LUKE
Campus was so weird. It was like a really annoying alternate dimension. You were constantly bumping into all the people you didn’t want to see, but the people you did want to see were never around.
I’d spent a whole week trying to ‘accidentally’ run into Phoebe. We’d had two lectures together; she’d been sat right across the other side of the hall both times.
I’d even tried skulking around the entrance to D Block, pretending to browse the munchie machines for longer than was strictly necessary, on the off chance she happened to walk out. But no luck.
On the other hand, as I shuffled down the walkway that led off campus, I realized that this was the fourth time in as many days that I’d seen Caribbean Jeremy. He was sat on the grass next to the lake, a big bag of Doritos at his feet, knocking out a fairly appalling rendition of ‘No Woman, No Cry’ on an acoustic guitar. Because he had his eyes shut, he hadn’t noticed there were two ducks with their heads buried in his crisp packet, cheerfully snaffling away.
I left campus and walked up the ring road, past the massive oak trees and the weird little bungalows where the PhD students lived. It had been a week of nothingy limbo – just Netflix, microwaved lasagne and the occasional spliff with Arthur – but I felt like tonight would be the proper start of uni. This was where the next three years would actually begin. Football initiations.
They were happening in a slightly grubby-looking flat-roofed pub just off campus, and when I arrived there were about five other freshers bumbling about nervously in the car park.
‘They told us to wait outside,’ said one lad called Trev, who I’d spoken to a bit at trials.
He grinned sheepishly from under his floppy dreads. ‘You nervous?’ He was quite short, with a sharp northern accent – Manchester, maybe.
‘Not really,’ I lied. ‘You?’
‘Probably the most I’ve ever been in my life, mate, yeah.’ He nodded. ‘I mean, second most, actually, now I think about it. My brother was on Pointless last year, and that was the most nervous I’ve ever been in my life. It sounds bad, but I wasn’t even nervous for him, really. I was more nervous for me, like, that he’d say something stupid, and then people would take the piss in school the next day. “Oh, saw your brother on Pointless last night, he made a right dick of himself.” That sort of thing. But in the end, he did quite well. He didn’t win or anything, but he got a Pointless Answer. It was on flightless birds.’ He stopped talking and breathed out. ‘Sorry, man. When I get nervous, I chat shit. It’s a medical condition.’
I laughed, and felt some of the tension in my stomach dissolve. ‘Yeah, well, I’m bricking it as well, actually. When I get nervous, I lie and pretend I’m not.’
A few other people arrived, including one bloke who was easily a head taller than the rest of us. He had a stubbly beard and a huge, dirty-blond cloud of hair, and could definitely have passed for a Game of Thrones character if it wasn’t for his bright-green rain jacket.
Drunk Toby from trials arrived just behind him, clutching a half-empty bottle of Schnapps. He started offering it round.
‘Mate, you do know they’re gonna be, like, plying us with booze for the next five hours?’ Trev said.
Toby shrugged and took a swig. ‘Settles the nerves.’
Trev gave me a look as a third year finally opened the doors to let us in. He led us into the back room of the pub, where there was one long, banquet-style table laid out in the centre.
‘Maybe they’re just gonna cook us a really nice meal,’ Trev suggested.
We all took our seats, and I spotted Will milling about, as well as a few other second and third years I recognized. Dempers pulled a chair out at the head of the table and stood on it.
‘Right, freshers, shut up and listen,’ he barked, in his plummy public-school accent. I could easily see him as a red-faced, sweaty politician in twenty years’ time, shouting across the House of Commons. ‘If you do exactly as we say,’ he continued, ‘you will escape from this pub unscathed. However, if you disobey, you will be punished . . .’ He left what he probably assumed to be a dramatic pause, and then slammed his fist into his palm. ‘Severely punished!’
Trev leant in to me. ‘This bloke,’ he whispered, ‘is a fucking tool.’
Dempers reached down into a cardboard box and pulled out a load of metal handcuffs. There was a genuine gasp of either surprise or horror or both from the freshers. All the older lads cracked up.
