A-Z of Being a Student

Innes MacKay

Description

A-Z is set on the bridge between adolescent dreams and adult realities; and between the town of Oban where Innes MacKay grew up, and the city of Glasgow where he planned to buy his first penthouse. The first of his family to go to university, Innes had assumed that a degree certificate came with a job and a BMW. Then, at the start of his final year, three words from a course mate shatter his dreams and leave him desperate to turn his time at uni into to an unlikely success story, rather than a fruitless, expensive withdrawal on his liver cells and bank account.

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 novembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783067435
• Langue: English

Extrait

The A-Z of Being a Student
Innes MacKay

Copyright © 2014 Innes MacKay
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1783067 435
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador ® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

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Contents

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1
*

The morning after

Things I do know – one minute after waking up

1. I have drunk an amount of alcohol that those at Alcohol Concern would find concerning.
2. I am lying sideways on a bed.
3. My head is on a pillow, and when my eyes have been brave enough to creep out from behind their lids, they can see, a blurry sea of beige.
4. My eyes aren’t working very well.
5. I am going to be calling myself lots of unflattering names today in a Tourette’s meets self-harm fashion i.e. ‘What a total bawfaced bampot I am!’
6. The things I do know don’t make me feel any better about the things I don’t.

Things I do not know – one minute after waking up

1. Whose bed I am in.
2. What I did last night post-8pm’ish.
3. How much trouble I am in… I am such a fucking fanny! (That last bit should go in the list above.)
2
*

