Bye Bye Baby

Bye Bye Baby

My cellphone bleeps with an incoming text message, as I'm rummaging for
my front door keys. I don't recognise the number, but I open the
message anyway. Perhaps it's from Vodafone, telling me about the
various offers that I'm not taking advantage of.

But it's not.

"Hello stranger! Saskia xxx."

I press delete, a knee jerk reaction, but already I'm in sinking sand.
A huge wave of misery cloaks me, as I picture the sharp-featured sender
of the text. She's still out there and she's still trying to drag me
into a past I want to leave behind.

Maybe she'll believe that I no longer have a mobile phone and that I've
moved, hopefully overseas. After all, it's been seven months or more
since we spoke. Then again? maybe she'll be really unhappy that I've
ignored her kind message, and it was just a kind message, wasn't it?
Angry avoidance caves in to girlish guilt.

This time next week, it could all be over?

She was an average-looking girl, with a deluge of dark hair with eyes
to match. Her slim figure was always clad in black trousers, tops and
knee-high boots. At first sight her look projected a certain
je-ne-sais-quoi, as if she'd been talking shop with de Beauvoir over
black coffee and Gauloises. She liked to think that she was an enigma.
When we became friends at sixth form college, we were only teenagers.
With the possible exception of John Lennon, we were the only two people
I could think of who liked the work of Yoko Ono. "Oh, you're the only
one Emerald, the only one!" she squealed.

Now I find her company challenging, in the manner that I'm challenged
to find anything of interest about her. Christ, I've even put it in
writing, in a pledge to myself. My own personal state of the union
address.

16th November, 2001, San Francisco - Back in London - establish
boundaries within friendships. Clear out the cobwebs. Stop feeling
sorry for these girls because nobody else likes them. Nor the fuck do
you!

My mother's words haunt me, though she's alive and well and living in
Thames Ditton. She told me never to be a bully. She told me about a
girl at her school called Christine, who was picked on by the whole
class. "She died in the end, of sadness" wailed my mum. "Always be kind
to people, Emerald, especially if no one else likes them."

Saskia has no idea how I really feel about her. Saskia really likes me,
or so she says. Saskia introduces me to people by saying that we go
back a long way. When I said I was thinking about coming out my
dreadlocks, Saskia said people would think we were sisters when we went
out. If Saskia wants to go out somewhere and I can't afford it - which
is most of the time - Saskia always offers to pay for me. She's
generous. She even gave me a job as an art tutor.

Last summer at a wedding, two suburban fat blokes asked Saskia who I
was. Now she could say that she was my boss. "What, are you a madam
then?" they asked her. Saskia roared with laughter, leaving me in my
shimmery Betsey Johnson frock and designer dreadlocks to point out that
they couldn't afford me. Still, I'm sure that Saskia didn't understand
what they were getting at, I thought, as I left the
blasts-from-the-past for the smog of South London.

Saskia and I didn't stay in touch after college. We weren't great
friends. But we did both like Yoko's strange individualism and were in
the same French class. The honour of being Saskia's best friend went to
Rita. She was gorgeous, as you may expect a young woman with Indian and
Finnish parents to be. The two of them were always embroiled in some
kind of power struggle. Rita would fancy a boy who would fancy her
back, and then Saskia would get her sharp face in the picture. The boy
would either be scared off or would become Saskia's squeeze, and then
they'd all be friends a week later. The last I heard after college,
she'd had her John and Yoko affair. She'd run off with a man she'd met
in Mosside and married him, without telling her doting parents. But one
day years later, I was waiting at Clapham Common tube station. Two
faces came up the wooden escalator, smiling at me in recognition.
Saskia and Earl had spent a day out together with their little boy, in
what turned out to be an attempt to save their ailing marriage. They'd
moved a stone's throw from where I lived. We exchanged phone numbers.
Well, it wouldn't hurt to go out for a drink with an old friend?

