See this circle? It never ends. That’s how long I’ll be your friend.
April 24, 2025
Emma Neale, who is shortlisted for the Peter and Mary Biggs Prize at the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, writes a personal essay centred around a childhood friendship.
By: Emma Neale
My childhood best friend had waist-length hair the colour of fox tails. When I brushed it free of sleepover tangles, I saw single strands of gold, white, brown, tar-black, and even, I swore, a tinselly pink among the amber. People said red hair meant bad temper. Yet Sherry was a gentle soul: a giggly co-conspirator, always keen for the mildly screwball things we’d tumble into together.
We were around nine when we first met. I can’t recall that encounter in detail, although I know my younger sister introduced us. Wherever she goes, all my sister has to do for people to warm to her is walk out her front door. My family had just moved to our second American suburb after relocating to the United States. We were there for my father’s medical research; my mother, denied a work visa, used our years overseas to write.
Within hours of our arrival, my sister had found a trio of girls: one her age, one mine, one slightly older. These were Sherry and her two ‘kind-of-step-sisters’. Sherry’s mother and the other girls’ father had started living together, more for convenience than for love, after their respective partners had an affair.
It was a relief to find our street had children heading to the same elementary school we’d enrolled in, my third school in four years. Sherry and I edged into friendship: trying summer-twilight roller-skating; watching older kids play Chicken with traffic; joining in on Hit the Deck (hide-and-seek involving oblivious drivers passing by).
Soon, our entertainments ranged from beach trips (to La Jolla Shore, or La Jolla Cove, its gentle curves tucked into sandstone cliffs, where we might take an evening picnic and watch for the green flash at sunset); to telling ghost stories; or immersion in imaginary games. A favourite was called ‘Teenagers’. This involved using a dress-up stash my family had quickly acquired in our rental house, much of it left behind by a previous tenant, who had ditched some raunchy choices: various negligées and diaphanous baby-doll nightgowns. (One, petunia yellow with froths of white ruffles, must have made whoever wore it look like a sultry fried egg.)
With another, older girl from our street, those nightgowns led to precocious sexual exploration: she initiated kissing, embracing, innocuous caressing in a role play of ‘Boyfriend and Girlfriend’. Her fire- and-brimstone upbringing quickly made her regret the game and hate me enough to ‘TP’ our house and front yard one night, when we were out. This was an American custom we’d never heard of: but one so common it was known by that abbreviation I mistook for teepee. How was it a teepee? It added to the disorientation. My parents didn’t know why this girl turned on us, but when her sister dobbed her in, they insisted that the 11-year-old and her ‘cronies’ (as Dad said), come to clean it up: the toilet paper draped all over the tree and driveway, shaving-cream sprayed in cusses (bitch, you suck) over the house exterior and bark chips booted everywhere. I got a stern telling-off from Dad, his jaw set in a way that meant he bit down on worse. “You need to think much harder about the kinds of friends you choose.” My very bones seemed to swim in a hot stew of shame, confusion, a smarting sense of injustice.
After that older girl and I fell out, Sherry and I grew closer. If we ever wore those risqué nightgowns, it was over jeans and T-shirts, as we snorted hysterically, then used make-believe phones to dial fictional boyfriends with names like Juan and Carlos; boys who drank beer and drove crazy-fast on their motorbikes. We’d use handbags from the dress-ups: purses that were also dynamite, guns, first-aid kits, stolen diamonds, because despite the ecstasy of dancing to ELO or Olivia Newton-John, there were only so many times we could play ‘double-date-at-the-disco’ without the thrill of plot, the glimpse of something dangerous, adult, forbidden.
It seems telling that the game was ‘Teenagers’, not ‘Grown-ups’. Teenagers, we figured, still had fun. Adults: not so much. They discussed work with a clenched drivenness, and their relationships could send out shadowy plumes of tension, raised voices, or the opposite: brooding silences that sometimes swallowed us, too.
A case in point: Sherry’s birth father had left when she was very young. He seldom made contact. I knew this was behind some bewildering, lost scenes when my friend curled into her mother, a kitten into her doe, and wept. It gave me a plunging, cast-off feeling: a desperate wish to help, to understand. Yet somehow, expressing this to Sherry hurt her more. Those were dim, mystery-cave times when I felt lumpen and ugly with obsolescence.
Similar scenes recurred when Sherry’s mother left her ‘kind-of-stepfather’. Sherry moved, separated from her sort-of-stepsisters. It was another rupture; one her mother, Jill, tried to smooth over with long, gentle monologues, explanations, promises. The reason for this second split was that Jill had met another man, a funny, kindly raconteur, a Jewish doctor whom she soon married, and who wanted to legally adopt Sherry. He brought a fresh tide of love and generosity into her life, and so into mine, too.
