Early on the morning of my 59th birthday I carry a mug across the backyard and into the studio to wait for Harriet. We haven’t been in the same country in nearly a decade, but through the alignment of datelines and digital technology we create a nest of impossible time: me in Melbourne (PJs, Ugg boots, celebratory cup of tea); she at her kitchen table in Devon, England, late evening on the second anniversary of the day her husband took himself to the highest point in the small town where they had loved each other for 20 years, and jumped.
I’ve known Harriet since I was 11. She was friends with Jo whose twin sister was friends with me. We all lived around the corner from each other in Islington, London, where my father was posted for five years as correspondent for Melbourne’s Age newspaper. I’d seen her around and had a vague idea that she might be a bit annoying. Certainly, she was exuberant (the great wide smile; the sense of all of her bounding forward at once). My reserve lasted until we found we were enrolled in the same secondary school, at which point our parents arranged a get-together and we fell in love.
For the next three years we were each other’s. Not exclusively, not in a romantic sense – although at her family holiday house in Norfolk we enacted long elaborate dramas in which she (as casting director) was inevitably a girl, I a boy, and in which I once lay on top of her in a field and we pressed our lips together, hard and ardent, until the air around us felt all empty and we stopped. We wrote each other poems.
This lasted until I was 14 and we both left London, she for the pastel-tinged haze of Cambridge, me back to the blasted wastelands of suburban Melbourne 1975. Since then I’ve returned to England maybe half a dozen times. Between these visits our contact has been sporadic.
So here we are. Harriet is wearing long tasselled earrings that sway as she talks, and a black dress with what look like Lurex thunderbolts. This is not in itself significant; she wears much the same at our usual mid-morning (her time) catch-ups. (“I walk across the moors like this; I don’t give a shit about appropriate clothing.”) It is 10pm in her world – on deathday, as she calls it – and she is holding up a lighted candle in a jar depicting a Moomin sunset, which she rotates slowly as she turns off the lights and sings happy birthday. Then she tells me about her day.
In a world without coronavirus, we might never have had this conversation. We would have already seen each other in person earlier that month. April 2020. The trip booked and paid for. And after I got back to Australia, I may have called her, or she me; but probably not on Zoom, because – why would we? We’d never heard of it.
Harriet isn’t the only English friend I’ve been Zooming. Before the lockdown, these encounters would have taken place, as with the impossible birthday/deathday conversation, uncomfortably early for me and awkwardly late for them. Now, we can talk quite easily on the same day, albeit me in wintry darkness; them in summer’s light. We meet around 7pm Melbourne time, when most of my friends would usually be working somewhere other than their kitchen tables, and therefore unavailable. Now they nurse mugs while I sip spiced rum (another Covid mutation) and ask them about then and now and what has happened in between.
This knitting together of space and time creates its own new sorts of meaning.
On the floor in my study I have a red plastic folder until recently jammed with cards and envelopes and slips of blue folded paper labelled Par avion. Some are decorated. Some contain small talismans. Most are postmarked between 1975, when my family left London, and 1978, when I finished school in Melbourne. This time capsule has waited, barely touched for half a century, lugged from home to home, tucked into chests and boxes, the back of my mind. When I unpacked the contents a few weeks back, their physical presence, the crystalline residue that emanated from them, was so palpable I had to put them down and go for a walk.
It is almost impossible, I think, to communicate to someone who has grown up with an internet connection and access to cheap air travel the vastness of the expanses between continents. When 17,000km was exactly that. A letter sent from Melbourne in 1976 could take a fortnight or more to reach London. Phone calls were for birthdays and Christmas: planned for weeks, measured in minutes, and what to say?
The letters now spread around the floor near my desk describe a world not only lost but, for me, never attained. (“R is, at this moment in time, going out with three whole boys at once … ”) In the year or so before leaving, I had been aware that friends (Harriet, notably) had grown breasts; some already had boyfriends. But the me that left London was still lanky and boy-chested; she didn’t menstruate; she slept surrounded by photos of Paul Newman and the Beatles. She yearned in complicated, non-specific ways for boys to kiss her or like her or lie on top of her. She was not entirely naive; she knew things. She knew, too, that she had to go back to Australia, but she was entirely unprepared for the realities of the return, when the part of her that had been moving forward would stall and the people she loved would move on without her. And so, in a sense, would she.
I suppose you must have heard of the music scene in England. Punk rock. Of course.
Eventually I would make new friends; get a life, a career, partners; have children, write books. But it would take the pandemic to lead me back to my old friend, and my young self.
**
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the nature of time, and what it is and how it passes and how it lodges itself in our bodies. In that first panicky week of lockdown, I sense it flickering through my chest like a queasy pulse. And, in the weeks that follow, as the world contracts, I feel the enforced passivity, the curfews and constraints nudging me closer to childhood.
