I Had Such Friends

by Meg Gatland-Veness

  I nearly collapsed on the spot. Then, as casually as I could, I grabbed a chair and sat beside her. And when the hairdresser asked if Annie was sure, because she had such beautiful hair, Annie responded, “Chop it all off.”

  But when the scissors came out, she took hold of my hand. She had short, chubby fingers, like a little kid. I liked that.

  As her long blonde hair fell to the floor, she whispered something to me that I will never forget.

  “Charlie loved my hair.”

  And the tears were there again. And I couldn’t do anything but pat her hand.

  I felt like that was my moment. My time to tell her that no matter what everyone else said, no, it wasn’t going to be okay, it wouldn’t get better, because it getting better only makes it get worse. Because instead of feeling sad, you hate yourself for not feeling sad anymore. You wonder how you could ever be such a terrible person to smile when your little sister will never smile again.

  But instead I lied to her. “It will get better.”

  Why was I such a liar?

  Once, a long time ago, my sister asked me what would happen to her toys when she died. At the time, she meant when she was an old lady, not in a couple of months. And I said that she could have her favourite, Fred, buried with her if she wanted, to keep her company. And she cried. She actually cried, because she was so much smarter than she should have been. And she begged me to make sure that no one ever buried Fred with her because she would be dead, but he would still be alive and he would get so scared, alone in the ground, in the dirt and the dark by himself, and he would slowly start to fall apart and no one would be there to love him or play with him.

  My mother always said that Paige was an old soul. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I did remember that she always seemed so much older than she was. That sometimes, when she spoke about things, she had sounded like a little old lady. It was weird, that, because she would never be a little old lady. It was strange for me to think that if she hadn’t died, she would have been twelve. She would have been going to high school, talking about boys, shaving her legs, wearing deodorant, worrying about how she looked. She would have been the same age I was when she died.

  And, it was funny when I looked back, because sometimes I thought that it wasn’t Paige who’d died at all. It was me. I guess that was crazy, because she was the one with the tiny gravestone at the cemetery. I could tell you this, though: I didn’t think I’d laughed since she had died. And that was the truth.

  Maybe it was because I didn’t know anyone funny anymore. Paige was funny. She used to put on little puppet shows for us. She would tie strings to the arms and legs of her toys and set them up on her bedroom window. We took the flyscreen out so many times that we ended up leaving it off. My parents and I would have to stand outside and watch.

  When they buried Paige, my father thought it would be nice to bury her favourite toy with her to keep her company. He didn’t understand when I told him we couldn’t do that. I yelled at him and said he was cruel, that I had never heard anything so evil in all my life, that he would be burying Fred alive. He thought I had lost my mind, that I was just crazed with grief. But I wasn’t. And I took Fred from my dead sister’s arms and from then on, he lived in my bed. And I don’t care if you think it was childish that I slept with a teddy bear because we were all each other had.

  So, Annie’s hair fell away from her face and she eventually let go of my hand, which was good and bad. Bad because I had never held hands with a girl before and I thought that perhaps I never would again after that moment, but good because my hand was sweating like crazy.

  So I tried to distract her by being funny, but I had never been very funny.

  “Can I get you anything? A glass of water, a tissue, a porno magazine? I think I saw one hidden behind all the hairstyle magazines.”

  She gave me a cute little choked laugh and sniffed a few times. She probably thought I was joking but I legit saw a porn magazine in there.

  When the haircut was finished, I was amazed. It didn’t make Annie look like a boy at all. She looked beautiful. She looked amazing. I could see all of her perfect face now. I could tell she liked it too. She was smiling. Properly smiling.

  I would like to tell you that we kept hanging out after that, but no, Annie excused herself and went to meet her mother at the tennis courts. I wasn’t upset that she left. The fact that we had spent the amount of time together that we had was amazing enough, especially since it was the first time I had ever spoken to her.