In Sherry’s new house, one of Jill’s promises materialised. Sherry was given a double canopy bed. The buttery yellow of permanent Californian sunshine, it had a madcap luxury, like a circus tent merged with a princess’s boudoir. On our sleepovers I was lucky enough to share it. Nights spent with Sherry increased. I was oblivious at the time that this was another bribe. With me there, Jill and the new dad (unbeknownst to my parents) decided it was fine to go out in the evenings. Somehow, in their minds, leaving two 10-year-olds home alone was safer than leaving one. This was four years before San Diego’s notorious serial murders began: yet in retrospect it still feels … lax.
In the new house, Sherry also received harpsichord lessons. The delicate, formal harmonies she readily achieved seemed dizzy miracles coming from one such as us, who’d boogied to disco, been mucky, clumsy, chubby, sunburnt, sugar-sucking, gum-smacking, bubble-blowing clowns together; grazing our knees in skating prangs; wallowing in banks of ice plant and backyard mud till we were slicked in it from scalp to soles; body-surfing at La Jolla Shore, where, a government website boasts even now ‘water visibility can sometimes exceed 30 feet’; waddling around with sand-filled swimsuit crotches after being dumped by rude waves; bumping bums together in underwater dance-moves; making ‘Secret Sauce’ for hamburgers, a gloop of mustard-mayonnaise-ketchup, stirred like artist’s paint, to get the right frantic orange.
Occasionally, in her new house, Sherry also had visits from a new, much older step-sister, Machla — her name as exotic to me as her Osaka-plum lipstick and almost Pierrot-white foundation. Her overture of kinship was to do our make-up. Apparently, this was an amazing opportunity, its amazingness linked to the fact Machla studied some guy called Picasso in New York, and owned a sleek, black cat named Aubrey, after some other guy: Beardsley, an illustrator. It all made her seem highly sophisticated — until my father privately nicknamed her cat ‘Aubrey Strawberry’ because of its little red puckered bum.
In Sherry’s new house, we tried to invent a new thing. We decided to bake our own sweets, using only kosher ingredients. It was vital that we not follow a recipe. How would we uncover natural genius if we listened to advice? (Natural genius was a golden-goose we’d started to hear much about. We hoped, desperately, that we might unearth an innate flair for something ourselves, so we could build on it and secure a bright future.) Combining our last names, we called our weird biscuits Nilches. They were revolting; we made ourselves sick eating them, yet still wheedled people to try samples, hoping someone’s palate would declare them culinary miracles.
Well, if we weren’t to be five-star chefs, how about theatre prodigies? Along with my sister, we entered the school talent-quest, dancing to ‘You’re the One that I Want’, the hit from Grease. Our opening moves felt outrageously bold: a charade of smoking and grinding imaginary cigarette-butts under our feet, followed by the sass of shoulder-shimmies and tossing hips, all totally unlike our real world personae. Yet that melodic bass and core drum-groove spun their trippy hypnosis, flooding me with a confidence I’ve rarely felt since.
Then, with the abruptness of a TV plug kicked out of a wall socket, our California interval ended. After three years, Dad’s work visa had expired. We were returning to New Zealand. When I told Sherry, she just stared, motionless. In my head, ELO sang at the wrong turntable speed, with the wrong words. She turned to stone, she turned to stone. Bluish shadows gathered across her face, and her eyes welled. Her mouth pressed tight.
No matter that it was involuntary, or that I was miserable: I was doing to Sherry what her birth-father had done; what her mother’s separation from her interim partner and his daughters had done also.
Leaving Sherry was like swallowing winter. I tried to adapt to life in Newtown, Wellington, a city which in the 1980s seemed to be all chipped paint, rust-bruised iron, abject graffiti, posters peeling like blistered skin. Everything flaked, decayed: even the white coating on bus-stop poles.
We moved into a rental which was cats-cradled with so many drafts that the only way to truly escape was to climb into bed, hug a hot-water bottle and hope to pass out. In the living-room, we girls had to be trained not to sit right in front of the two-bar heater, where we sent out the crispy incense of singed woollen jerseys and blocked all heat from the adults.
The houses in our street stood cheek-to-jowl: the bedroom I shared with my sister looking directly into an old man’s kitchen. The sight of him there, staring abjectly at us as he dried his dishes, pressed a raw loneliness in deeper. How dour Wellington felt, after laid-back California. Was it because of the way the wind bullied and chewed everything? Like frosted breath, remote resignation drifted from everyone: teachers, shop-owners, bus-drivers, even other children.
