If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother

'Echo' by Alexandre Cabanel, 1874

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I don’t know how it found its way back into my playlist. Some gentle thread of nostalgia, probably. But the moment the first bars played, I thought of her.

She loved that song — which feels wildly ironic, considering she’s one of the most spiritually vacant people I’ve ever known. And I suppose shackles bind us in more ways than a 90s R’n’B track can convey.

Once upon a time, she was my best friend. My only friend, really. Looking back, she was my antagonist. I spent years believing we were like sisters. It took me a long time to realise she never considered me blood. The signs were all there — just clouded to eyes that hadn’t been trained with enough love to consider them relevant.

I only realised she was my enemy when she stole my boyfriend.

By the time we were teenagers, I would get the bus to school and then walk past timber-framed thatched houses that had once belonged to abbey servants and butchers and brewers. I’d cut through the abbey grounds, not caring that the morning dew soaked my beloved Kickers.

Sophie lived in one of the town houses tucked away like little dollhouses—an architectural afterthought. We’d smoke the cigarettes she’d stolen from her mum’s purse that morning while I made her a brew.

I’d been trying out a new hair-do that day, after my mother bought me a Topsytail for my birthday. I agonised over it until she shouted up the stairs that I was going to miss the bus, so I settled on a half-up, half-down compromise.

I remember walking down the cobbled street towards school, fiddling at it self-consciously, when I felt her poke at the back of my head.

“What have you done to your hair?” she said, laughing as if I'd missed the joke.

“Why? Does it look bad?” I stopped walking. Grabbed the back of my head. Panicked.

“It looks like a bird’s nest.” She curled her lip, smirked, and walked on ahead.

I pulled it out immediately. I threw the Topsytail away when I got home.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice all the small ways she hurt me over the years. I think it was a combination of having no kind echo to shield me, and being used to the daily degradation of the female critique at home.

But I remember the first time I realised she was mean. We were sixteen, standing in the nightclub queue with my new — and first 'proper' — boyfriend. I remember the look in her eye when I introduced them in the grey-and-silver foyer of the leisure complex. I recognised it immediately because I’d seen it so many times before in my mother.

Jealousy.

Angry, hostile, bitter jealousy.

As we meandered slowly toward the front of the queue, she grabbed my head and forced it down so my crown was level with her eyeline. She held it there like a vice, made a small disapproving noise, and said, “You really need to get your roots done.” Then she released me as quickly as she had ambushed me, and tilted her mouth down in disgust, as if she’d discovered I had nits.

The first time I realised she didn’t even regard me as a friend was when she reversed into my car, and then used our friendship as a green light to avoid taking any responsibility. The only saving grace was her friend who, once we finally reached the bar and relayed the story, said, “Oh well, at least you can just pay her privately and not claim on your insurance.” Up until that point, she hadn’t even said sorry. And I hadn’t questioned it.

She laughed immediately. “What?! I’m not paying her! I don’t need to. She’s my friend.” Then she sauntered off to the bar to get herself a drink.

The first time I realised she was my enemy — someone who would take anything of mine without hesitation — was when she stole my boyfriend.

Perhaps that sounds like an unwarranted label by today’s standards, but back then there were no “situationships.” We just called it what it was: you were seeing each other.

He worked as a doorman at the nightclub that always let us in, even though none of us looked a day over fifteen. I’d actually been much more into a different doorman — the one who always gave me a particular smile on the way in and out — but he never asked me out. That confused and wounded seventeen-year-old me.

Now I realise it's because he was a good man.

They all seemed handsome to teenage me, really. Eventually, I started dating his friend — the one who gave me butterflies and smelled really good. I waited and waited and waited. Sophie reassured me he liked me. She even put in a good word. I waited and waited some more.

Eventually, he asked me out.

We dated for about a month before everything unravelled.

I can still see it: the dark nightclub floor, still too early to be compressed with horny, sweaty drunk bodies, the frantic oscillating lights spinning like they’d turned up to a surprise birthday party two hours too soon.

I was out with a school friend I’d reconnected with, and we’d met some new people — which feels darkly nostalgic now: the days when you made friends with drug dealer in nightclubs.

I was already coming up, releasing that throbbing glow of energy pulsing through my body, too high to care that I was the only one dancing…

…when they walked in together.

Holding hands.

In that moment — even though every chemical reaction in my body had only seconds ago been pure love for everyone — I thought, you fucking bitch.

But the thing about Sophie was that she was always too wrapped up in herself to ever pay attention to who I actually was. She thought I hadn’t clocked the snide comments. The sharing of private information. The put-downs. The looks.

She thought I’d missed it.

But I’d seen the whole show.

I often wonder how I would have reacted if I hadn’t already been desperately looking for a way to break up with him. Back then, I didn’t know you could simply tell someone you didn’t want to see them anymore — that you didn’t need a grand reason, or a confession, or even the truth.

But seeing them walk in together, her smiling and waving at me as if this were the most normal thing in the world, allowed me to kill two birds with one stone.

In that moment I decided she would never, ever, ever be my friend again.

And that I would never, ever, ever respect her enough to tell her that.

I gestured at her that I was going to grab a drink. When I returned, she had escalated her territorial performance by dancing on the podium with the guy I had, until three minutes ago, been seeing, gyrating against his groin before Miley Cyrus ever made it uncomfortable. And I smiled — a big, beaming, genuine smile — as I danced across that still-empty dancefloor as if my life depended on it.

When I reached the podium, I shouted over the speakers, “I’m so happy for you both!”

“Oh, are you?” she said, with condescending pity. “I was so worried you’d be mad.”

Yeh. It fucking looks it, doesn’t it.

“Noooo!! Not at all! I think you make a lovely couple,” I said, squeezing her hand and smiling at him. “No hard feelings, hey?” And then I turned on my heel and exited that damn dancefloor like I owned the building.

Because if she hadn't been so self-absorbed then she would have known everything. She would have known that a few days earlier we’d slept together for the first (and only) time…and it had felt like I was being assaulted by a Walnut Whip.

That night didn’t teach me anything profound or poetic.

It taught me I couldn’t trust her.

It taught me what retribution delivered by the universe can look like.

And it taught me that I enjoyed knowing that.

I enjoyed knowing she genuinely believed she’d won — that she thought she could take anything she wanted from me and walk away untouched.

And I loved knowing she’d go home with him that night and get the surprise of her life.

We stayed friends for a while, technically. But whatever thread of loyalty or longevity had once held us together snapped that night. I vowed I would never bow down to her again — and I let it show in small, deliberate ways.

It wasn’t long before she inevitably stopped talking to me.

It was only years later that I recognised my mother in her. It seems so obvious now. I think I’ve always found women confusing. Nothing is ever as it seems.

Myself included.