  I walked home with the loaf of bread and the knowledge that Annie Bower had chosen me to be her friend in the hairdresser’s. And yes, circumstantially, I was lucky because I’d just been walking by at that moment, but she could easily have brushed me off by saying that she was getting her hair cut and therefore didn’t want my company. But instead, she gave me a little glimpse into the life of a normal teenage boy who spoke to girls rather than just looked at them from across the classroom wondering what their hair smelt like.

  My mother didn’t thank me for getting the bread and she would have been sure to forget about it the next time she accused me of not helping out enough around the house. So I didn’t ever do the vacuuming or the dusting. It was my sister who’d loved all that stuff. She used to think the vacuum was a race car and she would push it around the house just for fun, so my mum figured she might as well turn it on and let her clean the house while she was at it. Maybe that was why she didn’t like to do the vacuuming anymore. But I wasn’t a lazy fuck or anything, despite what my mother said (not that she actually used the word ‘fuck’, of course). I did my fair share and I was always the one who got sent into town to pick up groceries. We did try to get by without buying too much, but bread was one thing that we didn’t make.

  I kind of wanted to tell my dad about seeing Annie Bower, but I was afraid he would think it was lame that I was so excited about a mere chance meeting and he would ask why I hadn’t asked her out on a date. Sure, me on a date, that’d be the day.

  My dad didn’t really understand why I didn’t have more friends. He never had trouble at school like I did. He was one of those big guys who got into fights and had a pretty crooked nose from having it broken a couple of times. He didn’t realise that I was the kid who got picked on, because those kids had been invisible to him at school. It wasn’t like he’d been a bully; he’d just been a bit spacey. He probably didn’t even realise he was at school most of the time. It was never really his thing, and he dropped out as soon as he could to work on the farm.

  At dinner that night, we spoke about the prospect of selling parts of the farm to our neighbour. My mother thought it was an excellent idea, but I think my dad would rather have died. He was putting all his hopes on the next harvest, but if it was anything like the previous one, we would have a much smaller fence the following year. This didn’t upset me because it meant less work on the farm, but my dad wouldn’t have known what to do if he couldn’t work in the sun all day. I couldn’t imagine him doing a crossword, or learning how to use a computer or wearing house clothes. It would have driven him crazy having nothing to do with his hands. He would’ve started pulling apart things like toasters and clocks. Nothing in the house would’ve been safe and my mother would’ve had a nervous breakdown.

  My mother, on the other hand, I could certainly see living a retired life. She would set herself up with a little bungalow and a small flower garden, she would drink tea on the veranda and listen to sixties music and watch movies in the middle of the day. She was never meant for this life. I could see her, all those years ago, marrying my father and thinking that they were going to live such a cute little life on a farm with animals running around and fresh fruit and vegetables. Unfortunately, she’d had a bit of an idealised view of life in the country and the reality was a lot less warm and fuzzy. She didn’t complain, though; she was a real trooper. But sometimes I wondered if she wouldn’t have lived a better life in some apartment in New York working in a departmen
t store, coming home to her boyfriend every night, asking how his day at the office was and eating cheap takeaway food in front of the TV. It was too late for that.

  We couldn’t escape that place; the three of us were trapped there, caved in by the peeling plaster and the muddy ditches and the silence. Always that pervading silence.

  7.

  It was a Sunday. You might think, Oh Sunday, that means Hamish got to sleep in. Nope. I did not get to sleep in on Sundays. Sundays I had to help Dad out on the farm. Sunday was my least favourite day of the week. Mondays were my favourite because I knew I had a whole week before it would be Sunday again. How backwards was that? My parents gave me Saturdays to do any schoolwork I had and then on Sundays I got covered in mud and shit and had to milk the cows or pick green beans or plant cabbages. I never did any of the jobs that required heavy lifting, because I had always been such a sickly little thing and my mother feared for my health. She probably regretted that later, of course, seeing how I turned out.

