Happy

Linda arrived at my school at the start of fifth form...

- Catherine Robertson

Small features and ginger hair, pale eyes behind wire-framed spectacles. She was tall and walked with high shoulders, as if expecting to be punched from behind. She sat on her own because that’s what you do when you’ve started a new school and you’re a nerd. I knew how it was. But by now, the cigarette-breathed older girls who’d menaced us had left and we could come out of our shells. I went over to say hi.

Her voice was soft, hard to hear, but once she got going, she liked to talk. She’d moved from Palmerston North to Wellington because her parents had divorced, and Linda, the only one of her siblings who was under 16, had been forced to live with her mother. Linda hated her mother. Hated being in the same room as her, listening to her talk about nothing, absolutely nothing of interest. Her mother had no hobbies, no dress sense, no career, no brains. One day, Linda told me that her mother had been to the dentist and had all her teeth removed. All of them! She’d come home with raw gums and dentures. Linda hated her for pretending she was old when she was only in her fifties.

Linda liked her father but rarely saw him. She blamed her mother for that.

I knew what it was like to have a bad relationship with your mother, but I didn’t talk much about mine because I couldn’t tell stories the way Linda could, so cruelly funny that I gasped as I laughed. I preferred to listen and agree how shitty her life was. I got the feeling she’d never really had anyone to talk to before. Made sense if her brothers and sisters were so much older than her, and if she’d been bullied at her last school. I could be the first good friend she’d had.