elephants

She was on time. I couldn’t miss her as she sloped down the escalator at Waterloo. Seventeen years since we knocked about together (and almost all that time apart). Seventeen years and she looked EXACTLY the same. Bar her hair. Which was now a sophisticated, grown-up bob. She looked great.

P was my best friend at college. We did our A-levels together in a rundown polytechnic, both preferring a smoky, hairy, student refectory to the conservative constraints of a long-outgrown school common room. Needless to say, being in an arty college environment did nothing for our concentration levels (which were poor-to-middling at best). Displacement activity became our speciality. We always found inventive ways to entertain ourselves. None of it constructive.

I haven’t seen anyone from my hometown pretty much since then. I left in 1990. There were good reasons why I didn’t look back. Reasons I'd mentally packed into neat little boxes and stored away deep in my subconscious - only to have them uncovered and then reclaimed, many years later, whilst sitting in a therapist’s chair. From some things you just can't escape.

Mine was a regulation unhappy childhood and one I'd managed to keep at a healthy distance from the friends I grew up with. Even at school, I managed the mess of my real life with an attention to detail Max Clifford would be proud of: on the surface, I really kept it together. This was not a question of dignity, like most teenagers, I was simply desperate to appear normal. Occasionally, things would leak, like any good news story, and word would get around. Like the time my mother tried to run me over (luckily, she was a terrible driver and over-shot) or when she pretended she didn’t know me in the street - in front of my friends. Frankly, these things were hard to put a positive spin on. But nobody ever mentioned it, it became our very own room-living elephant. Tension was punctured, with unspoken camaraderie, by a swift change of subject, something fun and upbeat like who was currently shagging that slapper in the 4th year...

Seeing P again brought it all back. The boys, the laughs, the stupid outfits we wore. We effortlessly slipped back into each other’s speech patterns, rolling from one dusted off memory to another. Cliché number one: I laughed until I cried. Cliché number two: the years quite literally melted away. Happily, we had as much to say about our lives now. Similarities abounded in the most unexpected ways: work, men, life. I realised the very fear which had motivated me to leave all those years ago, was the glue that had made P stay. There is no rhyme or reason, right or wrong, better or worse, it’s just about muddling through.

As we drank our own body-weight in wine, we talked further, deeper. Shared secrets were aired, dead friends remembered. Things that didn't need to be forgiven, were. Tearfully, the elephant was finally acknowledged and let out to graze. I’m glad we found each other again.