by Mary Hooper
Jean,
best of friends
Contents
Preface
Section 1: Recording begins at 9.03am with PC Janet Miller in attendance
Section 2: We take a ten-minute break before Amy resumes recording at 10.07am
Section 3: Copy of text conversation (i) given by Amy to PC Miller, included as part of this report
Section 4: Half-hour break before recording resumed at 12.10pm
Section 5: Printout of text conversations (ii) & (iii) included here
Section 6: Recording resumed at 1.45pm after a short break. Includes printout of text conversations (iv) & (v)
Section 7: Pause for break and sound check. Recording resumed at 2.50pm
Section 8: Recording resumed at 3.30pm after short break
Section 9: Recording resumed at 4.30pm after a short break
Section 10: Begins with text conversation (vi), also text conversation (vii)
Section 11: Resume at 5.00pm after check of recording equipment
Section 12: Begins with text conversation (viii)
Section 13: Recording resumed at 6.00pm after a break
Section 14: Recording resumed at 7.15pm after a break
Also by Mary Hooper
Preface
‘Now, Amy,’ the policewoman said kindly, ‘when you came in yesterday you gave us the basic details of the charge, but this morning we want to get the whole story on tape. I’ve brought in this cassette recorder and I’m going to sit here with you while you tell me what happened.’ She smiled at me reassuringly. ‘When you’ve finished I’ll go through what you’ve said, and then draft out a full written report.’ She patted my hand. ‘Take your time and begin whenever you like …’
Section 1
Recording begins at 9.03am with PC Janet Miller in attendance
It all started after I fell out with Louise and Bethany, really. It was falling out with them that made me try to find friends somewhere else, and the Internet seemed a good place to look.
I mean, everyone wants friends, don’t they? People might tell you that they’re quite happy knocking around on their own, but I don’t believe them. When people are described as being ‘a bit of a loner’, it sounds as if they’re deep and mysterious, but actually all it means is that they haven’t got anyone to go round with, and how sad is that?
I never have been a bit of a loner. I always had friends – kidded myself that I was quite popular – but then something happened to upset the balance, and all of a sudden I was on my own. Norma No Mates.
There were four of us girls to start with: Josie and Lou – short for Louise – and Bethany and me. We’d been best friends since primary school and gone through all sorts of different crazes. First of all it was collecting things: stickers, fluffy toy cats and glitter eyeshadows, then we were screaming about boy bands and fancying Soap stars. Josie was Lou’s best friend and Bethany was mine and we were the perfect four-some. One summer we even had identical bright blue tee-shirts with our names written in sequins on the front, and we wore them whenever we went out together. Other girls, girls who didn’t have a little gang to go around in, used to look at us really enviously.
Then, about a year after we’d all started at Ash Manor School, Josie’s family moved away. Her dad had got a new job and they were going to live in Scotland. We were all upset, of course, and promised we’d write to her for ever, but pretty soon that trailed off. I do email her sometimes, now and again, but she hasn’t got the Internet at home, so I hardly ever hear back from her.
For a few months after she left things were OK, and the three of us went around together just like before. The thing was, though – you know that saying about two being company and three a crowd? Well, it’s really true. When you go out places, things are in pairs: seats on the bus, and at the fair and on the train. Boys are usually in pairs as well. When you go and see a film or go for a burger somewhere crowded there’s always ‘Room for two more’, but there never seems to be room for three more.
So what I’m getting at is that Bethany and Louise were the two more, and I was the third one, the one left over.
And even that didn’t matter so much at first, because when we went anywhere and it became clear that someone was going to be left out, I would always stand down quickly, get myself off the case so that they wouldn’t have to suggest it. I was always saying, ‘No, it’s OK, you two go ahead!’ or, ‘I’ll get the next bus. Yeah, sure I’m sure!’
After a few months of this, though, they more or less expected me to stand down all the time. They had become a best-friend twosome and I just wasn’t in it.
Once I realised this I felt pretty desperate. I used to lie awake at night wondering what I could do to keep in with them. Pathetic, really. I used to think of things I could say the next day, ‘Your hair looks brilliant today, Bethany’, or, ‘Wish I could draw like you, Lou.’ In the end, those smarmy things sounded fake even to my ears, and I’d find them drying up in my mouth before they got said.
To make it worse, Lou and Bethany even look alike. They’re quite tall and I’m a good five inches shorter, and they have the same dark, shiny, bobbed hair, whereas mine is long and straggly and a mousy colour. There are other things, too: like they laughed together at jokes that I sometimes didn’t get, and like the same dance music, and go after the same sort of boys, and stuff like that.
And then I found out that they’d been seeing each other behind my back. This sounds a bit wet, I know. Like I’m saying they were unfaithful to me. It’s just that when it was Bethany’s birthday I found out that her mum and dad had taken her to a posh restaurant for a meal and that Lou had gone along too, but I hadn’t been asked. And then Lou – whose mum has a caravan at the coast – had invited Bethany to go down with them for the weekend.
Without me. Amy had got the elbow.
I just didn’t know what to do. Should I just leave them to it, or hang on in the hope that they might fall out?
