Imaginary Friends Re-United

It felt like a return to something long forgotten: a return to an imaginary past that was part real. But just how real?

What would my imaginary friends be like after all this time? – forty, fifty years in some cases. I had just assumed they would have just ceased to exist once I’d stopped – or grew out of – engaging with them. After all, they only existed in my imagination, didn’t they? It was my world they inhabited, by my bidding. The words they said, I put there. The things they did were at my volition.

So, who were these entities that were messaging me on this social network thingy?

An e-mail had popped up one day “Solly would like to be your friend again on Imaginary Friends Reunited”. I remember smiling bemusedly: incomprehensibly. But something had stirred in my gut. Is this a joke? ‘Imaginary Friends’ ‘Solly’. Solly was an imaginary friend of mine fifty years ago. I had a vague, chimerical notion of him: like shadows in Onyx. He was the older of the two – Bobo was the other, younger one – why ‘Solly’, why ‘Bobo’ I can no longer fathom. Solly sounded like a Jewish bookie and Bobo a prototype Tellytubby. Must have just latched on to the names somehow as a youngster, aged four? five? six? When had he abandoned his imaginary chums? Where do imaginary chums go when you abandon them? Nowhere, I’d imagined. Until now, and this eerie e-mail.

I had imaginary friends I imagine for much the same reason any lonely kid had them: to share in japes and adventures or just to talk to them and have them respond in a chummy way. I can’t imagine having imaginary friends that you fell out with or had fights with. Imagine having imaginary friends that you didn’t get on with. That really would be perverse and quite worrying in a five-year-old. Did Solly feel abandoned? Was there malignancy involved here?

I clicked ‘accept’ and waited nervously for the next move.

“Hi young Davie, you still a prick?”

‘Young Davie’ stared at these words for some time, a burning in my chest part anger and the beginnings of shame. How to answer? Or, not to answer at all. Too intriguing to resist, surely, this glimpse into my long-ago past.

My ego didn’t know where to go. My imaginary friend thought of me as a prick. If indeed it was my imaginary friend but no-one outside of my own mother had ever known about Solly and Bobo. Unless….! The thought was unthinkable. Surely it couldn’t be my mother somehow gone made and intent on some dreadful psychological vengeance a la Gaslight? Had my mother gone a bit nuts and somehow acquired computer and internet skill which had heretofore bewildered her. The woman who’d once asked me who Facebook looked like. It couldn’t be possible. But, then, if not her then….who?

I’d been a paranoid man alright, but surely the height of paranoia was that your own mother was out to get you. What was the saying? Everyone’s out to get me except my mother. But even she may be jiving me…!

And had he been a prick? If he remembered likely a prick was not the best thing to be in 1960s Glasgow. It existed down there in a very uncomfortable place next to diddy and tube.

Now that I’m thinking about it, Solly was always the more street-wise of my imaginary friends. I’d ask Solly for advice and maybe seek solace from Solly if that’s not too homophonic for you.

Bobo always seemed younger somehow, like a small bear.

“I must be going insane”

I went out for a walk to try to figure out my response to this outlandish phenomenon. “Hi young Davie, you still a prick?” For one thing I was no longer young, but was I still a prick? This question, I’m afraid, decided my course of action.

Only those that inhabited the world of imaginary friends knew of its existence. Its boundaries were endless: an infinite ether containing a simulacrum of beings: shadows, ghosts, fleeting, virtual beings. Insubstantial but as real as their present and former owners needed them to be. Figments of many billion imaginations going back to the dawn of conscious human thought itself.

Cro-Magnons imagined primitive facsimiles of themselves if only not to feel so alone in their wild, feral world. Plato discussed his Forms with an imaginary friend he named Celebrium, a situation he considered ideal as there was no chance to express his regard in any physical sense. In fact, Nelson’s final words were to his imaginary friend ‘Hardy’, and Oscar Wilde had an entire salon of imaginary friends on whom he practiced his epithets and epigrams. Russell Brand had an Albert Hall of adoring imaginary fans that he performed to when he was on the toilet. Human beings could have as many imaginary friends as it liked. One of them only had two and they had been neglected for a very long time.

‘Here lies Davie and his Imaginary Friends’

Abraham Lincoln had an imaginary friend named Sparky.

Imaginary friends were rarely around when one had a bad toothache.

