Creative non-fiction competition - Winner

‘Let my native American name henceforth always be coffee-shop-crying-wanker’.
 She texted me later that evening, apologising. Somehow, I think she felt that she had hijacked our long planned catch-up, that she had no right to be in pain. I can’t remember what I replied, probably don’t be stupid, you complete wanker. Or something like that.
We laugh when it’s sad, of course we do.
But really, that’s why we meet up. To let out the stuff we must sit on, now that we don’t see each other for weeks and weeks; now that we are making mistakes with kids of our own, now that we have to be sensible. Our feelings have been trained to run in such straight lines these days. Like seedlings in trays. But we both know it’s just for show. Underneath, the roots are still a tangled mess in the soil of our lives. So, we let it out in irregular bursts, like a pump of arterial blood.  A gush here, over coffee. One there, in a text. In scribbled cards. Children who won’t listen, men who won’t say the words, things that no one says thanks for; the things that have really cost us. Our time, our love, our energy.
At base we are the same, my best friend and me. Why else did she buy me that mug on my birthday, the one that says we wanted to be grown-ups so bad… now look at us. Just fucking look. And why else did we both laugh until we cried when I opened it, waiting for our Greek meze to arrive – the one that gave me terrible heartburn. Me, laughing not just because it was a funny mug but because I know she knows me. Her, laughing at me realising it. I know she’s thinking the same, when we manage to squeeze in these oases between multiple jobs, multiple neuroses and efforts to correct them; heartbreaks, ageing parents, kids, appointments. But we look at each other, as the silver hairs multiply, and we wonder how we got here. How is it a light year away and yet just down the road all at the same time? That time when we got so bollocked for fannying about in the home economics room in the fourth year of Juniors that in our collective state of anxiety we forgot to include the eggs in the scones? She went the colour of concrete when we realised.  I imagine I did too. Neither of us could bear the shame. But the scones came out fine, better in fact that everyone else’s.
I think our friendship must have an allocated guardian angel: we got out of so much shit. I remember feeling bad that we wriggled out of things. Looking back, I think the teachers knew we weren’t squeaky-clean but without a bit of leeway we wouldn’t have survived. We were bright and fragile, in a sea of deprivation and chaos.
We were once at the epicentre of a shocking data breach that would never happen now. We told a teacher – one who probably felt enormous gratitude to have kids in their class who were actually engaged – about our crushes on certain fifth year boys and our slightly creepy plan to write to them under some ridiculous nom de plume – Le Secret Sexy Scribbler if memory serves. We were planning to propose a clandestine meeting at the motorway bridge near my friend’s house. We knew even at twelve how the male ego worked. Our ulterior motive was just to get photographs we could moon over, with the crappy disposable cameras for which we’d pooled our cash. We had no intention of meeting them in person, mainly because we were a couple of bespectacled, awkward children in home-made clothing and not a (heavily) implied leggy, large-breasted twenty-something French bird. The fly in the ointment of this plan was not having any addresses to which to send our deceitful epistles. We’d gone through the phone book. We’d made a few investigative phone calls. All fruitless. This was the early nineties, information like that was hard to come by. We poured out our sorry tale and the teacher had listened, amused before walking away and coming back with the class registers with a nod and wink, suggesting we take them down to the office. Under no circumstances, they said, were we to look inside and copy down the addresses of the objects of our desire that just happened to be in their tutor group. We couldn’t believe our luck. We were disappointed of course. Two of the boys’ girlfriends turned up, presumably to give this foreign Jezebel a good kicking and one young man turned up with his mate in tow. Too far away to get a good picture and in the end none of them came out anyway. Think I had my finger over the lens.  
‘We were a bit psychopathic really, when you think about it. Weird as fuck.’ She has said to me since.  I think we were at a soft play centre, hardly able to hear ourselves think, continually disrupted by nappy changes and rescues from high ledges and stroking bumped heads and ordering juice and chips but somehow, we held the conversational threads between us.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘funny though.’
She laughed. I want to say we sat in silence and thought about it for a moment but that has never been us. An ex-partner of mine once said he hated it when we were together.
‘You’re a nightmare, both of you. Talking over each other or actually just talking at the same time. Finishing each other’s sentences, you’re so annoying. And so loud. It’s exhausting. More like a wrestling match.’
I just shrugged at him. Whatever.
We competed a little when we were young but that has mellowed with time. I feel her supporting me from the other side of the city. She’s the one I want, often more than my mother, when something is hard, when something is confusing, when something great has happened. She’s the one. She celebrates me, not just what I’ve done. I hope she knows I feel the same. Because I’m so proud of her.
I remember her toying with an idea for an event, some huge, glamorous thing, and although she was scared – of criticism, of failure – she did it anyway. It was amazing and got bigger and more exciting until she was ten years deep. Every time I could get to a show, I watched her working the room and being gracious and elegant, letting the performers shine and I would think she’s the one shining. That’s my best mate that is.
But I was jealous of her, in my teens. Jealous of her background and her ability, which makes no sense now. Our demographics were different. She had holidays abroad, I didn’t. She got more stuff at Christmas, we were poor. That shit that doesn’t matter now but it mattered to me then and I let it twist me into an ugly shape. I wasn’t there for her when she needed me in her late teens and if I could change anything it would be that. We fell apart for a while. She worked hard and I went off the rails, caught up in my own world of partying and risky relationships while she was suffering. But we never parted ways, not entirely. We share a gravity, and it pulled us back together from time to time. Even now that life has taken over, she’s always in touch at the right time, with advice and tolerance of my questionable choices.
We can’t change what’s done. I just wish I’d been there more to cheer her on when she was putting herself through it. I have never known a person work as hard as she does, and be so successful, and so talented, and have so little belief in herself. She’s a powerhouse. She once busted us out of a phone box we’d been trapped in by some local pillock who thought it would be funny to throw in a stink bomb and hold the door shut. She says it was fear, but I think it was rage. I’ll never forget his face. We didn’t follow the script. Instead of crying or pleading, my tiny friend – four foot nothing – prised that door open and got us out in a hulk-like show of lower body strength, which struck me as the funniest thing I’d ever seen. He wandered away to pick on someone else and we laughed all the way home.
Eventually I grew up and found my way back to her.
It’s hard to choose my favourite memories, they’re all jewels to me. The tapes we made, the scripts we wrote. The letters. Hundreds of letters. Every time she went away and I was stuck on the estate with warring parents – she’d give me a thick package of mysterious ephemera, wrapped and folded like a Chinese puzzle: one letter for every day she’d be gone, with quizzes and word searches and pictures and poems (some quite uncomplimentary of people we knew) all written in the tiniest handwriting you’ve even seen. I don’t know if she knew how important they were to me, lonely as I was back then. That kind of investment was a lifeboat. Maybe she did know, which makes it more precious. The stupid decisions – puking in a bag and leaving it on the back seat of the bus because we thought we’d get into trouble from her Mother. Throwing whities at Glastonbury thinking we were clever. Going to Blackpool for three days and living on wotsits and twixes so we had enough for booze. Encouraging each other to smoke. Encouraging each other not to smoke. Holding each other’s hands through all the losses and disappointments and failures and all the fantastic, shimmering messes we made of it.
I’ve loved it all.
And I love her, my best friend.