‘I didn’t like Kate the first night I met her. She’d turned up at a house party where we lived in Brighton where I had been doing pretty well – maybe I was chirpsing some guy and it was getting somewhere, I can’t remember – but the moment she walked in everyone’s attention sort of shifted away from me and the whole room just looked at her – gawped, really. I eventually got used to people looking at her, but that night it pissed me off. She was wearing a white t-shirt with no bra and you could see her nipple piercing. She had her hair scraped back in a bun and she was wearing barely any makeup. Next to her, I felt like a try-hard slapper.
Later, when she came up to my group and introduced herself, I remember being standoffish and distracted. I remember her glancing up at me for some kind of recognition and looking sad when I didn’t give it to her. She was doing coke that night but so was everybody else. We were all in our first year at uni and we were all always on drugs. That’s just sort of the way it was.
The next time Kate and I came across each other we were at another house party and I was in no position to try and look cool. The guy I’d been sleeping with was lying on a sofa right in front of me getting off with another girl. I felt like everyone was judging me for letting some guy humiliate me. When I forced myself to look up, she was staring at me warmly and smiling. She beckoned me to the toilet and I was so desperate to get out of the room, I let her lead me away. In the toilet, I cried a bit and then she cried a bit. We spoke about how that guy was shit and some other guy was shit and then, suddenly, we were laughing so much that we were crying again only these tears were happy ones. Sat on the toilet floor, we dipped our fingers into her baggy of MDMA and told each other our secrets and we cuddled and drank warm rose straight from the bottle and then that was it really. I fell in love with her.
After that we pretty much spent every night together. People used to comment on how close we were, joking that it was ‘sickening’ how much time we spent together. We’d get dressed up and go storming around town being stupid and staying up all night doing coke and MDMA and ketamine and pills. Silly drugs. The ‘heavy shit’ - like heroine - was banned. As Kate put it: we didn’t have a death wish.
One Halloween Kate mixed up all the remnants we had left over in our handbags (there always seemed to be baggies we’d forgotten about – only ‘cluckers’ took everything). She spelled out our initials in massive lines of god knows what on the coffee table and we hungrily hoovered the whole lot right up. Later that night, she smashed a bottle of wine on a street lamppost and cut up her hands in the process. When we woke up and she needed five stitches.
After a few months though, things changed. There was the morning when my bus pass went missing when she stayed the night in my bed; there was that twenty pound note that I left on my mantelpiece which disappeared. We stopped going to the toilets together because she didn’t seem to want to share any more. Anyway, she had met a new boy, and they were having the Best Sex Ever – so if she was sharing with anyone she was sharing with him. I was hurt but in a way it was handy because I had a degree to finish. I told myself I didn’t have time to go out dancing all night on the seafront on a Tuesday. Whenever I did speak to her all she'd say was: 'When did you get so boring?'
We graduated and I moved to London, whilst Kate decided to stay put and move in with that boy. She invited me to come and their new flat one weekend but I was busy. Besides, I knew they’d be doing drugs - I'd seen pictures of the place on Facebook and it looked depressing. (Not that that stopped me ‘liking’ the photo virtually though). When she came up to see me, she wanted it to be like the old times and I’d go along with it because we were still mates, weren’t we? But she got cokey and weird and she spoke too loudly about how interns were mugs and how London was for twats. She called me ignorant and she spilled wine on a stranger.
I told myself I'd give myself a break from her for a couple of weeks, till we both calmed down. But a few weeks turned into a couple of months and then I heard that she and that boy were doing heroin. I felt guilty and sad. But when I tried to call her it was clear she’d changed her phone number and she wasn’t on Facebook any more. So what could I do?
Three months later, when people starting changing their profile pictures on Facebook to pictures of her, I didn’t really understand. That’s a bit lame, I thought. Had I forgotten her birthday? Then my phone rang and it was that boy, telling me that she had died. He was crying. They didn’t know what had happened yet, but she’d been taking heroin. He told me she loved me and then he waited for me to say something. I didn’t. Eventually, I said OK and I hung up, sat down on my kitchen floor and just sobbed.
At Kate's funeral all our friends from uni were there, and people kept coming up and talking to me about how close I'd been to her. I nodded, remembering how I hadn’t spoken to her in months and feeling my stomach tie in knots. I looked at her coffin and it looked small and it made me feel sick because her body was in it - my friend’s body. Someone told me that people were doing coke at the wake. It’s a bit off, they said, but people deal with this sort of stuff in different ways, don’t they? Anyway, she probably would have wanted it that way. She’d have thought it was funny. I got drunk and we spoke about her and suddenly we were all laughing. It was ok because we were going to do this together, weren’t we?
For months afterwards I'd spend hours looking at the condolences people were leaving on her Facebook page and looking at text messages we’d sent each other. Three years of friendship on one little phone. I kept willing myself to go deeper, get darker, feel worse. My best friend was dead, and that was a tragedy - I’d say it to myself over and over again. Because if I didn’t feel grief, I’d just feel anger.
A few months later, the rumours started to creep in. People said Kate had been doing heroin for nearly a year and she’d stolen from friends to fund it. She’d been sleeping with a mutual friend's boyfriend for years and no one knew it – not even me. She hadn’t seen her mum in months and she’d missed her sister’s engagement party. She’d kicked her boyfriend out of their flat and had got payday loans out to cover the rent. Now I couldn’t stop the anger getting in. She wasn’t a fucking idiot, how had she let her life turn into this? What about never letting it get too dark? It was all so grotty and rank. I’d phased her out for months but now all I did was miss her, and sometimes it made me so angry I didn’t know what to do. In fact, I’m still angry with her now and I’m angry with myself for not intervening when I knew she ‘had it in her’ to take it this far. She could have been anything and instead she chose this.
Now whenever I bump into people from uni, I watch as they awkwardly fumble through normal conversation but I know what they're wondering how I'm coping. That in itself makes me feel like I'm not coping. It’s awkward for both everyone involved, so I basically avoid going anywhere where I think they might be. It’s a shame though because in a way I know we’d probably be able to give each other a bit of comfort. But for now I know it’s impossible because, even six months on, her absence is too conspicious. How can I speak to those old friends about anything other than this monumental tragedy that happened to all of us? Even when she’s gone, it’s still like all eyes are on her.’
Photograph: Ada Hamza
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.