In not much more than a month, Springbok tour protests dramatically altered my childish impression of a dysphoric, apathetic, subdued country. Yet from that earlier morose space, I wrote several letters to Sherry, carefully including my father’s workplace as the return address. Nightly, when Dad came home from Wellington Hospital, I’d ask if there was mail for me. Nightly, he’d say no.
One evening, after learning I would have to change to my fifth school, because my parents had found a house on the other side of the city, I couldn’t be brave about Sherry’s silence any more. When Dad said there was still no mail for me, I dissolved. He hugged me to him, solid and warm, yet emanating something my sister called ‘his hospital smell’. Vaguely sour, metallic, antiseptic, it also carried the marrow of deep weariness.
Several nights later, when Dad came home well past dusk, he handed me an envelope. ‘Sorry it’s not what you wanted,’ he said, ‘But it is for you.’
In the midst of ward-rounds, lectures, and setting up a research lab, he had made time to write me a letter. It said he knew how upset I was. It acknowledged how tough this phase was for everyone: for my patient mum — my daily confidante — who had ‘the difficult work of settling us all in’; for us girls with new schools; and for him, trying to navigate the toxic workplace politics of a new job.
Before reading his letter, I’d never thought that adults might still find change hard, too. With a small lurching step towards maturity, I realised the atmosphere of sadness and struggle wasn’t mine alone, in this strange, echoing city that seemed to embody so much of the beaten and indrawn.
But one Saturday, not long before we left that wind-laced rental, Dad brought me another envelope, with American stamps. It revealed a wonderful, thick, whopper of a letter, crisp and crackling as gift-wrap and running to pages and pages.
Sherry hadn’t forgotten me. She hadn’t been punishing me for leaving, she hadn’t seen, through the lens of time and distance, that I was the wrong kind of person altogether. She had wanted to write: but before I left, I’d expressly said to wait until I had a permanent home address. Had I?! Happy, happy idiot!! I’d been stubbing my heart against a brick wall I’d set in my own path!
From then on, letters zipped to and fro. Once or twice, so did expensive international toll-calls, which I’d saved chores-and-pocket money for. These calls were partly to set up the extraordinary event of Sherry’s visit to Aotearoa. Aged 12, she flew all alone from California to Wellington one December. Back then, international flights weren’t made as often nor as lightly as they are now, and it seemed barely believable to me that Sherry would even be allowed: by her parents, by the airlines, by the law. It was to be her last Christmas, she said. Sherry and her mother were converting to Judaism.
On that visit she gave me a thin gold chain. It bore a pendant: a tiny gold semi-circle, ragged along one edge, as if it had been torn. Embossed on it was the motto Friends forever. It came with a card featuring a rhyme I’d seen in American children’s autograph albums: ‘See this circle? It never ends. That’s how long I’ll be your friend.’ Sherry had a matching necklace; our two charms fitted together to complete a full circle. At 12, when I first saw it, something in my chest opened. The future bloomed with love and promise, as if these things were immutable physical laws and they brushed the sky cadet blue.
I try to recall more from Sherry’s visit to us, puzzled by how much has faded. I can summon the excitement of preparing my room for her; I can remember one or two outings: the most vivid being when, at Kaitoke Regional Park, we introduced her to the deception of New Zealand’s wild water, the practical joke of it even in high summer. There is a photo of all three of us girls under a hot aquamarine-blue sky, with a backdrop of soothing pounamu-green trees, as we stand in the Hutt river, our hands clawing the air, backs arced like incredulous cats’, as the cold shocks our spines.
And then — did something go wrong? At some point, Sherry and my sister grew absorbed in a game called ‘Witches’, played in a circlet of pines near our house. They carried on without me. Did we fight? Did I mention a gap widening?
I don’t remember our goodbye; nor much correspondence after Sherry’s return to the US. Once, her mother wrote in her stead — saying Sherry had a boyfriend, was working hard at high school: her mother was sorry she found little time for letters. I understood the real message. Sherry was growing away, moving on.
For decades, I kept the necklace Sherry gave me stowed in cotton-wool, inside its original gift-carton. Afraid of losing it, I only wore it on special occasions. Early on, I genuinely took its tidy black cursive to be a ligature, connecting me to Sherry across the Pacific Ocean. Later, I’d lift the glossy red-speckled carton lid and feel not the radiance of affection and union glowing like a small, boxed sunrise, but something akin to distaste.