  Unfortunately, I was nothing like my father. He was huge. I looked more like my mother; she was little like me. My mother grew up in the city and she met my father at some pig convention or something and that was it. Love at first sight, they said. But I doubted it was as romantic as that. She told me she fell for Dad’s rustic charm and old-fashioned courtesy. My dad said my mother was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. They were both lying, though. My father was not polite or charming in the least and my mother had never been beautiful. She was scrawny, just like me, and her face looked kind of like a mouse. I thought there was a very good chance they got married because of me.

  My sister Paige had looked like my dad. She’d had the same square face and hard features. She’d always looked like a farm girl. My hand-me-down overalls always looked cute on her when they just looked stupid on me. She could have lived her whole life on the farm, happy as anything. But she was dead and the only person to stay and look after the farm was me.

  I hope that didn’t sound selfish but it’s the truth. If Paige were still alive, I could go to university and get a job in the city and rent a flat and sleep in on Sundays. But I didn’t blame Paige for me not having a future. The only person I blamed was myself.

  I spent the day shelling peas into a huge basket. It was the sort of day you could get sunburnt through your clothes. My mother was making as many preserves as she could before the crops went bad and my father was ploughing away at the left field. That was where the cabbages went. Fuck, I hated cabbages. I mean, seriously, did anyone actually like cabbage? What was the point of this vegetable?

  It was a long, hot, horrible day.

  That night Peter called my house. My dad answered the phone. I could hear him from my bedroom.

  “Hello, yeah sure, I’ll just get him for you, Martin.”

  It never even entered his head that someone else might be calling for me.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, Hamish, it’s Peter.”

  “Oh, hi Peter!” I reminded myself to work on sounding less excited all the time. Playing it cool was not something I knew how to do.

  “Want to hang out tonight? I can come and pick you up from your place.”

  My place? Peter Bridges coming down my driveway in his beat-up old Toyota Corolla? I’d never be let outside the house again.

  “How about I meet you somewhere, maybe at the payphone on the highway?”

  “Yeah okay, whatever; see you there in like half an hour, mate.”

  He hung up.

  I looked at myself in the mirror. God damn I was such a frickin’ pansy. I was wearing my farm gear, the flanno and the overalls and I still looked like a little girl, and my hairstyle was still the same as it was when I was nine years old. I decided then to let it grow out so I would look cool like Peter. His hair was a tangled vine on top of his head. I changed into jeans and a T-shirt but they were both a bit too tight. I hadn’t worn them in a while, it seemed. Regardless, I went downstairs.

  “Hey guys, I’m going over to Martin’s.”

  I don’t know why I lied to them so much.

  “What? On a school night?” asked my mother.

  “Apparently he wants to show me some new game he got. I won’t be home late.”

  “All right, well, have fun then.”

  Outside, the air was a lot cooler than in my stuffy little bedroom. I wondered what Peter and I were going to do tonight. He didn’t give me a heads-up about his plans and, although he claimed never to have any, I was sure he did.

  By the time I got up to the highway, I was regretting the jeans. I should have stuck with board shorts. Stupid me trying to look tough like Peter Bridges and ending up looking like even more of a sook.

  His car wasn’t there yet when I arrived, and beside the payphone lay a dead possum staring at me with its reflecto-eyes and freaking me out. I’d never had the stomach to deal with dead animals. I always took the day off when we were dissecting things in Science because I was sure I would faint or do something even more embarrassing. Yet another thing living on a farm had not taught me.

  I was waiting for a good fifteen minutes before I heard the familiar rattle of his car. He pulled over and I jumped right in.

  “Hey,” I said, putting on my seatbelt.

