Styling Wellywood: A fashionable romantic comedy (Wellywood Series Book 2) (18 page)

We smiled at one another, kn
owing this was a complete lie, and then spontaneously burst into laughter once again.

After we regained our composure she continued,
“You really should have told us your favorite color and what music you like. That would really have rounded your speech off nicely.”

“
I’ll remember that for next year. Great tip.”

There’s always someone in any group of friends who’s more outgoing than the others and in our g
roup that was definitely Linds, as you can probably tell by now. She was the one who’d get in trouble with the teachers and end up spending a lot of time in detention. She’d often be made to sit outside the Principal’s office as a punishment during lunch hour, so we’d walk past and surreptitiously drop bars of chocolate or sticks of gum in her lap.

Once she
had the whole class, including the teacher, looking for a non-existent contact lens on the floor. We couldn’t believe how gullible our teacher was, but it used up most of geography class, so we were more than happy to play along.

She did loads of other things as well, mostly harmless, time wasting pranks
, just for a laugh. She wasn’t nasty to anyone, just seemed to get a buzz from breaking the rules.

They say hindsight is a beautiful thing and l
ooking back now I think she was a bit of an attention junkie, needing the limelight to feel good. But of course we had no such perspective back then - we just thought she was the height of cool.

She
was always the first to try anything in our group - the first to get seriously drunk, the first to get a boyfriend, the first to have sex, the first to smoke dope. She made it all look so fun and easy we’d all happily follow her wherever she led.

And she led us
to some interesting places, I can tell you.

From a shy, self-conscious
teenager’s perspective (read: me) she was a fantastic person to be friends with. She got away with so much because she could really put it on in front of our parents so they just simply didn’t believe she was anything short of a saint. Gullible, eh?

She had this
way of making you feel like the most important person in the room. The best way I can think of describing her was it was kind of like she had an internal light, and when it shined on you you’d completely revel in it, basking in its divine warmth.

I remember
she really listened to me and how I felt when my parents started arguing following Dad’s heart attack. She’d let me rant about how much my Dad had changed and how uptight my Mum was, making me feel like I was actually being heard. She was so warm, so sweet and caring. She never offered advice, she just listened, which is what I needed at the time.

Afterwards she’d always suggest we go out and have some fun, which meant things like bowling and movies when we were thirteen and drinking and boys when we were older.

But there was a dark side to Lindsay
as well, one most people didn’t see. She could drop you as a friend absolutely dead following what she saw as a serious infraction. She never did it to Morgan, Laura or me, but she did it to countless people, including Brooke. Lindsay decided the way Brooke treated me over the Steve McAndrew tragedy - when he chose her over me, fool that he was - was unforgiveable. So although Brooke was part of our tightknit group at the time, Lindsay decided then and there she’d never speak to her again.

And she was good to her word, right up to her death, as far as I know.

At the time I thought she was the best friend
ever
, sticking up for me like that. Looking back on it now I can see it was probably taking things a little too far. She did it to other people too, people she’d been close to for a short while, then they’d do something or say something she didn’t like and they’d be dropped like a tonne of bewildered bricks.

She went to Victoria Uni
versity with us, but didn’t manage to graduate. I guess she was just too busy getting into anything and everything to be bothered with something as mundane and sensible as attending lectures and tutorials. When we’d go out to the pub she’d be the one who suggested shooters, going on to a club, or skinny-dipping in the freezing water at Oriental Bay.

She’d always do things to
the absolute extreme - she’d get so drunk she’d pass out, or max out her credit card, repeatedly getting bailed out by her wealthy and forgiving parents. She was the one to try all the drugs our fair city had to offer, crashing hard. But whereas we learnt not to do it again, she didn’t seem to get the message.

I remember many a night when one or more of us would have to cart her up the steps to her parents’ home, hoping they were already asleep in bed
so they couldn’t see what state their darling daughter was in. We were so naïve to think they didn’t know what was going on.

We were all experimenting with different things, as
you do at that age, so it took a while for any of us to notice Linds seemed to have a problem. We just thought she was being Lindsay - the life and soul of the party.

We
learned after her death her parents, Todd and Cindy, had taken her to a string of mental health experts, but she never mentioned anything about it to us. She’d been labelled by these shrinks as all sorts of things, from bipolar to having an impulse control disorder.

In the end s
he’d been diagnosed with a thing called Borderline Personality Disorder, which apparently explained her behaviour, but we’d never heard of it at the time. She’d been what they referred to as ‘high functioning’ for most of her life, but had been unable to maintain it once Ethan had left her and she fell right down into the frightening depths of her disorder.

Ethan.
By the time we were twenty-three Lindsay had been seeing him for about a year and to say it was a rocky relationship would be like saying Hurricane Katrina was a spot of rain. You get the idea. They were either totally smitten with one another or having major meltdowns and they seemed utterly oblivious to whoever was there to witness either of them.

There were a number of incidents I
would have preferred not to witness, with a make up session involving a bag of frozen peas on the kitchen floor of my flat, while a group of us sat in the living room, pretending not to hear the grunts and moans and the
“oh my gods”
behind the thin sliding door. What had started out as an innocent drunken food fight involving all of us had turned into a full on adult-rate sex scene between the two of them.

Needless to say I was findi
ng dried out squashed peas in odd places around my kitchen for days after and as I swept them up I tried hard not to picture where any of them might have been.  

