Beth Kirby. One Cannot Eat Cereal With A Paper Spoon

I met Beth one August evening in Venice.

Inevitably it was an Instagram thing (she’d cringe to acknowledge), one of those drizzly lightning bolts whereby the retouched doyenne of social media finds herself flouncing about the same remote city as the people from the flavour-of-the-month Arcadian pizza joint, intercourse is initiated and Bob’s your uncle. Actually it was her stylist who I think first intercoursed. Beth would have been too proud, me and Inez too oblivious. And indeed, it was Beth’s crew whose eager smiles crumpled like wet piñatas when they saw, instead of the luminous face of the model who fronted Table on Ten, the grizzled visage of her elderly collaborator scuttling crablike towards them across the campo, gagging for a fifth spritz. I’ve never thought of any of them since. Only Beth, who I’ve thought of all the time. Some burbling in our mutual chemistry, a squirt from that gland that makes human beings recognize other human beings, and we were keepers. In a bar on Erberia, near the bridge, a friendship was ignited which spanned the lifetime of a decade, transcended continents, marriages, children, divorces; a kaleidoscopic song-and-dance routine full of joy, scabrous wit and not a little despair. It was the shape of a pocket. An act of resistance. 

Back then Beth was busy doing her domestic enchantress thing, pulling curated bunnies out of hats for vague ladies with virtual lives, choreographing purple artichokes onto pewter plates. It was chucklingly seat-of-the-pants; she’d finagled a couple of floors of a palazzo on the Grand Canal (complete with Richard Wagner’s putative sofa) and was busily corralling her diaphanous gaggle to go at it all day, pausing only to waddle and quack over to Rialto market, take pictures of fishermen’s hands holding fish. Beth was sober, swathed in linens, conducting the motley orchestra with a well-honed baton; bit of love here, stern mother-hen there, a swell of cliche in the woodwinds and lots and lots of strings. We parted at 1 in the morning, when she finally wearied of fending off Venetian drunks trying to ply her with booze (I include myself).

It’s the refiner’s fire. You never know what you’re alchemizing, with whom, nor what your synapses are actually up to. They channel themselves along peculiar pathways to curious ends. You think you’re rooting for the shimmering one at the apex of your vision, whichever powdered confection you can’t get out of your head, but you rarely are. So you never actually know who’ll stick. I’m pretty certain Beth’s amusement at me railing against all things blousy and artisanal – the stuffed horse she was flogging like a jockey – wore pretty thin pretty quick. So when I popped in at the palazzo the next afternoon, a snarky, tittering and not terribly avuncular uncle, she was content to whisper, “lovely to see you again, old man, now fuck off.” And off I fucked. But not far.

We stayed firmly in touch. In retrospect I guess it was high season for the Local Milk pantomime. There was a cookbook brewing; Milk marketing gurus, Milk manifestos, self-help guides, packaged Lightroom presets. See Beth push a bicycle through the medina in Marrakech! See Beth glide through a market in Montparnasse, loosely festooned with garlic and a beret! Here she is pronged like a fork on a promontory in Santorini, gazing at a distant boat bobbing in the caldera! Or the classic (which I’d send to her every time she needed a laugh) head cocked, beaming at the camera under cherry blossom in Kyoto like some peculiar doll that was about to sprout fangs and chew out your liver. It was heady and profitable and totally unsettling. But because neither of us wanted anything from each other except an elbow in the ribs and a hangnail of humanity, our friendship became something of an oasis in this desert of transactional drivel. The conversation was “what the fuck is this nonsense we’re mired in and perpetuating?” with me mincing about like the bard in Asterix, swearing I’d leave it all behind, go mould turdballs on Pantelleria, and her saying, “leave all what behind? You haven’t fucking done anything. I’ve quarried a life out of solid shit, not to mention a resurrection.” I didn’t get it. I mean, I got hints of it, from stuff she said and from that unnerving tightness around the mouth some people get when they’ve lived too close to ruin. But I thought she was maybe just a bit goth, a bit of a drama queen. You know, trading on trauma, squeezing the mental health bladder so it wailed like the bagpipes. The landscape we inhabited was so counterfeit and saccharine, so steeped in marketing, it was hard to needle out strands of truth from the bland tapestry of fiction.

But as she said then – and it became our mantra – I was an apple, she was an orange. The job wasn’t to understand each other, but to be available at the end of a line, be truthful, foul-mouthed and mutually fascinated. To ask questions and listen and not be disappointed at the absence of answers. When we next met in Venice Beth was off the wagon (and I’d never been on it), so what started out as a cocktail and dinner at Paradiso Perduto devolved into staggering through Cannaregio like twin Shane MacGowans to pick up my somewhat startled friends from the bus station. This was not the Local Milk of legend; the acolytes’ noses would have curled in horror, they’d be clutching their pearls and lathering the unfollow button. We went back to David and Paul’s where the cheap wine continued to flow, as did the stories. Beth was about to get married. She was going to have a kid. The house would be perfect, raw plaster and linen and a fucking Lacanche, you assholes. Oh, and a flat in Paris. She was going to bake the whole fucking fairytale out of the gobbets of sourdough Local Milk had excavated from the maw. Just watch her! And this, five minutes after electing herself the person in the room most likely to be found with her head in the oven. She stayed over in the spare bedroom and I walked her back to her friend Skye’s in the morning, her face the same shade of taupe as her crumpled linens. 

