We were never friends

When I turned the last page of Margaret Bearman’s book “We were never friends”, I sat and pondered. What had I just read? Was it a biography, a mystery, a book about families and what they can do to you, a psychological treatise on love and trust or a biblical work on transgression and redemption?

That I enjoyed the unfolding and intriguing story, there was no doubt. That it was well written, was obvious. That it flowed backward as a perfect and pristine river from its wide and tranquil entry into the sea of today and back to its more exotic and turbulent beginnings way up in the hills of an unusual childhood, only enhanced the delight of my exploration.

From the very opening sentence you feel that Lotti, our story teller, has a secret. And it’s an old secret. A yet unshared secret from school days. But Lotti has other secrets too. Perhaps not so desperately hidden but not the sort of things to share with those outside her enmeshed family.

Lotti has a problem. Her father is a internationally renowned painter. Her mother is a teacher but very beautiful. Very bohemian. Very much a match for her free-spirited husband. Lotti and her brother and younger sister live an intellectually privileged life but under the boding sky of a quixotic father who is as emotional elusive to them as he is world famous and feted as an artist. They must share their mother with their father’s pure artistic talent.

Lotti has another problem. Kyla! Kyla is a sickly girl at Lotti’s school and as the title of the book leaves us in no doubt, not one of Lotti’s friends. But not being a friend doesn’t stop Lotti, and we readers, from discovering quite a lot about Kyla. And that “quite a lot” is an unpleasant burden at times for reader and Lotti alike.

Kyla is a mystery that Lotti really doesn’t want to become involved with. She has other blander school friends that she is desperate to court. But there is something insistent about Kyla that won’t just go away. Like the purplish bruises on her body, that Lotti’s father captures so well for himself in his art, there is something very real about her physical world that won’t be brushed off and forgotten and forgiven.

There are burdens in life, apparently, that must be carried whether we want too or not. Sometimes just mumbling “we were never friends” is no excuse at all. Sometimes we do good, despite ourselves.