by Katy Gardner
I stared back at her. She was lying, I was thinking; for some reason she was making this all up.
“What do you mean? How could you have?”
“I wanted you to leave me. If it wasn’t Steve I’d have found someone or something else to blame you for.”
Now I was shaking my head. I could feel the pressure of tears behind my eyes again, my chest tightening into a sob.
“But why would you want me to leave you, Gem? We were best friends!”
“Best friends? You hardly knew me.”
“But that’s not true . . .” I could not finish the sentence. From outside I could hear laughter and very distantly, the faint strumming of a guitar.
“It was you that had this big scene about our friendship,” she said quietly. “Not me. I just needed someone to help me escape.”
I gave a sob, the tears spilling down my cheeks.
“But you’ve ruined my entire life!”
Gemma shook her head. “No, I didn’t,” she said. “It was you that did that. I just followed my path.”
In the corner, the smoldering wood popped and whizzed. I gazed numbly at the glimmering flames, the tears sliding unchecked down my face. Everything felt so surreal, my brain only dimly taking on what she had told me, yet in a small corner of my mind I could already see that it all made perfect sense. To disappear in such a way was exactly the sort of thing Gemma would have done. It was her style of revenge.
“Look, I don’t mean to be rude,” she suddenly said. “But I’ve really got to go.”
She stood up, brushing the creases from her robe.
“If you want to hang around until tomorrow Babaji will be back and you can meet him.”
I gazed at her. Perhaps five years ago I would have become angry, screaming that she was wrong, that she had misremembered the past, that ours had been the truest, closest friendship, marred by one fatal betrayal; that I would not allow my story to be dismissed so easily. But somehow I no longer had the energy. What would it gain? The only truth which mattered was that once we had loved each other, in the immediate, practical way that little girls do. Now, though, it was over. We were strangers, linked only by the dimly recalled, fragmenting past. I had got the whole story wrong. None of it mattered in the way that I thought it did.
Standing up, I wiped the tears from my face. Suddenly I felt very calm.
“No,” I said. “There doesn’t really seem much point.”
She gazed at me for a moment, as if on the verge of saying something, then shrugged. “Is Steve with you?”
I swallowed, but she was looking at me without any discernible ill will.
“No.”
“But you’re still together?”
“Not anymore.”
“What happened?”
“You know.” I turned to the door, not wanting her to see my face. “Stuff got in the way.”
“Shame. I always thought you two were made for each other.”
I did not reply. Gemma stepped through the door and I followed her into the freezing hall. When we reached the front door she opened it, standing aside to let me pass.
“Looks like it’s clearing up,” she said, glancing outside.
“Right.”
I stepped onto the porch.
“You’ll be all right?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Esther?”
“Yeah?”
I turned around and saw that her face had softened. For the first time that day, our eyes met.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” Very slowly, she reached out and took my hand. “It was just something I had to do. I had to get away.”
I shook my head. I was suddenly close to tears again.
“So what about your mum?” I eventually said. “Do you want me to tell her that you’re here?”
She seemed to shudder, wrapping her arms around herself as if for comfort. “No,” she said. “I’ll write to her. It’s time.”
We embraced then, stepping into the warmth of each other’s arms for the briefest of moments, then clumsily separating again, our cheeks colliding in a mistimed kiss. When we stood apart I understood that everything had finally changed.
“Take care.”
“Yep. You, too.”
“See you around then. Stay in touch.”
“Yeah, for sure.”
I turned, pulling my shawl tightly around my shoulders. In the time that I had been inside the ashram the path leading through the front garden had iced over. I started to walk along it, taking it one step at a time, not looking back to wave at Gemma, just making sure that I did not slip.
34
WHEN I reached the bottom of the track I crossed the road and stood by the side of the hill, looking through the trees to the valley below. Gemma was right; although the temperature had fallen, the sky was clearing: above the trees clumps of cloud drifted apart to reveal a clear stretch of blue.
In the patchwork fields below, I could see the lines of the plow, patches of common land sprinkled with goats and sheep, the thatched roofs of houses, their smudge of smoke rising into the air above. Directly beneath me a shallow river was winding through the fields, its waters still low enough for a wide beach of pebbles and sand. As I looked down I saw that just below the bottom line of trees a group of women were washing clothes, the slap of garments against the boulders blending with the gush and gurgle of the water.
I stood for a while, watching the women below. I felt strangely still, my thoughts suspended in the calm clarity of aftershock, those few focused moments before it all sinks in. And as their chatter rose up the hill it all came back: the Story of Gemma and I, or How I Lost My Best Friend. I thought of our childhood together, of our secrets, and passions, and vows and how it had all gradually changed, ebbing away with each different turn of our lives. I thought of school and how she was meant to be the clever one and I was the one who was pretty. I thought of how I had passed my exams while she had flunked hers and saw how deeply competitive everything was that we did: those Cindy Doll games, those discos and university places and men. How had I ever thought of her as someone to be pitied? I had known her for so long that I’d stopped seeing her as herself. She was not poor, overweight Gem, whose parents had split up, whose hopeless mother spent her life whingeing; not Gem the failure who had fucked up her A-levels and was stuck in a dump. No, she was someone else: Gemma the strong one; Gemma, who made her decisions and stuck to them. It was me who wanted to hold onto the past, me who was scared to let go. And it was me who had always been lost.
So I stood there for hours, watching as the women worked and thinking about everything. And as the sun slowly moved across the sky I began to realize how free I’d suddenly become. And I am standing here still, rooted to the edge of this hill, my story almost over. I have told you everything I know, all that I remember. And now that I have reached the end, I’ve discovered what I should have known all along. Gem and I loved each other once, of course we did. But then it ended, like most childhood friendships eventually do. It did not matter who did what, it was not about guilt or blame. It was just about growing up.
I take a deep breath, filling my lungs with the cold mountain air. All that time, what I thought I’d lost was never there at all: it was a mirage, a trick of the gods. Later, I may not feel like this; inevitably there will be confusion, and anger and pain. But now I laugh, reaching up at the cold air. It is over, and I am suddenly weightless, soaring above myself, as light and easy as the clouds. I look through the pines to the sky, almost expecting a sign, and with a sudden flash of silver the sun appears from behind a tree trunk, the light glinting off the patchy snow and momentarily dazzling me. It’s the real stuff now. All this time I have been so hopelessly lost, but now the journeys and the waiting are finished.
Below me, one of the women has started to sing. Shielding my eyes with my hands, I turn away from the view and start walking down the hill.
Katy Gardner is a graduate of Cambridge University,
and received a Ph.D. from The London School of Economics. She is currently a senior lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Sussex. She lives on the south coast of the United Kingdom. Losing Gemma is her first novel.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
http://www.penguinputnam.com