Wee Davie, then only two years old, had first become friends with Solly and Bobo during the great winds of January 1963. These had been one hundred mile per hour winds which had blown slates off of tenement rooves and ravished trees all across Scotland. Wee Davie in his frightened night-time state had summoned allies in the shape of the wise Solly and his kind little friend, Bobo. He whispered to them in the dark and they soothed and comforted him through the gale-strewn night. After that, all three were firm friends and played together in ‘the plantation’ behind the flats and jumped burns and climbed trees and did all the things a wee boy and his imaginary friends were inclined to do.

They were all he needed pretty much until the arrival of his wee brother, Alan, some three years later. After this event, he pretty much ignored them despite their implorations and eventually they faded from his young consciousness completely. Now, at least one of them had returned in the form of a message from this strange social network site. Like a voice from the grave of someone that had never existed and so, had never died.

“Thanks for the add wee man. Bobo’s no’ talkin’ to ye!”

I was more than a little startled by this response, not to say strangely hurt. I answered in what I thought a belligerent tone.

“How come you exist? I mean, where do you exist?”

There was a pause of some minutes before the reply appeared in the little message box.

“Well, you invented us, pal. Me and Bobo. In your own imagination”

“I know, but, where do you exist….now?”

“The infinite ether of abandoned friends. Or, should I say abandoned imaginary friends”

“Infinite ether? Like some sort of heaven?”

“More a waiting room. Though those of us whose creators have passed on are on the higher level waiting to join their ghosts. Sometimes that can take centuries of your earth years”

Was someone playing some elaborate gag here? I have a friend who has an imagination for the bizarre often sending me information about talking toilets and sexually promiscuous ducks, but even he would have no way of knowing about Solly and Bobo. I’d be far too embarrassed to tell him anything about that.

“Is that you Mum?”

“Whit?”

“My Mum is the only person alive who would remember Solly and Bobo. Is someone helping you with the computer stuff?”

“You’ve obviously lost the plot in our absence wee man”

Or it could be she’d, for some reason, told my brother that I had imaginary friends and this was him playing a trick on me. But, would he have gone to the trouble of setting up a whole website just to mess with my head. I’d have to play along and pick up clues.

This made me wonder just then if my brother ever had imaginary friends.

I ring him up.

“Hi bruv, how you doing?”

“O hi, just takin’ it easy you know, nothing much. You?”

“O this and that. I was just wondering, weird question I know. Did you ever have any imaginary friends, you know, when you were a kid and that?”

“Ha ha, what made you think of that?”

“Nothing really, just struck me maybe it was unusual cos I remember that I did and I was thinking about it”

“Erm, maybe I did, yeh I kinda think I might have”

At this point I should point out that my brother can be quite defensive, I think especially with me. It’s a big brother/wee brother thing and he being the youngest is always wary I’m trying to put him on the back foot. Very little does he know that I never am and that I’m as careful of not doing this as he is fearful that I am. Our conversations can sometimes feel as if I am unwillingly interrogating him in a cell somewhere in the Eastern Bloc of the 1950s. But I need to know if he’s behind this.

“Unt ze eternal ether. Vot do you know ov zees, schweinhunt?”

Obviously, I never asked this last question. I just left him somewhat puzzled and discombobulated and probably remarking to his wife “that was that mad brother of mine on about imaginary friends. What do you think he’s trying to say?”

Long summer days alone with Solly and Bobo. A lonely, bullied child who preferred the company of entities who were kind to him in his mind, smiled at him and laughed at all his wee jokes. The seeming vastness of the countryside around the New Town called East Kilbride in South Lanarkshire. 

Trees, fields and country lanes. The Calder Water for a quick jump and a splash. The quest was always ‘the auld hoose’ but no-one I knew ever reached there. Myths had grown among the kids of East Kilbride that it was a house haunted by an old man, some said it was an old couple and many a summer sojourn was made in search of it. I had been part of only one of these but found the experience so humiliating that Solly and Bobo would be my only companions on future ventures. The sun never appeared to hide behind a single cloud on these occasions and every day was new-mown and bright as a shiny coin. Thrush and Golden crest chirruped in the trees and the sound of traffic receded the further progress was made into the green fields.

I was never lonely when I was with Solly and Bobo, so implicitly did I believe in their existence and revel in their unconditional company.

I was obsessed with jumping burns and was encouraged in this endeavour by my wee friends.

“Go on Davie, there’s a bit you could jump easy. Mind you don’t twist your ankle, but”

“Away ye go wee man. You could jump that yin fae a standing start”

For some reason Solly was the more Glaswegian of the two. Maybe he was the wee toughie I wanted to be. Solly would never get dragged around playgrounds and have his trousers pulled down the way I did. Bobo, the more sympathetic, was more a secondary version of me. A version of me that was safe and divorced from the bullying.