‘Don’t worry, this isn’t some sick Fifty Shades shit,’ Dempers laughed. ‘You will all be handcuffed to one of your superiors –’ he gestured at the second and third years – ‘and you will have to drink double whatever they drink. So, for example . . .’
He plonked himself down and clicked the handcuffs on to Game of Thrones and then himself.
‘This is probably not a good time to tell you,’ Thrones said. ‘But I don’t actually drink.’
‘Fuck off,’ Dempers snorted. Someone passed him a pint of Guinness, and he downed it, spilling most of it on his T-shirt. ‘Right,’ he gasped. ‘Now you. Two pints.’
Thrones shook his massive curly head, sadly. ‘Like I said, pal. I don’t drink.’ He had a deep, booming Yorkshire accent.
‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ Dempers spat. ‘Then you can fuck off, you faggot.’
I felt myself flinch inwardly, but Thrones didn’t bat an eyelid. He shrugged, nodded, then stood up suddenly and walked off, yanking Dempers to the ground behind him. Dempers hit the floor with a loud smack, and a few people laughed.
‘You fucking dick!’ he bellowed.
Thrones took no notice; just carried on walking across the room, dragging the wriggling Dempers behind him.
‘Oi! Fucking stop!’ Dempers was screaming.
Thrones finally turned and looked down at him blankly, like he was a stone that had got stuck in his shoe. ‘You might want to undo these handcuffs, pal, because I’m not dragging you all the way home.’
Everyone was laughing now, even the older lads, and Dempers was almost purple with anger as he fumbled to undo the handcuffs. ‘Good fucking riddance,’ he shouted, as Thrones walked out.
Will didn’t look quite so convinced. Clearly, having someone Thrones’ size on the team could only have been a good thing. He cleared his throat and waved his hands for quiet. ‘OK, OK, chill. You always get one walkout. Wouldn’t be a proper initiation without it.’
Dempers chucked the handcuffs out and everyone got partnered up, and started drinking. I was cuffed to Geordie Al, who for some reason was insisting on calling me ‘Swift’.
‘That’s four tequila shots you owe me now, Swift.’
Between the third and fourth I asked: ‘Why Swift?’
‘Cos you drink like a fucking girl, mate. Luke Taylor . . . Taylor Swift.’
‘Oh, right. Bit tenuous.’
He downed a gin and tonic. ‘That’s two G&Ts, Swift. Go.’
After a while, Drunk Toby had puked so many times he was literally coughing up air, and Trev had just given up altogether. He was sat groaning with his head in hands while Dempers cackled and took photos of him. I was trying to stop the room spinning, but my head and stomach were both pulsing mercilessly.
‘Some of you are drinking slower than others,’ Dempers bellowed. ‘We need extra nominations.’
I felt a hand clap me on the shoulder and looked round to see Will standing over me, smirking.
‘I think Taylor could do with a more experimental drink order.’
‘Yeah,’ I slurred. ‘If you like.’
Will reeled ingredients off the top of his head: ‘Whisky, Pot Noodle, mayonnaise, absinthe, mustard, Guinness.’
Trev winced next to me. ‘Fuck’s sake, man.’ Will grabbed a glass to prepare this lethal cocktail, but Dempers stopped him.
‘No. He has to drink it . . . out of his shoe.’
The second and third years all cracked up laughing. I looked at Dempers to see if he was serious, and his pinched, unsmiling face told me he was. The mood seemed darker suddenly, more violent. But being massively off my face, I couldn’t tell for sure.
‘Get your shoe off, Fresher,’ Dempers snapped.
‘I’d rather not,’ I said.
He leant down so his face was almost touching mine. He was so close I could smell his tangy, chicken-korma breath. ‘Did you not hear me, Fresher?’ he spat. ‘I said . . . Get. Your. Fucking. Shoe. Off. Now.’
