Necromancy: When a Friendship Outlives Its Pulse

On the quiet art of letting old friendships rest

20 May 2026

• ​2262 words • ​13 min read

I remember the first night I met Charlie.

It was back in my airline days, when “crew” didn’t just mean the people you worked with. It meant the people you drank with, flew with, gossiped with, recovered with, and sometimes adopted as family before you’d known them a month.

Charlie had a party at his place, and all the cool crew were there. My good friend Scott lived next door and took me along.

I wore a dress I’d found in an upmarket op shop in Los Angeles: 1950s in shape, full-skirted, sequins stitched through the design, bold and happy in a way I probably wanted to be.

Charlie said he loved it. He called it my Hollywood dress.

At first, I thought he might be taking the piss. That was always possible in those circles; affection and mockery often arrived wearing the same shoes. But he wasn’t. He was interested. In the dress, yes, but also in me.

From then on, I felt I could be myself with him.

It is hard to explain airline friendships to people who have never lived inside them. They were accelerated things. You could meet someone on a Tuesday, fly with them on a Thursday, drink too much with them in a hotel bar by Friday, and by Sunday they knew things about you that people at home had never been invited near.

There was something about being young and slightly displaced that made everything feel more intense. We were always arriving somewhere, leaving somewhere, sleeping in strange beds, finding breakfast in cities we had no business feeling at home in. Friendships formed in the gaps: in crew buses, in briefing rooms, in the back rows of aircraft, in hotel corridors, in the exhausted hilarity that comes after a long sector and too much duty-free optimism.

Charlie was one of those people who made the room warmer. Before I knew him properly, I had seen him at crew briefings: the table where everyone seemed to be laughing. He had that quality some people have, of making you want to be included before you even know what you are asking to join.

When I finally was included, it felt easy. Immediate. Like being admitted to the fun table at the wedding.

We became close quickly. Inseparable, really, in that way people can be when they are young and life keeps placing them in dramatic lighting. There were nights out, flights, gossip, hangovers, shared jokes, hotel rooms, ridiculous confidences.

There was the Dominican Republic, circa 1990, when we were put on the same jumbo crew and given a crew apartment with two bedrooms. We drank too much at night, of course, because that was apparently a contractual obligation of youth. In the morning, I climbed into his bed and we ate room-service breakfast together.

It was their version of a cooked English breakfast, with fried plantain on the plate. I thought it was fried banana. Charlie explained what it was, and I learned something that morning.

Mostly that plantain is fantastic.

That is the thing about old friendships. They come with their own weather. Their own rooms. Their own food. Years later, one word can bring back a whole country.

Many times back then, our rosters would line up just enough for mischief. I might be doing a night flight to Gran Canaria while Charlie did Faro, and we would make a pact before we left. I would bring a carton of orange juice from the plane. He would bring back a bottle of espumante, bought from the ground crew while the aircraft was being turned around in Portugal.

By morning, we would be bleary-eyed on the back step of his place, watching the sun come up and drinking our makeshift Buck’s Fizz until we were so spectacularly useless that there was nothing for it but to sleep until the next flight that evening. We lived within walking distance of Gatwick then, close enough for the smell of jet fuel to drift into ordinary mornings. There was a time when that smell could make me tear up. We adored it.

Whoever got the destination with the bottle available down route brought the booze. That was the rule. Youth is full of excellent systems built on terrible judgement.

Despite us both being into men, we would often sleep off the tiredness and alcohol in his bed. There was nothing coy or complicated about it. It was just closeness. The kind of friendship where bodies were not yet battlegrounds, and affection did not need a committee meeting before it could put its head on the pillow.

It wasn’t only stopovers and night flights.

The airline went bust in the recession of 1991, and everybody scattered into the frantic scramble for jobs. Charlie ended up staying in aviation. I joined the police. For a while we shared a flat in Dulwich, which was a very different life from Cabin Crew Canyon near Gatwick, where everyone seemed to live within shouting distance of everyone else and nobody’s business had the decency to remain private.

But the friendship held. More than held, really. It was larger than life for years. And it was not all parties and night stops. I went to his father’s funeral with him. That is worth saying, because the friendship was not merely glitter and hangovers. It had depth. It could stand in serious rooms.

There were still parties, phone calls, letters, postcards, weekends, dramas, and confidences. There were still those long conversations people had before communication became something you did with one thumb while watching television. We had a massive circle of friends then, and diaries full of arrangements. You didn’t “catch up” vaguely. You went somewhere. You called. You wrote. You turned up.

Charlie and I did all of that.

Then, in 1999, I moved back to Australia.

Technically, I was returning home. But after thirteen years in England, it felt more like leaving a large part of myself behind. I left friends, habits, weather, shorthand, my father, and of course Charlie. I was buoyed by the promises people make when departures are still happening at the airport and everyone wants to believe geography is only a technicality.

We will stay in touch.

And at first, we did.

The phone mattered then. It still had the power to put someone properly in the room. A voice at the right time could close a hemisphere.

