Farewell, my friend

Farewell, my friend
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 1, 2014

I’m not one for living in the past. But the death of a long-ago friend has marked me in strange ways. Our friendship blossomed during a summer of waitressing in 1985, the year I turned 18. We shared the breakfast shift at the North Cott cafe, overlooking the beach. Her name was Jan. Her name-tag said so.

She was twelve years older, fit and tanned, a single mum to two girls. I’d pull up to the cafe at 6am and see her dilapidated Volvo 240 parked skew-whiff out front, windows open and a pack of Sterling Ultra Milds on the front seat.

By 6.30, the easterly dropped and left the cafe blinds in peace. The first swimmers shuffled up the concrete steps, salted by the ocean, hungry for breakfast. I’d never seen such a smorgasbord of near-naked bodies up close. Jan would elbow me as she folded a mound of serviettes. My eyes followed hers to some swarthy athlete who’d hitched up his red sluggos to display two meaty buttocks. A collection of old boys who swam daily, all-weathers, stood chatting in saggy bathers, drying off their wrinkly brown hides. Girls in bikinis paraded perkiness.

Behind the coffee machine, I admired Jan working the outdoor tables, a model of waitressing efficiency. She could stack three greasy plates along one forearm yet still wriggle free from the bloke who liked to pat her bottom as she took his order. Swatting his arm with her free hand, she weaved back to me. She’d dumped her plates and cutlery so they clattered on the bench and every head turned towards her. “One cappuccino for The Octopus!” she’d announce, grinning.

A virgin at waitressing, I was intimidated by the hulking coffee machine. The frothing proboscis dribbled boiling water on my hand or spat steam at my face if I lost concentration. Customers flustered me by huffing when their lattes took too long. I boiled the milk into a frenzy and served up flat whites with slimy skins that stuck grotesquely to upper lips. My new friend Jan was always encouraging: “You’re getting the hang of it. See? Do table four’s next – they’ve only been waiting for ten minutes.”

Now accustomed to dawn risings, Jan and I started meeting at the beach to exercise on days off. I wore a tie-dyed singlet and my favourite white shorts with elasticated lacy hems. Sometimes I wore a g-string leotard over the white shorts because I was all class in the 80’s. Jan had a bright purple leotard and black micro-shorts. We power-walked along the footpath that hugged Marine Parade from Swanbourne to Leighton beach. Engrossed in conversation, we ignored the smirks from middle-aged couples in sensible tracksuits.

We dissected our relationships – her new squeeze, my over-familiar one. We itemised their shortcomings, justified our own. We raked over our childhoods, volunteered deep secrets. Nothing was too personal or too painful for a verbal autopsy. I marvelled at her insights. She could solve any of my problems.

On the weekends her girls went to their father, we warred at the tennis net. Line calls were disputed with McEnroe histrionics. The sore loser copped the bill for lunch. We counted calories, invented new diet regimes, wondered if this would be the year we’d be thin enough (and brave enough) to wear a bikini.

And then I got sacked from the cafe. The boss caught me hiding in the coolroom, scoffing a slab of his prized hummingbird cake. Jan constructed an elaborate defence, but my coffee failures had caught up with me, and now I was also a cake thief.

I went off to Psych 101 at Uni, she had a baby with the new boyfriend. We still walked along the ocean once a week, then once a month, then not at all. We caught up on the phone, as delighted with each other as ever, but the gaps in our friendship grew longer until I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her.

And then one morning last year, I spotted her at the shops. She looked gaunt, her collar bones sharp against her oddly pale skin. I was shocked, but made a pretence.

“All right,” I said as we hugged. “You win. You’re thinner!”

“No. You win,” she said. “I’ve got cancer.”

I burst into tears.

I hardly knew anyone at her crowded funeral. A few faces were vaguely familiar, old friends of hers I’d met once or twice. Jan’s girls had slyly grown into women. I spotted three small grandsons. I was now a middle-aged relic from her past. I stood against the chapel wall and my mind drifted to the year we met, when the beach beckoned to sun-tans and summer romances. I longed for her company, for our shared confidences, for my younger self. But she is gone now, my friend Jan. Part of me went with her.