Me Life Story

by Scarlett Moffatt

  Siân was the straight talker of the group. She was brutally honest and told us to get our finger out of our arse when we were slacking with our studies, and she was also the one to tell us we needed bed and water instead of another 70p bottle of VK. Despite this, if you mentioned the words ‘dance off’ she would be twerking and doing the box splits in a flash.

  I was the joker of the group, never refusing a night out and always up for a giggle. Apart from going out on the lash, some of the funniest moments at uni were when I was vegging in front of the TV with the girls. We would all just watch movies, gossip, slag everyone off and eat pizza.

  We’d normally watch rom-coms because Zoe would pick the movie. Films I hate (despite being a Disney Classic lover), like Dear John. I hadn’t even watched them and I could predict the ending. I’d be like, ‘This is what’s going to happen.’

  And they’d say, ‘Oh don’t spoil it, you’ve already watched it.’

  ‘No, it’s just so predictable. They’re going to die together or she’s going to love the one that’s poor because they always do, because love conquers all.’

  I actually hate rom-coms. I’d rather watch Saw or Scream. I feel like that’s more real life. The shit that happens in Saw would be more likely to happen than Dear John or Letters to Juliet.

  But Zoe chose them, so I would have to watch them. And everyone would be crying, and I’d be like, ‘When is this going to be over?’ I’d be crying through the sheer pain of watching it, and they’d be crying because they were so emotional.

  Why are all rom-coms about two hours long? You can literally squeeze the whole plot into ten minutes: poor boy meets rich girl, girl then forced to get engaged with rich boy because his family and her family are friends, she realises she has to go with her heart and goes back to the original poor boy because love conquers all. That’s the story done. Let’s condense it and make it into a ten-minute YouTube video, acted by puppets. That would be easier.

  And it’s always the same actors and actresses. So then I’ll start to get confused. ‘So he dies?’

  ‘No,’ they reply. ‘That’s in the other movie.’

  Another thing that annoys me is the girl will get dumped and she will accidentally bump into the love of her life a week later – hello, he’s just a rebound! That’s not real life. Why is no one on Tinder? Why are they not stalking their exes on Facebook? Because that’s what happens in real life when you split up with someone – you start stalking the life out of them. They never do that. They never even get upset. They have a little cry on the night and then they’re like, ‘I’ve got to pick myself up and get out there again.’

  I’m distressed for a whole month. I’m like, ‘Oh, my life’s not worth living, I’m going to be alone forever.’ On a Sunday at around about eight o’clock at night, I start thinking of every bad choice that I’ve ever made. They never do that in movies. They need to make them more realistic.

  The sole consolation was that during these movie binges I’d always be in the reclining chair. I think the others knew that if I didn’t have the reclining chair, then I would be in my bedroom because I hated watching stuff like that. As I’ve said before, you can’t decline a recline. So I’d just be lying right back, contemplating life.

  Zoe, Jess and Sarah would be sat on the big couch and Siân would always be on the floor. Because she didn’t live there, she didn’t have her own chair space. She had to just sit on the floor. You have to get bumped up to that position of chair-sitting royalty. It’s like if you visited the Royle Family, you’d have to sit on the floor as well. Where else are you going to sit? All the other chairs are taken. So Siân would sit on the floor all the time. God bless her.

  Because I was never in charge of picking the movie I’d just end up downloading the films I wanted to watch on my Dell laptop upstairs after a night out. (Way before Netflix days, I’d have to wait an hour for it to complete and even then the film would buffer throughout.) Honestly, I’d be like an owl. I’d stay up till like four in the morning just watching horrors. I’d have a couple of hours’ sleep and then go to my lecture.

  I loved lectures at university, it’s the complete opposite to school. At school you have to take what you’re being taught as the gospel truth, but at uni it’s all about questioning what you’ve been taught. I am not an argumentative person but I love a good debate. Especially when it was a 9a.m. lecture and I was still a bit tipsy (which was quite often).