The Saskia I encountered aged twenty-nine was an unhappy figure.
Flicking through the pages of Hello! and imagining a part not played.
Passionately in love with a man who didn't seem to appreciate her.
Often I'd see Earl in Brixton when he should have been working. He'd
always ask me not to tell Saskia that I'd seen him, drawing attention
to the likelihood that he was up to something. Obsessed with
celebrities, Saskia had conjured up a starring role for herself, which
would at best make for straight-to-video. It was sad to watch this
highly educated yet unfulfilled young woman, in her whitewashed,
Clapham house conversion. It was sadder still when she insisted on
coming to my house in Brixton. As she sat in my dilapidated squat,
surrounded by the great unwashed and jobless, I knew that she was in a
world that she'd never understand.

Eventually, the threads that had held Saskia and Earl together rotted.
But different threads appeared, ones that bound Saskia to her new found
old friend. So often, once two women have supported each other through
a bad patch, it's hard to cut the ties. Until one day you're enmeshed
in a scenario that no divorce court can separate. Shopping trips give
way to the silent treatment. And so we both slipped into our
thirties.

Once over her marriage, Saskia and I went to the Swan in Stockwell for
St. Patrick's night. She'd been going there a lot, picking up younger
men who'd never call her. I knew this because I'd get a self-pitying
phone call the next day, and there were a lot of next days. As a
daughter of a man who wears the green himself, I told her not to sit by
the phone. That night Irish eyes were smiling in my direction. "Look
Emerald, that guy keeps looking at you. Why don't you go and talk to
him? Saskia suggested. So I did. And then she snuggled up to him and
dragged him off into a corner. I was mystified. It wasn't the guy - the
truth was he wouldn't have called either of us, and neither would I
have wanted him to - but it was the Saskia Hocking principle of one-up
womanship. What was she out to prove? Looking back I realised she'd
always treated her friends like that, flinging her willing body and
fairy-tale mind at their beaus, condoms in one hand, The Female Eunuch
in the other. She'd grown into her sharp features so well.

Still not to worry, Saskia had her eye on bigger fish. She was going to
marry a rock star and get to be Yoko at last. "You know, start a
revolution" she told me. Why don't you pick up a guitar yourself, I
suggested. She couldn't be bothered. Saskia had her eye on Liam
Gallagher, he of the penchant for slender blondes, rather than
hovercraft-arsed brunettes. That meant that Patsy Kensit was on
Saskia's shitlist, along with every other poor bird blessed with blonde
hair. She despised them, primal screaming at me if I named any blonde
babes. Cameron, a big thumbs down. Gwyneth, she's nothing! Even poor
Trude, the lovely TV vet who comes across as a gem, got a slamming.
She's only got the job because she was a blonde, oozed Saskia bitterly.
"I never have any problem getting men!" Just keeping them, eh?

But then Saskia encountered wisdom. She'd met Jenna, a forty-something
black barrister, with whom she hung out. I was relieved to be off the
hook. Jenna and Saskia discussed dating, which I was treated to hearing
all about. "And Emerald, Jenna and I were saying this. If a man wants
to go out with you on a Saturday night, he has to ask you by Wednesday"
she enlightened me.

But it hadn't even been her idea, or the elusive Jenna's, who it
transpired would dump poor Saskia the minute she got talking to a
twenty-something man in a club. It had been in The Rules, written by
two single New Yorkers sounded as desperate as Jenna and Saskia. When I
told Saskia I was onto them, she blushed and laughed, and I felt myself
welling up with a mixture of sympathy, contempt and bile.

What do you get out of it, I asked my psyche. I was friends with a
child who'd had her every whim answered by two over-protective parents,
whose well-meaning love had not prepared her for adulthood. They'd
never set those all-important boundaries with her. How I once envied
Saskia's relationship with her mother, who would insist that her
thirty-something princess call her if she couldn't sleep, even if it
was three in the morning. And Saskia would do so, never stopping to
consider that her mother shouldn't be neglecting her own needs so
badly. But then Saskia is one of life's takers.

On the other hand, I had parents who I always thought had forgotten
about me the moment I breathed my first, unaided breaths. Familiar with
abandonment, I couldn't bear to inflict it on anyone else, even those
supremely undeserving of my time and energy. God, how hard I'd always
thought I was! I was as wet as a village pond. And now I wanted to see
the back of Saskia - for good.

