Female friendships are fraught with competition. I met up with a girlfriend the other day, and she introduced me to a friend of hers with the following words:
“This is Jacinta. She used to be cooler than me at school. Would you believe it?” Later on, as we posed for photos, she said: “The main thing is, that I look better than you. As long as you look fatter than me, I’m happy!”
But that’s not all female friendships are about. They’re fraught with competition, but, and I’m sorry for the Hallmark cliché here, the glue that holds them together is Love….
I was always friends with the poshest girl in the school, right. In Infant school it was Rosa Wyatt. Her mum was an art teacher and her dad was a deputy head. My mum used to pause a little and almost gasp before she said the word “deputy head-teacher.” There was respect in her voice, but resentment, too, you know.
They had this sign on their fridge saying “When I give money to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor are poor, they call me a Communist.”
I remember that sign. I remember asking Rosa Wyatt’s dad about that sign, and what a Communist was, and if he was a Communist. I remember him saying yes, probably. I remember him reading us Clever Polly and the Silly Wolf and Anne of Green Gables.
I remember Rosa Wyatt always got to choose whose game it was – if it was at hers, she got to choose because it was her house, and if it was at mine, she got to choose because she was a guest. We used to play strict teachers and French dancing Can-Can girls. Rosa Wyatt told me that the real ones, in France, didn’t wear any knickers, but I didn’t believe her. I remember thinking that they just called knickers something-else in France.
At Juniors it was Deborah de Berker, her mum was a social worker and her dad was a civil servant, and not being funny, her dad was a bit in love with me. He used to try and get me to read Homer and stuff, and he’d drink whiskey and bounce us up and down on his knee and ask us what did we think of Stig of the Dump. You should be reading Homer, he’d say.
Deborah had everything she ever wanted: china dolls, Barbies, dolls’ houses, silver spoons, her own bedroom, a wooden Wendy house in the back garden, Care Bears, My Little Ponys, everything. We used to sometimes play Nazis in her back garden. Well, she was the Nazi and I was the Jew and we would fall in love and escape to Switzerland over the climbing frame. But mostly it was starving orphans and strict teachers.
I got converted to Deborah’s Methodist Church when I was eight. What it was, was I went along with her to this Billy Graham concert and got so bored I started thinking about other stuff. Then I switched back to reality just in time to hear him say: “You can stay up there and got to Hell, or come down here and bask in eternity with Jesus and everything.” So I went for the second option. I only lasted six months as a Methodist, though. I felt so guilty coz of masturbating and plus I thought God knew I was only believing in him because I was scared of going to Hell and so it didn’t really count anyway.
And at High School it was Jacqui. Jacqui Short. She didn’t have any dad but she was still posh, she pronounced all her Ts and Hs and a few extra ones, too. She read Elle and the Independent. She used to say the word “extraneous” a lot. She used to say: “Don’t get all extraneous with me, Jacinta.”
She had perfect nails and perfect hair and her brother was a vegetarian who went to the Grammar School. I remember her brother almost as well as I remember her. He loved Björk and Teletext. He had a letter on Teletext correcting someone who had spelt till ’til. Well, they’d written in, correcting someone-else and that had angered him. I remember once he found a spelling mistake in the dictionary, he was very passionate about it. He was kind of into trick questions, too, and then you’d fuck up and he’d giggle away at you for being stupid. Jacqui used to get annoyed but I quite enjoyed it, I’d fight back. He had an unfair advantage, though, being two years older and plus at his school you actually got taught stuff. He was really good at French and once he did Jacqui’s homework for her and wrote that her mum was a prostitute and her town was shitty.
Jacqui loved Barbie, Spice Girls, Absolutely Fabulous… and Annie Lennox and Simply Red. She adored Richard and Judy and simply despised Liz Earle. Once we got caught shoplifting – we did quite a bit of thieving, as kids – and ran away to Leeds together. Where are you meant to run away to if you come from London? On the way we nearly got converted to the Socialist Worker’s Party. When I had been fished back from Leeds, I was grounded, for, like ever. And then the SWP came round and asked if I was coming to their meeting. I don’t think so, my mum said. This young lady here is not going anywhere for a very long time, and certainly not with the Socialist Workers.
My mum never admitted that she thought Jacqui was a bad influence on me. she always said that we were just a “bad combination.”
“That just means a bad influence,” Jacqui used to say. She was quite perceptive like that.
One of Jacqui’s favourite quotes was how Annie Lennox used to say that she felt “not better but other” than her home-town. Jacqui used to say she felt the same. About Chadwell Heath. But then she used to go: “But other does mean better, really.”
I loved her for that
I missed her so much when we fell out, I did.
Why do girls send themselves so crazy competing with one another? It makes us so petty, it keeps us so small. All the men are flying to the moon – we’re down here on Earth, bickering about T-shirts. The worst thing is the reverse psychology one, where you say you are fat and the other girl is thin, forever and ever and ever and ever until your brain implodes:
“Does my bum look big in this?”
“No you look gorgeous – absolutely bloody gorgeous!”
“No, you know you’re the one who’s gorgeous, you know that.”
“Look how skinny and gorgeous you are! Look at your skinny little waist! Aaargh! Look how skinny she is! She’s such a skinny bitch!”
“No you’re skinny!”
“No you’re skinny!”
“No you’re skinny!”
No, darling, you are skinny! If you look up the word Skinny Bitch in the dictionary – you get your face!”
“You’re the skinny bitch.”
“No – I’m grotesquely fat – and you’re divinely skinny. That’s the difference between us.”
Why do we do it to ourselves? Why don’t men do it to each other? I suspect it’s to do with sex, and freedom. Men don’t repress their homosexual side in the same way that we do. They don’t snipe at each other – they just kind of wrestle. Women, on the other hand, snipe and snipe and snipe – and compare. And it’s fucking boooooowring. Because, seeing as how the glue which holds together female friendships is love, and not competition, I vote to stop competing and start loving. And the best way to find out who’s the skinniest is to simply get naked and start exploring each other’s beautiful, fertile bodies…….and shut the fuck up.
