Special

I still keep a photo of Zelda Spencer. Like a surprise fist in my gut it never fails to shock, but I suppose I'll never throw it away. To anyone else it would look like a happy picture, two smiling teenage girls at a party. Zelda's cheek is pressed against my own but her eyes look the other way, flirting with the camera. Her smile just edges in front, blocking my own, and if you look closely at the bottom of the picture, behind the wine glasses, you will see that one of her hands is around my throat.

I knew Zelda a long time before she spoke to me. I watched her, in the sixth-form common-room, surrounded by the brightest, best-looking boys as she held court and seemed always to be having fun. Zelda's crowd chattered loudly with the uninhibited arrogance of the elite, buzzing around her like wasps around their queen. She was sixteen and already a leader. She was exotic, confident, everything that I was not, and I watched her, wondering where her fear had gone. For Zelda, it seemed that the uncertainty, pain and self-doubt of growing up had never existed. You could call it repression or denial or any other thing but that couldn't take away Zelda's supreme power. Power, after all, is only ever the belief that you are powerful.

I was in love with Ashok, who wanted to be a doctor and had the loveliest face I had ever seen. We sat next to each other in biology and I lived for the feel of his shiny black hair slipping against my own as he leaned over my books. Ash liked me, I knew, because he drew me little cartoons and sometimes walked home with me after school, but in the lunch hours he always sat with Zelda. On Monday mornings he was usually full of tales of weekends at Zelda's house, of evenings in dark cellar wine bars, and of parties and concerts to which I was never invited. One of his favourite words was 'cool'.

I was never quite sure how to be cool. I wore a little too much make-up and I remember always feeling my clothes sitting stiffly around my body like they belonged to someone else. More than anything I cared too much what people thought, which made my conversation reticent and often bland, eager to please, and thus ensured that I was quietly popular with almost everyone. But underneath I longed to be like Zelda, who lounged easily in ripped jeans that moulded to her body, who always had a radical opinion to shout, and who didn't care what anyone thought, who was loved and hated but never seemed to inspire the kind of indifference with which she looked through me.

Sometimes Ash took me to see black and white films with French sub-titles, films that Zelda had raved about but which left me lost in my own thoughts, aware only of the heat of Ash's arm pressed gently against my own. He knew I was in love with him, for I had seen no reason not to tell him, but he treated it merely as a small problem on my part, a minor hindrance to our friendship. I rarely mentioned it and felt only gratitude that he was, at least, my friend. Pride came to me late in life. It seemed to me then that such were the way things were meant to be; I loved Ash and Ash liked me.

He confided in me. I was a virgin and so was Ash, to my surprise. The girlfriends he had, he told me, had never allowed him to go the whole way. I had always imagined that Zelda and her crowd were experienced in sex, that intercourse was merely another casual prerequisite for entering the realms of the cool, like smoking cannabis and drinking your coffee black. I wondered if Zelda had done it. She had a string of boyfriends with whom she heavy petted in the common- room, and boyfriends from other cities who came and stayed for weekends while her mother was cruising the Caribbean. They slept in her bed, according to Ash, and drove their fathers' cars, fast, in the middle of the night, to take Zelda wherever she wanted to go. I loved to hear about her life, with a painful fascination. I knew no one outside my home town, except a boy I had met on holiday in Wales, who had left ugly dark bruises on my neck and rode a moped.

So I wasn't expecting Zelda's invitation when she strolled over to me in the common-room and put her small hand lightly on my arm.

"Karen," she said in her husky voice, as if my name was her own intimate secret. "I'm having a party Saturday night."

"Are you?" I said stupidly.

"I mean can you come?" she said.

I looked into her dark brown eyes to see if she was laughing at me.

"Er - yes - sure," I said. "What time?"

She shrugged.

"Oh - you know - when the pubs shut," she said casually. "It'll go on all night."

"Great," I said, wondering what I would tell my mother. "Thanks."

She was turning away, already looking around for someone else.

"Shall I bring anything?" I asked her quickly.

She gave me a puzzled look and grinned backwards as she walked away.

