A friend in need is (not) a friend indeed...

A sizzling hot summer’s day in the beautiful city of Bath. It was 1989 and I was 17 years old. I had moved to Bath from a tiny village in rural Ireland and much to my parents’ horror was earning a decent enough living busking on the streets, singing songs with my guitar with the backdrop of the beautiful acoustics of this Roman city every night from 7pm to 11pm, catching a late-night audience of pub goers as they wandered home generous with their cash and of spirit. Those months were a difficult jarring navigation between where I had come from; all that I had left behind, and where I was now; living in a city on the edge of womanhood but not quite there yet.

It was a sweltering sizzling summer’s day when I first met Catherine*. She was the epitome of cool with dark curly hair, tanned skin, and wearing a little red peasant top and cut off Levi denim shorts. We bonded quickly through a mutual tendency towards bulimia and a shared parent history of manic depression (her Dad and my mother). I met her through a guy I was going out with at the time and when the relationship with said guy went south, she was steadfastly and loyally ‘on my side’ and our friendship was cemented in stone.

There were many nights of cheap red wine, Marlboro red cigarettes and sorting the world out. Dressed in black, we would start the day by polishing our boots – “a good start to the day!” she always said - before the afternoon slowly deteriorated into a mess of jumbled words and sentences, overflowing ashtrays and vomiting wine up on empty stomachs. I would bring her with me to visit my grandmother, and we would sit and chat to my Nan gorging on salmon paste sandwiches and Mr Kipling’s French fancies, our stomachs growling because we had used our last tenner the night before to buy more wine.

Kate married a squaddie, a northern no-nonsense kind of chap and I could tell she was increasingly unhappy in the marriage. She finally left her husband for one of her best friends and seemed happier than I had ever known her. She was over the moon when she became pregnant with twins and although her boys were born prematurely at 26 weeks, herself and her husband coped admirably and when they finally bought the little chocolate box scene cottage in Somerset they had always dreamed of, it seemed that life couldn’t get any better for them. I envied her figure, her children, her house, her everything. I looked up to her and tried to emulate her in every possible way.

One Spring, almost sixteen years ago now, Catherine and Richard came over to Ireland to visit and we all went out and got sloshed on tequila and Guinness and it was much later sitting bleary eyed and slurry worded at the kitchen table at two in the morning that Kate confided that she had been feeling low and had considered throwing herself off a bridge near her house at home in the UK. I was shocked, but determined to help her, and even more determined to fix her. Over the next few months my husband a former psychiatric nurse and I counselled her for hours and hours on the phone, tried to persuade her to get help, and begged and pleaded with her but Catherine either didn’t want the help or refused to accept the sharp decline in her mental health. Things culminated when she left the hand brake off their van and it rolled down a hill outside their, narrowly missing a collision with surrounding property or worse still hitting their neighbours. All along Richard, Catherine’s husband had been trying to maintain some sort of normality for their twins, now 11, and maintain some sort of control of the situation. One of these measures seemed radically extreme at the time when he locked all the alcohol up in his shed before going to work. Each time he came home Kate would have found some wine from somewhere/someone and would be drunk again. One day she rang me distraught saying Richard had thrown her out and she was going to her mum’s. She eventually moved to Wales with a man who ran some sort of rehabilitation centre she had been attending. She quickly got involved with him and got into sea swimming and an extreme form of meditation he was involved in. Seeing her briefly at this time she appeared at times manic and at times on the edge of despair.

In the meantime, I was busy raising my little boy. I had always hoped that Kate and I would become mothers at the same time and I had pictured a rosy future for us where we could swap parenting tips but each time she met my son, she barely seemed to register him.

To cut a long story short, I grieved for her profoundly and deeply when I finally realised that the old Catherine had gone and left in her place was confusingly the same physical person but the two personality were worlds apart. The new Catherine texted me at all hours of the day and night often sending ten texts in a row. She emotionally manipulated me repeatedly often involving my husband in a weird triangulation of text messages until finally he called her out on it.

Catherine said she was visiting some friends in Ireland last summer but given her form I was worried that she could land on the doorstep and refuse to budge. So, I arranged to meet her halfway between my home and where she was staying. This did not go down well, and suddenly there was deafening silence – I don’t know which was worse - the constant barrage of texts or the silent quiet phone.

Then a few weeks ago, I heard from Catherine again when she rang me to tell me she was moving to Ireland. Not only was she moving to Ireland, but she was moving to the county I was living in; not only was she moving to my county, but she told me she had already visited here six or seven times. I tried to grapple with the fact that she had been here and I tried to understand why she hadn’t contacted me – some sort of punishment and further manipulation perhaps? – but gradually as the conversation moved on, the answer revealed itself. Catherine was seeing an old boyfriend of mine who had relocated to Ireland some ten or eleven years previously. Apparently he had asked her to stay for a night, and she had ended up staying for 6 weeks. However much this shocked me, what really put the nail in the coffin of our friendship was that a month previously I had texted Catherine and asked her to be a witness in a historic case of sexual that I had finally found the courage to report to the Gardaí. I realised that finally I was done. The final ties were severed. The hurt and pain I felt were comparable to the grief I felt at the loss of my mother so much has this woman been interwoven into all the stages of my life. I do not know what her next move will be. I do not know what she will do next. I cannot control her actions or what she chooses to say about me to anyone. But I do know is that my sobriety has given me a very important gift here - the gift of waking up and smelling the roses and realising that some people just aren’t worth it. But more importantly, I have the the gift of placing enough value in myself – perhaps for the first time ever – that I now have boundaries as to what is acceptable and what is just not on anymore. This friend could and still can provoke such hurt and anger within me that I know deep in my heart that some nostalgic notion of our friendship is not enough anymore. It is not enough anymore. I now value friendship based on honesty and authenticity.

I bring this to you not as a cautionary tale of friendship on the exterior and interior of sobriety. I bring you this story as an example of what can happen when you love with your whole heart. What happens when one day a friend you love changes beyond recognition. What happens when you try desperately to cling on to some older version of yourself and herself in the vague hope that you can still be friends. But this hope is based on your shared history; it is based on drinking wine, and it is anchored firmly in the past. This hope can never survive. Hope is looking forward to the future with expectation and possibility not harking back to a version of yourself and herself drinking red wine and wearing black clothes in a flat in Bath putting the world to rights. Goodbye Catherine.

MEMBERS ONLY

I bring this here not as a cautionary tale of old friendship before and after sobriety. I bring you this story as an example of what can happen when you love with your whole heart.

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