Chrysalis

The following was written as a frame piece by Miranda Gold for the launch of Kit by Meghan Barker, published by Cheerio Publishing, July 2023.

Molly’s grandmother, Hazel, was congealed to the worn brown velvet armchair in the front room on Sunday evenings.

Hazel may have been as immured to the armchair as the framed moths and butterflies were to the walls, but as eye-witness I can only account for the hours before I was picked up from Molly’s, the two of us flopped on our bellies, feet up in the air, ankles crossed, faces inches from the TV screen, willing the second hand to stop ticking.

Imprisoned lepidoptera and mute, brandy-sipping grandmothers aside, Molly’s house was everything I imagined a home should be: quiet, snug, ordinary. To hear the doorbell was a certain kind of agony. To peel myself off the orange squash sticky carpet and away from Molly predicted an ache that would be drawn out till the next week. Anxiety of departure, anticipation of reunion; a curious prelude to first love.
 
In that fragile realm of emerging consciousness, our shared imaginations provided the remedies we needed, dabbling with the placebo effect before we knew there was a term for it’s: we labelled a tiny bottle filled with pond water ‘happiness drops’ to take the edge off terrors we couldn’t yet name, created potions from an unholy mix of whatever we could get our hands on from kitchen and bathroom cupboards, paint sets, and garden life (the alchemy of which was easily repurposed) and though we were witches of the bumbling Mildred Hubble variety rather than the irreproachable Ethel Hallow, so long as we had one another to confirm the truth of our inventions, the arbitrary and the unknown could be endured. Our spells garnered us with the illusion of agency – while making a glorious mess. To be with Molly was to land in a world, which was both safe and free. Nothing had to be explained; everything was understood.

From a reasonable distance, we were variations on a theme: white, middle class, awkward – ie the same. Close up, my mother’s illness and bouts of rage defined my world; Molly’s mother’s sense of order and protection defined hers. Night time in our house meant paralysing chaos; in hers it meant Shepherd’s Pie and Lights Out at nine. The novelty of sitting round a table at Molly’s and being told what time to go to bed felt as magical as the moment her father switched on the fairy lights at Christmas. Between the carefully curated boundaries of that Cricklewood home our improvisations were infinite.

It’s not irrelevant that Molly was born into a Christian family – or more importantly, not a Jewish one. In my eight year old mind if you were Christian, you got to do Christmas and go to Brownies; if you were Jewish, God died in Auschwitz. If you were Christian you were clean; if you were Jewish you could scrub and scrub and the water would never run clear. The ‘happiness drops’ had their limits. Why I didn’t attach this sense of shame to other Jewish children, I don’t know, but children have a habit of believing themselves to be exceptional, and the version of Jewishness I’d inherited meant someone was always after you, which could only mean you were exceptionallybad. No one was after me at Molly’s, and no one could come and get me in the middle of the night, which meant, more practically, I wasn’t scared of sleep there. Sleep, like the breakfast we would certainly wake up to, was inevitable. If I was allowed into this world, which was so good so normal, then I must be good and normal too. It wasn’t just Molly who, however unconsciously, provided a kind mirror, but her family too. We could keep interrogating the questions adults refused to answer, we could find ways to make sense of the ever shifting lens, and we could always watch Grease again if that got too much, because Grease always made sense, and anyway we were going to star in our own version of it.
  
Primary school ended, the ecstasy and torture and boredom of adolescence began, and Molly and I, somewhere between selves, remained entangled even while we drifted, watching one another slip into the grip of old fears reincarnated in new guises. Perhaps the very ordinariness of her home, which had been such a refuge for me, prompted her towards a chaos, which had its parallel in the one I was trying to escape. I knew something was happening to her, she could see something was happening to me, but we’d run out of placebos and couldn’t make each other better. We didn’t have a prescription for witnessing one another in pain, let alone our own. We didn’t have the language to describe what was happening – and perhaps it was best we didn’t, giving the illusion of understanding while tucking it neatly into boxes marked ‘grief’ or ‘trauma.’

I received an email about a primary school reunion a couple of months ago. They couldn’t find Molly and asked if I had her number. A google search proved useless. I pictured her house – a place I still dream about, one I can see as vividly as my own childhood home. I couldn’t imagine her parents anywhere else – in all honesty I still pictured her there too, with a gap between her front teeth, hair in bunches.
 
Close to three decades since I’d dialled her home phone number, but I still remembered it. Her mother returned my call.
 
Don’t be silly, of course I called you back – you girls spent a lot of time together.
 

You were always so lovely to me, I don’t know if you knew, but –

 
We knew things were…difficult.
 

You always made everything so…

 
Normal?
 

Ha! Something like that.

Molly and I spoke shortly after I got off the phone from her mother, our adult selves who wouldn’t have to curate to the early years, who couldn’t disappoint one another, who were still here somehow, grateful the other was okay, the simplicity of our wishes for one another equal to their sincerity – just that the other be well, all right in their own skin, still alive to the magic we once knew, even if it is a different kind of magic, one which can accommodate the claustrophobia of the diurnal circle.
 
In her adult self I hear echoes of friends I made later – ones who have become family, even home. Perhaps then, we know, instinctively, who we might become, who’ll accompany our future selves as we tend these imprints of the heart.