I thought and thought about it. I’m an only child, see, so my friends are really important. I mean, I know brothers and sisters are hateful to each other sometimes, but at least they’re always there for company in the evenings and at weekends and things. If you haven’t got any brothers or sisters or any friends, it can be pretty lonely. What I really wanted was for them to have a row and end up hating each other, so I could step in and be Bethany’s best friend once more. Or maybe, if I caught some disease or other, they’d feel terribly guilty and be sorry for me and want to be friends again.
In the end, though, I realised that there was nothing I could do to break them up, and from being smarmy I went the other way and took to muttering things whenever they were nearby. ‘Careful, you two, don’t leave each other alone for a moment,’ I’d say, or, ‘Whoops, you moved apart from each other for a few seconds there!’ OK, it was childish but I just felt so bitter. Bethany was my friend, not Lou’s. It wasn’t fair!
At first Bethany and Lou didn’t take any notice of these mutterings of mine, just looked at me pityingly, which only made it worse. They were probably waiting for me to get over it, but I didn’t – I just started slagging them off even more. In the end it got to the stage where we had a right old slanging match in the playground, with Bethany asking just what my problem was and saying I was a sad cow, and Lou telling me to get a life, and me shouting back that they were nothing but a couple of pathetic tarts and lesbians. I called them a whole lot of other things as well, and I also grabbed Lou’s bag and tipped everything all over the ground. I didn’t quite sink to pulling their hair or punching them, but that was only because I was holding tightly onto my new leather rucksack and didn’t want to put it down. Also, I’d never done anything like that before, never been in such a temper, and I was a bit scared of what might happen if I really lo
st it.
Everyone within hearing distance gathered round, of course, and thought it was a right hoot. They started laughing and jeering, and pretty soon I realised that they were jeering at me, because I was getting really het up whereas Bethany and Lou were keeping their cool – they had a sort of superior, sarcastic calmness to them. There were two of them; they had each other as back-ups, and I only had me.
In the end everyone was surrounding us, and of course I just got more and more frustrated until finally I ran out of insults and just burst into tears and ran away. Everyone just collapsed then, screeching with laughter. They hadn’t enjoyed themselves so much since two of our teachers had had a row in assembly. As I ran across the playground and barged into the school I could hear the crowd behind me, cheering and applauding.
I ran along the corridor and locked myself in the first loo I came to, then just leaned up against the door, shaking all over. I’d blown it now; blown it completely. Everyone in the class would hate me.
Who was I going to be friends with? Who was I going to go round with? I wondered. There was no one – no one in my class at all. You might think that I’m exaggerating, but believe me, for one reason or another, right then I couldn’t think of anyone who was even a half-way possibility.
I remember looking at my watch and realising that the bell was going to go in another five minutes. What was I going to do then? It seemed to me that I had three choices: barricade myself in the loo, run away from home, or go and face the music. The first one was ridiculous, the second – well, I’d never have the nerve to run away – so that just left the last. I’d have to go out and face everyone. Even if I skipped off home now and left it until the next morning, I’d still have to do it in the end. And it would be ten times as bad the next day.
I decided I’d have to rise above it. Although I was absolute jelly inside, I’d have to act as if I was OK. I’d lost Bethany and Lou as friends now – that was a cert – so I had nothing else to lose. And at least I could stop sucking up to them.
When the bell went I splashed my eyes, came out of the loo, and went into class with what I hoped was a superior, uncaring expression on my face. God, it was hard. I was so scared that my legs were all shaky and wobbly.
The whole class stopped what they were doing when I walked in, and there were some cat-calls from the boys. ‘Whoo! Here’s the firecat!’ they said, and, ‘Wash your mouth out, girl!’
My glance fell on Bethany and Lou – I didn’t want it to, but it just did. They were both looking at me with withering, disgusted looks, as if I’d crawled out of the dustbin.
I marched straight past them, sat down and stared at the back of their heads. I looked uncaring on the outside, but inside I felt hollow and sad. I thought about the birthday present CD I’d saved up to buy Lou the week before, and the books of mine that Bethany had borrowed that I’d obviously never get back, and then I thought about all the things we’d done together since we were little: the parties and the outings, the videos, the laughs and the boys. That was the end of all that. Finished.
So I braved it out that day, and ever since then things have been totally over between me, Lou and Bethany. I haven’t spoken to them and they haven’t spoken to me. They look at me and whisper things to each other, and giggle a lot whenever I’m around. They’ve taken to wearing matching friendship bracelets, and have had the same haircut, still a bob but really short at the back, and they wear identical silver rings on their toes. Clones, they are. ‘Clones,’ I hiss under my breath whenever they come into the classroom arm in arm. I say it in a really sneering way. Pathetic? Yeah, but I don’t know what else to do.
So, with the end of the Amy–Bethany–Lou friendship, I had to find something to replace it. As I already said, there was no one at school – or so it seemed then. They were either already in twosomes (and I wasn’t going down that road again) or had formed into little cliques that stood for something: they were Goths or footie fans or belonged to the drama club. I didn’t want to have to pretend to be something I wasn’t, and anyway, these groups would have seen through me immediately – known that I was only joining them because I didn’t have any friends. There were a few girls in class who didn’t go round with anyone, the so-called ‘loners’, but they nearly all had something weird about them. Even if you couldn’t see it, I knew that there must be something weird, otherwise they wouldn’t have been loners.