It wasn’t that I’d decided the necklace was gimmicky. It was more to do with the way the container, the cotton-insulation, the little watermelon-and-green gift card (4U in bubble font) stayed inert: reminders of my own stagnation. I’d expect a quickening stir, to find some answer to a longing, an aspiration, a restlessness I couldn’t articulate. Instead, as Sherry’s letters dwindled, I was faced by an amulet that had lost its magic; an inanimate object with nothing of the idiosyncrasy and dynamism of a person or relationship. I’d shove it away again, saddened, even repelled.
Yet that necklace survived my leaving home, several changes of flat and two overseas moves, part of me unable to reject the girl I had been, so entranced by the friendship gesture. When did the bauble’s twinkly gleam stand not for two parts of a whole, but for separation? I can’t pinpoint it. Memory is an amateur jackdaw. It darts at disparate, shiny embellishments, forgetting to gather up context, settings, fasteners.
Forty years later, in Ōtepoti, Dunedin, I show my husband a jewellery ad for a similar necklace in a junk-mail brochure. I mention my own necklace, which I must have finally discarded after we had our first child. I say I’d love to know what sort of life Sherry has had; whether she remembers our friendship as the same vivacious, intense, all-consuming influence I do. Would we like each other now? I mention I’ve just been hunting for her online; I’ve found her parents’ address, but not Sherry herself.
My husband, who has been half-absorbed by screens, flicking between news and emails, interrupts. “All these years, and she’s never once reached out to contact you. You’ve never changed your name. Your dad worked in the same place until he died. Once you got published, she could have found you easily. She would have found you if she wanted to. Sometimes, with these people, I think you’ve got to take it as a message. A statement.”
I go into a bit of a fugue. After stacking the dishwasher, I wander out to a local reserve, as if to track something I’ve unwittingly dropped. Now and then native fuchsia let fall their slim purple and scarlet flowers onto the path. They have never looked more like the tiny cap and bells tossed aside by a stage fool.
The day wears on. The exigencies of work and family seem to back up my husband’s view. I push the past away.
Almost a year later, I come across the word condominium in an essay. That word, which feels so very American and 1970s to me, means I’m gone again, lost in a flock of images. I wonder if this flurry of wistfulness is a particularly middle-aged affliction.
Maybe. Maybe, in part, the mind’s time-slips are a form of self-soothing for all kinds of wounds and cognitive dissonance, as we try to reckon with what we have lost personally; and even with what feels at threat globally. The best things. Like all the teeming invention in childhood; all the polymorphous potential, sparkle, electricity, the formative, transformative points of empathy and connection. All the good things we can be to each other; all the could-bes a child embodies.
When I start trying to find Sherry again, our youngest son is the age that she and I were the last time we met. His 12-year-old self is such a different personality from mine at the same phase. I watch his bristling mini-swagger, his lightning-quick reactions, the headrush he gets from nutting out maths concepts, his early detachment from me — by which I mean, his camaraderie with his dad, his bright-eyed, buzzy independence — and I’m struck by how very much his own person he is already. I needed my mother for longer; needed to check my responses to the world against her guidance more. But he does remind me of one facet of my childhood self: friends are his fuel. When with them, he is plugged in, lit up.
Noticing this finally encourages me to write a physical letter to Sherry. I’ve found an address for her, having learnt her new last name from her adoptive father’s obituary. So far, social media hasn’t worked for renewing contact. A Friend request on Facebook has remained unacknowledged. A message I send by Messenger isn’t ticked ‘seen’. Yet I know from other Facebook activities — and even a separate Messenger message to her adult daughter — that Sherry is still alive. Her daughter has responded warmly, thanks me for reaching out, says her mother is rarely on Facebook, but she’ll let her know to look for a message from me.
Yet there’s still been no result. So, in a simple, ritual re-enactment of the way we kept in touch for several years, I mail a letter to her. It is a chilly blue July morning, 2022; a day where the scent of snow blows in from the hinterland hills, although any blizzard, so far, has skirted the city. With stiff, wintery fingers, I release the letter into the post box as if tossing a coin into a wishing well.
A year passes. One day, half-idly looking up Sherry on Facebook again, I come across a public post about US politics from her ex-husband. It blazes with belligerent patriotism; it lacks all nuance or compassion.
In an instant, my urge to excavate and examine a shared, past girlhood seems fruitless. With all its apolitical naivety; its sweet loyalty only to each other and our families, and not, persuasively, to any country, cause, or creed, it remains unreachable — other than in that most unreliable of time capsules, memory.
Sherry never replies.
I turn her silence over and over, as if it’s a tangible offering. Its burnished surface flashes, like sun ricocheting off thin, beaten gold, painfully bright. Distance can be more than years and geography. It’s well past time to look away.