It wasn’t so long ago that the phone would ring at midnight and I’d find myself in a cab to Brick Lane and a late night bar and wine and talking. It wasn’t so long ago that we would end up dancing until four and then walking the east end streets clutching a bottle of wine and still talking talking laughing and putting the world to rights. Never a booty call despite the gender differential. A strange and deep friendship. It wasn’t so long ago that we would end up in a tiny flat in Whitechapel and I would pull out the mattress on a sofa bed so familiar that I gave it a name and wrote poetry about it. One or the other of us would rise to an unwelcome alarm next morning and go to work first. Sometimes I would wake to an empty flat and a note, bottles and glasses strewn everywhere, a memory of five other people sitting around in there, a throbbing head. Sometimes I would go to work myself and leave the note myself, amused and heady, half functional. Sometimes I would decant to her vacated bed and sleep the fitful sleep of the non-contributor, long into a grey day, not wanting to face my own idleness, calling it “recovery”.
It wasn’t so long ago that we would go for long restorative walks in parks and attempt geomancy with sticks. It wasn’t so long ago that we would sit opposite each other and just go “aargh”. It wasn’t so long ago that we would talk for hours on the phone because we needed to, because we didn’t have anyone else we could do it with, because we wanted to make sense of things.
She’s a mum of two now. I was in Uruguay for her wedding. She’s still my best friend but those strange lost times are a memory. We are maybe both in a better place, we have moved towards other ways of helping ourselves forget the painful things. I don’t get the late night calls anymore and I only occasionally miss them. Time relentlessly marches on, and tonight we celebrated her birthday. Another year.
We are older now and going out is harder for our friends. Out of a possible 27 people just 5 appeared. Babies, work, distance. It was a familiar group. Old friends outside as the sun set on the south bank. Even amongst the five of us there is a history of opinion and experience. We grow and change and things attach to us as we go. It was glorious.
Much too much wine. Rosé. Light and quaffable and the time passed and we kept topping up. They have a grandmother babysitting. I’m still here in this flat dreaming of the break. She’s doing great. We got drunk again, but my tolerance has changed. It wasn’t so long ago that I could drink that much wine and keep on dancing. As I walked up the stairs to the bridge in the early summer night, I stopped for what I think might have been a tactical chunder and might have been just an inevitability. Momentarily unobserved in the city, I conversationally erupted about two large glasses of wine, self conscious, in a guilty corner. The adrenaline from that and the endorphins walked me all the way home. Here I am, happy and nostalgic for those nights when I wasn’t even thinking about how much I had consumed. When I might stay up until two even though I was working at eight. No work tomorrow thankfully – but for the flat. Still post bridgespew I’m likely to wake up okay and capable. It was good wine, but I just didn’t want my liver to have to work that hard, and the opportunity presented itself. Even though I had filled up with bready pizza.
AlBarclay 