When the interviews I have scheduled for my (formerly) upcoming trip to London have to move to Zoom, I am doubtful. I fear our talks will be thinner, more detached. And yet I find that something happens in these conversations, cocooned in our individual studies and living rooms, mediated by the virus that separates and connects us. I am aware of a vulnerability (mine and theirs) that I attribute at least partly to the overwhelming fact of the pandemic but also to the medium, which allows me to view in intimate detail my friends’ expressions while I recede like an animated postage stamp to the top right corner of my screen. Because of the slight time lag, it is difficult to interject without disrupting the flow. But that small constraint intensifies the quality of attention I bring to the moment. I find that I see more, listen better.
I find that I have missed a lot of things along the way. The world for which I mourned so long was darker than I’d understood. One friend has described lying curled in bed blocking out the sounds of her parents’ violent arguments. Others don’t want to talk about those days at all.
The last time I saw H in person was nine years less three days ago, on the morning after the surprise 50th birthday her husband, Ed, had organised. As a young woman there’d been plenty of boyfriends. Then there was a husband with whom she had two sons. And then there was Ed. “The first time we kissed was on the 25th of November 1998, which was the night we were doing a massive show for school. And I kissed him, and I said, ‘Oh no!’– because I knew then. Because he smelt right. And I knew … ”
Genial, kind, handsome Ed. Who taught us how to ring the bells at the local church; who guided my partner and son across the moors; who gave no sign of the noises inside his own head, or not that I could tell. And where was Harriet in all this? Everywhere. All at once. Did I notice how hard she was working to keep us all fed, entertained? Was her voice a little too bright, a little brittle?
**
In the weeks leading to and from the anniversary, our conversations will start tentatively (will there be enough to say?) in a semi-formal interview mode, and veer almost immediately and delightfully off track. I rediscover the rhythms and rich cadences of her voice, the mobile face, emphatic opinions; her generosity, curiosity, the uprush of her laugh. We talk about ageing and sex and body hair. Words and grammar. The declensions of grief. We talk about #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter and the falling sky. We talk about Ed.
One of the hardest things about the process of grief is the way in which it repurposes your memories. Like the discovery of an affair, it orientates everything it touches: past, present, future. The first time Harriet and I speak by Zoom, she talks about the pain of recalling almost anything from the past two decades. “Even the happy memories are painful. Because it’s all being re-remembered.” She talks about being dragged against my will, kicking and screaming to this part of herself. The part that looks back.
We talk about that. And we talk about the stories we tell ourselves about love. The script our culture has written us and the parts that we play, and how seductive they are, and how we are seduced. And how it is kind of crap. But compelling crap.
And we talk about each other.
Until very recently if you had asked me about my London childhood, I could have described in detail the friends I’d left behind, and the desolation of my return. What I couldn’t have told you was what I was like. Because I had no idea. Because when I left London, I left myself too. Or that’s how it seemed. But Harriet remembers.
“To me it felt like we were adventurers together,” she writes. “Carelessly and optimistically I would set out with no plan and definitely no figurative bottle of water in my figurative jungle, because I could rely on you to remember those things and in any case your plan, when it emerged, would be so much better than mine. You were Watson to my Holmes.”
And a little later: “Funny, sensible, gentle, incandescent Kate, who made me feel mighty and strong because she had chosen me to be her best friend.”
She tells me too about the relief, through our conversations, of travelling back and finding a part of herself untouched not only by Ed and his insistent, ambiguous legacy (“my husband had an affair with death”) but by the postures and pressures that came with puberty and the ambiguous gift of womanhood.
“And what do I feel about that girl now? I feel she’s – I like her. I like her. And that’s a big deal!”
Only once in the time we’ve been speaking have I seen her unable to laugh. This is the week after we talk at length about her falling in love with Ed. In a later conversation she will tell me the toll of that call: the lethargy, the sense of a day spent climbing stairs. “You know, one of the things I find saddest about Ed going, which I finally admitted to myself, was he took with him a bit of me that I really like.” When I ask, she says, “My softer side … loving, you know, the loving.” Pause. “Yeah, that’s something I thought I did quite well.”
And my heart squeezes slow sad blood for her, and I am reminded that these conversations do not exist out of time but create the conditions for what comes next.
But today she is ready. Over the next hour we will cover: our views on tattoos; her love of Dickens; the importance of reading trash; her delight in her four young-adult children, three of them now in lockdown with her; the letter of resignation she has just sent to the school where she and Ed met and where she was head of English and drama; the formative exotica of London’s long-gone Biba boutique; the sex/death nexus (“The awfulness of your libido suddenly waking up at completely the wrong time when you’re like, What? What?”) The self-help book she is writing for families reconfigured by suicide.
We end in what now seems to be our normal: a flurry of two-handed waving, kisses. To me she is as vivid, beautiful, her smile as entire, as when we first met; unmarred by time, space, the passage of grief.
“See you next week.”
• This essay will be part of the anthology Fire, Flood and Plague, edited by Sophie Cunningham and published by Penguin Random House in December