"Bring what you like, Karen," she said.

It took me ages to get dressed that Saturday night. I had persuaded Ash to pick me up so at least I wouldn't have to arrive on my own, but I had been too embarrassed to ask him what I should wear. In the end I settled for jeans and a baggy black T-shirt, which I knew was the standard uniform among Zelda's crowd, but I still felt uncomfortable. I put on lipstick and thick black kohl, wiped it off again and then re-applied it, pulling my face into expressions of nonchalance in the mirror. I had bought a packet of Gauloise and tucked them into the back pocket of my new black jeans, sneering at my reflection in the mirror and wishing I had a leather flying jacket like the one Zelda wore. I tried on my two old coats and decided I'd rather be cold.

Ash and I went to a pub near Zelda's house because he said we had better not arrive too early, and I drank a couple of bottles of strong lager too quickly as he told me stories about legendary parties at Zelda's. I bought another four cans to take with us and wished I knew where to buy some cannabis. As we walked up to the house I shivered, not just because I was cold, but Ash gave me his flying jacket and I pulled it round me gratefully, warm from his body.

Zelda opened the door with an amused expression, a bottle of brandy in one hand and a joint in the other. I held out the cans of lager but she just raised her eyebrows and nodded at the kitchen counter.

"Leave them there," she said, walking down the hallway. We followed her into the enormous lounge where about twenty young people sprawled on the floor.

"Hey guys!" called Zelda. "Look who's wearing Ash's jacket!"

I blushed, but she turned to me smiling and held out her hands.

"Nice as it looks on you," she said, "you'll be far too hot - I'll put it in the bedroom."

She looked me up and down as I struggled out of the jacket.

"You look great, Karen," she whispered warmly. "You've got such lovely long legs."

I smiled nervously. Zelda was short, a good five inches shorter than myself and I wondered, for the first time, if I might actually have something that she envied. Next to her I felt gangly and graceless but she nodded approvingly at my legs and handed me the brandy bottle before leaving the room with the jacket. I looked round for Ash but he was already settled on the sofa, talking intently to a slim girl with waist-length blonde hair which she was stroking gently as she nodded at Ash. I hated her.

I looked around for someone I knew and saw Rachel, Zelda's closest friend, lying on the carpet smoking a joint. I crouched down awkwardly beside her.

"Hi," I said.

Rachel looked at me, upside down.

"Oh - hi, Karen," she said. "Here."

She took a long draw on the joint and passed it to me. I gulped at the brandy and passed her the bottle.

"No thanks," she said. "I don't drink."

I smiled, puffed on the joint, and tried to think of something to say, but fortunately Rachel began telling me animatedly about a new piece of Tory legislation and I sank thankfully onto my bottom and watched her mouth moving in its strange reversed position, feeling the warm numbing of dope and brandy, and only occasionally glancing at Ash and the girl with the beautiful hair. I was lost somewhere, comfortable with an ostensible tete-a-tete with Zelda's best friend, but just nodding automatically as my mind began to cruise deep fantasies of confidence, rehearsing conversations that I would never have, creating screenplays where I was, at last, the star. I was almost relaxed when Zelda appeared at my side, kneeling close with a bottle of little white pills which she tapped onto her palm. She handed two to Rachel and two to me.

"What are they?" I asked, watching Rachel swallow hers.

"Speed," replied Zelda. "Well, actually, my mother's slimming tablets - try them- they do the business."

I swallowed them, with another gulp of brandy. I would have swallowed arsenic. She smiled at me, a smile which I clung to like a lost puppy, and as she leaned against me, taking the brandy bottle from my hand and fixing me with her almond eyes I felt suddenly paralysed. Her breath smelled too sweet.

"You know, Karen," she said. "I think you and me are going to be very good friends."

Then she was gone, turning up the music and pulling Ash to his feet and soon everyone was dancing. I even forgot to be embarrassed as I usually was on dance floors, clumsily trying to step with the beat whilst wondering what to do with my arms, for the memory of Zelda's words allowed me to close my eyes and sway easily with the rhythm until, inevitably, the walls of the room began to sway too and I stumbled to the bathroom.

