Desperately seeking Samantha

With time on her hands during the Covid-19 lockdown, Kelly Dennett wanted to find out what happened to her childhood best friend.

Ispent a few hours with my school-aged self this week. Nothing brings short, sharp focus to the oddities and triumphs of your current reality than having a conversation with the young woman who desperately wants to be you one day.

I’d moved home to mum’s rural property from my home in the capital the night before the Covid19 level 4 lockdown, frankly alarmed, because at nearly 32 I thought I was looking down the barrel of never living anywhere but my own home again.

At mum’s it’s hard not to climb back into the past. The small community I’m locked down in is a bedrock of memories.

Here, just a few kilometres away, are my preschool and primary schools, and the local hall where we used to have school dances and fizzy drinks.

On my daily walks I pass a farming family’s huge shed where we had our after-ball party that I think might have been shut down by the police. It’s at the treacherous crossroads where you know you’re not supposed to pass others on the 100kmh stretch because someone died there a long time ago. I can’t remember who. I snap a photo of the shed and send it to my friends, ‘‘Remember this?’’

There’s the bus stop I used to wait at with dread for that day’s trundle to secondary school, the homes of people I used to babysit for, and the restaurant that earned me enough money to one day move overseas.

At home the garage holds relics of past flats, and my bedroom, previously housing bunk beds and a desk, overlooks the field mum once filled with radishes in what we’d now call a side hustle.

One afternoon with time – so much time – on my hands, I drew a breath and went in. The bag of journals buried in the spare bedroom cupboard numbered around half a dozen and I’d barely looked at them, ever. They were Kelly: the definitive history.

Caution. The advice from psychologists online was serious: rereading your old self can be like tearing off a bandaid only to discover not scar tissue, but gaping wounds.

But, I had a specific purpose of unravelling a mystery I’d been thinking about pre Covid-19. What had happened to my best friend from primary school?

The disappearance of Samantha Smith from my life was an anomaly. Most of my friends who had meant something to me at some stage, who I’d long lost touch with, were just a Facebook click away. Mum sometimes sees their parents and provides updates.

Tracing the what-became-of-you is usually a journalist’s party trick; that notification to others of how much of our lives are imminently traceable on the internet. Sorry, I commiserate sometimes, as I relay that even without social media there is Google, LinkedIn, property records, telephone records and newspaper archives from which to be found. (And yet I’m still always blown away by David Lomas’ investigations into missing family members.)

But a few hours of searching various versions of Sam, Sammy and Samantha online had given me no