But like many a guy trying to extricate himself from a road-to-nowhere
relationship, I was an emotional coward. So I told her that I would be
busy, waiting for the inevitable demand to visit her. I wont be in
touch for quite some time, I said. With any luck she'd forget all about
me.

"What? You haven't even got the time to make a phone call?"

"No Saskia, I haven't" I said, adopting the adult tone the pop
psychology books advise. I need my full concentration for work. I
haven't got the energy, emotional, mental or creative, for somebody
else's life, and I've got a lot of things on my mind.

"Well so have I!" I was under sonic attack. "Haven't we ALL? I'VE had
things on MY mind!"

"Saskia, books don't write themselves, you know" I explained.
Grudgingly, she turned the key and let me out onto the exercise yard. I
leapt over the wall and legged it to freedom.

***

I never looked back until one day in Tescos, when I looked forward. For
coming towards me was Saskia and her ten year-old son. My blood ran
cold. My eyes were on hers, which had glanced around the periphery of
my being without actually seeing me, for I had a drastically different
hairstyle. Any jerky movements might make her spot who I really was. We
passed each other like ships in the night. Outside Tescos, I looked
back. I could tell by her actions that she hadn't recognised me, as she
talked down to her son and mused over the celebrity gossip mags. Though
even then, as I walked up Acre Lane, I felt a twinge of guilt. Surely
it wouldn't harm me to go back and say hello?

But it would have! Going back wouldn't just mean hello. It would also
mean a demand that I got in touch, maybe followed by a phone call an
hour later to find out what I was doing that night. I was planning a
romantic evening in with myself, with white wine and candles, watching
24. I knew that I wasn't strong enough at the time to be cruel, but the
hour was approaching.

The text message is still plaguing me as I sit at my laptop. Hello
Stranger. How dare you dump me! I want to ignore it, but maybe it's
time to take the bull by the horns. I'll call her to say quite bluntly
that I've moved on, so toodle-oo. But when I speak to her all I hear is
how wonderful I am for writing a book, how dedicated I must be and how
much easier the next one will be to write. I can stay at her cottage in
France, if I like, because there'll be no distractions there. The
pressure of twenty-odd years of acquaintance weighs very heavily on my
heart, and I think what a terrible friend I am.

"You've got to come and see me!" she beseeches. How can I be so cruel?
And she calls again, the very next day, and invites me to go round to
her house. "You might get some inspiration for your book" she purrs.
"My life's pretty complicated at the moment." Marianne Faithfull,
anyone?

"What's happening?" I ask, more out of exasperation than interest. And
so she begins to weave a fabric of passion and intrigue. Of a marriage
she's been gate-crashing, unknown to the wife, who's told her much
younger man that if he cheats on her, she'll send him "back to the
pigs." He's married her for a passport, I'm told. And he's spun a
colourful yarn to twist into the cloth - he tells Saskia that he really
loves her and wishes things were different! And again, I slip into the
gratingly comfortable role of counselling her. Aren't these the types
of relationship that you were having in your twenties, girl? Nothing's
changed in her little head, she's still playing a part. And I can't
stand to be with people who wont change, when I have so
drastically.

This time next week, it could all be over?

Admit it Emerald, you big jessie! You don't like Saskia. Whatever way
you look at it, the answer is always the same. You don't like her. You
haven't liked her for a long, long time. That's why you haven't called
her. Saskia's lonely and so sometimes are you, that's why you feel so
damned guilty. But Em, you like being alone as well. You thrive on your
own company, maybe even a little bit too much.

Hearing her voice has made me feel as if I'm a supernova being sucked
into a black hole. I've been working so hard to break from the orbit of
unhealthy friendships these past few moons, and I'm not going
retrograde now. If I go back on my decision to go forward, I'll be
absorbed like a comet in a gas cloud.

It was time to go full throttle ahead, so I called her.

"Hi Saskia, I hope you're well. Look, I haven't been very straight
with you. I'm not coming round to see you, I've moved on. But thanks
for your calls and I'll see you around. Toodle-oo!"

I hang up, berating myself for taking the latter option of fight or
flight. But then I smile. She'll get it. After all, she must be used to
guys not calling her by now!