Friends

Friends.

Anna is the one talking. She says:

“D’ja know, P.T. is like, finally cool again?”

Miguel is plugged into his ipod, sorta: one bud sits in his ear, the other nestles itself in his lap. It kinda looks like an umbilical chord lying there, I think to myself, or a snake, or a…The metaphors drain me. Wait – or an abnormal sperm, ready to puncture an egg and spawn a child without legs, without eyes. But then I think no, what it really looks like is one half of a pair of headphones.

“What’s P.T.?” Arnold asks, bravely. Questioning Anna’s constantly evolving slang is dangerous business. Arnold’s wasn’t always Arnold. He used to be Jean-Paul. But the mundane is cool again and Arnold is a hipper name than Jean-Paul. He changed it through deed poll.

We have another friend – born of hippies – whose name was Cyan Glitterbug. She changed it to Jane Stevens. She works at an organic bakery now. Her boyfriend’s name is Dirk. He changed it. Used to be Cerulean.

“Duh,” says Anna. “It stands for public transport.” She snickers, and flicks a stray lock of hair from her brow in a gesture that is practiced, considered. ‘Duh’ is cool again all of a sudden, which is weird, because it’s a 90’s thing, and the 90’s are no longer in, although they were for yonkers. ‘Yonkers’ is not cool, which is why I think it, rather than speak it.

“What?!” Miguel bellows. His music must be loud, but I can’t hear anything and I’m sitting right next to him. He puts a cupped hand to his ear.

“Take your headphone out then, yeesh,” snaps Jane 2. Jane 2 is actually our original Jane. But we liked Cyan better than her, so when Cyan became Jane, Jane became Jane 2. She hates us because of this. She hates us with an intensity that was at first rather chilling, but now is the source of much amusement for us. She’s my roommate. She never gets invited to anything, but she’s always here.

“What are you listening to, anyway?” Pete wants to know.

Miguel doesn’t answer. He just throws Pete a ‘phone, and Pete plugs himself in.

“It’s nothing,” Pete says, confused. “I mean, there’s no music.”

“It’s John Cage, you pleb,” Miguel drawls. “He was making a point about – y’know – whatever. So it’s silence.”

“Then why were you shouting?” Anna asks.

“What?!” Pete bellows, catching on. Anna is the easiest of us all to make fun of, but she’s the one we fear and respect the most. She had a cancer scare last year, and the thought of losing her propelled a number of us into deep existential crises we have only just recovered from.

“Please mind the gap,” comes the tinny voice of the announcer. He is obviously ethnic but none of us are racist, so we do not acknowledge – even to ourselves, privately – that he is ethnic. We have gotten very good at making the issue of race invisible. It is one of the things we congratulate ourselves on.

“So, birthday boy,” says Miguel, clapping his hands together and craning his neck to look at me, “you excited?”

I nod. The Plantation – tonight’s destination – is a kale and quinoa joint that literally every single site I visit has declared THE PLACE TO BE. A few nights ago, I had a dream about a plate of kale. I didn’t eat it or anything. Just kale. Just a plate of kale.

“I do not think there are any circumstances under which it is right to discipline a child in any way,” Anna is saying.

“We talking physically disciplining?” asks Pete.

“What?!” bellows Anna, and though this joke is so unbelievably not funny, we all laugh. I don’t know about the other guys, but I am laughing because there is a businessman looking at me from the other end of the carriage, and there is something in his gaze that says he envies our youth, and our beauty, and our friendship, and so laughing would only make him more envious, and although that is a shitty thing of me to do, I laugh and I laugh.

A few days ago Jasmine, the girl who serves me my daily skim latte, was not at her usual place behind the counter, and there was a spotty teen standing there instead, and this upset in routine was so drastic that it came to feel apocalyptic, and the feelings of dread it stirred in me were only exacerbated a few days later when I discovered that she had been hospitalized with an ailment cocktail made up of anemia, digestive upset, scurvy and stomach ulcers because for three months she had eaten nothing but chicken feed as part of an art piece/social experiment designed to bring to light the terrible treatment of animals bred in captivity, and she is sick enough to possibly die, and I bought her flowers but never sent them, because I didn’t know where to send them – didn’t know the hospital, didn’t know the ward – and they are sitting in my apartment right now, withering, dying.

“The rights of children are actually -  you know, actually – more important than the rights of adults,” Jane 2 is saying. I know that Anna shares this view too but as we all feel mildly disgusted by anything Jane 2 says or does, Anna immediately and vehemently begins arguing with her.

