The Mutual

A work in progress

Here’s a short story about friendships, loneliness and the quest for mid-life happiness (it’s funnier than it sounds. I hope.). Hopefully this will evolve into a novel someday soon.

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‘She’s trying to kill me.’

  My response to this information was an out-of-body experience. I could see myself sitting at the small table in the busy coffee shop, reflecting benignly upon these surprising words. What I was feeling at that exact moment was a deep sense of validation. My long-held suspicions were confirmed. 

 This is why I don’t have any friends. Because they do things like this. They tell you somebody wants them dead. And I’m supposed to somehow respond with the wisdom of a concerned friend or to genuinely care. Because I didn’t. I barely knew the woman sat across from me, with her wide eyes and overcast expression of impending doom.

  It took me all this time to realise that I have no friends. Fifty-five and friendless. I should have realised five years ago when my last landmark birthday arrived with the grace of a deflating balloon.

I was sat at my desk, pretending to be busy whilst keeping an eye out for signs of a birthday cake or a card signed by my work colleagues. I couldn’t be sure, but something was going on, a buzz in the air. Then they emerged from their offices and desks, put their coats on and meandered towards the elevator. I watched them from over the top of my monitor, expectantly to begin with, until the frisson of excitement paled into confusion. Where were they all going?

  As I sat there with a furrowed brow, one of the team glanced in my direction, making eye contact. Realising their mistake, they quietly conferred with the others, before calling out to me.

  ‘Kitty. We’re going out for lunch. Are you busy…’ It wasn’t a question, more of a hope.

  ‘No, I’ve got to get this done…’ I nodded, smiling for some reason. And I was left uninvited. Alone. Thankfully with the office biscuit tin and one of my alcoholic colleague’s secret bottle of gin. It was a wild fifteen minutes.

  Three years later I can look back at the moment for what it was, with an understanding that I am no longer popular, desired or necessary. But then came the heart-poking clang of alarm bells: Was I ever?

  I’m a sociable person. A good listener. Friendly, smiley, not a boat-rocker. But then comes another stab of stark reality: The many bars, clubs, parties and weddings I’ve frequented in my time were, for most of the time, functional and deeply lonely experiences. Like an awakening from The Matrix, I began to question it all. Did it mean anything? Do I mean anything? Rushing paranoia swelled in my innards, and my brain questioned all the angles like I’ve just been had by Keyser Soze. Was it all a lie?

  I needed reassurance, but who could I turn to? I mistakenly phoned my Dad for a sympathetic ear. But he’s eighty-two, can’t be bothered with my realness, and can always outdo any problem I may be experiencing. Predictably, my desperate attempt for a kind word ended with my Dad stating I must have done something to drive all the friends I ever had out of my life.

  According to Facebook, I have fifty-seven friends. From that list, I noted my actual friendships. The ones I counted as proper friendships, rather than acquaintances or those people who come and go, who get what they want from you and are out of there with a screech of tyres. It wasn’t good news.

Kitty Brown

First best friend: Junior School. I didn’t have a best friend in infant school. I didn’t even want to be there and had convinced myself that it was all temporary, that school was for everyone else but me, so my heart wasn’t in the game for making best buds. In the second year of Junior School, my teacher announced that a new person was joining us. Dread filled my shoes at the possibility that the new person would end up sitting next to me. And they did. She had the same first name as me - Kitty. And her surname began with the same letter as my surname: B. Only hers was ‘Brown’, and mine was ‘Burtenshaw’. Two Kitty B’s. What. Were. The. Chances.

  I could imagine all of those awkward moments when the teacher would call out ‘Kitty’, and my red cheeks after I’d mistakenly answered. ‘Not you, the other one.’

  The most surprising thing was we became firm friends. Kitty would come round to my house for lunch and we would ride our bikes around the streets with no destination.

  By the time I started secondary school, distance had grown between me and Kitty. Eventually, she stopped coming to school. I quickly formed a couple of friendships, hedging my bets. Louise Ormondroyd and Christine Lanchester.

  Louise stopped speaking to me in the fourth year, and I didn’t know why. Turned out I’d laughed at something I shouldn’t have which had upset Louise. We made up before we left school - it took a year, but we parted on good terms. Never saw her again. No idea what happened to her.

  My main Comprehensive school friend was Christine Lanchester. We were totally on the same wavelength with tv, film, music, and sense of humour. We only had to look at each other to know what the other one was thinking. 

  Once school was over, it was difficult to keep up the friendship. Christine went one way, and I went the other. She went to college and uni, as did I. Just different ones. I would feel pangs of jealousy when we met up, hearing about her new friends. And when she got her first boyfriend I became a dotted line, as was always the case with Christine and her love life.

