Spinebending

Spine-bending.

The room was beginning to fill with shadows but neither of us seemed to
mind. A cool, wintry light lay where it pushed back the gloom. We could
hear the dim echoes and faint din of the world outside; inside was a
quiet hollow. And everything was still. In a room that should teem with
memories, I was very aware of the emptiness, the strange stillness.
It's amazing how appropriate a setting we had chosen for goodbye,
without even realising it.

Claire. I can't remember when I last said her name. And it will always
be hers. Names have a tendency to take on the form of the people I've
known to inhabit them. I haven't known a Claire since but I doubt I
could extricate her from the name. Her surname was Able, which always
made me smile - I haven't known anyone as efficient either. Everything
had its right place in her world, unlike everything strewn where ever
in mine. When I turned up, I felt I traipsed my noise and mess through
her life, briefly. Then order resumed. Inconsistencies of her own
occasionally flashed across her lifestyle, one was her temper. When
angered, her neat and structured life scattered in the way a board game
does when a piqued child throws it.

We talked endlessly, even when we were really young. We used to sit up
for hours, all night sometimes, just talking. I have no idea what
eight-year-olds talk about but I know we never ran out of things to
say. As we grew older, she retained this ability to make conversation
fluid, I could only talk to people I felt comfortable with, otherwise I
made erratic, stuttering attempts. I began to get on better with her
sister, who was ten years younger. Claire had an ease that infected
whoever she was with - few saw her mood swings - and she could enjoy
anyone's company. In fact, she hated being alone.

Once you've known someone for a long time, it is always amusing to talk
over your first impressions of each other. It was more difficult for us
because our existences had been vaguely linked long before we were
friends. Sitting facing her, in that big, empty room, I began to
describe what I had thought of her. It suddenly felt really strange. I
suppose I made the inevitable 'what I knew then' and 'what I know now'
comparison. But it was more to do with the stripping away of all we had
done together since.

If I were to tell you about her, or at least what I thought of her
until that day, I'd have said she was vivacious. That would've been the
exact word. Something about her movements and her voice gave her a
sense of power and vitality. She never seemed to be someone who kept
her thoughts to herself. Her awareness of what people wanted to hear
was flawless; she never said anything out of place, like everything
else, she had a sense exactly how things should be. She was liked by
most, another realm where we were not alike. And she could meet your
eye for a long time. The directness of her stare was unnerving, pinning
you down as you spoke, making you over-conscious of how you looked or
acted. But I gradually grew to enjoy it, recognising it as a form of
intimacy. She could say so much in a glance, often a person was
condemned within seconds, her eyes belying what she said. So I suppose
I always knew when she was lying.

There were a lot of things I didn't understand about her. I'm sure she
made sense of them herself. And there is a lot I have forgotten. The
more I try to fill her in the more I realise how flimsy an outline I
have. All those nights, all those hours, it was me that spoke. I wish I
could deny the vanity in that, and it really didn't seem at the time to
be self-indulgence, but that is what it must've been. I think. Although
I can't be sure. But it clarifies something someone said long after I
knew her. They casually referred to the fact that she wanted to be me.
I laughed a little too much and they then had to convince me that was
actually what it was like. Suddenly the fact that we were so different,
and yet she professed to be like me, made sense. She didn't want to be
me, she just didn't want to be her. So when, for no real reason, she
disappeared out of my life, it was to assume her new role. To take on
her next project. Her new life.

It took a long time for me to realise, but in every memory I have of
some ridiculous incident from my childhood she is always on the
periphery, never involved. I remember one lunchtime, in October, me and
another friend decided to jump into the burn. We just wanted to see
what it felt like, if we kept our shoes on. Our feet and legs soon
warmed, and we enjoyed walking around in the water. But not as much as
walking in wet shoes outside of water. They sort of suck at your feet.
You are aware of every slimy step you make. Clearly, we had forgotten
about school. As we schlepped our way into class, our feet squishing in
our shoes, and after we sat, a puddle growing at our feet, the fact
that we were fifteen resumed its social implications. Claire tried to
conceal her embarrassment with aloofness. It was one of those days
where the exclusiveness of what we did was so important: it was a
stupid thing to do but at least we did it together. She never did
understand that.

I haven't seen her since that peculiar day in her room. But we both
knew that it was the last time we'd act like friends somehow, anyway.
And when I left I looked along her bookcase, at all the books I grew up
with. I could never tell which ones she had actually read; she had an
obsessive preoccupation with keeping the spines of books unbent.

Sometimes I find myself wondering if she has found a book that she
doesn't mind damaging the spine of.