“How come Bobo’s not talking to me?” The unreality of that sentence boggled my mind and I had to stand up from my computer seat and do my wee breathing exercise to calm down. I was in danger of using this as an excuse to drink.

The wee dots in the message box indicated that an answer was being formulated. The suspense was making me fidget so anxious was I over what the answer might be. What had I done to offend an imaginary ally of fifty years ago?

“Ye’d hiv tae ask him. He still goes oan aboot twig boats under bridges.”

Rouken Glen in the autumn months. Russet and gold. Rhododendrons and cool streams. Secret nooks and leafy hollows. A leafy park in the leafy lanes of suburban Glasgow.

Sometimes one imaginary friend would be more prominent than the other. The wee bridge over the burn that raced toward the waterfall was the place for twig racing with Bobo. Solly would have maybe found this pursuit a wee bit beneath him. Now that I think of it, he was somehow the older of the three of us: when we were five or six, he was maybe seven or eight, a big difference among wee boys. He’d maybe be off climbing a big tree while Bobo and I raced our twigs.

Oft-times I’d play this game with my father but in the summer holidays when he’d be working in the factory it would be me and Bobo, the twigs and the burn. Rose-twigs I favoured from dying blooms in the rose garden (I loved the smell of the roses, they reminded me of my Grandad, he smelled of roses and apples). You dropped the twigs from the wee bridge over the burn then rushed to the other side to see them hopefully appear then speed along toward the fall. I’d often hope that Bobo’s twig won just to see the joy on his wee face.

Was Solly ashamed of me?

“Are you still a prick?”

Imagine having a hostile imaginary friend. Like finding Jesus and discovering that he doesn’t like you very much.

What kind of damaged persona could imagine a friend that thought him a prick? Just like his peers did.

“You didn’t rate me much then, Solly?”

“Ach, ye were an embarrassment”

“Hard to imagine what you both look like after so many years”

“It’s your imagination, wee man”

“I’m no’ exactly wee any more, Solly, I’m six foot four”

“………………………………………………………………………..”

The silence is eerie. For some reason my old imaginary friend didn’t like that last statement. I feel intimidated.

I don’t even like my name: Wylie. The way it was abused and contorted has left me with a sort of loathing for it: I hate saying it and I hate hearing it. For so long it was used as a term of abuse.

“Wylie! Ye sure it’s no’ Willie, ya dick?”

Funny thing, my Da’s brother was William – Willie Wylie. No wonder he cried himself Billy!

When you’re a bullied child you can turn against everything about yourself.

Your name.

Your parents.

Yourself.

That’s why you have imaginary friends. To create a world outside of all that: a world where you are accepted and liked. You don’t expect them to turn against you too.

It was important I got to talk to Bobo.

He was all dressed up as Charlie Chaplin, the wee man, all expectant and excited that his big brother was going to take him out for Halloween. His wee moustache of charcoal (the charcoal biscuits my Da ate for his stomach?) and his wee mad hat and a wee stick for a cane. But his big brother was forgetful or neglectful, I can’t remember which; either was possible. By the time I’d come in from being out playing it was too late for a wee four-year old to be going out and I was skelped by my Da and berated by my mother. The wee man stood up for me “It’s alright David, don’t worry”. He was anxious for my parent’s castigation to stop and for me to be forgiven. I remember his kind, forgiving, concerned wee face to this day.

Bobo was communicating like he had a gun to his head. In fact, I wasn’t at all sure it was Bobo I was speaking to but Solly pretending to be him.

“Good to talk to you again, Bobo. How have you been?”

I tried to keep it upbeat and positive, mindful that Bobo had a grievance.

“Fat lot you care, wee Davie. Haven’t heard from you for so long”

“Aye well, you know, you were imaginary friends. Loads of kids have them. I didn’t realise you were real”

“Aye well, you know now eh?”

So now I go about my daily affairs accompanied by what I imagine is Bobo but may be Solly. I try not to think too much about if it is actually Solly for fear of having to think therefore, about what has become of poor Bobo. So I say “fancy a walk on the beach Bobo? I’ll give you some bread to feed the gulls” And he says “sure thing, wee Davie. And kin we see aboot gaun to the Auld haunted hoose, finally?”

I don’t tell him that I live elsewhere now and that Auldhouse is in fact just a wee village quite near East Kilbride.

You have to keep some mystery in life.