Mum’s friends, my friends

Two out of three tonight. Women. Big fucking personality women. They came to see the show. We were children when we last new each other.

My mum had a brief period where she was a lady who lunched. One of her most frequent lunch buddies was Pam. She lived up the road, which helped. Mum wasn’t big into driving and public transport was a foreign country. She had the number of Augustus, from a local minicab firm, who respected the eccentricity and vulnerability of my glamorous mum. He would move her around in emergencies. But largely she kept to her patch. Chelsea. She had a car but… no.

Pam had three daughters. Actually four but that’s another story. “Oh that’s marvellous, I’ve got two sons”.

“Go and play with Yara!” I was instructed one day. We were twelve. I was the youngest, Yara was the youngest. That’s childcare sorted. Neither of us particularly felt like playing with each other that first day but we worked it out. We improvised with a ball and a wall as I remember, and actually enjoyed it and decided we were friends while mum and mum were lunching. Perhaps in mum’s head we should’ve immediately fallen in love, but we will defy our parents. For me, friends was a big thing with a GIRL. That was a huge win. Starved of feminine company at Harrow, that ball game started a whole track of being easier friends with women than with men my age. I started making female friends only, or younger or older friends. That pattern didn’t shift until my mid thirties when I finally started to learn to trust men my own age again post Elmfield (the house I was in at posh school, hi I went to posh school etc) My Elmfield contemporaries suffered from craphuman. Some have recovered. Others have entrenched. But as examples of men my age, they mostly fucked my trust.

Anyway. Yara is a couple of years younger than I am. Georgie is my age. Lisa is a couple of years older. I lost track of them when our respective mothers both died much much earlier than they should have, both at 55, about a year apart.

Two out of three? I’m referring to the sisters. Yara isn’t in the UK. Georgie and Lisa came to the show. We snatched lunch before notes. Georgie and I got hammered a few weeks ago, processing. Lisa and I haven’t seen each other since everyone was alive. She’s teetotal and a techno DJ.

I’m so thrilled they came to Othello. I think this is a fine piece of work, and I’m enjoying my place in it. I’m taking risks, challenging myself, and I think it’s landing. This is all we can do, make it land, tell the truth, tell the story. How gorgeous though that they chose to come so early in the run. “Your mum would be proud,” they said. She would. Mum … she’d already know everything about everyone in the cast by now if she was around and they’d be bemused they had told her but they’d have somehow got swept up in it anyway. “How are you feeling about the thing with your brother and that rugby ball?” They’d be involved in random conversations with her about things going on in their lives that I had no idea of, but she had effortlessly prised from them. She’d probably have booked a club somewhere on my fiftieth and insisted everyone came and chased up people who weren’t there and given them notepads to write things to each other in and then made me do a speech. Somehow, everyone she had asked would have come, not to celebrate my fiftieth but because there was no way they would ever let Thérèse down. Half of them I would be surprised were there. She frequently became better friends with my friends than I was.

One time when she lost track of me for a weekend she familiarly rang about fifteen people I hadn’t seen for a decade and got us all back in touch while trying to track me down. I realised most of them had a relationship with her that I knew nothing about. Still when she died, Melody was better friends with her than with me, and I walked her down the aisle a few years later. I’d been crap friend to Mellie for years, caught up in my stuff, but she and mum totally got each other and mum provided the support I didn’t.

I miss mum. She was too big for this world. She was a great mother, off the scale great. I miss her terribly and I wish I could share this with her as it’s a great show with lovely people.