The doctor said I should talk to you, Claire, as if everything’s fine and you’re able to hear, because you probably can. It struck me as a funny thing to say because ordinarily when we’re together you can’t shut us up. It’s a wonder we haven’t run out of things to say by now. Forty years! That’s how long we’ve been friends, Claire. Can you believe it?
Do you remember when we first met back at Intermediate, how I defended you against that tall girl who used to spit on kids’ food, so they wouldn’t want it anymore and she could eat it herself. I told her to fuck off even though I was scared out of my mind and I’d never said that word out loud before. I was stunned by my own boldness. The girl just shrugged it off, moved on to the next well-lunched kid. As for you and me, we were best friends from that day on.
I was thinking about these things when I was driving to the hospital just now. Like, how we fell out of touch for a while after high school, when you moved to Dunedin for uni and I was at design school in Whanganui. At the time I knew our friendship was changing but I didn’t dwell on it. It was only natural our interests and the choices we made would lead us down different paths. Your focus was depressing literature, mine was fashion and textiles. We had whole friendship circles unknown to one another. For me, friends were made and lost at the drop of a hat, something to be tried on and quickly discarded if it didn’t suit. Kelly appeared in my life. You were consumed with that boyfriend of yours—that’s really what got me thinking today—and you never actually met Kelly, but you came close. I was with her when I got the call the first time, all those years ago. Not such a random connection, after all. I wasn’t there for you, Claire, and I should have been.
*
I met Kelly leaning on a bar in Whanganui’s most popular student dive. We already knew each other by sight. Whanganui was Kelly’s hometown; I had family living there.
“You’re Jess Davies, right? I went to high school with your cousin Mike,” she said. Michael was a dickhead—still is, but if Kelly held this opinion, too, she didn’t let on. She just grinned drunkenly at me and presumably I did the same. With one expendable line we were fast friends.
Kelly was training to be a glassblower in those days. She was a girl suited to the intense heat of the blistering furnaces and steaming water, the gritty textures of crushed quartz and frit. Her small wiry frame handled the heavy iron blowpipes and weight of molten glass like she was made for it. She had calluses on the palms of her little hands.
I was using speed in those days, taking whatever was on offer; quaffing energy drinks spiked with vodka. Not Kelly. She liked her bourbon and coke, the odd spliff and smoking weed from her handcrafted glass bong. She liked classic rock. I liked her consistency. Kelly knew who she was, or perhaps she simply never wondered by what criteria she was defined, like I did—constantly.
I turned up to see Kelly at the studio. I was in awe watching her gathering and blowing glass. She showed me some of her finished pieces, organic sculptural forms, air-bubbled and flawed; candy-coloured like over-sized boiled sweets. I picked up a small lilac bowl with opaque copper swirls riding the undulating contours. It was an unlikely colour combination, but somehow it worked. I turned it over in my hands entranced by the cold resistant smoothness of the curves, the variations of thickness and shape.
“I want you to have it. The bowl,” she said, apparently reading a look of confusion on my face.
“But, it’s not my birthday!” I said moronically.
“So?” She laughed and that threw me too. Her generosity overwhelmed me. I couldn’t understand the motive behind the action. “Fuck, mate. It’s just a bowl.” She laughed again, squinting her eyes so they wrinkled at the edges.
“Wow. I love it, Kelly. Thank you.”
“Actually, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out,” she said.
Kelly’s gesture sealed our friendship. We began to spend more time together. We could be found sitting out the back of a grimy café, drinking coffee and reading our horoscopes in the local paper as the rancid odour of spilt milk released itself from cracks in the brick courtyard. We put a lot of stock in the advice of horoscopes back then. We accepted the blind flattery they provided and made sense of their coded confusion to our own ends. There were always trivial questions, uncertainties and problems to be solved in our silly lives, especially around relationships, and horoscopes were easily bent into the shape of answers.
Kelly’s boyfriend Jono worked in the kitchen of a three-star hotel. I don’t know if cooking was his main ambition or if he was failing at something else as well. Jono made me feel nervous to be around. There was something raw and edgy about him. He had a temper that flared unpredictably and self-confidence I wanted to match. It went against all conventional logic, but Jono was that most irresistible type of male: untamable.
Kelly didn’t want to change him. She accepted him, knots and all. They were cut from a similar cloth of small-town commonality and just comfortable with one another. They expressed themselves without pretense, like siblings do. If one was pissed off, they’d come right out and let it be known. It didn’t matter who heard. The same went for happiness and affection. I was both appalled and fascinated by this emotional transparency. They were such a perfect set. I wanted to possess them both.