Charlie came to Australia sometimes too. It is important to say that. He did not simply vanish into the northern hemisphere and leave me waving at a dead line. There were visits. There were holidays. I would go back to England, or he would come here, or we would meet halfway somewhere warm — Thailand, Malaysia — and have the kind of blast that made the old friendship seem entirely recoverable.

There would be laughter and sun and too much to drink and the relief of thinking: there you are. There we are.

But between those trips, something changed.

Phone calls with Charlie became rare and precious. Then rarer. Then almost impossible. He became, for reasons I never fully understood, almost allergic to answering the phone. It wasn’t just with me. I had seen him do it with other people: the phone ringing, his eyes flicking toward it, the decision not to pick up. The caller could leave a message. The caller could wait.

I knew what that looked like from the room.

Later, I knew what it felt like from the other side of the world.

The friendship became increasingly asynchronous. I could send something into the air and wait for it to come back altered. I could leave a message, but I could not always reach him. And there are times in life when a message is not enough. There are times when you need your friend in real time, not as a dispatch, not as a photograph, not as a voice note sent when the moment has already passed.

Social media complicated things further. My generation did Facebook. For a while, I did it too — ten years or so, before I saw it clearly enough to step away.

Charlie was always available there. He still is, I imagine. But availability is not the same as presence.

Facebook can keep the appearance of old friendships alive. It preserves names, faces, birthdays, photographs, old jokes and mutuals, but it can also stop you noticing that the living friendship has quietly left the room.

Leaving it was a bigger decision than I expected. I lost contact with a lot of people. Or perhaps I found out which contact had only ever been held together by the platform. There is a difference.

What remains now feels smaller, but more honest. If someone seeks me out, I know they are looking for me — not simply broadcasting their life into a crowd and hoping the old names are still watching.

Perhaps that is where some friendships become ghosts: not when contact stops, but when contact becomes proof of life rather than life itself.

For a long time, I kept answering the friendship as if it were still the old one.

That is how necromancy works, I suppose. You don’t begin by admitting something is dead. You begin by lighting candles around it and insisting you can still feel warmth.

There were voice messages. Photographs. Updates. Familiar phrases. Enough contact to keep the outline visible, not enough to make it breathe.

There were times I would listen to one of his messages and realise I had no honest answer left in me. The gap had become too wide. He wasn’t really speaking to me anymore, not in the way I understood speaking. I was getting the party line, or perhaps worse, what he thought I wanted to hear.

And because the friendship had once been so alive, I kept looking for the pulse.

The truth arrived quietly.

For years, if I imagined going back to England, Charlie was part of the picture. He was not merely someone I would see; he was part of the reason England still felt like somewhere I could return to. Once, he had been the person I would run to.

Then one day I realised that if I went to England now, I probably wouldn’t tell him.

Not out of spite. Not as punishment. Simply because I no longer wanted to perform the old friendship when I could not feel the current one.

That was the moment I understood something had to be cleaned out. Because I try to live truthfully, and not telling him I was there would have been a lie. Not the loud kind. The quiet kind. The kind that says: this is already over, but I am still pretending it isn’t.

So I wrote to him.

We had almost made it to forty years. That mattered to me. It still does. You do not dismiss that kind of friendship lightly, even when you know it no longer knows how to live in the present.

I did not want to be cruel. There is no honour in taking a friendship that once gave you shelter and setting fire to it on the way out. I told him, as gently as I could, that I felt the friendship had changed, that I wanted to quietly close the door, and that I wished him well.

Then I waited for the grief.

I expected it to arrive. After all, I had known him for most of my adult life. He had been woven through whole countries of memory. He had been there in the years when I was young and reckless and building a life far from where I began. He had seen me in my Hollywood dress. He had known me before I had learned to explain myself.

But the grief did not come.

What came instead was calm.

Not triumph. Not satisfaction. Not the horrible little buzz of having won something. Just calm.

The hugeness of it never hit me because, I think, the friendship had already ended somewhere inside me. The message was not the death. It was the paperwork.

That can feel indecent at first, the relief. We are taught that if something mattered, it should hurt theatrically when it ends. But sometimes relief is simply the body telling the truth before sentiment can interfere.

Perhaps that is all that happened. We got on different trains somewhere along the way, and by the time I noticed, we were no longer waving from opposite platforms. We were in different countries altogether.

I don’t think of him with bitterness.

I think of the first night, the Hollywood dress, the party, the cool crew. I think of the Dominican Republic and fried plantain. I think of orange juice smuggled from aircraft carts and espumante bought on the turn-around in Portugal. I think of the back step, the sunrise, two young people drunk on Buck’s Fizz and their own absurd freedom.

That friendship was real.

That is the part worth saying.

It was real, and it ended.

Necromancy is tempting because it lets us believe that enough memory can bring something back to life. But memory is not breath. History is not intimacy. A name in your phone is not a person standing beside you.

Some friendships don’t need resurrection.

They need to be allowed their ending.

Not a dramatic burial. Not black horses and weeping veils. Just a quiet one. A kind one. A hand on the door. A thank you for what was alive.

And then, finally, peace.