There were the boys, of course, and I knew that a short-cut to being most popular girl in the class – at least with the boys – was to start putting it out. That, I also knew, wouldn’t have lasted long. We’d had a couple of girls try that one and they’d had three months of being lusted after by half the boys in class, and then they were downgraded to slags and tarts and no one wanted to know them.
And then, just when I was sure I’d never have another friend in all my life, along came Zed.
Section 2
We take a ten-minute break before Amy resumes recording at 10.07am
I met Zed in a chat room on the Internet. If you’ve never tried a chat room – well, the short answer is don’t bother. Chat rooms – at least teen chat rooms – are mad. What happens is you log on to the web and go to a chat room site – there are millions of them – then you just type in your nickname and away you go. The thing is, you can only type in a line at a time, so you can’t really get a conversation going. You type something like, ‘Anyone want to chat to a 15-year-old girl?’ and either you get completely ignored, or someone puts on, ‘Yeah, if she’ll chat dirty’ or something. And then you get all these one-liners zipping up one after the other, like, ‘Anyone seen Psychogirl?’ or, ‘I’m bored’ or, ‘Who you?’ ‘Where are you?’ ‘Gimme sex!’ and no one ever seems to reply to them. And if you do want to say anything back, you have to be really quick at typing before the message you want to reply to disappears off the top of the page.
Sometimes you get about a hundred people in one chat room all trying to speak, and they’ve all got these desperately groovy names like Coolchick and Hotgirl and Evil Vampire. No one uses their real names.
I wouldn’t have wanted to use Amy anyway, just in case someone from school was logging on at the same time, so I had to decide what to call myself. First of all I tried the French version of my name, Aimée, but that had been taken by someone before me. Then I tried Maisie (after our cat), Clubber (though I’m not) and Jazzie, but they’d all gone too. After that I tried Bee, because my second name is Beatrice after my great-gran and Mum sometimes calls me Amy-Bee, so there was some sort of connection. Even that had gone, though, so I ended up being Buzybee, which I thought was pretty OK. Better than Hotlips or Killerteen or Totalcool, anyway.
I tried a dozen different chat rooms at the start, and found that they were all pretty much the same. And after a while I noticed the same names appearing in some of them, and one of these names was Zed.
It was difficult to remember who was who at first, because everyone sounded so street and sharp, and instant, but after I’d spotted his name a few times I found I rather liked the sound of Zed. He didn’t speak much, but when he did he undercut stuff that other boys said. Like when you got guys boasting about their prowess in bed, or the size of their equipment, Zed would put in, ‘Yeah. Heard it all before.’ Or, ‘Those that talk about it, don’t do it.’ Stuff like that which made me grin.
Once someone called Hotlips wrote, ‘Any boys around 14–16. I’m gagging for it!’ and he sent a message saying something about her being all talk. I quickly wrote something to back him up, ‘Hotlips – take a cold shower!’ which may not exactly sound cutting edge, but it was all I could think of in the seconds available.
No one else took any notice of this, least of all Hotlips, but a moment later a message came up for me which said, ‘Buzybee. Want to chat 1-2-1 with Zed?’
I said yes and a number came up which I typed in, and then we – Zed and I – were in a private chat room and could really start talking. We stayed online for about forty minutes tha
t first time, just jawing about music and friends and TV and stuff, and by the time I logged off I felt I knew him. It seemed like I’d just had a good conversation with a real friend. More than that – he was a boy. I didn’t think I’d ever had a real long conversation with a boy before. The boys round our way aren’t like that.
My mum says that when she was young she had pen-friends, people she used to write letters to in different countries. Friends on the Internet is not much different from that, really. The thing is that instead of writing with a pen, going down to the post office, putting the envelope in a red box and waiting weeks for a reply, it’s instant. My mum is also dead nosy. She has a habit of standing over me when I’m on my computer, cruising from one site to another, and saying, ‘What does that mean?’ ‘Why is it saying that?’ and, ‘What do all those little dots and brackets mean?’ And in spite of having all those penfriends when she was younger, she’s always been highly suspicious about anything to do with the Internet.
‘I’ve read about girls who use chat rooms,’ she said, coming into my room one day soon after I’d started getting to know Zed. ‘It was in the paper the other day. A thirteen-year-old girl thought she was writing to a boy the same age, and they got to know each other and met up, and he turned out to be a forty-year-old pervert.’
‘I know all that!’ I said. ‘There’s always those scare stories in the papers. I’m not that stupid, though.’ And I showed her the stuff that the website made you read before they’d allow you into a chat room – about being sensible and not writing anything rude and never meeting up with someone you didn’t know without telling people exactly where you were going.
‘And not everyone’s a pervert, Mum. One of the teachers at school met another teacher online, and now they’re getting married.’
Mum shrugged.
‘Anyway, to get into a teenage chat room you have to give your date of birth.’