A flash of anger momentarily sobered me up, and I felt like shoving his face away. The second and third years started chanting ‘Shoe off, shoe off,’ and the other freshers were just laughing nervously. I looked at Will, vaguely hoping he might step in and veto the whole thing, but he was chanting along with everyone else.
I took my shoe off slowly to a massive cheer, and watched as Dempers proceeded to fill it with the lumpy, greenish-black cocktail. He handed it back to me and I thought about the Game of Thrones bloke. How could he be that confident to just walk out? How he could be so sure he’d find other mates?
‘Do it,’ Dempers barked. I could see blobs of mustard bobbing up ominously near the laces. I put it to my lips, feeling the noise in the room rise and rise around me, and hoped the drink would just knock me flat out, and put an end to the whole evening.
But it didn’t.
It just made me throw up, quite violently, on my other shoe.
The rest of the night happened in stop motion. One minute we were in a taxi into town, streetlights fizzing by in a blur, fresh air billowing through the window. The next, Toby was gabbling apologies and the taxi driver was shouting: ‘Fucking students! Who the hell’s going to clean up this sick?’
Then we were in some club somewhere, and I was trying to stay upright, as Will yelled in my ear over the music.
‘Don’t mind Dempers earlier,’ he was saying. ‘He gets a bit carried away.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘Sure you’ve seen it all before, anyway.’
I nodded, but the truth was, football drinking at school had always been much tamer than this. More of a laugh. Probably because me and Reece were in charge, and we weren’t exactly going to force anyone to drink out of their own footwear.
Will got his phone out. ‘I’ll add you to the group chat so you’ll know about training times and that. Plus, y’know . . . some extra stuff.’ He handed me another Jägerbomb. ‘Some bonus material.’
I’ve no clue how I got back to the corridor. I staggered into my room, opened the sink cupboard, and tried to focus on my face in the mirror. But it kept dividing at the nose and swimming into two separate faces staring back at me.
I lay down on the bed and looked at my phone. The football group was already buzzing with pictures of me and Trev and Toby and everyone else throwing up. Most of them involved me and the shoe.
I scrolled up a bit and suddenly had to squint harder at the screen to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.
In among all the puking photos there were three pictures, one after the other, of three different girls. Each was asleep in bed, their eyes closed, their hair messy on the pillow. Underneath the last one, Dempers had written: ‘Wall of Shame Top 3 from last year. Gauntlet laid, freshers . . .’
I felt my skin prickle. It was like pressing your eye to a peephole; seeing something totally private that you knew you shouldn’t have access to. I don’t know why, but at that moment, for the first time since I’d got here, I really, really wanted to go home.
I closed my eyes to try and sleep, but the next thing I knew I was hearing voices.
‘Hello?’ someone was whispering. ‘Luke?’ I looked down at my phone.
‘Abbey?’ I slurred.
‘Luke . . .’ she mumbled. ‘Do you know what time it is?’
‘No . . . What’s going on? Are you OK?’
‘You called me.’
‘Did I?’
She sighed. ‘You sound pissed.’ She sounded tired. She sounded like home.
‘I’m not that pissed. How are you? I’ve been wanting to call you. All week.’ I watched the ceiling spin faster and faster above me.
‘Why?’ she whispered. It felt so good to hear her voice.
‘Because . . . I don’t know. Because I miss you, I guess. I was . . . Maybe I shouldn’t have said what I said on the first night. I wasn’t really thinking.’
‘You’re not thinking now.’
‘No, I am . . . I just . . . Uni’s not how I thought it would be. I don’t know if I’m fitting in here. I don’t know if it’s working out.’
‘So you thought you’d just call me and we’d get back together and everything would suddenly go back to how it was.’ She sounded tearful. ‘It’s not that easy, Luke.’
‘No, I know. It’s just . . . Maybe I’m not over you.’ The words seeped out of me before I could think about whether I really meant them.
‘I’m not over you, either,’ I heard her say.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘OK, then.’
And then the ceiling stopped spinning, and I fell asleep.