The Stayers

Friends to the Moon and back

The ‘Yes’ rainbow for Anne

Nancy’s birthday is soon, and alerts will start to pop up. Last year when I went to post birthday wishes, one of the first things I saw on Nancy’s page was my greeting from the year before, not replied to or liked.

So, I delved into our email trail. ‘I’m eager to see you,’ Nancy wrote in her last email to me before we met for drinks and dinner in London some years ago.

Searching to see if a friend has died is never a good feeling. A story and photo pop up with a story containing tributes from work associates who were her friends, people I remember from the Nancy phase of my life. Published 18 months before. When I posted the previous year’s felicitations, Nancy was already gone.

My need to condole with someone was strong but no one here knew Nancy. I’d met her son a few times, so I messaged not knowing if he’d ever find it amid Messenger’s ‘other’ messages.

Will I keep Nancy’s birthday notifications? Or should I delete them? How would I even do that?

I remember an article in the New York Times about the vexing dilemma of medium friends, the people who sit somewhere between close friends and acquaintances. Who of my friends is a medium friend? Nancy was more than that.

A medium friend might be that woman I used to have incidental coffee with, or random chats on Main Street. We followed each other on Instagram, and perhaps we still do. For a while we were friends who lent books to each other, always labelled, always returned.

Birthday alerts pop up every year for my friend Anne, listing the next age she won’t reach. Every few weeks we’d meet for lunch. Leaving it longer would feel like a beat was missed. Anne would tell me about books she had read, always more than me, and I’d say, ‘Oh, I’ve not read that yet’.

I regarded Anne and another friend, Anko, as the kind of readers for whom writers write. Anko read a book every day. Our friendship sealed at a book club, reading was her retirement plan, her life plan. Nearly the last words she said to me were ‘Marian, please bring good books. People are kind but they bring me terrible books.’ The last book I passed on to her was written by a friend and I was keen to know Anko’s opinion and never will.

Anne and I met for lunch in the divisive times before Australia’s same-sex marriage plebiscite and she told me she was worried for her son. She would have known the time she had left was short but did not let on. When I switched topics too soon, Anne pulled me up, no, she wasn’t done, she needed to talk about it. I hadn’t realized I could be that kind of friend, or that there would be so many conversations we’d never get to, the trajectory of our friendship cut short on the ascent.

On the day the ‘Yes’ result for same-sex marriage plebiscite was published, the day after Anne died, I saw a brilliant rainbow.

On Facebook memories a post from my friend Susan pops up where she listed the albums that meant the most to her, and invited me to make my list, spending no more than 15 minutes. Sniffy then (and still) about online quizzes, I never replied.

Susan’s list of albums was eclectic and cool, the kind I’d like to say was mine but there was only one likely overlap, Dark Side of The Moon by Pink Floyd. And I wonder if Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here nearly made Susan’s cut. How I wish you were here.

We met at a Marion Halligan writing workshop, and Susan had the most original voice in the room – in any room. Her Quaker faith and being polyamorous were only parts of what made Susan. The wrong person to ask for a quick-fix validation Susan had a knack for subtly alerting me to any self-delusions and would lovingly challenge me.

If we’d not been in touch for a while, Susan would say, no problem, I guessed you’ve been stuck between two fridges. Or that she had been stuck. From where the expression came, I’ll never know.

Our marathon phone chats no longer possible as her illness progressed, I booked a flight to spend a day with Susan at her hospice. Many times that day, I wheeled her reclined armchair with Susan tucked in under a tangerine poncho and a crocheted maroon and cream blanket, along the sanitised corridor, through the porch, and out into the crisp sunshine, frost glinting on the brown grass, poplars and bare trees by the blue lake, and many times I cupped my hands around her lighter aligning the flicker of flame to her cigarette.

It’s Father’s Day when I visit and the hospice is busy with visitors and family parties, and I look about and think that next year will be different for everyone here.

For us it already is. Now conversation punctuates long silences.

In her room, Susan’s last room, I remember the black and white photo of young Susan, her raven hair in a loose bun, bare-shouldered, her head against the end of a bath. It is pinned amid many photos, a mother with raven-haired children. And Susan’s photo of a rainbow arching across the grasslands of an endorheic basin, a landlocked river network where she worked on a stone labyrinth, that would become her eternal place.

Susan’s Quaker Friends arrive in the afternoon as she becomes more sleepy. There are too many people to be in her room so the leather chariot is wheeled into a chapel-cum-meeting room, and it’s explained to me that we will sit in a circle in silence but that anyone may speak if they wish. Two Friends discuss what to play on electric organ. As the music started, I shudder. The organ is painfully out of tune. Surely they’d stop. But no, this was an offering, so they played the sick instrument and sang for this woman who played the tuba and taught music to thousands of school children. Susan sleeps.

When I find out Nancy has gone, the Wimbledon tournament is on, a kind of symmetry for together we attended the men’s final in 2002. We climbed to our seats in the gods, me hauling myself, eight months pregnant, and we stayed until every ball had been struck. As we left, I tripped and tumbled, belly first to the concrete stairs and Nancy was by my side when the paramedics put me in a wheelchair and carried me down 68 steps, some of the most terrifying minutes of my life.

Nancy and I met at a conference in Lausanne, or London, maybe, and spoke almost every day for years, hanging out or working together in Berlin, Vancouver, Nice, London, Santiago, Chile, and sharing red wine and a picnic supper on the overnight train from Paris to Barcelona before converting our bench seats to couchettes.

There are masseuses who knead, glide, rub, tap, and shake up your body in silence. Mine is not the silent type. We chat about concerts, she is the mistress of securing tickets. As she eases out the knots in my back, I speak of a death that touched me in the week, and she tells me she has got to her thirties without losing anyone close and dreads that starting. I can think of nothing to say to will ease that. My mind leaps to a statistic circulated on the 50^th anniversary of the Moon landing, that only 30 per cent of people alive now were alive in July 1969. Now it’s more like 25 percent of us, or fewer, but I don’t bore her with this, and I tell her that many people who were in my life have gone now, yet not gone, still part of the circle of my life. And as her fingers press on my neck, a signal we are nearly done in the darkened room, I know why I won’t delete the notifications.

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