Half life
What are friends for?
Carole Morin
Swans are supposed to be monogamous but the bad-tempered ones I feed in Regent's Park, instead of swimming nicely together, are always sailing off alone. In the summer, you're expected to be out playing with friends, but I prefer staying in with the air-conditioning or watching a video to listening to the woes of problem feminists.
Trees suck in bad air and pump it out clean, Dangerous Donald — my best friend — explained to me. I suspect this is another one of those things that everyone else has known for years, but I'm full of my own importance having just discovered it. All week I've made a point of standing under a big tree while I'm feeding the sulky swans. After discharging my obligation to fresh air, I can go straight to Prime Time to rent a movie.
'When you stop being able to trust your friends. What then?' asks Ewan MacGregor in the great voice-over that opens and closes the thriller, Shallow Grave, which I watched on Tuesday and Thursday. You know you're losing your marbles when you start identifying with an actor, but in August you can blame everything on the heat.
Trust is over-rated. There are millions of good reasons for not trusting people. Most of the friends I've had afternoon coffee and cakes with recently seem to be seeing shrinks because they can't trust anybody, when they'd be better spending their money sipping pins coladas under palm trees.
Oh yes, what if you stop being able to like your friends? What then? 'I want to control everything,' Junky Janet told me, conspicuously gulping a Prozac with her iced coffee and refusing to eat a rum baba because she has a broken heart. You don't need to be called Sigmund to know that control isn't her problem, it's lack of it. Certainly, after hearing the aggressively boring story about her boyfriend dumping her, I'd need to be paid by the hour to meet her again. No matter how narcissistic and nauseat- ing my friends' behaviour, I'm supposed to act polite and sympathetic. There's Duncie who says everyone's saying I've had a face lift because I don't have any spots. (She doesn't have to make sense, she never has a boyfriend.) And New York Klaus — who doesn't even have the excuse of being a bitch — who calls at 4 a.m. to share anxi- eties and beautiful silences. He can wake me up and bore me to tears, because he's lovesick/insomniac/selfish. I have to listen, because we've been really good friends for years. But guess what? I don't!
And hanging around with swans and trees while Dangerous Donald's at work is definitely more exciting than meeting peo- ple to listen to emotional vomit then pay the bill as well, because they're too depressed to go to the cashpoint.
Of course you need to keep some friends, or you're a queer hawk. At night, friends are easier to stomach. Drinking cocktails with a gang is much more fun than intimate coffee and sympathy ses- sions. When you're drunk, deciding whether or not David Wicks in EastEnders is sexy is great fun.
And like Ewan MacGregor in Shallow Grave, I believe in friendship — but only with people who keep passing the audition. Not with false friends who are dying to see you down and out — eager to gloat at your distress, and sneer at your success. Who wants to be loved by the undiscriminating?
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