The Other is Gold

Wednesday afternoon. You are friends. You feel that the tongues of your trainers are hard with mud. A breeze strokes your limbs as you run with the ball at your feet, you keep your head down too much, or at least that’s what your Dad always says. Still, this time you look up, and see he’s made a good run into the area. You slide a pass towards him, and it’s good. Both his feet are off the ground when he strikes the ball. It pings at an impossible speed past your rucksack, the goalpost, and rattles around on the road. Together you do a victory lap, around the bench, the post box, and to the bin. Later, you walk home. His mum fills you two tall glasses of Coke, and you fall around laughing watching The Simpsons. You are always laughing.

You have to change schools. It’s time for Secondary and he goes private, you go grammar. Nonetheless, you are more excited than sad. He is around the corner still, and always will be. The school is new, clean. You are welcome there, and you have a lot in common with your new friends. Whenever you meet them, you know you will crumble into laughter. You are always laughing. You still see him, but less often. You think he has different friends too, you just hardly ever meet them. When you get together, you don’t need to talk. You watch movies, which make you feel at ease not catching up, not asking how each other’s lives are growing. Those things don’t matter in the moment you’re together.

You grow. You learn guitar and form a band. You read The Catcher in the Rye and you believe it is the best book ever written. You believe you are Holden Caulfield. You start to get girlfriends. Slowly, painfully, you learn not to smother them with your feelings. You learn through trial and error not to move too fast or too slow. You keep watching movies with him.

You grow. You half quit guitar, your band never really wrote a whole song. You start smoking. It surprises you when, in the street, you see he has done the same. You realise that bumping into him in the street is the main way you see him now. You are watching fewer movies with him. When you do, you still laugh, it just gets harder. One day, you see him with a girlfriend, and it curiously hurts that he never told you, even though you probably wouldn’t have asked. You start to like other books more than The Catcher in the Rye. You start calling books ‘novels’.

Things change. You are both at University now, and halfway through your first year, on a visit home, his mother rings your doorbell. She is crying. You are alone in the house, and ask her what’s wrong, and make some tea. He has dropped out of University, and has been at home for two months. You are quietly offended that you never heard this from him. She drinks the tea, but her tears continue to flow. He has become depressed, she says, and even violent. He is aggressive, he shouts at her and his sister. You sense, through your horror, the surreal scene you are in. A mother you have always known, though not your own, crying on your shoulder. Her tears are so warm they break your heart. You had always thought that the emotions of parents were indestructible, that they were always composed.

‘Please help’, she says, ‘you’re the only real friend he’s ever had.’

You have an idea. You invite him on a holiday to a place that you hope invites perspective, introspection and an opportunity to open up and change. You invite him to India. In your email, you force you style to be casual even though it is the most important one you have ever sent. You feel that you have grown too far apart, that your email is fanciful and presumptuous. He accepts your invitation. You start to believe there is truth in the feeling that it is we that create the impossible, and we can remove it just as easily.

At the airport he is civil. He brings you a smile and an embrace, and you think that they contain warmth. His face, however, moves in jarring ways. His eyes are sore, and he cannot hold your gaze. He stutters in speech. In India, you speed by honeyed fortresses, tumbling city faces and expanses of blue-sheeted slums. You feel guilty. Guilty about your fat western wallet, the jobs you turned down, the times you skipped work, lectures. You feel guilty about him. His wash bag is filled with tablets, medication that he tries to take discreetly. He takes eight Valium a night to get to sleep. There is grey under his skin, yellow under his eyes. Some days you see the sights without him, while he spends whole days in bed.

On an overnight train, you are smoking out of an open doorway, feeling helplessly alive, sentient. Timidly, you poke out your head to see the front carriage, terrified that you might lose a limb on a pylon speeding past. He lights up beside you, and all at once begins to talk. He starts to tell you stories of whole nights and days on Cocaine, Ketamine and spirits throughout the day. You have heard skeletons of these stories from mutual friends, but you chose not to believe them, because that was the friend you never asked after, your friend that you ignored. This is your chance to tap his exposed nerve, to change him while he’s malleable and open, to make him stop. But he laughs, and you join in. You are always laughing.

You feel guilty, because as he stops at every chemist to buy prescription medications, you can see the foreign forces eating his fibres inside, the fraying of his electric wiring, laboratory acid mushrooming into his blood

And you should have said no. You should have said ‘If you don’t stop this, you will die.’

You grow. You wish to god that you didn’t. You fight against it with everything you have got, because you know that you are lucky, and everything is exactly what you do have. You fight against it because you still believe there is a truth in the feeling that it is we who create the impossible, and we can remove it just as easily.

But you grow old, and the truth is that you wonder, have always wondered, and always will wonder if he remembers the goal he scored that Wednesday afternoon. And whether he could ever forgive you. Forgive you for never asking.