What people do.
Written at 8:41 a.m. on 2005-11-02
I was reading Clarity's entry in Jenn's diary and she was writing about an incident in her past where a friend hurt her (I would link to it but I've not the first idea how you do that, sorry, if anyone ever reads this and knows can you let me know). Anyway, I thought I'd write down mine. Coz I'd always thoguht I was a pretty good judge of character, I'd never been stung by a friend before and it rattled me quite badly.
At uni I made a lot of friends. My closest friends were Vicky, Kate and Penny and we spent a lot of time together, especially me, Kate and Penny, as we were doing the same course. When it came to moving off campus and into a house in the second year, Kate moved in with her flatmates and Vicky, me, Penny and some other very good friends from my campus flat (Ruth and Di) and Penny's (Helen, Rob and Mark) all moved into a big old victorian house. For a while it all went brilliantly, we were getting on well and having a great time. Then it started to go wrong. I'd met a guy a few months earlier called Ben and we decided that since he lived 400 miles away it would be easier if he moved in with me. I discussed it with my housemates and they all liked Ben and thought it was a great idea, so in he moved. This was when it began to fall apart. Penny had always been someone who liked to be the centre of everyone's world and now, with me, she wasn't. So she began to form a clique of her, Mark, Ruth and Helen. They would take over the living room and refuse to speak to me or Ben. It got to the point where if I (and to a lesser extent Ben) walked into a room the whole clique would fall totally silent and physically turn around to face their backs to me. My mum and my friends from home were shocked, it was like some sort of cult all following Penny blindly without thinking and none of them had ever experienced anything like it. Di and Mark started to see each other but Penny soon put a stop to that and Di started to receive the same treatment as I did. She wasn't as stubborn as me and she was more easily intimidated, she dropped out of uni and reapplied in London.
This continued for months, none of the clique had said so much as one word to me for 4 months, not a word. Ben had had about 10 words in that time. I was working in a bar at the time and had to work about 4 nights a week because I was skint and I got in one evening to find Ben in the bedrom hopping nervously from one foot to the other. When pressed for what was wrong he told me that while I had been at work in the evenings Penny had been coming on to him and asking him to have sex with her. I was hurt, shaken and truly furious. I knew she was a spiteful bitch and I knew she wasn't interested in Ben as a person, that I could just about have taken but she was using him to make a point, that whatever stability I thought I had, she could take it away if she wanted. But she failed, I know Ben wouldn't have done it, he just wasn't like that. We were supposed to be in that house for 2 years but the next morning Ben adn I went house hunting with Pam, another girl who was supposed to be moving in the next year, a friend of Di's who had received the Penny silent treatment and didn't want to now. The three of us found a gorgeous little house with an attic rom that looked out over the sea and we moved in the next month. The clique were furious because we'd passed our rooms onto anyone who'd take them and hadn't asked them but we didn't care. We were just happy to be out of there.
I had the better part of 9 months of hell from these people and so did Di. She left because she got upset but I got angry and I got stubborn and decided I wasn't going to let them drive me out but I can't even tell you how hard it was. To face that hostility day in, day out. My other friends were great and so were Ben and my family but it was still hard. Since then Ruth has apologised for her behaviour, she makes no excuses, she doesn't know why she so blindly followed Penny, all she says is she's sorry, and that's fine. We're mending bridges. I've seen Penny, she isn't even vaguely sorry, she just pretends it wasn't a problem and says it was all a misunderstanding. But it wasn't, it was deliberate and I can't reach Clarity's level of forgiveness, I hated her then, I hate her still and I may well always hate her. Not just for the bitchy behaviour, not just for using Ben to make a point and making him feel uncomfortable, not just for creating a clique in the house and intimidating Di so badly that she left but for destroying my faith in friends and in my own judgement. That I can't forgive.
