now, and still Shelley and Susie slept. Along the beach groups of other idlers lounged before the waves, the neon Empire Pier sign reflecting white in the water.

After lying prostrate away down the beach, Guy revived and began to roll, over and over towards the sea. I tried to bar his way but he came racing towards me, rolling, rolling, and I had to leap over him as in the waves he went. He staggered to his feet, laughing blindly, thrashing the sea with arms and legs, keeling backwards into the surf as I waded in to pull him out. Finally he ran screaming and whooping up the subway onto the prom and back before passing out at the foot of a stack of deckchairs.

We sat for a while on top of these; Shelley and Barry atop one, Lindsey and I atop the other, swigging cider I’d gone up to the off-license to buy. It had been such a manic evening.

At midnight we carried the unconscious Guy to a taxi.

Back on campus, Osibisa were in full flight in the large marquee behind Wollstonecraft Hall, the first night’s entertainment of the annual UW Tenant’s Association carnival. We met a lot of people there; Gareth and Pete, plus Tony, down from London.

Flat of angles

Our flat situation has moved quickly. Barry rang Crown Racing back today and was told that our compromise has been accepted. We're jubilant. Our own flat! We can hardly wait to move in.

We have to pay £114 each (£50 deposit plus four weeks rent, which is £64 each). I will have to borrow the money. We feel we’ve been very lucky in getting this flat for so cheap a price. Shelley and Penny went to see two bedsits today but they were far too expensive.

I expect we’ll have a lot of people kipping on our floors at the beginning of next term.

Ghastly blue

Last night another great storm rolled in from the sea and we sleepers shivered in our beds as the world fell apart above us. I snuggled into my quilt as the ghastly blue flare of lightning lit my room and the sky rattled with ear-splitting cracks and rumbles, as though it was being torn from horizon to horizon. In my half-awake state I imagined I could see the figure of an old black haired woman sitting at my desk. My plastic shrunken head loomed at me from the wall, and looked as if it was about to swallow me up.

It has been a good week in a way. At least I got my essay done; I finally got it written up and handed in today. It’s taken me a week to get it copied out neatly, working on and off for an hour or so every day, and I pinned it to Miriam’s office door this afternoon.