I suppose you could say I instigated it. At least, I knew what I was doing when I rocked up to the hotel at the end of Jono’s restaurant shift. The bar was one of those tacky places with mirrored walls, populated by the multiple reflections of a few subdued patrons. Simultaneous disorientation and self-consciousness were the effect. Bottles behind the bar were backlit by fluorescent bulbs. Midori greens and chartreuse yellows, blue curacao and cherry reds were given a garish laboratory look. It was not a place you’d want to be if you had an acid trip coming on. Jono was sitting at the far end of the bar looking surly and unkempt in his food-stained chef’s uniform.
“Hey Jono,” I said casually, as though this was a place I frequented. He didn’t even look up.
“You out tonight?” he said.
I propped myself up on a bar stool beside him and opened a packet of cigarettes.
“I was just heading home. Thought I’d pop in.”
“Not really your scene though, is it?”
“Whose scene is it, really?” I said, as Jono flicked his Zippo to light my cigarette.
“Mine. Can’t beat the staff discount and I’ve got a tab here, so.” He shrugged. “What’re you drinking?”
“I’ll have a glass of red.”
My choice, I thought, embodied both sophistication and seduction.
Our faces were close in the flat light and unfurling blue smoke. He wasn’t conventionally good looking, Jono. There was something too angular about his chin and cheekbones, his thin lips and narrow nose, but those glassy dilated eyes with their pale blue rinds were electric. He looked at me, taking only a moment to evaluate the situation, then he turned to the bartender and said,
“Two Quick Fucks, mate.”
After a couple of shots, a transformation took place. The gaudy bar with its neon and mirrors was converted into an adult candy store where light and colour was caught and refracted in the abundant glass. Chemical processes, both natural and artificial, altered our own compositions, heating and cooling, blending in our bloodstreams, bending our synapses. In this fluid state our passions were inflated, the process natural. This was how it always played out. We never spoke about it. There would be some detached chat and then a proposition.
“I’ve got some MD, if you want to?”
Before long we’d be screwing recklessly against graffiti in a toilet stall, or on an empty beer keg out the back in the alley behind the bar.
Don’t worry, Claire. I’ll spare you the details. I imagine you’re cringing deep inside right now. We never did talk about things like that, you and me. You considered sex a private thing. And I’m not proud of what I did. That’s not why I’m telling you this.
The first time it happened, the following day, I woke up in my bedroom alone. The rain was coming down hard outside. My initial conscious memory of the previous night sent a flood of guilt crashing through me. In my dark room, on the table beside my bed, Kelly’s bowl seemed to glow unnaturally. I stayed in bed the whole day, sleeping intermittently, waking only to be admonished by the steady sardonic applause of the rain.
Some months later Kelly turned up at my flat. She was jumpy, biting down her nails and smoking heavily. I had a sick feeling that things had come to a head and I braced myself, meaning to deny everything. Soon I realized if she’d been there to confront me, I would have been knocked out cold on the floor from the start—it was what I deserved. She said she thought Jono was cheating on her. She had no proof, just a strong suspicion. Her voice was breaking but she didn’t cry. She wasn’t that kind of girl. I let her talk it out without saying much, except that she was probably being paranoid. Eventually she conceded; she was almost her usual self by the time she left. Even so, I was shaken; it felt like a fair warning.
I distanced myself from both Kelly and Jono for a while, engaging instead with my design school friends and focusing on my work. I had a thesis to pull together as well as my final collection. My girl was a twenty-first century urban huntress: feminine but tough; edgy and elusive. I developed ideas around survival, resourcefulness and visual deception in the urban jungle. Soft pastel fabrics were screen printed with industrial motifs—wire mesh, cladding and studs—man-made patterns which mimicked skins, scales and animal prints. My theme was emerging. I commissioned Kelly to make tiny russet drops of glass that I attached to findings and threaded on nylon cords to be worn at the throat, ears and wrists.
Throughout the night I sat bent over my industrial sewing machine with pins between my pursed lips. I manipulated the fabric over the feed dogs, under the relentless needle, stitching lines to join deliberate shapes, matching patterns, line upon line of small perfect stitches; lines to stay awake through the night. I felt the vibration of the heavy machine through my fingertips, an endless tuneless refrain: a stitch in time saves nine a stitch in time saves nine a stitch… My right foot pressed on. The old machine clattered and whirred, sucking at the power and causing the lights in the flat to flicker and dim, rattling my nerves. I left my seams frayed and raw.
It must have been late October, then, towards the end of the second semester when you did this for the first time. We hadn’t been in touch for ages. I was having coffee with Kelly in the garden at my flat when my mum called to say you’d been admitted to hospital. Your boyfriend was sleeping with other girls; you couldn’t take it. It hit me like a bitter chemical-tasting blow.