I spent a long time splashing my face with cold water, staring at my desperate reflection and cursing my stupidity as I humiliatingly and repeatedly threw up in the sink. I had sunk to my knees when the bathroom door opened, my head hanging limply between my hands, and I remember hoping that it was Ash. Ash, with whom I had nothing to hide, who knew I wasn't cool, and who I trusted never to laugh at me. But it was Zelda. As I tearfully began to retch again I felt her come up close behind me, her hand on my shoulders, as she began to croon softly into my neck. I remember staring into the sink, watching my vomit slip down the plug-hole as I sweated hot and cold, retching again, and clinging to consciousness just enough to be aware of Zelda's spidery fingers undoing the buttons of my jeans.

I don't remember much more about that night. I think it was Ash who got me home. The next day I was shaky and pale, staring at objects on the breakfast table with a lonely horror as I answered my mother's questions in a voice that seemed to belong to someone else, a long way off. Zelda phoned me after lunch, warmly and excitedly inviting me for coffee.

"You're very special," she told me. "I can't wait to see you again."

I went to her house naturally, passively. I don't remember ever thinking that I had a choice. The sun was shining on the cherry blossoms which lined her street and I smiled at people as I walked. The world was suddenly a warmer place, and I was Zelda's special friend.

I never mentioned Zelda to anyone but she must have talked a lot about me. Soon it was all around school that we were lovers and I found myself with a second-hand charisma. People looked at me differently, and more often. Suddenly I had lots more friends. At Zelda's house, after school, I slipped easily into the company of the earnest young grammar school boys who argued over Sartre and Camus, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and listening to the Velvet Underground. I learned to like my coffee black. I learned to mock the ordinary, the superficial. For the first time in my life I stayed up all night, because there was so much to say.

Zelda took me to London to meet more friends, and we slept in a huge double bed in a communal house. I was greeted by everyone with an interest that startled me, made me even more nervous and careful of my words, until I realised that I did not need to perform. My status as Zelda's girlfriend was enough to carry me through a holiday of acceptance and goodwill and I think I knew even then, for all Zelda's murmurings of love between the sheets, that I was merely a trophy, an idealised image of bisexuality for her liberal, free-thinking friends. I remember feeling nervous as we climbed into bed, but there was no need. After the first strange incident in the bathroom our sexual relationship rested on token kisses, and the fantasies of everyone we knew.

We still had boyfriends and talked about them, analysed them, laughed about them together. The boys didn't seem to mind about our special friendship. In fact, it must have been part of the attraction. We were both still virgins, yet we maintained an exotic mystique of secret experience. I felt almost powerful, invincible, as I learned from Zelda the mimicry of intimacy, not least because I cared little for the boys who constantly phoned to take me out. I was still in love with Ash.

Ash and I had become closer, to use Zelda's phrase, and she beamed on our friendship with a confident generosity. I found it difficult to talk about him, but Zelda nodded knowingly whenever he was mentioned and said she understood that he was special to me. One Saturday night we had all gone to a huge party in the richest part of town, an acquaintance of Zelda's whose father dominated the property market and lived in the nearest thing I had ever seen to a stately home. Zelda was wearing an Indian costume of glittering silk which she twisted and twirled around herself as she danced, exposing brief glimpses of her smooth dark skin and the tops of her large breasts, like some perverse Muslim bride. Ash and I were lying on one of the enormous leather sofas, watching her, and drinking brandy. I was leaning against him, comfortably feeling the warmth of his breath on my neck as he stroked my hair. When I turned to face him he was looking at me in a different way, his full lips softer, his brown eyes sadder than I had ever seen them. He kissed me gently on the cheek and said quietly,

"Do you still love me, Karen?"

I felt a tightness in my stomach, a protective tension of the love with which I trusted him.

"Yes," I said.

"I'm very fond of you," he whispered.

For a moment we both looked at Zelda, swaying her hips against a foolishly smiling young man while another danced close behind her. The boys looked intoxicated, following her voluptuous rhythm with ungainly persistence, and I saw Zelda glance over at us, with her special smile.

