Carly

By Su Blackwell

Sometimes a person comes into our lives and changes our trajectory forever. 

You were such a person.  

You arrived in the second year of my secondary school in Sheffield, a bubbly, confident, spark of a girl, with a mop of brown curls and a wide beaming smile. You told me your name means ‘brave’, and for a while we were inseparable.  

We brought out the silliness in each other. Your eyes sparkled mischievously, whenever we shared a joke.

You were the most intelligent person I knew by far, somehow always managing to stay out of trouble, while I took the blame for our silly pranks in school.  

For a time, we were best friends. Before our self-conscious, precocious teen years. That fleeting moment, between being a child and a young adult.  

I was an outsider, shy and introvert. It seemed to me everyone wanted to be your best friend. 

Your life seemed so much more filled with adventure than my own, you were born in Africa, and lived in a large rambling house with dozens of rooms. You kept a horse in fields at the edge of the city, and sometimes after school, I’d come with you to help you clean out the stable and groom your horse. 

‘’And that’s the field you went back to. Yet no one thought to search for you there.’’ 

You taught me to ride and told me you would educate me by making me listen to Eurythmics on repeat. Winding back the tape over and over, on a tinny-sounding tape machine. Over and over, I think of you, whenever I hear them play.  

One winter evening, we went to the stables, a frost lay over the fields. As the light faded, crows began to flock together, their calls echoing like ghosts.  

On our way back home, your mum in the driving seat, us in the back, excitable as twelve-year-olds often are. We were singing a Eurythmics song at the top of our voices, through fits of giggles. Your mum asked you to stop with no hint of emotion in her voice. But we didn’t because we were so happy at that moment, caught in the rhythm of our song. There was nothing in your mum’s voice that made me think she would do what she did next. As we hollered out the chorus, ‘No one on earth could feel like this, I’m thrown and overflown with bliss. There must be an angel. Playing with my hea-aaarrrt’, your mum suddenly swerved to the curb, and asked you flatly to ‘get out and walk home.’ 

At first, I thought she was calling your bluff, but then you actually got out of the car and disappeared into the darkness. No coat, just a black knitted jumper, with sleeves pulled down over your hands. 

We drove past your shadow and the rest of the way home in silence.

I stepped out of the car and hesitated. A winter drizzle hung in the air, damp and cool. It was three miles from home when you got out of the car. The walk back was a long one, down a wide leafy lane, a lonely walk for anyone, not least for a twelve-year-old girl.  

Back inside, I didn’t think to tell my parents. I went to bed that night, wondering if you’d be okay. 

I was relieved when I saw you in school the next day. But when I asked you about it, you said very little, just that ‘you had walked all the way back home.’

I look back on the moment now, as an adult, as a mother, and think ‘wasn’t your mother’s behaviour a bit strange?’. I knew she was raising you to be independent and fearless but wasn’t this advertently putting you at risk?

As a child, I didn’t question these things, so, I didn’t think about it for a long time. I didn’t think about it again until twelve years later after I’d heard you’d died. 

A discerning adult may have recognised something deep and dark behind your eyes, that you were hiding a secret behind your smile, but as a child, I didn’t see any of it. I only ever saw your light beaming from you. 

I didn’t spot any signs that not all was well in your world. 

Except for one time, I bumped into you on leaving school. It was before you went to university and took a year out to go travelling around the world. We walked past a tattoo parlour and decided to spontaneously get a tattoo together. You seemed different and told me that you had been diagnosed with M.E. I asked you what that meant, but you gave the briefest of answers.

I learned from the radio that they’d found you. I was at my parent’s house for Christmas, the radio on in the background, and something in the news bulletin caught my attention, so I stopped what I was doing and listened.   

A man out walking his dog had come across human remains in the fields where you’d kept your horse. I knew it to be you, even before the reporter said your name, explaining that you’d walked away from your mother’s house on November 1st and had been reported missing for 14 months.

They discovered an empty bottle of pills and a bottle of liquor close by. 

I was hoping they’d find you alive, but as the weeks and months passed by, it seemed unlikely.  

You were always smart, and you didn’t want to be found easily. 

At the inquest, I learned things about you that I never knew. We had grown up and grown apart and I didn’t fit in with your new set of friends. 

I read in the coroner’s report that you had attempted suicide on an overdose of pills a week before you went missing, and that psychiatrists had wanted to refer you to hospital for tests, but that you had declined. 

Mental health was still taboo and not spoken about openly.  

By all accounts, your death remains a mystery. Your family said you were in good spirits the day you went missing, and the coroner report was inconclusive, meaning no one really knows why you died. 

I remember our conversations and how perceptive you were, telling me how ‘I would leave home as soon as I was able to, because of my hostile relationship with my father.’ And you were right, I did! I left home when I was seventeen.  

I wished I could have been as perceptive of yours. 

I sometimes think if we could have spoken, would it have changed things.

I’ve heard it say that suicide is cowardly, but I also think it took some guts to do what you did. And while it affects me still, there is part of me that admires you for that.

My friend, Carly, the Brave.