13.3.89-7.4.14

Thursday 10 April 2014

“But how do you even become friends with someone so famous?” was, and I suppose still is, the first question I get in response to disclosing that I was, for a while, a friend to Peaches Geldof. And the only answer I really have is that at a time when the whole world was set against her, I showed her a little respect. What started out as the odd supportive tweet turned into mutual following and DMs, which lead to Facebook contact, and eventually meeting in person a handful of times. My interest in her arose, I am embarrassed to admit now, out of thinking she was beautiful (anyone who knows me will know my weakness for a girl with a nose ring), but quickly turned to intrigue – I’m hardly the first person to be sucked into the tragic world of the Geldofs, but I was perhaps the first random tweeter to reach out to her personally and tell her I cared. There are no words to express how much I did care, or how much I’ve continued to care despite our arguments and falling out, or how much I will always care.

I’ve tried to shrug it off in recent years, but ultimately I held the misguided belief that I could save her. I was twenty-two when we first met, and younger when we initially became friends – this was 2010, 2011, the height of her drug abuse, ‘wild’ behaviour, a strained relationship with her family and fleeting contact with her friends. I was training as a counsellor with ChildLine at the time, and she latched onto it in a big way – I would regularly receive a torrent of FB chat messages closed with “Don’t tell anyone though”, as if I was about to spread it around like gossip. With my unconditional positive regard hat on, I allowed her to pour out anything she wanted and accepted it at face value – even the things I knew couldn’t be true, I allowed her the benefit of the doubt. You see, I knew what would happen if I didn’t – she would drop me instantly, turn nasty, and I was too naïve to realise that this was actually what was best for me all along.

The first time we met, she was recording OMG with Peaches Geldof. As soon as the show had been announced I applied for tickets and told her I was attending to come along to a taping; she told me not to bother with them and put myself and a friend on the guest list. Whilst I was on my way home from this, she messaged me asking me to come back to London in a few weeks so we could hang out properly, and it felt like my dreams were coming true. The day itself was not quite what I expected: she was two hours late to meet me (though did text the whole time), she crunched ice throughout the whole three hour film we saw (Norwegian Wood), and she divulged things that I had suspected of being true but hadn’t wanted to believe. She also lied on several occasions, about the most trivial of things; she was fixed on finding out what my family and friends thought of her (“Do they think I’m a cunt?”); everyone she knew who didn’t agree with her choices was “mental” or “psycho”; and bizarrely tried to discount any other ‘celebrity crush’ she forced me to admit to. I headed back to Birmingham confused and shaken, and not filled with the joy I’d travelled down with.

I think it was at this point that I knew I was getting into something deeper and darker than I could handle, but didn’t quite give up on her. We maintained intermittent contact, but I found myself getting frustrated with her hypocrisy and fickle nature. We argued over one of her Twitter tirades about the Daily Mail reporting that she was engaged as she was wearing a ring – she was fighting for her privacy despite baiting them (oh, and the fact that she had been engaged for six months at this point). In fairness to her, she managed a better debate than she usually does (for every bit as smart as she was, she was irritatingly closed minded), but we stormed off from one another in as spectacular a way as you can manage in 140 characters. A few weeks later, she tweeted a photo of The Handmaid’s Tale to me – a book I’d insisted she read when we had spent the day together – and I took this as a peace offering. We spoke intermittently again for several months, until we parted ways following an argument over an interview with Tom being printed in the Daily Mail. This was a situation I was very definitely in the wrong in (the interview was sold to them from a Jewish newspaper), but I think it would have happened anyway. She had changed in ways I couldn’t reconcile with the girl I’d first started talking to, and it didn’t seem that she was going to be coming back.

A friend encompassed my precise feelings in 2013: “Everything she’s doing now – the perfect life, the interviews, the weight loss – is a thousand times more scary than any of the times she fucked up in the past”. And it was. Peaches had never made a secret of feeling that having children would be the only thing to save her, to give her a reason to sort out her life and take care of herself. She seemed to want to be, if anything, the reverse of her mother, who Peaches disclosed to me she felt hated her because she had not been enough to make her want to live. This wasn’t a hatred she felt was aimed at her sisters, only at herself. I was proud and moved when her feelings around this started to change when she fell pregnant, and she managed to talk about her feelings in interviews – I had always believed she’d have gotten a lot less stick if she’d just talked about this years ago, but can understand why she didn’t. But then, it all got a bit much. She started sharing absolutely everything, and I felt she became obsessed with portraying that she had everything she wanted, that the babies had fixed her, that she had the life she’d wanted for so long. I don’t believe that anything could resolve the trauma she’d experienced, or at least not in the instantly healing way she believed it had. I don’t doubt that she was happier, that she had a purpose, but had twenty five years of heartbreak been wiped away in one fell swoop? No, I do not believe so. And her obsession with pretending that it had, ultimately, might have made her feel worse. There was something unsettlingly soulless about how she abandoned her convictions about privacy for the sake of earning cash to provide for her family. Put like that, it doesn't really sound that bad, does it? But it seemed to me she'd pushed the real her aside in favour of a woman who existed solely for the media - her worst nightmare.