  I know the reason I’m quite a recluse now and why I don’t feel the need to go out all the time is because I was a social butterfly in York. For four whole years I partied non-stop so I’ve got all that out my system. I went to types of parties that I didn’t even know existed: foam parties, school disco, UV parties, house parties, Toy Story parties, pyjama parties, everybody dress as something beginning with an F party, honestly any kind of party you can think of I’ve probably ticked it off my list.

  ‘Where’s Wally?’ parties were the best. You’d always lose a friend because everyone was dressed the same. You’d be like, ‘Have you seen my friend? She has blonde hair and is wearing a sort of slutty Wally outfit – low-cut stripy vest, blue tiny hotpants and those 3D glasses you get at the cinema but she’s poked the lenses out of them.’

  It was all harmless fun. That’s what I said to my parents at home when I called them to tell them I had passed the ‘initiation test’ to become part of the hockey society. I didn’t actually play hockey. I mean I did a couple of times but I had no interest in the sport aspect of it. I wanted into the hockey social club because they went out every Wednesday and most of my friends were in it.

  ‘Hiya, Mam, you all right?’

  ‘Yeah, we’re all great, I’ve put you on that speaker thing so Dad can hear you too.’

  ‘You alreet, kid?’

  ‘Yeah, you sound concerned. Of course I’m fine.’ I was very hungover, eating 99p noodles out of a plastic container but I wasn’t going to let on.

  ‘Just your mam seen you had all rips in your clothes last night on that book of faces.’

  ‘Facebook, Dad. Mam, I’ve told you not to stalk me on that.’

  ‘I can’t help it. Anyway, I clicked onto a few people in the picture and I seen a picture and it looked like you had a bottle of wine Sellotaped to your hand.’

  ‘I am fine, honestly. I’ll explain, please don’t freak out. So you have to be allowed into the hockey society by all the second and third years. They are in charge of the first years, us freshers, that’s why we all had to dress as slaves and then we each do a challenge to prove ourselves worthy. That’s why my clothes had rips in because I didn’t want to actually spend any money on an outfit so I just ripped up a really baggy white top, wrote “slave” on the back and wore ripped tights with it.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Scarlett, it sounds like a demonic cult.’

  ‘No, Dad, it’s just like when you get asked to down a pint at the football. Anyway coz they know me and Sarah are best friends, they set up a challenge for both of us. It was a pint glass filled with port, red wine, red VK and this red sambuca shizz. We had to drink it all, but not through a straw – through a tampon.’

  Looking back, I suppose this was my first ever Bushtucker Trial in a way.

  ‘And these are the people who are going to be future doctors, lawyers, politicians and teachers? They sound barbaric!’

  ‘No honestly, it’s a good laugh, trust me. One girl had to eat mealworms so I got off lightly.’

  ‘But that doesn’t explain why you had a bottle of wine stuck to your hand.’

  ‘Right, well one of the rules they had is you are not allowed to go to the toilet while anyone is getting initiated. I told Sarah I wasn’t peeing in a bucket in front of anyone so I was going to sneak out. Well, they noticed didn’t they, so they Sellotaped a bottle of red wine to my hand as a punishment.’

  What I didn’t tell them is that I couldn’t leave until I’d drunk the whole bottle. I mean, it should be made illegal really. How I was still st
anding, I just don’t know. (At least I didn’t have to do what David Cameron was allegedly made to do. If you don’t know what I mean Google ‘Pig-gate’.)

  I mean, how bad is this? Jess, who I lived with, is lactose intolerant. So at the initiation ceremony, they gave her a bottle of milk and she had to drink it. I mean, really! They knew that – that’s why they gave her it. It’s evil, isn’t it? In the second year, I didn’t go to the initiations. I felt too bad putting the freshers through what we all went through. Some of those girls were really, really mean. But the thing is, regardless of that, the hockey society still organised really good Wednesday nights out. Swings and roundabouts, really.

