Community: Real Life

Ex-best friends

Clare is a 22 year-old graduate of Performing Arts from Middlesex University. She's starting a TEFL this year with the aim of inflicting herself on other parts of the world in the future. She also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of 20th Century serial killers.

Clare Riley wonders why ex-best friends hardly ever part on good terms, but she's not bitter. Oh, all right then, she is. Very.

I hated school. I was always picked last for rounders, hadn't heard of sun beds and found myself floating between social Antarctica and boffism. The only credibility I gained was by forging absence forms, being sarcastic and setting fire to things.

If it hadn't been for Kerry, who knows? I would probably still be wearing virgin socks and have a monobrow. Kerry you see soared where I failed. She had a smile like a mile-wide fridge being opened at midnight, the body of an Amazonian and wavy blonde hair. People were drawn to her like a wasp to the bathroom when your pants are down. I however, repulsed people like a Gary Glitter joke at a christening.

She wasn't exactly sensitive. When I took laxatives in an attempt to be thin, skinny Kerry gloated how she could eat and eat and didn't know where it all went. And when I had eczema, she drew crusty bits on a diagram in science and called it Clare.

We did all the normal best mate stuff; gave each other tattoos with our compasses, inhaled anything that stated "Avoid Inhalation" and engaged in amateur arson. At weekends we would get together and have bonfires, absorbed in burning stuff with Radiohead fuelling our teenage angst, me picking my acne and Kerry lighting her farts. Once we both singed our eyebrows while trying (unsuccessfully) to set the school loos on fire ... true Enid Blyton stuff.

The problems started after we left school. At college I happily realised that not all people in the world, or indeed Surrey, were like the poodle-permed, Argos-embellished, big-fringed plastic gangstas from school.

At school, I repulsed people like a Gary Glitter joke at a christening.

My acne cleared up, the puppy fat fell off and I stopped being so bloody miserable in the name of grunge and started enjoying myself. I became more extroverted - which Kerry said didn't suit me. I dressed differently and Kerry said it looked tacky. I started hanging out with new people - Kerry said they were all losers. If a bloke fancied me then Kerry said he was some new-variant leper, whereas of course, all her boyfriends were studs. It took me about five years to realise that around Kerry, I was the perennial coat-holder, just like at school. I felt about as attractive as an Ewok with mange.

It had to come to a final break in the last year of university when I heard she was cussing me to anyone who would listen, and had warned one of my new mates: "Clare's my friend, leave her alone."

=Last I heard she was working full-time in the same Saturday job she had when she was 16, with the same fat boyfriend, still lived at home with her parents, was about two stone heavier (ah-ha so that's where it all went) and really depressed.

We vowed to be mates forever, and I thought we would be. Eight years later are we still chums? Like fuck we are. It's the most we can do to avoid throwing rotten vegetables at each other in the street. The loss of our friendship saddens me sometimes, but then I remember what a jealous, spiteful, self-centred, (did I say selfish?) cow of a sniping slutbitch she is. (Okay I've stopped foaming at the mouth now.)

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