These aren't the pieces of graffiti I'm looking for, though. I thought this was the desk I'd been sitting at when I wrote it, but obviously not. I've got my books out now, and there's someone sitting at the other end of the desk, so if I get up and leave now I'll look like a right twat. So I sit here and wait and leaf through this book and I don't even read a word and finally the girl is off and then I can head along to the next desk.

Matt T. pissed under this seat in 1994. S.P.J. gave P.T.C. oral sex under the table on March 12th 1997 and P.T.C. gave S.P.J. ten out of ten for it. Chad is a twat. I heart Millwall. Spuggie woz ere, too. But this isn't the desk I'm looking for either. It's obvious somebody didn't come here very often in the first semester. I'd never realised just how identical all these desks look. If I had, I would've left a marker. As it is, it takes me another ten minutes before I find it.

Lee Madden, 1983-2003. I wrote that.

And beneath it, some cunt has written: WHO THE FUCK IS LEE MADDEN? And beneath that, someone else has replied: The world's longest serving fresher - flunked 18 years in a row. And beneath that: I don't know, but he gave good head. And beneath that: How do you know that if you don't know him? And around the whole lot someone has drawn a huge circumcised cock with a permanent marker that's either spurting cum or has a long hair growing out the bell end, or maybe it's a gonorrhoea wart bursting in an explosive fountain of sexually infectious pus. It's fucking sick, that’s what it is.

I take out my pen and add, in the largest letters of all: R.I.P.

NOTES:
Originally this chapter was to have been from an anonymous perspective, and the reader was to guess who, though I think it would always have been obvious that it was the gay character, Andy, so made it explicitly so. However, this isn't a typo. I did end up attributing it to Alex. One of the original arcs of the story would see Andy, who had a crush on dead housemate Lee, transfering his crush to Lee's twin Jack. That got marginalised pretty quickly because it was always more of a comic subplot. This chapter worked just as well from Alex's perspective, who was similarly obsessed with Lee, just not in a lustful way.

Incidentally, some of the graffiti I've described here can be found on the walls of the UEA library. In most instances I haven't even changed the names, even though I always intended to. I think this Spuggie bloke was even on the union council a few years back. I got bored one day in the library in January and started to note down the memorable graffiti. I have seven pages of the stuff now. I had it in mind as an opening device even before I knew what the story was going to be about.