When I turned thirty, I lived in a flat that backed onto a railway line. The estate agent said people got used to the trains, and she was right. But some days, the trains wouldn't run. I didn't notice at first, except that something felt weird, something strange in the air, something off. Eventually, the silence would emerge into my conscious mind, and then the reason for it. And I would look out of the back window, and see the tracks bare and still.
That is how I fantasised it would be for Sofia, after I disappeared. She wouldn't notice I had gone at first. But she would detect some drop in temperature, some barely perceptible wobble in the atmosphere. Eventually she would realise. The trains were off, the friendship over.
We had met through her boyfriend, ten years earlier. When I think of her then, she is walking through the door of the bedsit they shared, her face flushed from cycling in the cold. I see her flinging down her rucksack. There she is, cross-legged on my bed. Jumping up to do an impression of the stupid thing she said to the boy she liked. She is lying on her bedroom floor, with Ella Fitzgerald playing and candles flickering. She is dancing in a nightclub, eyes closed, her long body undulating, the rest of us bopping up and down like Duracell bunnies. I see her in the Italian café she loved best, the chocolate on her coffee growing dark and sticky as she leans over and tells me her secrets. I drink her in.
We became closest in our mid-twenties, sharing a flat and white-knuckling through London with little money and hearts full of ambition. She was going to save the world, I was going to write about it. Her magic was difficult to explain, even then. Men fell head over heels for her. I did too. Of all my friends, she made me feel like I mattered, like I could do anything. And so I forgave her, those times when she disappeared for weeks because of a new boyfriend, and then arrived home speaking ten to the dozen about some thrilling new contract she'd landed, not even pausing to ask how I was. And what did it matter? Wasn't her life, my life too? Her dramas mine? Together we were a grand story. A high society of two. I was her most important person, so I believed. And she, certainly, was mine.
Maybe it's inevitable that you come to resent the person you once idolised, that you tire of feeling like they are a statue and you are the tourist sitting at their feet. Perhaps it is just the nature of things, that such an incandescent friendship will eventually burn out. Perhaps it was my broken heart, nothing more. Nothing less, either.
It's hard to know when the end began. There was that night in that fusion restaurant with the walls shaped like a stone cave. She had moved in with her boyfriend two years before, and it had been getting harder and harder to pin her down to meeting. I had spent the day looking forward to seeing her. But then she ordered cocktails for us both that I could not afford and was too proud to say so. She launched into an extended monologue about her latest work drama, and I had a peculiar sensation. Shrinking. 'So, what's going on in your life?' she eventually asked. I just shrugged. 'Nothing special,' I said, and steered the conversation back to her: her news, her achievements. I hated my stiffness, the way my throat had closed up. It wasn't deliberate. I went to the toilet, and berated myself. Why are you making this so hard? I tried to come up with something to say about my own life, something to dissect and discuss, to share. When I sat down again, she invited me to come with her and her boyfriend and their friends to a gig of a band I had never heard of. I remember the sensation of becoming smaller and smaller until, poof! I fell off the horizon and vanished.
There was another evening like that, and then another. I would go home on the bus, brushing tears from my chin with my sleeve, inwardly raging at myself: who the hell weeps on public transport because they are behaving weirdly with their friend and can't understand why? Oh believe me, I tried to explain it. The problem was, it wouldn't stay explained for very long. No one had stolen the other's boyfriend, or sold her out to their boss, or any of the other Hollywood clichés. It was more like a slow, quiet leak of the ease between us. Like an evaporation that had left a crust of suspicion behind.
Was I jealous? Sofia's life had propelled forward: a high-powered career, money, now she was living in a grown-up house with another boyfriend who wanted to marry her. This one seemed serious enough that she was thinking of saying yes, and talking of having a baby. I was still working in low-paid arts jobs, going out with yet another interesting guy who didn't want to settle down. Next to her, I was still on the starting line, fumbling with my laces. But jealousy was beneath me! Beneath us.
Had she changed? True, her life was now a whirl of people I had never met and places I did not want to go. But wasn't our friendship above these kinds of superficialities? We were soulmates. We existed on a higher plane.
I definitely didn't want to admit the abandonment I felt. Once, I had assumed she would always be there. But ever since she'd moved out, I had felt the distance between us growing larger. It took her longer and longer to reply to messages, but it was petty to mention it. I knew she was busy. I didn't want to seem needy. But I also felt foolish: I was the one always chasing her to meet up, and began to suspect I cared more about her than she did about me. Sometimes I even wondered if I had made a terrible error and misunderstood what we were to each other all along.
My other friends knew of Sofia, my great romance, my proudest achievement (oh how I basked in her reflected glory. And she had picked me!). But now I could not tell them what was happening. It seemed so embarrassing; I was behaving so childishly. I knew from pop songs, novels and movies that romantic love was supposed to be dramatic and end painfully. Friendships - or the good ones, anyway - were supposed to be less complicated, more robust and enduring. I was eighteen when the Spice Girls released their single 'Wannabe'. In my mostly white, middle-class London suburb, the song leaked from car windows, from the tinny radio in the newsagents, from other people's Walkmans. Whether you wanted to or not, you remembered the lyrics: Zig-a-zig-ah. And if that didn't instil a longing for a lifelong best friend, the Friends theme tune would. Or the glossy faces of the Sex and the City foursome whizzing past on the sides of cabs. Or adverts: friends tangled up together on the sofa with mugs of steaming tea; friends swapping clothes and doing their makeup; friends strutting down the street in their highest heels; friends clinking glasses, planning holidays, laughing. I knew what female friendship ought to look like, and how it ought to feel. Why are you making this so hard?
I began to think she might be grateful if I slowly faded out from her life. And that I might be too. And in time, that thought grew louder. I knew I ought to talk to her, but what would I say that wouldn't humiliate me and make her uncomfortable? I wondered: if I simply stopped contacting her, would she even notice I had gone? I thought about the trains. I thought about the silence. Sometimes I imagined the hurt she might feel, and the part of me that was angry felt pleased. But worse was imagining what I suspected to be nearer the truth: that she might be relieved I was gone.
It was around then that I also started to think about the other friendships I had lost. The ones I had let drift away, or which had blown apart, or stiffened like a corpse. A friend from school, a flatmate in my early twenties. Various people I had worked with and then moved on from. There had been more than a few failed friendships. Perhaps more than was normal.
Did I lack the courage or commitment friendship took? I began to feel that keeping friends was always going to be my private burden, my Achilles' heel. That I was a failure at this essential aspect of feminine and feminist life.
I was bad at this. A bad friend.
Humiliated, I put that thought away, and tightly locked the box.
We tend to think of feelings as the most spontaneous parts of our lives, a reflection of our personal psychologies and histories. I am a historian of emotions. What really interests me are the public stories we tell about them, and how those stories leave their mark. For almost twenty years, I have taught, thought and written about the hidden cultural and political forces that act on our emotional worlds, and shape the way we feel.
I spend my days dissecting seventeenth-century advice manuals and poring over Edwardian love letters, learning the different rules that governed how to feel at those times. I chase down obscure theological sermons and medical texts, to understand why in one era people admired a certain feeling, such as sorrow, but a few hundred years later that same emotion had become a problem to be solved. I spend more hours than I care to think about hunched in archives attempting to decipher handwriting, trying to untangle the cultural myths that bind us, the stories we did not write ourselves, but...