Fiz Golightly

My first job - the first of many admin jobs. From day one I was friends with a pretty blonde girl called Fiz. Her actual name was Helen, but everyone else called her Fiz. One zed, not two. We were both in our early twenties. I, the grounded one, whilst Fiz was always up for a good time. Always had a glass of something in her hand, even at work when the boss wasn’t around. That was until she got married and would only mix with married people. Later I overheard her refer to me as a mad spinster. Marriage had killed all the fun in her, replacing it with judgmental sniping.

Catrine Bage

I met Catrine in my next job, temping for the NHS. Catrine was one of my bridesmaids, and will forever hold a prominent position in my memory for announcing her engagement on my Hen Night. What should have been my evening became her evening, as all of my friends fussed around Catrine and her amazing news. I’m Godparent to her daughter, but I never see them since they moved to Glasgow. Catrine got divorced and became unresponsive to any correspondence. Maybe she was drawing a line under her past? (I didn’t get married, by the way. A week before our wedding my fiancé had a change of heart after his night out with the boys. Something about not being ready to settle down. And strippers. I forget the rest.) 

Edwina Melidor

Turning thirty forced me to consider all those things I’d wanted to do but hadn’t. I had always wanted to learn how to dance, and after a month of dancing with little old men at the local Ballroom and Swing club, I was ready to throw the towel in. Being the only woman present was a challenge, to say the least, and at the end of every evening, I would have to take a long shower to cleanse myself of the disturbing comments about how I reminded these men of their wives (I later learnt that they weren’t all dead, they just didn’t want to go dancing with their husbands). On what was meant to be my final appearance at the club, Edwina Melidor joined. My life-saver. 

  Within a couple of sessions, we had jacked it in and went clubbing instead. I’d never liked nightclubs because we all know what they’re about, but to just go there and dance with a friend who would bat away lecherous advances of boys barely out of their teens was a Godsend. Me and Edwina had fun. I would have done anything for Edwina. At times I did. I travelled hundreds of miles to support her when she was away studying to become a teacher until she decided she didn’t want to be and instead got a job working as a life model. She would always tell me that whatever happened, we would end up as old ladies sitting on a bench, friends forever.

  Until she found a new friend. 

  I ask to meet up for a coffee, only to be met with a response like ‘I can’t constantly support you.’ I didn’t know what she meant - I wasn’t asking for anything other than, well, her. I noticed her Facebook posts featuring days and nights out with other women. She had sucked dry my essence and moved on to the next poor unwitting soul.

  After Edwina, I stepped back from the hope of having a proper true friend. It was too much work. Of course, there were people I was friendly with, but as Richard Dreyfus mused at the end of ‘Stand By Me’, I never had any friends since then like I did when I was younger.

Marcelle Diez

My final effort at making a new friend was Marcelle Diez. I was reading a book in a coffee shop. Marcelle asked if the chair opposite me was taken, I said no… We sat in silence for a few moments, until I noticed we were reading the same book by Compton Larbey. I forget which one, but most of Larbey’s books sound the same: ‘I Found You’, ‘You Did This’, ‘You Know What You’ve Done’, ‘I’m Waiting To Get You’… Titles that sounded like an angry wife yelling at her feckless husband.

  Marcelle noticed that I had noticed her choice of author, and we smiled. We chatted politely until an hour had passed and I sensed something about her, about what was happening. She could be my friend. We liked the same things and were open and warm towards each other. She was about to leave when I asked if we could meet again. She beamed and said she would like that. 

  So we did. At her place. With her husband. And their three children. 

  The kids were possibly the worst-behaved sprogs I had ever witnessed. They actually smashed a mirror and threw a mug of coffee at their mum during the ordeal. They had also wee’d and pooed on and around the toilet, but not actually in it. Her husband was the laziest, unbothered poor excuse for a husband and father ever (and I used to live above a father of four who sold cigarettes to his kids’ friends. Okay, maybe this guy was the worst.). 

  Their home was also the untidiest I had ever seen. I perched on a chair at their junk-stacked dining room table, one eye trained on a used cotton bud which laid perilously close to my stained (on the outside) coffee mug. I left their flat and ran for my life, never to return. 

  Marcelle would message me and ask to meet up, but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t understand how she put up with her life. Why she hadn’t sold her kids and thrown her husband out of the window? She wasn’t the happy, interesting person I first met in the coffee house. 

  Looking back I suspect she was depressed and not coping, and I left her to it. I am a terrible person, I know. Sincerely.