"Karen - I wanted to ask you -"

I turned back to Ash.

"Ask me what?"

"Have you - yet?"

I shook my head.

"Why not?"

I didn't really know. I had no vested interest in preserving my virginity, but neither had I made any effort to rid myself of it. The boys I dated were somewhat nervous with me, ideologically restrained, and waiting for me to make the first move. And I didn't love them.

"We're eighteen this year," sighed Ash. "And I would love to - with you, Karen."

He kissed me again as he said it, but the tightness in my stomach became a cold fist as I realised what he wanted.

"But you don't love me," I said.

I looked at his lips, slack and bloated and his dim eyes which were no longer seeing me. His face looked weak with desire.

"I'm very fond of you, Karen," he said again. "You know that."

"So that'll do?" I said.

He nodded.

"Well, neither of us have ever - - and we like each other - - and we could - "

"Practice?" I asked.

He looked embarrassed but he didn't deny it.

"You want to practice on me?" I said, almost to myself. Then I got up off the sofa and went to talk to Rachel. It was my first row with Ash, and Zelda was watching.

I drank a lot of brandy again that night. I told Rachel all about it and I think she understood, as we would come to understand each other much later in our lives. It always surprised me that Rachel never seemed jealous of my friendship with Zelda. In fact, it was Zelda who glanced warily when I spoke to Rachel for too long, who interrupted with an arm around each of us, twin kisses planted on both our cheeks. But that night Zelda was nowhere to be seen. After a while I thought I had probably bored Rachel enough and so I went off on my own to explore the house. I found myself wandering alone through the palatial corridors upstairs, peeping into the massive gilded bedrooms of a world which seemed sinister and unreal. I found them in the bathroom, Ash and Zelda. She was straddling him on a velvet linen box, her back to me, and Ash stared at me over her shoulder, guiltily, still clutching her breasts like a very little boy. Zelda slowly turned her head and smiled, coyly, as she reached out her hand to me. Quietly I stepped backwards and pulled the door shut. I went downstairs, said goodbye to Rachel and a few others, and did not cry until I got home.

Ostensibly I remained a special friend of Zelda's for a few years, long-distance. We left school, moved to different cities, and wrote each other long letters. She used to send me books with tender inscriptions in the front. The last, I believe, was the collected works of Anais Nin. In the front she had written,

"To my dearest Karen. Remember me when you're married with your Volvo and 2.2 kids."

I think she knew then that she had lost me. It was always her joke, her threat, that life without her would revert to a dull normality, that only with her could I be special. That was the myth I fell for, like Rachel, like Ash, like so many others.

I still hear of her from time to time. Ironically it was Zelda, not me, who married and had two children, and I heard she soon took two lovers as well, one of each sex. The last time I saw her was at the wedding of an old friend. Rachel and I watched Zelda's entrance with a shared horror as she walked through the crowd, dressed in sparkling ethnic turquoise and accompanied, so it seemed, by some new special friends.

"It was so strange," Rachel murmured to me. "I used to find myself telling her I loved her, yet I never even liked her."

I nodded.

My stomach dropped just a little as Zelda came towards us, smiling.

"Karen!"

I noticed Rachel slipping away with our empty glasses and saw Zelda glance after her. They had not spoken for years.

"Karen - how are you?"

She looked much the same, but her eyes were dull amidst her peacock finery.

"I'm fine, Zelda," I said, "and you?"

"Marvellous! Tell me, Karen, I heard you and Rachel are sharing a flat?"

"That's right," I said. "And Ash too."

"Ash! The three of you?"

"Yeah, just temporarily." I tried to sound casual in my betrayal. I didn't know how much it hurt her. I didn't even know if Zelda could be hurt.

"Well, well," she said. "You're like the spider in its web aren't you, Karen?"

I thought about spiders, biting their victims to inject the venom which dissolves the inner tissues into a soup. I thought about the spider sucking out its nourishment, leaving the dry husk of its prey stuck in the web. She was staring at me but I was no longer frightened. I knew the spider wasn't me, and I was very glad I was no longer Zelda's special friend.

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