By a man who has been stabbed in the back so many times he’s considering a punch card system

There is a peculiar kind of magic that happens between two people who genuinely like each other, and it has nothing to do with proximity, WiFi signal, or how recently you’ve spoken. You know the sort of friendship I mean. The one where you haven’t spoken in fourteen months because life got in the way — mortgages, children, a mysterious rash — and then the phone rings, and within four seconds you’re laughing so hard you have to sit down. No catching up required. No awkward small talk about the weather in whatever godforsaken postcode they’ve ended up in. It’s as if the conversation simply paused, like a video call frozen on someone’s unfortunate double chin, and now it’s unfrozen and carrying on exactly where it left off.

That is a real friend. Time doesn’t touch it. Distance doesn’t touch it. You could be on opposite ends of the earth — one of you in a London traffic jam contemplating the meaning of existence, the other stuck behind a tractor somewhere in rural Ohio — and somehow you’re still tethered together by something that has absolutely no scientific explanation. Scientists have mapped the human genome, split the atom, and put a golf cart on Mars, yet nobody has ever satisfactorily explained why two souls occasionally just click and stay clicked for thirty years. I’m inclined to call it magic. Possibly witchcraft. Either way, it’s rarer than a polite reply from your internet provider, and it should be treasured accordingly.

Now. The other kind.

The other kind of friend is not a friend at all, but a sort of parasite wearing a friend costume, and they come in two devastating varieties.

The first variety is easy enough to spot once you know what you’re looking for, though it takes most people a humiliatingly long time to figure it out. This is the friend who is only ever around when there’s something to be extracted from you — a favour, a introduction, a couch, a free meal, an ego boost, whatever the currency happens to be that week. The moment the till stops ringing, so does your phone. You’ll notice this species tends to vanish the instant you’re the one who needs something. Ask them to help you move house and suddenly they’ve developed a chronic back condition that flares up exclusively on moving day. It’s remarkable, medically speaking. I’d nominate it for a research grant if I thought the friend in question would actually show up to collect it.

But it’s the second variety that deserves its own chapter, possibly its own Netflix documentary with ominous music. These are the ones who are worse, precisely because they don’t look like parasites at all. They look, for all the world, like the real thing. They remember your birthday. They send the nice messages. They laugh at your jokes with what appears to be genuine enthusiasm and not the polite grimace you get from people who are simply waiting for their turn to talk. You’d stake your house on their sincerity. And then — and this is the bit that gets you — one ordinary Tuesday, completely out of nowhere, you discover there’s a dagger buried so deep between your shoulder blades that you can feel it scraping against your spine every time you breathe.

No warning. No build-up. No dramatic villain monologue beforehand to give you a sporting chance. Just betrayal, delivered with the same casual ease as passing the salt.

And here’s the part that really ought to be studied by people in white coats: sometimes they don’t even need a real reason. They’ll simply invent one. They’ll manufacture some elaborate, entirely fictional grievance out of nothing but thin air and spite, polish it up until it gleams, and set it loose in the world like it’s gospel. And when it eventually reaches you — as these things always, always do, usually via someone who “just thought you should know” — you don’t feel angry first. You feel something far stranger. You feel like you’ve fallen asleep on a perfectly normal train and woken up in a different dimension entirely, one where up is down, black is white, and the person who once shared your fries is now the narrator of some fantasy in which you’re the villain. It’s disorienting in a way that betrayal alone never quite manages. You’re not just hurt. You’re genuinely, sincerely questioning whether you’ve lost the plot, or they have, or possibly the both of you, or the universe itself.

I’ve come to believe this particular breed doesn’t do it out of malice exactly — malice would almost be easier to forgive, because at least malice is honest about what it is. No, this is something murkier. A kind of restlessness in people who cannot simply exist alongside someone else’s peace without needing to disturb it. Give them a calm pond and they will find a rock. It’s not really about you at all, though it certainly feels like it is when you’re the one left picking gravel out of your ripples.

So what do you do with all this? You do what any sensible person does after enough winters. You get choosier. Ruthlessly choosier. You start treating friendship like a good whisky — not something you hand out in bulk to whoever’s standing nearby with a glass, but something you pour carefully, for the people who’ve actually earned the pour. The fair-weather ones drift off on their own eventually, chasing whatever the next thing is that they can get out of somebody. Let them go. Don’t even wave. And the dagger-wielders — well, you simply stop leaving your back exposed to people who’ve already shown you what they do with it.

What you’re left with, if you’re lucky, is smaller. A handful, maybe. But it’s real, and it survives oceans, time zones, silences, and the occasional fourteen-years gap in phone calls. And when that phone finally does ring, you’ll know within two seconds whether you’re talking to one of the real ones.

That’s the whole test, really. Everything else is just noise.

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