Chapter 6: Falling Apart

This chapter begins as Tanya collapses and is rushed to hospital with an ectopic pregnancy. Catherine blames Victor for not being around for Tanya when it happened. While all this is going on, Victor looks to increase his third year work rate by purchasing a computer and begins looking at options. Victor introduces Nathan to his northern friends at Wembley as Preston take on Wycombe in the play off final. Tanya and her Essex friends take Victor to Royal Ascot’s Fourth day. At the end of their tennancy Victor and Nathan ‘do a runner’ from the house leaving Carl and Mauli with money for the final bill payments after living out the last month’s deposit. As the term comes to an end Tanya decides Victor should stay in Essex with her family over the summer break and manufactures two jobs to keep him there. Victor exhausts himself nine to five in a graphic design position in Walthamstow, Tanya then picks him up, feeds him and transports him to a bar job in Fairlop from seven to midnight for the next twelve weeks. Victor writes a letter to his close friend Mark back home saying “I’m starting to reach breakdown point.” By the end of the summer he makes enough money to buy the computer outright.

In August Carl’s dad writes Victor an angry letter for outstanding money left on the gas bill. Their friendship would never be the same again.
Victor’s grandmother dies at the end of the summer all his hard work pays off and just before he moves back to college to live with new housemate Lewis and also Nathan for a second year. Victor sees his grandmother before she passes away and the sight of her bruised defeated body and spirit disturbs him.

Within a month of the new term Victor buys the computer he worked so hard for over the summer. This instantly affects his relationships with Nathan and especially Tanya. Nathan gets his father to buy him a computer and Lewis soon follows suit. The three bedroom flat is now an office. Victor begins to spend all his time working and spares nothing for Tanya. Subsequently she is asked to take a lead role in a film being produced by Contemporary Media Practice student Gideon Barnes. She accepts and begins to spend alot of time with him. After campus rumours start of an affair with Gideon, Tanya falls ill with foreign cells on her womb, possibly cancerous and is admitted to hospital for keyhole surgery. Victor visits her on recovery and after a night of no sleep, he plays football for the University and scores feeling accelerated. This heightened state improves his work on modules “Information Application”, “Typolinguistics 3” and “Representation & Mapping” whilst working with Alan, a student he is becoming close to.

Whilst becoming a supportive boyfriend, agressive sportsman and super hard working academic Victor and Lewis develop a hefty weekly consumption of cannabis which along with the coffee and sleepless nights promote paranoia. Nathan encourages this with a campaign to terrorize Victor in his own flat by holding gun fights in the darkness using fake Reugers, while Victor locks himself in his bedroom. Nathan also heavily criticizes Victor over “putting people in pigeon holes” when it comes to any social interaction at college. After watching the film Shallow Grave, Victor is deeply affected by it’s subject matter in relation to a group of friends living together and what they may be capable of doing to each other.