The repercussions begin

I felt like shit when I first woke up, but I feel even worse now.
Reluctant eyes catching flickers of piercing grey; guts writhing with buckets of fast eels slipping down narrow, puke-filled intestines. A furious erratic heart punching lazy lungs that would rather give up, heaving clammy warm breath over clammy stale skin. A detached head falling deep into a vast, crushing, murky loch. A brain squeezed into a tight skull, teased by irregular pings of electricity sent up from the base of a worrisome spine.
Worse than all of this though, I’m terrified I’ve made a knob of myself. The reason for this is that I have form in this area. Too much of it. Too much to go into now, but to give you an idea, the last time I was in this predicament I found out I’d tried (persistently) to get off with the girlfriend of a gangster and followed this up by staggering my way down George Street with my willy haplessly flopping through the zip of my Levi’s after forgetting that most basic of tasks following a risky pee up an alley. Luckily the polis were in an absolvent mood (/couldn’t be arsed writing up the paperwork). My friends, who still wind me up about that night, were less forgiving. You get the idea; and here I am again, lying in a bed struggling to remember the night before – all too often a sign that my brain’s too ashamed to inform me what it’s allowed me do after I’ve pickled it with alcohol.
I get my first bit of good news of the morning when I send my eyes out again to see if they can come back with anything more concrete than “you’re lying in a bed”. After a couple of strained efforts, I am relieved to see the cheeks of my Jessica Alba poster come into glorious focus. So at least I made it back to the flat. For now though, nature dictates that figuring out just how I got back will have to wait.
I stumble heavily towards our horrible bathroom and prop my forehead against the wall. With my waist and important apparatus dangling over the pan, I take a long, long piss. I am then greeted by my sorry state in the mirror. My face is colourless and its features droopy. In my best light girls describe me as “cute”, or even “very cute”. Never anything like “hot” or “sexy” though, and I can only conclude that it is the latter attributes, rather than the former, that make them want to sleep with you without a fair bit of persuasion first.
After washing my hands, I’m not sure if I want to point my head or arse at our filthy toilet pan. The answer is probably both, but I steady myself and go to the kitchen for what I hope will be a reviving drink of water. Unfortunately this does nothing more helpful than stop my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. With water not providing any answers, the next progression is food. Something greasy. The thought of this makes me wretch as if I’ve just been forced to lick the coarse polystyrene bottom of a stinking, scaly fish crate. I am obviously not ready for that step.
So not ready for that step that my next reaction is to snap my hand to my mouth, bolt to the toilet, throw myself to my knees and jolt my head down the pan. The rest is involuntary. The water rushes up my throat as quickly and as coldly as it went in, gushing out my locked jaw. Another heave and marching on the back of the water comes the warm paste and chunks of the eels; which happen to be lumps of semi-digested kebab meat that probably doesn’t look much different to when I ate it. When this is up, I’m allowed a quick intake of putrid air before another massive heave. More kebab paste; more foul, stinking liquid. An intake of air and then a deep heave from the pit of my intestines that brings up burning digestive acid that rips at my throat. After some spluttering and shivering I manage a couple of breaths and this part of the torment is over – for now.
‘Why, why, why do I do this to myself?’ I mumble as I collapse back on the cold, dirty and pube-confettied bathroom floor. I lie there lifeless for a while, unable to find the energy to move. If food is not the answer – and it emphatically isn’t – I’ll head for the shower.
A refreshing shower may help, but this option isn’t open to me. Our shower is an instrument of pain. It alternates between dispensing water so hot that it could literally peel your skin off and so cold that it could induce a seizure. There’s a knack to having a shower in our flat. It involves applying soap and standing away from the water while it’s firing out at Guantanamo Bay temperatures, then quickly diving under and washing it off in the brief seconds the spray switches from one extreme to the other.
I emerge from the shower feeling no less like shit, but at least I feel clean, and after I scrub my teeth, at least my mouth no longer tastes like it’s been spunked in by five distilleries. My mind’s still troubled though. Cogs whirl as I try to piece together the night before, but they don’t click to any meaningful recollections.
With trepidation I stand over the heap of clothes at my bedroom door and reach down to pick up the crumpled blue jeans. They’re heavy. I get my second bit of good news of the morning; I have my wallet. Ye olde hopeful look inside the wallet’s cash compartment, uncovers nothing but fabric, but that’s to be expected. I have the same success with my jacket when I pull out my phone from the inside pocket. With only one eye brave enough to witness it, I go to the call log: there is nothing of note, so at least I didn’t drink and dial. There are similar results from text and Twitter, and nothing embarrassing on Facebook. No clues, but at least no humiliation. Yet.
Still wet and wrapped in a towel, I grab another glass of water and end up where I began the morning: lying on my bed, praying I haven’t done anything stupid, and being almost certain that I have. I go back to the last point I can remember in search of the ghosts that probably await me.
3
*

Past night regression

Drugs like LSD and cocaine are referred to as “pharmacological scalpels” because they affect distinct parts of the brain: i.e LSD – the bit that makes you hallucinate – and cocaine – the bit that makes you a wanker. Alcohol on the other hand is a “pharmacological grenade” as it’s a general shitter-upper of all your brain does. It has this affect by inhibiting how nerves talk to each other. So in high doses, it can just as happily bugger up instructions on how you should walk as it can general decision-making. It is also thought to bind to NDMA, the memory chemical, which explains how you can struggle to remember the night before. In my case I’m concerned that in addition to the NDMA blockage, there’s some post-traumatic protectionism preventing me seeing what a dick I’ve made of myself.
My mind casts back to the safety of my first drink. It was early afternoon and we had just finished the first lectures of the final year of our Environmental Science degree at GCU. The lecture had a familiar tone to it. We were greeted with a welcome from the head of year four. He had wasted no time in dusting off the old repertoire. ‘If you thought [insert previous year of study] was tough, then think again. In [insert current year of study] only by really knuckling down can you hope to achieve anything…’
In the same talk last year, we were told that no one had ever increased their mark by more than 8% between year three and the all-important year four. This stat was enough to focus me for the whole of the first week of year three. Still, I had to forget that now. I couldn’t think my hopes of getting anything better than a Desmond Tutu were doomed before I even started. So I listened to some of