I had to tell Kelly I couldn’t use the jewellery she’d made for my collection. It would be grossly inappropriate. I had that much sense, at least. I wanted to confess to her what I had done with Jono, but I couldn’t get a word in. She talked on and on in a kind of buoyant way about her cousin’s suicide, like life goes on, people live and die. I was stunned. I couldn’t relate to her; I couldn’t empathize with you. I was doing a fairly sound job, killing off brain cells on a daily basis, sucking and swallowing and honking up poisons without a care, just like pretty much everyone else I knew, but I still thought my life was the most precious, perfect thing on the goddamn planet. Hearing that you’d tried to take your own life, tried in earnest, it didn’t seem real to me. It didn’t make sense.
I visited you when you came home to your parents’ place after you were discharged. Kelly insisted on coming with me for support. We drove down to Wellington in my old Ford Cortina. She waited for me in the kitchen, cheerfully prattling on to your nervous mother, while I sat at the end of your bed and awkwardly tried to mend the absence I’d created in your life. It scared me to see you so small and frail, hemmed in, pale as the bed linen. Your forearms were bound, lying tender and limp at your sides. I didn’t know how to forgive myself for what you had done.
After we left, Kelly started going on about her dead cousin again, and still in that jovial, she’ll be right, roll with the punches, water of a duck’s fucking back way of hers. And I couldn’t take it.
“Shut up, will you?” I snapped. “Claire’s my goddamn best friend!”
And she said, “Jeez, sorry. I’m sorry, Jess.”
I wanted to say, “Don’t be so damned cheerful. I’m fucking your boyfriend. I have been for ages now and I can’t stop. I don’t even think I want to. Nor do I care. That’s right, I don’t care. Some friend I turned out to be. I put my best friend in bandages. Not me exactly, but someone like me. Someone who couldn’t leave another girl’s boyfriend alone, someone who wanted what wasn’t theirs, someone who would spit on an apple, so they could eat it all themselves; someone who wasn’t even hungry and poor, just greedy and vain and stupid!”
I didn’t say any of those things to her. I left her standing by your parents’ gate and I ran hard, like a deranged faun in my platform boots and faux fur vest, away down the footpath.
The year was fast coming to an end. We were young, and time was pushing us ever onward. Even your attempt to stop the future was just a bump in the road. The cyan skies of late spring were washing our mistakes away. There were shows, parties and exhibition openings to parade about in. My collection was a success; anxiety was replaced with a strange mix of melancholy and excitement for the old and for the new, respectively. I was moving on. I thought about Kelly, about saying goodbye. Whanganui was her hometown, where she would stay. I flipped a coin to decide my next move; loaded up the Cortina and left town.
Around five years later Kelly’s gift, the lilac glass bowl with the rust-coloured swirls, was broken. It felt longer than that, a lifetime even, that I’d been coupled with this object. I’d taken it from town to city, from one place to another. I never stayed anywhere too long in those days, I couldn’t settle. That bowl always went with me. Wherever I lived, it would be positioned in a place best lit to enhance its natural qualities. People often commented on the unusual colour combination, but how it worked, against intuition, to create something plainly lovely. I could only agree. Sometimes I would add,
“I knew her—the artist, yes. We were quite good friends in that brief and intense way that young women can be. But we fell out. Well, we all do stupid and careless things at times, before we know what it’s like to be hurt ourselves.”
I was moving again, in with a new boyfriend. My packing had been hasty. I can picture Kelly’s bowl perched above the lip of the box, nestled loosely in an upturned hat. Scrawling the word fragile in black vivid on cardboard isn’t accident insurance, but I would be responsible for transporting this particular box from the car to the house. I was on the concrete steps when I faltered. The bowl simply tipped over the edge and broke as it hit the step. That was all it took. It seemed perfectly inevitable.
“Don’t worry,” my boyfriend said. “We can fix it.”
He didn’t know anything. After all, glass breaks.
Now Claire, here we are at the end of my story.
“So what?” you might say. “It’s just a bowl, a throwaway friendship, a meaningless affair. There were no consequences for your actions. Nobody got hurt and life goes on.”
But that’s not true, not really, is it?
I sometimes think that Kelly knew the truth all along, but like all things in her life she accepted what she couldn’t change. You don’t try to change a person, you simply can’t. It took me years to work that out. Here we are, years on, repeating old patterns, old mistakes. I’m still pretending to be someone I’m not. You’re still trying to end your life. I can’t change those things. I can’t change the past. Forgive me, Claire.
Asked what was on her mind when she wrote her story, and why she wrote it, the author replied, “It was developed from a creative writing exercise on emotional transference onto a lost or broken object.”
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