Best Friends and Bras from Spar.
Wanda was tall, beautiful, easy going and intelligent. She was also as mad as a box of frogs.
When we were young kids, me 7 and her 8, I kind of idolised her. She was so different to me, everything about her, but we liked to do the same things and got on like a house on fire straight away. It was decided that we were best friends within an hour of me joining her table of friends on my first day in a new class. We remained best friends for years, until her illness. Our lives bisected then, taking us in directions so disparate that we no longer had a point of reference to ground and unite us when we did meet up later.
It wasn’t one sided by any means, our friendship. She chose me as her best friend because she just liked me instantly. I never did really understand why, but I thought she was great too. Wanda had asked her mum to change their washing powder, so that she could smell like me. Funny, it didn’t seem odd at the time, just kid things, but one could in hindsight see that as a sign that she wasn’t quite secure in her own skin.
She almost always went along with my crazy plans when we were little. She embraced my giddy kipper approach to life, whilst at the same time never losing her natural grace and poise. It was something I envied, though I didn’t have the words to describe it at the time, and it was something that I could never even have tried to imitate.
Wanda’s mum wasn’t super keen on me, especially as I started to grow into a rebellious teenager, by her ‘Christian standards’ at least. During the primary school days, she seemed happy for us to spend every spare minute together. She didn’t comment much other than a slight raise of her eyebrow once in a while when some of our antics came to her attention. The ladybird circus, where poor beetles were made to walk sewing thread ‘tightropes’, or the mock radio interviews with pop stars like George Michael, recorded on cassette tape with requisite girly giggling.
Wanda was the daughter of a dance teacher, so not surprisingly dance routines formed part of our summer holiday activities. Having no discernible dancing talent, I put myself in charge of costume design to make up for it. For an unsophisticated routine that Wanda had choreographed to the tune of Abba’s ‘does your mother know’, I created homemade skin tight red polyester mini skirts, convinced they were the perfect costumes. We were 10 years old, with no real understanding of the implications of the song’s lyrics, but I cringe even writing that now.
Everything seemed ordinary to me then; there was a little bullying from some older girls at one point, but that didn’t bother me much, and I had enough problems at home. But all in all, I still look back fondly on the years when we were besties. Wanda didn’t judge me, or my family, my house. Although something about the way her mother treated me, with hindsight, seems to suggest that her family were not comfortable with the amount of time we spent together.
Then there were the Wanda-wilderness years, that time in high school when we were between 12 and 15, and we went our separate ways. She stayed very quiet, reserved, and shy and kept herself to her small group of very conservative friends. I barely noticed her during that time to be honest, as I went along in my own teenage way. I was full of hormones, fear and excitement, hairspray and lipgloss. At 16 we drifted back to each other, via Petra. Petra was somewhere in between Wanda and I on a personality scale, a bit of a rebel at heart but on the surface quiet and well behaved. It worked well, and we became a trio quite quickly. Wanda’s mum still did not much like me, or Petra, truth be told, as we were a bit too wild and not suitable companions. We persisted though, and the trio remained intact even throughout the beginnings of Wanda’s breakdown.
One day at college Wanda started to look pained, upset, and she complained of a fierce neck pain out of the blue. Confusing to 17 year olds who were not accustomed to ‘old lady aches and pains’. We discussed it with our tutor, who told Petra and I that it would be best if we walked Wanda home so that her mother could take her to the doctors surgery that afternoon. We presumed that we would see her back at school in a day or two, full of her story about the old GP and her mother fussing too much.
But that wasn’t to be the case, and I remember that walk to her house so clearly, as was the last time we ever saw ‘Real Wanda’, the pre-electric shock treatment Wanda.