  So what would happen was, the social sec – my friend Chloe – would plan the Wednesday nights out. You would just get a text out of the blue:

  ‘This Wednesday meet-up point: 7p.m. outside Salt & Pepper Takeaway. Theme: television. You have been given the character: a Banana in Pyjamas. C x’

  Other people would turn up dressed as characters from Baywatch or The Simpsons. My friend had to dress up as Lisa, so she painted herself all in yellow and ended up not getting the deposit back from her landlord because half the walls in the house got stained. In hindsight, I wish Gogglebox was out at that time because I could have just walked around with a chair strapped to my back and sat down whenever I wanted. That would have been a perfect night for me.

  People went all out on those fancy-dress nights. One night we had to go as something dressed as the letter F. One lass went as a full-on fence. She’d got a big long bit of cardboard and cut it out, so it was like a white picket fence. She had to walk sideways into all the bars.

  You would get slagged off by the others if you hadn’t made an effort. There was a lot of pressure. There was a girl called Fiona, and at the F party, she came as herself. The rest were like, ‘That’s shit. You need to go home, mate.’

  The most memorable night out for me was the night I got burgled while I was dressed as a burglar. Oh my God, it was so ironic. One of the hockey club’s nights out was a ‘cops and robbers’ theme. All the first years had to go as robbers. So I wore a black and white stripy jumper and a little mask, complete with a swag bag. We were in the club Tokyo, and Sarah and I were shattered. I just wanted to go home. Zoe and Jess said that they would follow, but we went to the kebab shop on the way home, so we thought that they would be back before us.

  We were eating our chips with a tub of garlic sauce in the taxi, and then when we got back, all the lights were on. So we were like, ‘Oh, Zoe and Jess are already in.’ We knocked on the door and tried to open it, but the latch was on. We were like, ‘Let us in, it’s freezing!’ but no one answered.

  I rang Zoe and could still hear the music in the background. At that moment, my heart dropped. We peered through the window and Zoe’s bedroom was upside down. All the drawers were pulled out. So I rang my friend Oliver, who was a rugby player and lived at the end of the road. I was like, ‘You need to help us get in.’

  He banged open the door, but what had happened was that the burglars had got a paving slab and thrown it through the back window. The neighbour was like, ‘Oh yeah, I thought you just had your telly on loud.’ What would we be watching that sounds like a paving slab going through a window?

  The thieves had literally stolen everything. They’d even taken Jess’s suitcase to put our things in. But obviously when the police turned up and we were all dressed as burglars, they thought we were taking the piss. They were like, ‘Just so you know, this is wasting police time. You will be given a caution.’

  ‘But we’ve really been burgled!’ I cried, swag bag in hand. They genuinely thought we were taking the mick until they went in the house.

  Sarah’s mam Wendy came for us the next day. I just wanted to go home and burn my swag bag. When Wendy arrived she gave us all a huge hug. She made her way through the house. ‘Oh God, look at the state of it,’ she said. She was in my bedroom. ‘I can’t believe it, Scarlett, I am so sorry this has happened. They’ve trashed the place.’

  ‘No, Wendy. They just took the laptop from my bed.’ My room was a tip from getting ready. That’s probably why they only took my laptop; they must have thought they had already done that room.

  I was gutted they had took me laptop. Not because it was expensive because it wasn’t, and it was like lobbing a sack of bricks around it was that heavy. But they’d also stolen the dongle that was in the laptop with all my work on. So then I had to go to uni and give them the crime number because obviously I bet they heard that story all the time. ‘Well, actually that work was stolen from me.’ But it really was.

  I had to just do the work again in two days. I think it was my worst mark ever. I got like 40 per cent, so I just passed. But it was too much to do in two days. I’d been doing it for like a month and a half. I sort of still remembered the books that I’d used so it wasn’t as difficult. But still, trying to do six weeks’ work in two days was almost impossible.

  I thought that the lecturers would have given us a bit of leeway or given us a bit longer. But they didn’t. They were like, ‘It’s still due in then.’

  ‘But I’ve just been through the traumatic event of being burgled while dressed as a burglar and now you’re telling me I’ve got to do all my work in two days!’

