Goodbye, Natalie

I was on the bus at the end of the day when I found out that Natalie had died.

I had worked late – one of those rare occasions when I did so – and I took my seat next to Phil as the 5.45 pulled away from the office and out onto the motorway, packed with people getting back to the bits of their lives they liked (or in some cases, I guess, the bits of their lives they didn’t). The journey dragged so badly that we came off a junction early, trying a different route to avoid the clot of cars going nowhere fast. As we drove past the multiplex cinema selling dreams to the suburbs, my phone blinked with the fateful email. I read it, I read it several times at least, but I couldn’t take it in. It’s not as if I wanted to try.

“Christ.” said Phil, looking round. “It’s all going on here in Winnersh, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose so.” I said, on autopilot. More accurately, I wasn’t on autopilot but I was saying the sort of things I would have said if I had been. I found myself wishing I had an autopilot switch but, looking at that mail again, I might have just turned it on and left it that way forever. In the failing light, the bus coasted up the long straight road lined with nasty looking off licences, dental surgeries, the bastard offspring of garages and supermarkets. We were caught up in nearly stationary traffic but they were quieter, less frantic vehicles with calmer, more complacent drivers. Hadn’t they heard the news that Natalie had died? I wanted to get off the bus and bang on a gridlocked window, take issue with them all for their indifference. I wanted to shout at somebody. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. My phone sat in my hand like a smoking revolver.

“I’m sorry Phil.” I said, “I’m not really with it. I’ve just found out that one of my friends has died.”

“Oh, sorry mate. Were you close?”

I realised the answer would be difficult to put into words, but then everything seemed to be; this was a very recent phenomenon. I mentally counted how many minutes it would be before I could get to a place where nobody could see me and my face could have the expression that came naturally, instead of the one you have to wear when you’re on a bus with people from work. It was too far away, I wasn’t sure I could make it.

“It’s a funny one. Yes, we were very close but we never physically met.”

Some people, I realised as I said this, would instantly understand this concept. My life is full of people who would. And here I was, stuck on a bus, with a mail on my phone I couldn’t reconcile with everything else about the world, sitting next to somebody who never would, not if the traffic backed up for hours and I didn’t get home until midnight and I spent the rest of the trip explaining to Phil who Natalie was and what she had been to me.

“You never met?”

“No. We got to know each other on Facebook, years and years ago. There used to be this application, you see, called ‘iThink’, and it was sort of like a virtual debating society.” I said, increasingly aware that this probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone. “We got to know each other through that, and we‘ve been friends ever since.”

“Sort of like a chatroom for toffs?”

Natalie was very far from a toff; it just wasn’t worth telling him that, he didn’t mean anything by it.

“Yes, sort of.”

“Right.” said Phil and we stopped at a junction, waiting for the car in front of us to get a move on. “Jesus, imagine living in one of these big houses.”

Inwardly, I smiled. Natalie would have liked the randomness of that conversation. She took a bus to work, too, and I knew from the messages we used to exchange that she heard things as odd as that every day.

Phil’s response, if anything, should have made it slightly easier. He had acted as if I hadn’t said it, and so I thought I could follow suit and do the same. It would have been nice to act as if I hadn’t heard the news either, but further emails on my phone filled out the picture and made that impossible; it had happened a few weeks ago and the funeral had been yesterday. It was her heart, her friend said, she’d always had problems with it, maybe I hadn’t known (I had).

Then I made my big mistake, looking on her Facebook wall, the virtual equivalent of the flowers at a crash site. Such beautiful tributes, every one showing that she was properly missed for who she was, by somebody who really knew her. Every one made it harder for me to pretend everything was the same as it had been when I finished work, what felt like a decade ago.

I had to be someone else getting off the bus, thanking the driver and telling him to have a good evening. I had to be that same person as I parted company with Phil on the corner, leaving him to go home to his wife and his little boy, and I had to keep that mask in place as I walked home through all the disinterested extras in my crowd scene. It was only when I got home, took off my coat, took off the mask, and Kelly hugged me that I could be me. Only then could I cry, and when I could form a sentence it was the sentence I would say over and over again that evening, the only one I seemed capable of.

”I always thought that I’d get to meet her one day, you know?”

“I know.”

Later that night I stared at the wall of her Facebook page again and again, half expecting her to turn up and respond to the things people were saying. But life doesn’t work like that, and death certainly doesn’t. I tried to sum up how I was feeling in a few inadequate paragraphs; as if she could hear, as if she could read it on the other side, a side I had never really entirely believed in. There, stuck in the middle of my inarticulate efforts, was the only line that seemed to be worth anything at all: I was a little bit in love with you Natalie, I think we all were.

The next morning, just the latest in a long string of mornings Natalie would never see, I felt more and more like a fraud as the day wore on. The arbitrary horrors playing out on the other side of the world were so fresh and visceral, the outcry so vocal, that I became increasingly aware of my tiny unuttered screams of protest drowned out amid the laments of the whole world. There is no disaster relief for human earthquakes.