The mystery surrounding the circumstances of her death is the hardest thing to deal with. My initial thought was heroin (whose wasn’t?) but after more consideration, I just can’t see it as an option. She might not have been as happy as she wanted everyone to believe (and this in itself is my own conjecture), but to intentionally risk everything? There’s just no way. Right now I’m holding out for a conclusion of SADS, because I do not want to entertain the notion that the toxicology report will have an answer.

People are mourning for Peaches as a mother, a daughter, a sister, but so few for Peaches as a person. I am. The first night we met, we stood chatting in a corridor of a television studio, and we talked about books (we always did). I told her she’d completely revolutionised what literature I’d been interested in – that she’d introduced me to science fiction and this had ultimately transformed how I viewed the world. She was confused, as if she couldn’t believe she could have had a positive influence on another person. I had the opportunity to read some of her short stories over the years we were friends, and they were barely fictional – most of her stories were largely biographical with a supernatural twist at the end, to throw people off the scent, I can only assume. I had always maintained that, had she ever reached the point of having her stories published, I would have been first in line to buy them, regardless of the bad blood between us. Nobody would have been more proud than I would have been. If there was one thing she taught me (beyond the perfection of J G Ballard and Philip K Dick) it was how to turn pain into beauty, to write your way out of the prison of your mind. If her stories are published posthumously, I will, as promised, be first in line to buy, and I will remain forever proud.

This doesn’t begin to communicate how broken my heart is that she’s gone, or how incomprehensible it is that I won’t have the privilege of being irritated by her again. There are no words, no inspiration, to get me through. But I have some of the happiest memories to hold onto, and these are the ways I want to remember her:

Waiting in the crowd at the taping of her TV show, she catches my eye and waves a little too enthusiastically, with the biggest grin I’ve ever seen. I tell my friend it was probably at someone else; I wasn’t sure she would even recognise me. The taping ends, and teenage girls gather around the stage to get autographs and photos, and she pushes through them all, rushes over to me, picks me up, and spins me around. “I can’t believe we’re finally meeting,” she says, kissing my cheek and wiping lipstick away. “It’s been so long.” Her manager, inexplicably, makes us all stand together for a photo, then I’m taken backstage to wait for her. It’s a clusterfuck. Janice Dickinson is obsessed with my friend’s pink hair, Tom is impossibly tall and insulting Coca Cola, people interrupt us to ask for photos. She asks what I’m reading and I take The Unit out of my bag – dystopian to the core – and she flicks through it, before we run over the last few books I’ve read, most of which have been her recommendations. Rather than passing the book back, she opens my bag and puts it in for me, kisses me on the cheek again. On the train journey home, I get a DM asking me to come back soon so we can hang out properly, and my heart explodes.

I overestimate how warm London will be when this finally happens a month later. Cinemas are cold as it is, but in my thin t-shirt and blazer, I’m positively shivering. She gives me her coat, covered in horse hair and smelling like a farm, but it’s warm and I’m grateful. We get outside and head to McDonald’s, and in the middle of her attempting to order a “large Big Mac” (not a meal, a non-existent larger burger) she turns to me and inexplicably shows me all of the forms of ID she has on her: provisional licence, 16-25 travelcard, passport. We sit down and, honestly, I’m too nervous to eat; she takes the opportunity to zone in on my food and finish it off. We sit and talk for two hours, and she comes out with the most hilarious unfiltered comments and questions: Why are you so short? Why don’t you have a Birmingham accent? Why don’t you have a girlfriend? It’s so hard to be a bisexual person. You could totally move to London on £900 a month, you should definitely move down here. Never before had I been so conscious of the fact that she was on an entirely different planet to the rest of us. We head back to the tube station and I’m still cold on the way; she takes off her scarf and wraps it around my neck. Heading in different directions at Euston, I give her everything back, and we hug before we depart. She seems so impossibly tall. This is how I remember her: so big, so much more than anyone ever wanted to acknowledge, and as Bob perfectly put it, so completely bonkers.

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