  We can giggle about it now because we were dressed like that. I think if we’d just been in normal attire it would have been more of a traumatic event. They actually found some of our stuff – they were selling it in Leeds Market. One of the criminals was actually ‘friends’ with a couple of us on Facebook, and he’d seen that we were all on a night out. He was just a randomer that had seen our posts on Facebook. Firstly the picture that showed where we lived because we had stupidly put a photo of us outside the house, like, ‘Yay, new house!’ And the next post was us all dressed up, ‘Yay, we’re going for a big night out!’

  I think what they had done is they’d just added loads of people who were friends on Facebook with the university. They knew freshers were going to have new laptops and stuff. It has taught me to be a lot more careful on social media.

  So much that sometimes I even block my own mam off Facebook. Now this sounds harsh but she would call up and be like, ‘You cannot go out dressed like that,’ so I would just block her for a few nights so she couldn’t stalk me, and then add her back again. Or she would say, ‘I thought you had an essay to finish so why are you going on another night out?’ To which I always replied, ‘Mam, would I even be a student if I didn’t do all-nighters and finish my essays at the last minute in the library?’

  I decided to get a job to pay for my new laptop. I remember sitting in a little office in the Topshop in York about to have an interview for what would be the first in a long line of student jobs. It was quite easy to get part-time jobs in a busy student city. I had only been to uni for three weeks and I was already running out of new clothes. ‘I’ll apply for Topshop,’ I thought. ‘You get 60 per cent off; I’ll have a new wardrobe before long.’

  That job lasted three months. I take my hat off to Topshop girls; they make such an effort for work and that just isn’t me. They would come in looking like they’d just walked off set from a Black Eyed Peas music video, wearing black lipstick matched with super-skinny jeans with some sort of avant-garde hairstyle. I would rock up looking like a hungover student in basic black leggings and an oversized jumper with my hair in a top-knot.

  I didn’t get as much make-up as I was hoping for Christmas so that was next on my job list. I managed to get a job at Clinique, with a whopping 70 per cent off make-up. I worked there for a few months – and loved it. However, after a couple of warnings I eventually got the sack for the most ridiculous reason. Apparently I was making all the customers ‘too orange’. Yes, I am known to love a bit of bronzer; yes, I did like to go a couple of shades darker than people’s skin tone; and yes, sometimes people’s faces ended up a different colour to the rest of their limbs but I just like giving people that ‘just come back
from two weeks in Tobago’ look.

  My manager kept saying, ‘You know, Clinique is all about looking au naturel.’ But I’d reply, ‘It’s cold outside, let’s make people smile. Everyone feels better with a tan, don’t they?’ I was gutted when I lost that job; no more £3 eyelashes that were so long I had to throw my head back to open my eyes.

  My favourite job at uni was when I worked at a club called Salvation. It was the big club in town, but the queue was always massive. We didn’t have to queue anywhere else in York because we were out so often we were friends with most the bar staff, door staff and DJs. But we didn’t know anyone at Salvation. ‘Well, I’ll have to take one for the team and start working there then,’ I told Sarah. I would sell shots or do promo for them. I was one of the arseholes in the street with a big bomber jacket on, giving leaflets out. You know, the ones that you cross the street to avoid. That was me.

  I even remember the jargon I used to give to passers by. ‘Excuse me, can I just stop you please? I’ve been looking all night for someone who looks like they know how to have a good time and wants to get mortal. I’ve only got a few of these flyers to give out – it’s to make sure the club is filled with fun people to give the place an even better atmosphere. So if you hand this leaflet in at the door you and your pals get free entry and a free shot. You know it makes sense.’

  Even though we would be out in all weathers until stupid o’clock in the morning we had such a giggle. Plus there was a pasty shop that was open until about 2 a.m. so if morale was down we would all just go and get a big Cornish pasty.

  I always had a job throughout uni. I was even a quantitative research analyst for three months. I always seemed to be skint though. I didn’t even know where my money went. Recently I went for a catch-up with my friend Zoe. She had brought her friend Christie down with her. Zoe said to me: ‘Tell Christie how many big shops you did when you were at uni.’

  ‘What do you mean?’