My Friend Steve
My friend Steve died a few years ago, and to my shame
I can't even remember when. He wasn't my best friend,
more a friend of a friend, but I liked him well enough.
He used to drive us all around in one of his many cars. I
think all told he had about nine cars, most of them Minis,
but the occasional bargain basement deal as well. He
drove like a maniac, and we all said that one day the
cars would kill him, and one day one of them did, but not
in the way we thought.
For a couple of years he was one of our crowd. We'd
all be in the pub together, drinking too much, as is the
way of most of the male English population, and we'd
worry that he wouldn't be able to drive us to wherever it
was we thought it was so important to get to. I don't
know if he really drank as much as he said he did,
because on the occasions where he was breathalysed, he
always got the green light. He preferred to drive, and so
perhaps the pub was too restricting for him, too
stationary. I used to live in a town surrounded by
countryside, so there were always plenty of roads to
choose from.
Where did we drive? The simple answer is "around",
but they were adventures, every little journey into the
wilderness of tight twisting country lanes, only lit by
the pale beams of an ancient Mini. There were many pranks
played, like the time we decided to blow up the local
radio station, armed only with a few fireworks and the
dubious verbal skills of our teenage posse. Of course, we
never got into the station, mainly because one of us (a
punk born ten years too late) blew the whole game, but
the attempt to rid the world of recycled muzak has
remained with me ever since.
The pranks grew stale and childish I guess, because
then we roamed further afield, to Brighton or London. On
one foray the others made, Steve decided to stay in
Brighton with some squatters he'd met, and the first I
knew of it was when my best friend Phil came back with
Steve's Yugo van and we went for another ride. Steve
always did unpredictable things, like when he decided to
get married.
He married an older woman, a girl who was into the
unusual side of life, which of course made her
fascinating to our parroquial eyes. Her parents were
hippies, she had many friends of dubious sexual
backgrounds, and the last person we'd expect to get
married, but she did. Her name is Zoë, and she was the
only person I'd ever met who was prepared to talk about
culture in a pub.
After the wedding (at the reception of which we
attempted to grapple dance) I moved away to a grim
Northern university, and lost touch with events a little.
At every return, the town seemed a little duller - there
were fewer people in the pub, less parties, still no
nightclubs. Steve and Zoë faded away from the pub life,
and I lost touch, save for the occasional drunken chance
meeting when we'd attempted to rekindle past memories.
The scary thing was, that no-one else seemed to notice
the changes, they were still living their lives in a
routine of rutting and drinking. So it seemed to my
superior student eyes at the time.
I dropped out of university for a while, the party
life haven taken its toll on my grades and study habits,
and so I came back to live in my home town. I got a job,
and tried to earn the money to get back to the North. One
day the news came from Phil that Steve had killed himself.
I didn't believe it. We went to the pub in a daze and
tried to understand it. Steve had, for reasons no-one
understood (even the note he left made no sense) decided
to kill himself one day. He'd drunk half a bottle of wine,
downed some aspirin, and gone into the garage to start
his car. He never left the garage.
We made a plan to go and see Zoë. Because that's what
grown-ups do. We went. We were miserable. She was
impossibly buoyant, talking about the way he died, the
note, the nonsense of it all. It was strange. So then we
went to the funeral, didn't cry, and then, because we all
thought that's what he'd have liked, we went to the pub.
We made jokes, got drunk, and tried to forget.
Until now, that's what I've done. I've forgotten for
so many years that I can't remember them. You forget your
grief, but it never forgets you. Steve was my friend, and
looking back, it still seems like I treated him like shit.
I wish I'd been a better friend, and now I try to keep my
friends. That's something I've never forgotten, but until
now I didn't know why.
1998