  But Peter didn’t reply. He looked kind of distant and didn’t turn the radio down as he chucked a U-ey and we headed back towards town. He didn’t look at me until we reached the top of the hill, and then it was only a sideways glance. It infuriated me that I never knew what he was thinking; that he never gave anything away about himself. All I knew of Peter Bridges was his rep at school, and there was no way all that could be true and that he would still be hanging out with me… willingly. He pulled over halfway down the hill and turned off the engine. But still it hadn’t hit me what we were doing there. He didn’t get out of the car for a long time. He looked almost frightened and I was suddenly scared that we were going to do something illegal.

  “Peter?” I said, trying to sound like it was a casual “What’s-going-on Peter?”, not an “Am-I-going-to-get-in-trouble-for-this Peter?”

  Unfortunately, it was fairly obviously the latter.

  “This is where it happened,” he said, and his eyes were almost glazed over as he stared, unblinking, through the windscreen.

  And then I realised. This was where the kid had died. This was where Charlie’s car had crashed into that tree.

  Peter opened his door and got out of the car. He walked down the hill with his hands in his pockets, kicking stones along the way. I started to panic. There were bunches of flowers tied all over the tree and a photograph of the dead boy. Why were we here? Was he going to do something to desecrate the shrine people had built on that tree? Graffiti it? Trash it?

  I waited for a good five minutes before I couldn’t stand it any longer and I took my seatbelt off and got out of the car. I could see Peter, but he was just standing there, looking at that tree like it was the most fascinating thing in the world.

  “Peter?” I said as I cautiously moved to his side.

  “I didn’t want to believe it, you know? Kept thinking I’d see him again, at school or in town; that it was all just a big mistake.”

  I was dumbfounded. Honest to god, I couldn’t think of one thing to say.

  “Stupid fucking idiot, what was he doing out with that fucking whore anyway?” he yelled.

  “Peter, I don’t…”

  But then something happened that I would never forget for as long as I lived. Peter started crying. And if you know anything about anything, you would know that Peter Bridges did not cry. Peter Bridges got in fights; Peter Bridges keyed teachers’ cars; Peter Bridges got suspended for swearing at the deputy principal. I remembered once Peter broke his wrist at rugby and he didn’t even stop playing until half-time when his coach had to physically restrain him. And that hadn’t been easy. But here he was, looking at a tree and crying and it wasn’t just casual I’ve-got-something-in-my-eye crying, but real, heavy, sh
aky, wrenching crying. The kind of crying mothers did when they lost their children. And I knew what that kind of crying looked like.

  It occurred to me then that perhaps Peter hadn’t been entirely honest when I asked if he knew the dead kid. Maybe they were friends after all. Though it seemed strange to me that the most popular guy in the school, who had everything he could ever want, would hang around with a dropkick like Peter Bridges. But, then again, he was hanging out with me and that was even weirder.

  I was so perplexed by this unreal display of emotion that at first, I didn’t know what to do. But eventually I put my hand on his shoulder and said something stupid and unhelpful like, “It’s okay.”

  Then, he hugged me. And it was the weirdest thing in the world. Peter Bridges – Peter get-the-fuck-away-from-me Bridges – hugged me. He wrapped his arms around my waist and buried his face in my chest. So, I hugged him back. What else could I do? He was shuddering from these huge sobs and his arms were around me so tight it hurt. I honestly thought he was going to crack my ribs. But I didn’t pull away. Peter was my friend and I had to be there for him.

  I realised then why it was that Peter had befriended me. It wasn’t because he wanted to take me under his wing to make me tough like he was. He just wanted someone there to share his grief with. I wondered then how I would feel if Martin died and I must admit, I didn’t think I would be nearly so upset. I mean, sure, Martin was my only friend, but it wasn’t as if I couldn’t live without his incessant attempts to get us both beaten up.

  After what seemed like an hour, Peter let go of me and he turned away quickly so I wouldn’t see his face. But I did, just for a second, and it was something I hoped never to see again. He looked like he had lost everything he had in the whole world, like one of those people on TV who lost their home and their family in a flood or a fire or something.

  Then he sat down and I sat beside him and we both started to rip up gum leaves.