The Friend

by Teresa Driscoll

Houses breed the delusion of more comfort indoors than out. And yet – see. Just look how wrong they are. How much they miss.

Not every hour is equal. Ask an insomniac how long the night is.

It was probably what I liked about her most: this knack of leaving you nowhere to hide. She had a way of looking at you ever so directly and asking the questions that mattered, peeling back your layers and exposing the core that you normally managed to keep from people.

She told me, quite matter-of-factly, that for the first two years after her husband’s heart attack, she relived finding him time and time again until she knew every beat of the scene; as if she needed to be sure of every single gasp of pain and every second of what had happened in order to accept it and learn to live with it.

‘People tell you to try not to think about it. Your own instinct is not to think about it. But that doesn’t work,’ she said. ‘The trick is to learn to cope with thinking about it. To accept how truly awful it was. Am I making any sense?’

Be careful. Sometimes when we read back what we have written, we read what we intended to write, not what is on the page. And sometimes when we listen, we hear what we expected to hear and not what is being said . . .

some children are grown in their mummy’s tummies. And some are grown in their hearts.

I really thought on that terrible train journey home that the biggest shock and most important lesson was realising what other people are truly capable of. But – turns out there is a much greater and more chilling shock. Learning – in the face of evil and in the name of love – what you are capable of yourself.

The ‘problem’ with having a conscience is you expect other people to have one too, so you analyse and evaluate their behaviour according to your own standards. But true sociopaths have no understanding why we all worry about rules or laws . . . or the lives and feelings of others.