VI

They say that you don’t imagine anyone in dreams whole cloth. Everyone is someone you’ve met or seen. Isn’t that an idea? Everyone is someone, no-one is no-one, and there’s not a single person who has ever been invented. What does that mean for the myths and legends of the world? Apollo? Maybe he was a baker. Zeus? Perhaps a Casanovaesque Athenian. How about Ms Eyre? Lady Chatterly and her ‘friend’? What would it mean to the world if we had never inflated and conflated people and created the pantheon of heroes, villains, gods, goddesses, and all the characters of the world’s fiction? Could we survive--no, could we stand to live in a world without those whom we ‘invent’ and admire?

It’s like how, when we are children, we always make imaginary friends. Harmless perfect beings whom we trust to be true. We always give them up; we are always told to give them up. Why do we adults deny children of their perfect delusion, yet continue with our own? We still write stories about imaginary people and tell other people about them. It seems that the only difference between a child’s imaginary playmate and an adult’s myth or legend is that one is a private fantasy; the other, a shared delusion.

If everyone ever thought of was real, at least in some form, is the same true of events? Is the every happening in a story really a corruption of memory? Or perhaps memory is the corruption; maybe our legends and tall-tales are the real truth of the world.

Or maybe imaginary people, places, and goings-on are just that: Imaginary. Maybe stories are just acceptable lies. Maybe.

V

From a very early age I both loved and feared hospitals. They were exciting places! Full of sound and light, with many people in bright white coats running all about. Forever on the move. They seemed to my young eyes as a great anthill, overflowing with hundreds of individuals each with their own job, each busily working in the massive roiling ballet of people. I was in hospital when I was twelve. I’d fallen down a hill at school--or at least, I said I’d fallen. In reality I was trying to set a new record for hill-rolling--and broken my hand. I remember thinking at that time that I was the luckiest person on the planet! After all, I’d broken my writing hand, which meant only one thing: No homework.

I remember only one nurse specifically. Over these intervening years I’ve lost her face and name. Indeed, I’ve been told that we never think of a face we’ve not met, and I wonder sometimes whether a fleeting image in my head isn’t that nurse. She was kindest of all the people at the hospital. Now, don’t mistake my meaning; they were mostly all kind, but she was best. I can distinctly hear her voice in my ears even now. I had never seen an angel, but I could have easily believed she was one.

I used to keep a journal even then. It was rubbish, of course it was. Full to bursting with the stupid dreams of a young person: ‘I want some day to live in a big house! With a spiral staircase! Or maybe a castle? …Definitely a castle!’ That sort of shit. When this nurse saw me with a pen in my off-hand, the small book I used propped on my lap, she asked me if I would like her to write for me. I don’t think I ever said yes faster in my life. It was the final proof I needed: She was certainly an angel.

However, my view of hospitals changed on the day with the boots. They lost their idyllic quality: That day was the first scratch through the bright shining lacquer clouding my view of them.

IV

When my brother was about nine years-old he began to be bullied. It was nothing so serious that he told our parents or anyone at the school about it. To be totally truthful, it was more of a playground squabble than bullying proper. Being the elder of us, the duty fell to me to back him up. As we walked home for lunch one day, we were jeered at by my brother’s tormentors. I never knew the cause of their teasing on that day, but thinking back now, I realise that it was because of the boots. He was wearing mother’s boots. They were pink, rubber, and came almost to his knees, but what was he to do? Walk to school and back in sodden feet? It only occurs to me now that it had been raining all that week. Surely if Fate jokes, then Memory is a trickster.

I’ve always thought that it must have been something brother had done, but it wasn’t. How many times in one’s life does Memory pull the wool over our eyes? We go through life with our feet on the firm cobble of our memories--memories big on equal level with memories small. But how firm is our footing? How many stones are illusions created by our minds so we don’t have to trip over our faults?

III

In the many years since that day, I’ve become convinced that Lady Fate must have a sense of humour. At that moment when the last tremulous vibrations of our voice were nearly at their end I would have told anybody that I had seen the face of god, and that it was beautiful and terrible to behold. I felt such beauty in those dying seconds! Much later, after there was no church left in my town, and the pews were indistinguishable from the trees which had been long surrounding the church, but now formed their own holy designs on the decayed floor; I went back. I went back there, and saw beauty again. This time it was not the face of any god; it was the gentle wrath of nature and the silent march of time.

II

My brother did not like to pray. He always found it too relaxing, and he more than once dozed off when he should have been thanking god for his gifts. Even though my gifts were fewer and my sins graver, I always prayed joyfully and in earnest. It was like I had a third parent. He was just and forgiving, and he loved not in spite of my flaws, but because of them.

We were sitting in the local church one morning, going through the centuries-old rituals. As we said the ancient words, out voices rose up to the rafters, filling us not with the words of many, but a single word in a single universal voice.

‘Gloria! Gloria! Gloria!’

And our voice grew higher, and we felt the walls shake.

‘Gloria! Gloria! Gloria!’

We became the church with its ageing walls. We became the air, alive and ringing with our sound. We became each other, each body bleeding into the next, smearing into its neighbours and into theirs beyond, and on, and on, until all the world sang in our voice.

‘GLORIA! GLORIA! GLORIA!’

We sang as man. We sang as woman. We sang as a twittering of birds and a chattering of squirrels. We sang as a flash of lightning and a roll of thunder. Our voice was a booming of drums and a squalling of trumpets. All of creation roiled and finally exploded in us.

‘GLORIA! HALLELUIAH!’

I

There are two things wrong with my life: The times I cared too much and the times I cared too little. It is true what they say, that distance makes the heart grow fonder. But on this insignificantly small hunk of rock, there’s only ever so far between two things; that is why human beings have memory. With memory we can peer back over the interminable parade of nows and see the distance not only in miles or feet, but in minutes and seconds.

I’ve always been old. No matter how many years passed, I could never catch up to my own age. My friends used to tell me that I was the youngest senior citizen they’d ever met. But, you know, I never wanted to believe them. They always treated me as an outcast, a dancing bear in a circus; an oddity, and one to keep well shy of.

In the long years of one’s life, one always tries to write down their memory. For more years than was, perhaps, my due, I have tried to begin writing this, but have never been able to. I tried staring at the blank page, waiting for my sticking thoughts to clot into words. I tried laying awake in my bed until finally sleep gave my mind release from the torments of remembering.

Before now, I never understood why it’s always the old that write. I thought it must be because they’ve had more dreams to write down. It’s only now that I’ve begun that I realise that we write because we don’t dream any more; we only remember.

The Bell Invites

This is primarily an explanatory first post letting you know what this blog is all about. In essence, this is the first part of what I hope to be a three-part story. Who knows, perhaps it will one day be published. That's not my goal, however.

I may put up the second and third parts when I get done number one, especially if people are enjoying the first part. I haven't decided quite what I'm going to do with this yet.

I warn you now, this isn't a standard linear story with a dashing hero and a distressed damsel. There is a definite beginning, middle, and end, like all good stories, they just may not come out quite like you might be expecting.

With all that said, please enjoy! I love comments, questions, and criticism, although I won't give spoilers and I don't take kindly to trolling. Without further adieux:

The Bell Invites

by Alasdair MacFhionghuin