Weirdly, we only clapped eyes on each other other a couple of times after that, both in New York. A dinner at Aska with Andrea and Marty where we squatted and nibbled pickled fish with our incisors like Scandinavian beavers, and an evening at Roman’s so oafishly mishandled our friend Evan paid for everything as an act of protest. But we spoke all the time. Long talks deep into the night from distant spots around the globe. Drip-by-drip our friendship titrated into something I can only describe as love. I know, it’s a mildewed word; people use it to greet their florist, their FedEx man, like they use exclamation marks and wet wipes. But how else to describe the thrill of seeing somebody’s name pop up on your phone at one in the morning (‘Vocal Milkers’) knowing you’ve got a few hours of giddy conversational filigree before the first smears of grey stain another Catskills morning? It’s like you’re looking at earth from space, someone clicks on a light by a bed in Stockholm, another goes on in New York, and that’s all there is in the world. A torrent of communion sluicing along an invisible pipe, the way water tumbles through a storm drain. And the text novellas, sheaves and sheaves and sheaves of them, peeling off like cartoon pages of a calendar, carried away by the wind. I never met Eula, nor any of Beth’s friends. She never met my kids. They were pertinent to our narrative only as reference points – Eula in particular was the fulcrum of why life should persist – but there was no need to introduce them as corporeal beings, their tics and warts and dirty diapers. I mean, what’s the point? It would only muddy what we had going. And what we had going was an endless after-hours conversation between two friends in a pub miles from anywhere, a fire crackling in the grate, the publican having gone to bed and left us to it. It was brutally honest, nothing off the table, nothing left unsaid. If we recoiled from truth, we had to agree to recoil back. Part confessional, part ping-pong tournament, part amateur dramatics, part philosophy class. Beth was clever, witty and quick. It was a really good time.

In retrospect – to my eyes – the whole Beth/Milk duality came to look like a willful act of schizophrenia. Bipolar people are good at this social media fakery, the conflicting realities fit them like mismatched gloves. And bridging the gap between Beth and Milk seemed manageable when it was just her; she shimmied along the tightrope doing pirouettes. But as the fairytale expanded to include family, homes, a kid and a dingleberry bush of hangers-on, it all started to become a bit difficult to watch. It was as if nothing was allowed to be invisible, everything got Milked, nothing was just Beth. Nothing, that is, except her manifold demons, which had escaped the duct tape and were pounding like zombies at the basement door. But let’s face it, nobody wanted to see that. It’s interesting; she told me every time she posted anything dark, she lost tens of thousands of followers. They jumped ship like scalded lemmings. What was required was more gauzy nonsense, conscripted, branded, grist for the Milk mill. The husband sub-brand was greedily propagated, Eula sat in the waxed-canvas wigwam, her hair festooned with a corona of wildflowers. And the results spoke for themselves. I mean, check out the comments. The audience gushed like vanilla geysers. They still do. Look over now, see them queueing at the shrine, all crying a river. What are you crying about? Are you a crocodile? Or do you just cry easy? The only thing that discourages them is when stinky-bonkers seeps through the seams. Then they abscond like flies. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter now. I’m not crying over here. I’m just trying not to be annoyed.

The last couple of years we spoke more than ever. After electing to spend the first months of lockdown alone in Paris fending for her herself, she succumbed and returned to Tennessee. That’s when it felt like the shit hit the fan. And then hit the fan some more. There was a lot of shit and it was a big fan. It always looked like a dangerous move, returning to the scene of so many crimes with no route of escape. She knew it too, and said so at the time. She could see what was coming. But she had no choice; Eula was there and she had to go back. Honestly, had that not been the case I think she might have stayed and it would have afforded her a better chance of making it through. Maybe she’d have drifted down to Morocco to see Emma, or to Venice, or England. Or we’d have visited her, built some kind of structure founded on decency, pork pies, laughter. But once she got into the slow, brown whirlpool of the place she grew up in, its attendant ghosts, ghouls and dark corners of history, it was hard to see a way of pulling her out. She was drowning by numbers. She’d pass, I’d hear a cry – sometimes once a month, other times several times a day – but when I looked over she was always out-of-reach. Once travel was possible we were going to meet in Marrakech or Paris. But it never happened. She was unwell and wasn’t going anywhere. The last message I got from Beth was at 4.15 on Sunday morning, saying “Hey, what are you doing in April? Well, specifically late April?” I told her where I’d be, that she should come too. She died on Monday.

Yet if this all sounds like a grim inevitability, a question not of if but when, it really wasn’t. The conversations were funny, lucid, honest, if sometimes frightening; they started with “still tottering about?” and ended with “I can do this. This isn’t going to beat me.” Beth wasn’t some floppy Dali clock, draped across the furniture waiting around to die. She was steely and determined. And I believed her. In some ways I didn’t even worry; she always turned up with a new panoply of tall tales, her wit as crisp as an apple, and I never wearied of it. The opposite, in fact. Text marathons ended with her groaning “I’m exhausted, will you stop being interested and fuck off?” And I always trusted that the golden grains of narcissism would be the featherweight that kept the balance slightly in favour of her sticking around. But it doesn’t always work out that way. The body can only take so much. It’s funny, my daughter Dusty said to me the other day (about another friend of ours with a Beth inside her keening to get out and leap off a bridge) “It’s unpredictable. I suppose you can’t keep both arms around people like that, right? We just do what we can.” At sixteen, she’s right. We do what we can. And most of the time they pop back up, these maniacs, though their dives can be deep. But like she said, it’s unpredictable. Sometimes they don’t. And you don’t even get to see ripples. Just flat, dark water.

Goodbye Beth. I’ll do something cheesy for you in Venice, something you would have liked. Spritz in plastic cups on the Fondamenta Misericordia. A linen jacket from Barena. Toss flowers into the canal at Rialto, watch them bob on down to Ca’ d’Oro. I really wish you hadn’t gone. Still – and I know you know this – it was always a pleasure, always a thrill. Lots of love, and buon viaggio, cara.

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