When I left Australia almost four years ago, I left behind some of the best friends I’m ever likely to have. The kind of friends who stay up drinking with you until 5am because they know you need to sift through the debris of that break-up one more time. The kind who help you plaster your suburb and all the suburbs abutting your suburb with posters to help find your lost kitten. And the kind who take your kitten with them to the country one year later when you renege on your promise to come home.
When I first landed in London I was lonelier than I’ve ever been before, the kind of lonely that eats at you while you’re watching daytime TV because you can’t even find a way to insinuate yourself into other people’s normal lives. Loneliness that sends you out on an hour-long tube ride to a gig you’ll watch alone and go home from alone having only managed to speak to the bar staff. Don’t get me wrong – I love to be alone. I’ve travelled alone and loved it. I’m one of those people who regenerate alone. I usually struggle now with how to get enough time on my own. But back then, the loneliness had its teeth in me.
For the first few months I clung desperately to the friends back home that I’d left behind, and they reminded me that I did actually deserve friends and would likely make some again, sometime, probably. I called home as often as I could sneak the call in at my sister’s house. I emailed as often as I could afford credit at the EasyInternet place on Trafalgar Square.
Things weren’t good there, either. C was still cutting herself and drinking heavily, bludging money for cigarettes and wine from the few people she kept in touch with – mostly people who remained in our share house – and their patience was wearing thin. This had been going on for a long time. I started pulling away. I couldn’t bear their sadness and my own.
By the time C moved to a small country town in the south west of WA, we’d all but lost touch. Her phone had been cut off. She rarely had enough change for the internet café even when I did send her emails, which wasn’t often. I’d started to settle into my travelling self a little bit and was distracted. It showed. We kept up with each others’ news through a mutual, more diligent, best friend. That let us off the hook, I think we thought.
She moved to a town with no phone reception and no internet café. I took my first ever proper job at a fun place, and suddenly had friends to play with again. I heard she was happy, in love, being looked after, off the booze. The few times I spoke to her she described an idyllic life: fruit trees, a veggie patch, clean air, a menagerie of animals, a boyfriend who played her songs on his guitar. In my dilapidated, student-y house, walking past murder inquiry posters every day, in smoggy, filthy, flinty London, it sounded too beautiful to take.
Nearly three years later, I found out it was. Our mutual friend told me that things sounded sinister, C seemed afraid of something. Later we heard that, during an argument, her sweet, talented boyfriend had wrapped a garden hose around her neck. She emailed me a few times but was anxious that he would intercept our mails. They knew every detail of each other’s lives, including email passwords. I asked why she couldn’t leave. It was because of her dog, and the animals. There was nowhere she could think of to go that she could take her dog to, and she couldn’t bear to leave him. Where everything else in her life had drifted away, Argos had been the steady point of the compass. She stayed because although she thought she could leave her home, her bad relationship, her town, she couldn’t leave her dog.
I told her to set up a new email account, and she said that she wanted to move back to the city, and had heard there was a job going at the bookshop we both used to work in. And then dropped off the radar again.
Last week, she emailed to say that she’d got the job and moved up to the city. Today she sent me her first-ever text message. In the precise, correct type of someone who’s never even seen a R U GOIN 2B L8 sort of a text, she signed off with: ‘Love your elbows. Mwa! Mwa! XX’
Sometimes them phoenixes take forever to do their thing. But it’s always worth it.
Because Bill Hicks said so.