In any case, it seemed odd to mourn for somebody I’d never met. All I knew of what she looked like was a few pictures I had seen online. In one, she was sitting on a chair in her back garden, straight fine hair, heavy glasses, all elbows and knees with her arms around Freddie, the dog she loved so much and cleaned up after so regularly and without complaining (“I ended up doing very little today.” she once told me, “I did give a bath to a stinky dog - that was fun. It was my stinky dog, by the way, not a random one off the street.”) In another picture, she was wearing a deep red cloche and smiling; the photo that had cropped up so regularly in my timeline, on messages or on chat conversations. It wasn’t the face of a dead woman, it was the face of someone with plenty to look forward to. It bore no hint of her disappointments, and now it was a constant reminder of mine.

So I’d never seen her face move, never heard her voice either. And yet her voice had jumped off the page in every mail, every message, every chat conversation. How could that not be knowing someone? She never wrote a dull sentence in her life, and I was as much the beneficiary of that as anyone. She was always wry, frequently self-effacing and occasionally bitchy with the same gleeful reluctance of a dieter giving in against their better judgment to a whole packet of biscuits. Our correspondence was very English, we always danced around doing our best to hide our deep admiration of one another. I soon learned that you could pay Natalie a compliment, but you were best off hiding it a couple of paragraphs from the end of a long email. If you were lucky she wouldn’t pick up on it, or maybe she did and she let it pass.

And yet when she finally left the family home and moved into her own place, I was as happy as I could have been if it was somebody I saw every day. I remember looking through the album of photos, a guided tour of all those rooms waiting to be filled up with life, and hopes, and stuff, and feeling a palpable excitement about her independence, something she had almost given up on. I sent a card and it was an easy one to write, one where you really mean it and aren’t going through the motions, struggling for something to say.

“I have another friend who lives near Exeter.” I told her once. “You’re going to have to start thinking of excuses not to see me, because one day I’ll come and visit.”

She never needed to, as it happened, but I always thought there would be enough time. That’s the trick time plays; you always think there‘s enough and then one day there isn’t. The opportunities have run out and you have wasted it doing something else, something unimportant like tapping away at a screen or arguing with strangers or playing pointless games on a mobile phone. And so I never got to sit in her garden on a warm day, and dodge Freddie, and find out how her voice sounded, or what her smile was like and it’s a rotten, rotten shame. It makes me think about all the other people I’ve never met, yet feel as if I know, and makes me want to buy them all a drink on a summer evening, while we all still have time.

She was a huge supporter of my writing - when I got cards printed for the blog she made me send her one. “I’ll sell it one day, when you’re a published author” she said. I remember her comments on my blog, too, always elegant and complimentary but not too complimentary. And I’m struck by some of the ones she commented on and how similar we could be. I wrote a piece very early on about not fitting in with the cool kids at work, and she told me that I could have joined her in the library at school for a Connect Four tournament. It so summed up a shared feeling of not belonging that ironically brought us together, a connection far more important than living in the same town or drinking down the same pub. Another time, I wrote about what a fearful child I had been, scared of everything: success, failure, girls, the unknown, my friends, not having any friends.

“It made me want to hug the six year old you.” she said, “But in fact I’d quite like to go back in time and hug the six year old me too.”

“I think if the six year old you and the six year old me had got to sit down and play Connect Four together, it would all have been okay.” I replied, and the funny thing is that I think there might be something in that. If nothing else, it’s a lovely image - and we never got to do that but she beat me at Scrabble online time and time again. If we had crossed swords at Connect Four, even as children, I don’t think it would have been long before she had suggested playing for money.

When her mother died last year, of the same condition she had, I remember sharing her devastation. We swapped lots of messages around that time, and she read a piece I wrote about going to see a medium shortly after it happened, which I wrote the day her mother passed away. She said it sort of helped, and she told me a story about a feather. She said that ages ago a psychic told her that finding a feather could be a message from a dead loved one letting you know that they’re okay.

“That’s bonkers in itself, isn’t it?” she said. “Why a feather? Who figured that one out? It’s just someone trying to comfort another by making up a story, right? All I know is that I found one in my garden - I’ve never found one there before. The next day my dad found one in his garden. My sister was upset she hadn’t and actually looked. She didn’t have one. I got a call today from her - her friend took her to the park. As she was there, sat at a bench, loads of feathers landed at her feet.

“I know it’s 99.99% coincidental and us just wanting it to be true, but how much do I wish that 0.01% is right.”

Reading that again I do too, more than I can say, and I hope she’s reunited with her mum. And I don’t care what anybody says, I can mourn someone I’ve never met who told me a story like that, and if I can’t then somebody needs to explain to me why this has all been so hard to put into words.