Kate Leaver - The Friendship Cure

Contents

KATE LEAVER is a journalist for Glamour, The Guardian, The Independent, Pottermore, Red and Vice. In Australia, where she was born, she was features editor at Cosmopolitan magazine and senior editor at Mamamia. She lives with her boyfriend and their dog in London.

HarperCollinsPublishers

First published in Australia in 2018

by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

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harpercollins.com.au

Copyright Kate Leaver 2018

The right of Kate Leaver to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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ITS THE FIRST WEEK of university. Cambridge, 1998. That tender, exhilarating week, when you feel like you have to choose your friends for life, right there, on the spot. Gillian is 19 years old; Liz is 18. They meet and they like one another, but they toy with the idea of befriending other people.

Days into university life, Gillian and Liz discover theyre both reading English. Theyre sat next to one another in a class about playwrights and on this particular day theyre studying Harold Pinter. The teacher calls for two women to read one of Pinters scenes out loud. Its called The Black and White, from A Night Out. Its from a collection of tableaus by Pinter; a series of little life stories. This one is about two old ladies dunking bread in soup and watching the world go by. Its one of those flawless sketches mundane in perfect measure, like its been written straight from life.

Gillian and Liz are nominated to read the scene. They giggle, as teenagers do, even that close to 20. The teacher (Peter? Ed? They only remember that they were already on a first name basis) reads the stage directions aloud.

THE FIRST OLD WOMAN is sitting at a milk bar table. Small.

A SECOND OLD WOMAN approaches. Tall. She is carrying two bowls of soup, which are covered by two plates, on each of which is a slice of bread. She puts the bowls down on the table carefully.

Gillian is THE FIRST OLD WOMAN, Liz is A SECOND OLD WOMAN. Or was it the other way around? Whatever; they take an old woman each and they read the scene, which is a quaint little meditation on hot soup, social interaction, bus timetables and the dangers of talking to strangers as an older woman. They taunt each other about flirting with strange men, imply they used to be troublemakers and peer out the window to check when the bus is coming. It is a rather perfect little glimpse into friendship between old ladies.

During that scene, with the ease of youth, Gillian and Liz become best friends.

That was nearly two decades ago, that class. Gillian and Liz are now in their late thirties and theyre still best friends. In fact, in homage to the Pinter play that cemented their friendship, they have a standing date for the year 2040. Its a Facebook event with only two guests: Gillian and Liz. In roughly two decades, theyll go back to Cambridge, find a diner within walking distance of a bus stop, and order tomato soup with complimentary bread. Theyll natter on at one another about public transport, the audacity of the young, men in uniform and the passage of time. Maybe theyll recite the Pinter scene, maybe by then theyll have their own grievances with hospitality and strangers. Either way, theyll be there, a lifetime into a friendship that started one day in 1998. Theyll have a language only they understand and that curmudgeonly way of speaking that you have to earn with old age. Their kids will have had kids, their husbands might still be around, their families will keep them alive. But after all those years, theyll be the ultimate ambassadors for lifelong friendship: THE FIRST OLD WOMAN and A SECOND OLD WOMAN. And oh, what a glorious achievement that will be.

When I try to predict my own future, theres one thing I know to be true: my friends will be there for it. When I daydream about my life to come, the elements of existence dance uncertainly. Marriage? Sure. A long and fascinating career? Yes, please. Kids? Probably. But friendship is my non-negotiable, my definite, my always. I can see it now: five or six of us playing lawn bowls in the sunshine, drinking wine, squabbling about decades of shared history. Therell be a few new hips and knees between us, several dentures, a couple of hearing aids. Well have some kind of mutual vice that our doctors and children wish we didnt have alcohol with our blood pressure medication, a regular stash of hash cookies, an old-timer gambling ring, some late-in-life mischief we can cackle over. Well have our own shared language; maybe its bus timetables, maybe its the creeping heat of summer, maybe its the proper rules of Balderdash. In my ultimate fantasy of old age, we live together or at least, on the same street. Were within shuffling distance from one another, possibly with walkie-talkies for ease of communication. Whatever happens between now and then, we choose to close our adulthood the way we started it: next to one another.

To me, thats the ultimate in friendship. Its the promise of soup and cantankerous behaviour decades from now. Its a tacit pact to stay in each others lives by choice, not because biology compels it. Thats what friends literally are, after all, theyre the family we choose. Or, perhaps its better to say that staying friends until the end is the gold standard in friendship. Its the dream. There are so many complex, lovely, toxic, frantic, fleeting manifestations of friendship for all of us. Its what defines us at every turn: the people we choose to keep and the people we leave behind. Every time we interact with someone new, we work out whether we want them in our lives and if so, in what capacity. Each new acquaintance has the potential to be elucidating, destructive, fabulous, painful and sublime. How we manage our relationships with other human beings is what makes us who we are.

There are the legacy friends weve had since preschool or primary school, the ones we cant quite let go of because the longer we are friends, the more accumulative history we have in common. There are the family friends we just kind of adopted from our parents, like pseudo cousins who grew up around us. The high-school friends we originally chose out of necessity because adolescence is a game of survival and you grab whoevers closest to you on the first day. The university friends we actually consciously select using our almost fully developed frontal lobe. The work friends we spend more time with than just about anyone else in our lives. The accidental friends we collect along the way and keep until its too late to discard them. The casual friends we get on with at parties but dont bother to pursue beyond that. The Facebook friends we make partly out of social obligation, partly because on some days, somewhere in our souls, we still count the number of social media connections as a measure of who we are. The Twitter friends we banter with when we should be doing work. The Instagram friends with whom we only ever really exchange likes. And every accidentally on purpose acquaintance in between: our ex-boyfriends particularly fabulous mother, our sisters friend, our friends sister, our old drama teacher, our swimming coach, our gender studies tutor, our trainer, our psychologist, our grandmothers doctor, our favourite barista.