Friendship Over

From the age of 17 I have been very good friends with someone I will call Liz, which is not her real name. On leaving the school where we met, we remained in touch. She was in Hull and I was in Manchester. We had some great and some truly memorable times.

Both of us, eventually, moved back to our home city - Sheffield - me for a man and a job, her to mend a broken heart. We saw each other regularly and for a short time shared a place together, with another friend.

We became really close and told each other everything. (Well, not quite everything because I don't  think we ever do tell anyone absolutely everything.)

Liz and I got married the same year and had our children more or less at the same time. We were both teachers. We even job-shared when our children were small. We phoned each other most days, went out together, took holidays together. Our husbands were friends and socialised together. They were friends at university.

And then - Liz had a hysterectomy. I visited her in hospital and she asked me to pick her up and take her home when the hospital discharged her. I did - of course. But what I didn't realise straightaway was that I had brought home a different person. It seemed that not only had she had her uterus removed, she had had her personality taken away too.

Very soon after leaving the hospital, she started online dating. With alarming speed she had built up her number of dates to at least four a week, with four different men.Yes, she was still married but she had become very unpleasant and disrespectful towards her husband, who, within the space of six months, since she came out of hospital, had decided, with much encouragement from Liz, to get a job abroad. His first job was in Namibia and he took their youngest child.

Free, almost, with just her teenage elder child, who was very studious, living with her, she bashed those dating site keys with energy and abandon. Her tops got lower, her skirts got shorter, her hair got blonder and her heels got higher. She slapped the make up on too, in a way in which she had criticised women who did that in the past. She was barely recognisable in her appearance but more importantly, her character had gone through a metamorphosis. She was loud, talked over people everything was on her terms and on her agenda.

She fell in love twice - with the second one she was circling around the love object's house - at 3am. She suspected he might be seeing others so she was out checking for unknown cars in the area, no doubt belonging to a woman who her love object was at that moment sleeping with. Frankly her behaviour became demented.

Incredibly, that was only the start. Liz met a man in Leicester with whom, after just a couple of meetings, she fell madly in love. She told me all about him. He was handsome, apparently, he was highly intelligent, he was wealthy, he drove a BMW. He was also great company, interested in everything, thoughtful, considerate and generous. They had a connection, she swore they had.

I met him. He was not good-looking. In fact, he was rude. He asked my friend who was also at my house and who was a belly dancer, if she could show him her moves, until my husband thankfully piped up, 'Mate, can you stop. She's obviously not very comfortable.' He did stop, but not before telling my husband he was being ridiculous. We then told him that he was rude. So, this wonderful man was falling far short of what Liz had described.

Sadly, the relationship continued. He told her that she was not the one. He told her that she was too
fat, too short, her hair was too frizzy, her nose was too broad and that she was too old. Once during sex, he stopped proceedings and told her that her nose hair was distracting him. He removed it there and then.

Inevitably, things got worse. And she was paying for everything - drinks, meals, plane fares, supermarket shops, in fact anywhere they went together - she paid. He tried to finish with her, told her she would never be the one. He wanted someone younger, slimmer, prettier. She would never fit the bill. You can't fault him for not being honest.

He had a foot fetish. He loved women's feet. He loved the toenails varnished, the feet to be deeply
tanned, adorned with toe rings and strappy sandals. She immediately started to 'dress' her feet. Pedicures, stick on toe nails, with inlaid beads, tanned body and feet and toe rings. Frankly, she looked like an ageing prostitute.

Our meetings were now infrequent. After spending so much time together, I hardly saw her. The times I did see her were unenjoyable. The conversation was one-sided. It was all about her - her thoughts, her feelings, her anxieties, her activities. So why did I stick with her? Well, clearly the longevity of our friendship, shared experience and closeness were considerations. Now though, I was beginning to feel differently. She started lying to me. She phoned me at work a few times, demanding I go to her, because she was distraught. He had told her he was seeing other women. No, he would not stop seeing other women. He didn't love her, he told her. I was summoned to comfort her and to encourage her to hold fast to her decision to leave him for good. She made many excuses to not meet when we had arranged to meet, because she was seeing him, but she lied about it.

She didn't leave him, she couldn't leave him she said. But you're utterly miserable and he says he doesn't love you, I reminded her. He looks women up and down when you are with him, young women who wouldn't even look at him, though you seem to think they would be keen to go out with him, which really is delusional. This man is fat, unfit, not good looking, arrogant and rude! i did not mince my words.

Things got worse. She began spending whole days sitting outside his house. He would turn off the lights, barricade himself in with furniture and not answer the phone. What she was doing was proof of her insanity.

Not long afterwards came the climax. She had persuaded him to go for a drink with her - she would be paying of course. Coming out of the pub, he told her that he didn't want her to stay over and so she should drive home. Slightly inebriated and very upset at his hundredth rejection, she started to pull at his clothes, apparently ripping his leather jacket and his shirt. He called the police. She was arrested and bungled into the back of a police car. She was not released until 2pm the following day. In her cell, she had dried cornflakes and having nothing to read, asked for a book. One was thrown in through the slot of her cell. It hit her on the head.

At court a magistrate said that she must have a Restraining Order. It would she said, 'protect her from herself.'

She told me this after the trial when she came round to regale me. Her main concern was that in the court her ex had said that once, they had got on. She hung onto this as a drowning man clutches at a straw.

It was April. Liz was at my house,we were sitting in the garden. She had come to tell me about the trial. She couldn't understand why she had been given a restraining order. I said I could understand and that the magistrate seemed to understand her. She stood up, told me that I was upsetting her, knocked the cafetiere, the cups, the plates and the biscuits with a sweep of her arm onto the ground. My dog was terrified. She stood up, grabbed the birthday presents I had given her from the kitchen table and began screaming at me.'Your job is to listen!' She told me. I told her that I had been listening to her for the last ten years. She carried on screaming. I told her that she was screaming in the street. She got into her car and drove off at high speed. And that, was pretty much that.