My baby's got the
bends
We don't have any
real friends
Every time I scream
this (it can be quiet, but it's always a scream), I wonder if Thom Yorke was
thinking well, but there's always the imaginary ones. You know where you are
with them.
My first two lived
about my person when I was a child: in the creases in my belly, to be exact. I
mostly talked to them in the bath. They were Maledores (F8) and Jongomes (M7).
They lived in pyjamas (sensible). We would just chat, we didn't argue. They were good company. They understood me, basically, and, like many
slightly geeky kids, I felt that nobody else really did. I think they probably
disappeared around the time we got a shower and I didn't have so many baths.
But I have a bath pretty much every day now and although my creases are in different places these days, I remember them fondly.
My adult imaginary
friends are very different beasts. There are currently three of them. The two
that have been around longest kind of sit on my shoulders, like angels (or
devils), whispering things in my ear. I take their advice seriously, but I
don't always follow it. They don't talk to each other. In fact, I don't think
they've ever met, and they would for sure get right on each other's nerves if
they did.
Ginny has been
around the longest. Her full name is Ginny St Clements, like something you
might drink on a punt. She's been there in some form ever since I moved to
Oxford... maybe even earlier, since Cambridge, when I first encountered the
kind of people whose parents held garden parties in the summer, because that's
the kind of gardens they had, what else are you going to do with them?
She's gorgeous, is
Ginny. She has long curly auburn hair and golden skin. She has lots of freckles
and in late summer they kind of join up across the bridge of her nose. She can
play tennis well enough to make up a mixed doubles if you need her to, and her
French is sufficiently fluent to deal with platform changes and dietary requirements. Not her own though, she eats everything, there's not a single thing she doesn't
like, though if pushed she's a bit squeamish about lobster, because she's read
David Foster Wallace. She's a handy kind of woman to have around generally:
good with kids, can handle the business end of a barbecue, always has a spare
tampon. I want to hate Ginny, because she's so damn nice and because she would
run a 10k just to keep you (not me, obvs) company, but I can't.
You see, Ginny is
the person we could all be, if life didn't regularly cut us off at the knees.
She's optimistic, she's at ease, she's pretty much always her best self. I
dream of a world where we all get to be our version of Ginny. She's not
perfect, that would be weird. She can be pretty moody sometimes, and she had a
verruca once and didn't wear a swim sock. But she has every chance of
fulfilling her potential without fucking anyone else over in the process, and I
love her for that. As Randy Crawford once said about Almaz*, she was born in a world
where love survives.
But woman cannot
survive on the counsel of Ginny alone, so there's also Tits. Tits McGovern. Before
you ask, Tits has no time for your bullshit. She doesn't often even have time
for mine. Tits is Scottish, fairly obviously, but looks a lot like 00s Jeanette
Winterson. She's short, dark, fierce and butch, and she has been wearing the
same biker's jacket since, I'm guessing, the late 80s, though I didn't
meet her till well into the 21st century. Life has not been kind to Tits, but
she's made from tough stuff and she has read a lot of political theory. She
eats structural inequality for breakfast, with a side of black pudding, and
your balls for afters. You take her seriously, or... well there isn't really an
or. I do really like Tits, but she's hard work. You have to explain yourself A
Lot, but that can be a real help when you're not sure why you're doing
something, or whether you should be. If Tits is ok with it, it's ok, is my
basic strategy. Her bar is very high, and she has the humanitarian rigour I
sometimes lack. She's the reason I have stopped buying Italian wine, for example.
Tits doesn't drink wine, though. Her poison is single malt. You possibly
already knew that**.
And then there's
Alice. Alice is the new girl in all of this. There we were, me and Ginny and
Tits, getting by, and then something happened that threw both of them. I've
written about this already and won't repeat the long version, but there I was,
sleepless in Yangon, and something had to happen.
M and I have a
jetlag / insomnia strategy that isn't remotely original but works pretty well
when there are two of you, which is that you choose a category (eg model of
car, country of the world, type of fruit or vegetable) and then try and think
of an example beginning with each letter of the alphabet - Astra, Beetle,
Capri... Albania, Belgium, Canada... Apple, Beetroot, Carrot etc. It's less
effective on your own, but I was desperate, I'd had a full sleepless night and
was well on my way to a second. So I popped a Valium, and I worked my way
through a few categories, sticking as usual on the N and the X (N is a common
letter but not one a lot of words begin with, though I could just have an N
block). Then I thought, oh, let's try girls' names. A? Alice.
And suddenly, there
was Alice. She looks like she could have been drawn by Tove Jansson, she is as ageless as a Moomin. She has a black bob with a perfectly
straight fringe, and wears a pinafore dress with a stripy top. She looked at
me, and she said 'sleep, please', and pushed everything else straight out of my
head. I slept. I thought her manifestation was a one-off, but interestingly she
has joined the gang. She only turns up when I really need to sleep, but while
she may have needed a benzodiazepine to emerge, she can come back quite happily
by herself. And what she does, she does well. Ginny and Tits give her space.
There is a lot of mutual respect in this sisterhood.
joella
*Not recommending this as a life manual or anything, I should absolutely emphasise.
** Before I published this, M asked what Tits's song was. It's this.
