chapter four

alphabetti spaghetti

The previous morning, Guy Fall had dragged himself out of bed as he did every other morning. He shared a subsiding flat at Holyrood Quadrant off Great Western Road with a fellow student with whom he was barely on speaking terms. The floral wallpaper peeled off the walls of his high-ceilinged bedroom, baring mushroom-brown damp stains. Tall, rain-pocked windows revealed the tenement’s back green strewn with sodden tabloids and porno mags, orange peel, empty and open rusting tins of baked beans and chopped tomatoes and an assortment of holey supermarket polythene bags.

Chilled to the marrow, he kicked down his stale sheets and raised his head from the hollow indent of the yellowing striped pillowcase, pondering whether he was up to facing the laundrette or whether he could get away with postponing it for a further day or two. He yawned, stretched his limbs, cracking his joints, rolled himself onto his feet and stumbled off to relieve himself in the toilet, scratching his scalp, bracing himself for the arctic hall.

He lived in standard student squalor but that didn’t depress him — only the laundrette, populated with its terminal captives of poverty, managed that. As a product of a middle-class suburban home located on the city’s northern outskirts, Fall equated squalor with liberation. He revelled in its decadence. It was temporary poverty. It gave him a baseline from which he would chart his progress. He’d recall it with affection in years to come when he’d achieved his ambition to be the creative director in the city’s hippest ad agency.

Fall was in his first year of a full-time media studies course at Glasgow University, which he was studying as a career route into advertising. Advertising was his obsession. He was as passionate about ads as other people are about books or records or films or paintings. He was a connoisseur of adverts. He could recite taglines and whistle jingles from ads he’d seen when he was three years old. Adverts were visualisations of his conception of paradise. He yearned for reality to be like an advert.

Conversely, he did all he could to avoid the news and never read a paper. If adverts were visualisations of paradise, newspapers — with their never-ending supply of fatal accidents, murders, genocidal atrocities and natural disasters — were daily confirmation of the reality of hell.

But, as Fall shuffled into the toilet and stood shivering and pissing into the lavatory whilst a tap trickled lukewarm water into a grimy bath, his romantic notions of the glamour of squalor soon evaporated.

His flatmate was a reclusive fellow student (who had never been spied on campus during daylight hours but had occasionally been sighted entering the flat from some all-nighter and heading for bed, passing Fall in the hall with a short sigh and an averted eye) with smooth white skin, whose diet seemed to consist solely of long-past-its-sell-by-date alphabetti spaghetti which, given that there had never been any evidence of used pots, pans or plates, he apparently consumed cold from the tin.

But Fall didn’t pass him in the hall that morning. Instead, after crunching his way through slices of burnt toast and slurping a cup of instant coffee, he packed his bag with books and headed out for the lecture he was destined to miss.

He was destined to miss it because, as he turned to lock the flat’s bottle-green storm doors behind him, a figure emerged from the shadows of the communal entrance, silenced him and dragged him back into the shadows.