J
ust before Christmas Ethan told Lindsay it was over, he’d met someone else, and that he no longer loved her. Lindsay was absolutely destroyed.

At first we thought it was
just another one of their now legendary arguments and they’d be making up on someone else’s kitchen floor before long - frozen corn this time, perhaps some tasty fish fingers? - but after Morgs spotted Ethan with his tongue down a girl’s throat at a bar in Courtenay Place one night we started to get the picture it really was over between them.

The usually gregarious Lindsay was
gone. She stopped eating and sleeping, looking like one of those heroine chic models you used to see in magazines. She’d given up the admin job her dad had found for her and barely left her bedroom at her parents’ house.

It wasn’t until mid-February we thought Lindsay had started to move on. She called me one day, asking me to come over to her place for a chat. I got there as fast as I could
as we’d all been so worried about her, but she looked so much better, so much more like her old self.

W
e sat and talked for ages, in a way she hadn’t ever talked before. She really opened up to me, telling me what had happened with Ethan and how it’d made her spiral down into the depths of despair.

Looking back now I realise she was doing what people call
‘offloading’ - she found peace by passing on her story before she took the next step, which of course was to end her life. She was so calm, so
serene
by the end of our talk.

B
ut at the time I didn’t know that was what she was doing. In my ignorance I thought she was telling me about how she’d felt because she was getting over it and had decided she could start to move on. More fool me.

Two days later she was dead.

Her mum found her, lying face down on her bed, empty packets of sleeping pills, anti-anxiety medication and mood stabilizers scattered across the floor. The image is such a suicide cliché. Apparently she’d stored up the medication she’d been prescribed by psychiatrists and GPs over the years and took the lot. She took so many it was clear she meant business.

T
his was no cry for help. She’d left no note.

She
hadn’t wanted to say anything more to anyone.

I was at work when I got the call from Laura
. Lindsay’s dad had told her what had happened when she’d turned up at their house, offering to take Lindsay out for coffee. At first I thought it must have been a mistake - there was no way she could have done such a thing. Hadn’t we just had a great chat a mere two days before? She’d seemed to be getting it together, to finally accept what had happened.

They say denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, and I certainly wallowed in its depths that day.
And anyway, she was my
friend
. That sort of thing happened to other people, or on TV. Not to us.

I didn’t know how to handle it. I was
only twenty-three.

I was just too young.

It wasn’t until the day of her funeral the unutterable tragedy of her death truly struck me. The beautiful, exciting, fun, unpredictable girl I had known and loved for over ten years was gone.

I was sitting in a pew in a
packed Old St Paul’s Cathedral in the city, listening to Lindsay’s younger brother’s heartbreaking eulogy about his big sis when the tears started and wouldn’t stop.

Ben was next sitting next to me. He
put his arm around my shoulders as my tears turned into sobs. He didn’t let go. He just sat there, stroking my arm, allowing me to cry for my dear, dear friend.

I’d
feared once the floodgates had opened I wouldn’t ever be able to stop. But I did, and it was the only time I really cried over her.

I kept going to work, doing everyday things like wash
ing, eating, sleeping, but it was all in a daze. I felt numb. I’d sit in the living room of the flat I shared with Morgan and Laura and would just stare at the floor. Apart from in the early days, the three of us barely talked about it. I think it was just too hard for us.

It was easier to pretend we were unchanged. But we weren’t. Her death had altered something in all of us.
We’d all lost something. I think when she died we felt rudderless. She’d been such a dominant member of our little group of friends, and we simply felt lost now she was gone.

And then came the guilt. Oh my
god, the
guilt
.
She chose
me
to talk to about her feelings.
I
could have done something to help her. Couldn’t I?

No one said anything to me -
no one had to - but she’d reached out to me, and I hadn’t done anything about it. Not knowing she was ‘offloading’ in order to kill herself didn’t make any difference to my guilt and over time I learned to direct it into anger.

After
all, anger felt easier than giving in to the guilt and despair I was only just keeping at bay. I developed a permanent bad mood. I was pissed off with Lindsay for doing what she’d done, but most of all I was pissed off with myself. I ‘buried my head in beer’, as they say, in an inevitably doomed attempt to quell my fury.

U
nsurprisingly, it merely further fuelled the rage.

So
I felt it was serendipitous when I saw Ethan across the road on Cuba Street one cold, windy autumn day. He was standing outside a menswear shop, chatting to a pretty redheaded girl who bore more than a fleeting similarity to Lindsay. He was dressed in a fedora, waistcoat and hipster jeans, looking quite the archetypal muso.

I stood there, rooted to the spot, watching him chat nonchalantly away until he laughed out loud
at something the girl said. That happy, carefree laugh swung me into action.

I barely noticed the traffic coming to a
screaming, horn blasting halt as I purposefully stormed across the road, eyes fixated on my target. He didn’t register me until I was right next to him, and to his credit he was visibly discomfited by my unexpected arrival. He looked nervously from me to the redhead, seemingly undecided as to whether to introduce us. Or perhaps to simply flee.

After a few moments
, during which I simply stood there, seething at him, not taking my eyes from his face, he told the girl he’d catch up with her at Fidel’s Café in a few minutes. She left reluctantly and there we stood, barely sheltered from the southerly wind, me still scowling, and him clearly struggling for what to say to the crazed woman before him.