Pia

I did rent a friend once. People often hire someone to accompany them to events (not like that), so I hired one for an hour at lunchtime (not like that). We would sit on a bench at Trinity Square near the Tower of London (I was working as an I.T. administrator at St. Katharine Docks), and we chatted about… stuff. It’s why most men go down the pub to talk bollocks. But I found my rent-a-friend - whose name was Pia (she was from The Netherlands, so I guess that was her real name?) - to be too agreeable. She would smile and nod, but I sensed she wasn’t understanding me. I had to explain what I meant repeatedly or clarify… maybe she was just bored sitting on the bench, eating her Pret sandwich and thinking of The Netherlands?

  I realised I had to change the way I viewed myself and the world. Once I had accepted life is constantly changing and nothing ever stays the same, I was fine. Being on my own is great. I like me, I like my company. I like the things I like. I can go to art galleries. I can get a decent seat upstairs in Waterstones at Trafalgar Square because it’s always couples or families looking for two, three or four empty chairs. My maisonette is how I like it, everything has its place. I dine out alone and I simply do not care if other people think it’s sad, because I’m not. (The only pisser is being turned away at the door of exclusive establishments because they don’t offer single tables.) I see whichever films I like, go to Borough Market on a Sunday morning to taste the freebies (although I don’t do this so much these days after one stallholder said I was taking the piss with her samples of gourmet sausage). I have the time and peace to read, to watch what I like on television. Listen to two hours of Pick of the Pops live with Paul Gambaccini on a Saturday afternoon. I live-tweet along with old episodes of Top of the Pops every Friday night with my tribe.

  I still meet up with people occasionally, but it’s all on my terms. No drama queens. No users or emotional drains. No good-time friends. 

  Trying to be all things to everyone had never worked up to the age of 47, and it was time to jump ship. My family no longer understood me because I started to behave as they always had: Self first. Acquaintances no longer found the cut of my jib appealing. Not that I was being rude or anything - I just was looking after number one. The old me was dead. That skin was shed.

Zelda Pecure

I forgot one particular friend. Zelda Pecure. We met when we were both working for Waltham Forest council. One of the team had left to work in Bahrain, so I applied for her job. It would have been a huge leap in salary and stature, but an outsider won the position. Zelda. And she was awful at her new job from day one. But then the interview panel was biased. My line manager hated me for some reason - mainly because I was always right and she was constantly wrong… well, she had to have her revenge, didn’t she?

‘I’m not making this up. She has killed before and I have very good reason to believe I am next.’

  Zelda. When we worked together, we got on fine. Mostly we chatted about the television adaptations of Compton Larbey’s novels. We were both into Scandi-noir and Scandi-pullovers. She even convinced me to attend a Scandi-noir convention, which had been over-sold and we were almost crushed to death whilst queueing to get Compton Larbey’s autograph. In the end, I had to abandon her, ducking out of a side door. Up until that moment she had clung to me at work like a barnacle, but there was a strange disconnect between us after the convention. The awkwardness was unbearable, so I left. Finding new employment because of embarrassment isn’t strange, is it?

  Apart from the odd birthday greeting on Facebook, I hadn’t heard from her since. Until today. 

  She had messaged me asking to meet up for a coffee. I thought it was an attempt on her behalf to fan the flames of friendship, but I barely had time to sip my decaf skinny latte before she laid it on me:

‘Your friend Christine is a murderer.’

  Christine Lanchester? The girl I went to school with? Whose hair I would hold back when she had drunk too much in our twenties. The one who needed my sympathetic ear in her thirties when her marriage was on the rocks, and the one who would emotionally dump her post-divorce raging bile on me in her forties. The one who I mysteriously fell out with seven years ago, for reasons lost to me.

  What I couldn’t understand was, if there was one certain about Zelda it was her sincerity. She was incapable of joking. She was straight down the line. You always knew where you stood with her.

  I listened to Zelda’s story, scrutinised her intense stare, and tried to make sense of it all. For days after, it was all I could think about. I didn’t know what to make of any of it. 

  Then came another voice from the past. The most unexpected one. A name I thought I would never hear again. 

Christine Lanchester.

  Once again I’m sat in the same coffee shop, in the same seat. Christine gets down to business without so much as a ‘hello’ or ‘what have you been up to for the last seven years?’ Instead, Christine kicks things off with a familiar complaint from my social circle these days.

‘Do you know someone called Zelda Pecure? I think she wants to kill me.’

  See? This is why I don’t have any friends.

(Photo by Hannah Rodrigo)

Copyright © 2023 Andrew Wright