Her name was Constance though I only knew her as Connie.
She’s dead and now I want to talk to her.
Alive she seemed to have words for everything – I didn’t, not way back.
We became friends after her family moved to a house near us.
At thirteen I soon called her my best friend and there was some relief to have that settled – she was my friend and there was an end to it.
A lot else was unsettling but I could, at least, rely on Connie to walk to school with me.
How much we might want each other’s company was never a question – going together was what we did.
We giggled and talked and found plenty to say, it’s only looking back I see what was not spoken.
I probably once wanted a best friend more than I cared about developing my own judgement.
A half formed sense of things stayed in shadow, while Connie was decided in many opinions.
She seemed like an adult in that and I did not begin to disagree.
It interested me how she could have certainties and I was wary of showing myself as missing some quality needed to give me an equally firm shape.
And Connie had plans.
For her the future seemed to have a reality which I could not believe in.
But I went along with it when she got out the atlas for us to decide where we could go.
While Connie took the lead I wouldn’t admit I didn’t understand how anyone saw far ahead.
I barely knew what might happen in a month, my body was probably about to begin to menstruate, while Connie seemed able to step over confusions and sound in control – although she led only in some ways and just expected me alongside.
Sometimes she impressed me but more often it felt a matter of flowing with her, without giving voice to any doubts.
She’d had a more glamorous life in a city before her father took over his uncle’s legal practice in our town, where he could have a garden as big as he wanted.
Connie told me we didn’t have good shops – because you couldn’t buy the books her mother read – her mother who despised the magazines most women seemed to get.
My mother liked her “Woman’s Weekly” trying its recipes and an occasional knitting pattern.
It had not occurred to me my mother’s pleasure might be inferior.
But then I began to wonder if rather a lot had not yet occurred to me.
Connie, with confidence, read her poetry to her parents as well as to me and this was certainly a surprising possibility.
I’d kept mine entirely hidden and Connie had been a friend for two years before I quoted one of my poems as we walked.
She had just read me her latest and only when she asked “Whose work is that?” I admitted having written it.
I’m not sure she was pleased.
She was almost a year younger than me, though we were in the same class, and that gave me a slight edge, even if it didn’t cancel out her confidence in knowing the city and its better ways.
I wanted to know more too and was eager for the city she already knew.
I would read those better books, then perhaps I’d see for myself if magazines were so inferior.
My mother had her own judgements and one was that comics were bad for us – only proper reading was going to improve her children.
But then my younger brother, Peter, became a constant reader and that, our parents said, was too much.
Besides he began to find dark books in the library and at fifteen read philosophy which, apparently, was not good.
But how could I disagree with my parents or Connie while it was confusing that they could be sure.
Perhaps something in me was missing and I should be careful others didn’t recognise this.
Years went by before I no longer shrank from Connie’s clarity in fear I might be faulty.
We both went to university where opinions whooshed around us.
Though I was absorbing ideas they weren’t caught or fixed.
But Connie was soon convinced that we must join the Women’s Movement and there find a tribe and belong.
With each phase there was a crucial book all her friends simply must read – whatever the current bible I too was expected to be a believer.
She was not a bully or always instructing, we had fun and laughed a lot, but in her family she was definitely the eldest of four, expecting to be steps ahead, lettings others know the way.
I had two older siblings and one younger and seemed to move sideways to wriggle away from the moral authority of that older brother and a bigger sister both having interpreted our parents, expected to pass on how things should be done with more weight than either my mother or quieter father.
Connie’s mother intimidated me. I believe she didn’t think I was the most promising friend for her first born.
She made it clear that once we left for the city and university Connie would find exciting new friends. She did find other friends but kept me close and five of us got a flat in our third year.,
It was during that final year when everything changed.
We didn’t discuss it at the time but decades later Connie told me that she’d had to put up with my “breakdown.” That term seemed to imply my behaviour was a failure of some kind and I would not accept her judgement.
Certainly there had been a failure to be as available to Connie as I had been once I was taken over by a huge event.
Of course she was sympathetic when Peter, my eighteen year old brother, killed himself. Everyone was briefly kind.
But that suicide left me covered in a thick layer of horror.
Connie soon decided that in becoming preoccupied with his death I was losing the living.
All I knew for sure was the clichés and pseudo explanations would not do. I owed Peter more than that.
Perhaps his death sucked me into some of the blackness he knew.
Later Connie told me I contaminated the whole flat, not just my bedroom where I mostly stayed.
Back at the time she became certain I needed help.
I did not think that was up to her and, though I did attend the appointment she set up with the student counsellor, it was far too soon,
What words did I have?
I knew Peter’s death was on top of me and though it was just possible to get air into my lungs, it was still impossible to see or speak clearly.
Yet there was Connie expecting me to explain myself to her.
She was not at the centre of that massive family quake but of course was subject to aftershocks and those she came to resent.
I didn’t realise while it was happening how far my turmoil swept around her when, as she saw it, she’d gone to university for good experiences.
As I had done though for me Peter’s death superseded my smaller hopes and expectations.
I wasn’t looking to escape all his suicide brought – Connie was. It wasn’t her family.
Connie’s mother, no doubt after hearing her daughter’s complaint, sent me a book on grief and marked pages for my attention.
Connie was pleased so I didn’t tell her that this map I was expected to read might as well be double-dutch while my head was still a blur with more than I could take in.
Nevertheless my resistance to Connie’s notions of being helpful became a sign to both of us that I was no longer coasting alongside her.
Another friend told me I unnerved her, she couldn’t imagine what Peter’s death had done to my family and probably didn’t want to know.
I could deal with that.
I kept going home. At least there it was obvious that the terrible had actually happened – nothing was the same as before his death and never would be.
I didn’t have to be the same either.
There was no choice anyway.
But Connie was losing me as the friend she’d known.
I didn’t miss the ease of friendship because too much simply separated me from her, since I stayed immersed in all Peter’s death thrust into my heart and face, and that was too big to share – there was just this seismic shift with no pining to go back to what had been.
Such a possibility never occurred to me, so it didn’t register when Connie expected that return.
Peter’s disastrous act had to be reckoned with.
University now felt thin since none of my courses began to answer the muddle, which I had to confront. But how?
I started reading Peter’s books but they didn’t address my questions.
Why had he done it?
Why didn’t I?
Did Peter have any idea of the impact his suicide would have on family and his close friends?
Did he care?
He had grown condescending as he read philosophy the rest of us failed to value.
Although Connie and I began slowly drifting apart after Peter’s death, our jobs and partners took us further away from each other.
But Connie had scores to settle.
We met up and it seemed she expected me to take responsibility for impacting on her precious time at university.
Not that she put it like that – though she said “Your breakdown was very hard. You should know how it was for me.”
Something in me snapped!
“Why should I want to hear if you begin with a knowing assessment – why call it a breakdown?
What if it was an understandable reaction? How can I regret that Peter’s suicide knocked me sideways?
What sort of person would I be if it hadn’t?”
In sticking up for myself I failed to wonder why, after twenty years, she expected me to account for spoiling her final year.
There was my view and her different one in conflict.
She didn’t tell me she had breast cancer and was scared.
She died and left me ashamed of standing my ground, finally insisting on my own judgement, and not wondering what had prompted her to come with a challenge.
She had once been my closest friend.