I look down at my hands. I am suddenly terribly interested in my hands.

“I hear that blueberries are actually bad for you,” says Miguel, to no-one in particular, and suddenly, I am seized with the desire to stay on the train when we pull up at our stop. I will just sit where I am, staring straight ahead, and the guys will try to talk to me but I will ignore them, and they will have to choose between trying to communicate with me and going to The Plantation, and I know – I just know – that they will choose The Plantation, and will slip through the closing doors, leaving me here, defiantly and brilliantly alone.

“How old are you, anyway?” Jane 2 asks me. The rest of the group take a collective breath.

“Jesus,” Miguel says. “You don’t know?”

“You live with him, Chrissakes,” snaps Anna.

“He’s twenty five, gawd,” says Pete, wrong.

“He’s twenty,” says Anna, also wrong.

Miguel turns to look at me.

“I thought you were twenty three,” he says. “I remember you saying clearly that you were twenty three.”

“Yeah, two years ago he said that,” says Pete. “Two years ago that is what he said.”

“How old are you?” asks Arnold. I look into his eyes. They are exceptionally beautiful. For a long time I wanted to be gay, partly so Arnold and I could go out, but mainly so I could have something to rail against. I was fourteen when I discovered that, as a straight, middle-class, white male, I had no cause to rally behind. One of my high school obsessions was a non-fiction book I borrowed weekly from the library. It was about the Black Panthers. I don’t think I ever actually read the book. I just looked through the pictures. I looked at the marches. I noticed how close to each other everyone was standing. I thought about that a lot.

“I’m twenty seven,” I say. The words feel like marbles rolling around my mouth. My therapist once said the source of all my problems was my vanity. I countered by telling him about the six African children that I sponsor. He told me that using the children as evidence in an argument about vanity was a vanity of the worst kind. I came home and cancelled my sponsorship. I still think about those kids. I had a dream that I visited them, bringing gifts of mock chicken steaks, and we roasted them over a fire and gazed across the savannah.

“Jimi Hendrix” was twenty seven when he died,” says Arnold. He puts air quotes around the words “Jimi Hendrix” for reasons I cannot begin to fathom.

“What point are you making?” says Anna, not unpleasantly, genuinely interested. Anna is a Conversation Expert. She delights in tangents, and has an excellent ability to propel casual statements into philosophically and ethnically interesting territory.

“None, really” says Arnold, not realizing that in saying this he has disappointed Anna on a most fundamental level.

“Kurt Cobain, too,” says Pete.

“How come famous people don’t die of like, regular things?” Jane 2 asks, gazing out of the window. “Like, I had a friend: her mother died by getting her ring caught in the toaster. Or, like, my other friend: her aunt got killed by an automatic door in a supermarket.”

“Whojeewazzy died when her scarf got caught in the wheel of her car,” Miguel says. “Strangled. Dead. That’s kinda regular.”

“That is almost the exact opposite of regular,” says Pete.

“Who’s whojeewazzy?” says someone, whoever.

Miguel shrugs. “I don’t know. Movie star.”

“Well, what movies was she in?” Jane 2 wants to know.

“No idea,” Miguel says. “Literally the only thing I know about her is that story.”

Anna has been bent over her smart phone. She looks up, slowly, and something exists within her expression that sends my heart pounding.

“Christ,” I say. “What’s up?”

She shakes her head.

“I don’t know –“ Anna manages. “I don’t know.”

She sighs. The whole train should be quiet for the news that Anna is about to deliver, but it’s not, because the fucking businessman is talking on the phone, and I shoot him a look, and we lock eyes.

“Is using the poop emoji considered flirting?” Anna asks, quietly.

I am still staring at the businessman. We have moved past the boundaries of socially acceptable stranger based eye contact, but here we are: staring. And then, for whatever reason, we stop staring. He looks out of the window. And that is it. Done. Hardly worth mentioning. Not worth mourning. I look back at the group, who are all glued to their smartphones now. I pull my own out of my pocket. Looking at our phones is not anti-social: how can something be anti-social when everybody is doing it? Indeed, it is Jane 2 who seems anti-social when she breaks the silence, and says:

“Cage free is organic but organic is not necessarily cage free,” Jane 2 is saying, and although I know what each of these words mean, they do not make any sense to me in that order.

Our stop is approaching, so this is it. I prepare myself.

“Come on doofus,” Anna says affectionately. I look at her. I stare into her eyes. And then I rise. I leave a person who looks like me, has my name, but is different – fundamentally different- sitting on the train, and then I follow my friends through the open doors.