Lauren John Joseph reveals a remarkable and moving story of love, death and enduring friendship
I put the book in the post with a note that said, “I know that once you’ve read this you may never want to speak to me again, but please know I couldn’t but write it.” The envelope slipped into the postbox and landed with a muffled thud atop a heap of hopes and squabbles and council tax rebates. My stomach quivered at the thought of what I’d done. In a day or so he would have my book, a novel that was as much his story as mine, testimony to a love we shared, and shared the loss of.
We met completely by chance, on Myspace, barely out of our teens, back in the indie sleaze days. We had no mutual friends, we found each other just by clicking about, discovered that we had a similar sense of humour, recognised that we had ridden parallel trajectories from the northwest to London in search of ourselves and others. He was studying at the Royal Academy of Music, I was at King’s College, he was becoming a composer, I was becoming a woman. He introduced me to György Ligeti and Maria Callas, I took him to nightclubs in Shoreditch where we danced until 2am to the Klaxons and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
