The Blueprint by Marcus Bryan Read Free Book Online Page A

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