Small Change by Elizabeth Hay Read Free Book Online

were welcome, when you’ve been invited once you’re always invited. But no one was fooled. The people who came varied each year, some fell away without a word, lost at sea, never heard from again.
    Ted tried to reassure me. He said, “Johnny’s incapable of being offended about anything.”
    Whereas I thought he was capable of being offended by many things. I saw him as an easygoing man who was deeply competitive, an easily hurt man quick to rid himself of anyone who hurt him, a deeply disappointed man who refused to allow anyone to revel in his disappointment. A proud and friendly man who used friendliness to keep people at bay. Which one of us was right? Or did we simply bring out Johnny’s different qualities, so that with Ted he was someone who never took offence and with me he was the opposite? Was it a matter not of finding out the truth about Johnny, but rather taking note of how he changed depending on whom he was with?
    You absorb someone and he comes out someone else, made again, and yet he still stands, the one who existed before you ever met him, right there across from you. And these two people, the one you can’t ever know and the one you think you know, become a large uncertainty. At best you are filtering parts of him through parts of yourself. Sometimes you filter his kindness through your envy, sometimes you filter his anger through your generosity, and each time you get a different person.
    Over the years Johnny and I had had gusts of ill feeling followed by gusts of affection, the latter seeming to cancel out the former, but never a match for our mutual belief that neither of us had the other’s interests at heart. In hindsight our affection always seemed paltry, nothing to depend upon, and ill will the only dependable thing.
    Over berries a week later – washing them in an old metal colander – Jill and I talked about Johnny. She had known him longer and had seen the various stages of his life and the castof friends who changed with each stage. (Though she had remained quietly constant and in the background – never so valued as to become close, never so undervalued as to be left behind.) Her fingers on the berries were jewelled. Always the same six rings on the same six fingers. They weren’t beautiful rings, they were heavy and ornate, and her fingers weren’t beautiful either. They were too stubby, too white. A strange habit, I thought, and asked her about it. She pointed to each ring, naming who had given it to her, her hands clunky under their load, but deft, and her logic always generous no matter how sick she became. We were talking about Johnny’s quick and abiding displeasure despite his smiles, so that we were never sure when the worm would turn. Once you’re invited, you’re always invited; and he had immediately phoned the uninvited friends. Naturally they hadn’t come, though they could have restored themselves only by coming, only by some
effort
.
    Jill said, “I know there are many things going on and I also know that I’m always wrong.”
    She meant that in seeing Johnny’s wounded, hurting, complicated underside, she lost the breadth of his personality. She said her observations cut through his jolliness and deepened him by reducing him. This paradox at the heart of friendship baffled her.
    Her kitchen was beautiful. All of the rooms in her house were beautiful. The furniture was arranged, the various blues and reds employed in ways that spoke of a natural artistic bent. She wasn’t obviously talented in the way Maureen was, she hadn’t excelled as a child or attempted anything ambitious as an adult, but she was not without ambition, notwithout disappointment. She was rueful, generous, with a wider reach than her memorable sister. Maureen’s conversation rarely strayed beyond herself, her children, and Danny. Jill was interested in you.
    Even in sickness, especially in sickness, this remained the case.
    “Feel my stomach,” she said. I felt all the lumps – the