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The Imaginary Brother

Tim Newton Anderson

    It was a few weeks after my mother’s funeral when I got a phone call from my brother. Which was a shock because he didn’t exist.
    I don’t mean he didn’t exist to me because of a row. My mother had made him up.
    When I was a naughty as a young child she would say: “If you don’t stop that, I’ll get that Jerry.” Not a kind technique, but she had a lot of stress to deal with. My Dad was in hospital with tuberculosis and she had to juggle looking after me, visits to him, and the job she needed to pay the bills.
    I wasn’t a bad child, but I was certainly a handful. I was rarely still or quiet. To get some peace, out would come Jerry. Until the day I wanted to carry on doing something and said: “I’m going to be naughty so you’d better get that Jerry.”
    After my dad died I wasn’t as naughty, or if I was I would do it quietly and out of sight.
    I hadn’t thought about Jerry for years until he phoned and said: “Hello Jim, this is your brother Jerry. How are you doing?”
    He had just been an amusing story to tell friends. This was not amusing. I was shocked and angry. I was still grieving, and someone winding me up wasn’t funny.
    “Who is this, really?” I said.
    “You know who this is,” he said. “You were very naughty not to invite me to our mother’s funeral.”
    “This is not funny,” I said. “Have some respect.”
    “You are the one who needs to show respect,” he said. “I am the oldest, and I want what I’m entitled to.”
    I didn’t want to talk any more and hung up. The number on the phone had been withheld but I had no intention of ever calling him back.
    The “with sympathy” card arrived the next day. There was no message, just “Jerry”. It was postmarked South Shields, where I had lived before I got married and moved to East Anglia. At first I thought it was just another well wisher - Jerry is a common name and my mother had lots of friends I had never met. Then I joined the dots and felt the anger again. And a chill.
    The irony was that I would have loved to have had a brother. As I said, I became quiet after my dad died and we moved into my Grandmother’s house. The house was never empty - there were lots of aunts and uncles and cousins in and out all the time - but I had to stay out of the way as my Grandmother sorted out the latest dramas. My cousins were all younger than me and felt it was as much their house as mine. Something they had a right to, as much as my toys and clothes that were given to them. When they left for their own houses I was on my own. I had moved houses and schools six times and my few friends had long histories with each other that I didn’t share. I felt like a lodger in my own life and my mother was too caught up in her own troubles to support me.
    So when I had the contact from my imaginary brother, part of me wished it was true.
    I had family on my father’s side and spent a lot of time with them when he was ill. But after he died they faded into the background as if only my father had that connection. When I got married and moved away the same happened with my mother’s family. Visiting was like watching a soap opera you haven’t seen for years. They probably felt the same way about me, a vaguely friendly ghost from the past manifesting in a house it no longer belonged in.
    I obsessed about the contact for a few days but then wrote it off as the action of some crank. I couldn’t think of anyone close enough to know about Jerry who would want to upset me. The dozens of sympathy cards from relatives and my mother’s friends were from people I only knew as names from brief visits and phone conversations.
    “Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier” my wife Jane asked. “We’re a team, and you don’t have to carry all the problems yourself.”
    She was right, but we all have the voice of our young selves in our heads telling us to stay safe, even when we are in the safest place we can be, with a wife and child who love us unconditionally.
    “If he gets in touch again, you have to talk to the Police,” she said. “This is harassment. I know it’s hard enough dealing with your real relations, never mind an imaginary one.”
    I remembered the discussions around the funeral. Cousins who felt they had a greater claim on my mother and her house than I did. I didn’t want anything from her home, apart from the family photographs, but it still hurt they felt they had a right to take what they wanted.
    And that gave me an idea - perhaps there was a clue in those old photographs.
    There were boxes and boxes of them. As her siblings and cousins died off one by one, my mother had hoarded their pictures as a bulwark against the loss of the happy childhood she remembered. Just like the scores of gifts and mementoes that filled every surface.
    The main thing I took from the pictures was the change after my dad died. Before that the photographs were mostly of him, me and my mum. My mother and I were still there in the later pictures, but normally at the back or on one side, with other relatives in the foreground. I realised her life also ended when he passed, and she too had faded into the background of other people’s lives. I didn’t regret moving away to make my own life, but felt sorry that she had not managed to make her own escape.
    I also realised that my imaginary brother could be anyone of dozens of faces I didn’t recognise.
    So when he phoned again a couple of days later, my first question was: “Who are you really?”
    “Do you realise how hurtful it is not to be recognised,” he said. “I’m reaching out and you just want to push me away.”
    My conversations with Jane had made me realise that you have to come to terms with your past in order to live in the present, and this was a spirit I had to exorcise.
    “Then let’s meet up,” I said. “If you want to get to know me, we have to talk face to face.”
    There was a silence on the other end of the phone for a long time before he said: “OK.”
    My stomach was doing somersaults and my body was shivering when I walked towards the beach cafe where I had spent some of my happiest times. My father and I had played on the sands while my mother looked on, and my son and I had done the same. As the sea crept up and down the shore we had moved backwards and forwards in search of wet sand to build a sandcastle, or a dry spot to soak in the sun while we ate our ice creams.
    Then I saw him, and recognised him instantly. He was me. Older looking, tireder, hair receding, stomach distended. In clothes that had obviously been bought in a charity shop. The me I would have been if I had not gone to university, married, and moved away. Worn down like my mother was at the end.
    “You owe me a life,” he said. “You left me alone in that house.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. This was not happening. It was some kind of grief induced hallucination. “You don’t exist. You never existed.”
    He stepped closer and closer until he was only three feet away. One more step and he could grab me.
    “I’m your doppelganger,” he said. “The being that absorbed all of our mother’s grief and pain but was forced to behave as if everything was all right. I was the child she wanted to have, and look what that expectation has done to me.”
    “This is a sick joke,” I said. “Who put you up to this?”
    I wished I had brought Jane with me - she would tell me how ridiculous this all was.
    “My life is a sick joke,” he said. His arms were slightly raised from his sides and his thin fingers twitched as he spoke, as if trying to grasp something only he could see.
    “You used to be afraid of me, but you grew up,” he said. “I was the one she turned to when our father died, the one who understood her pain and comforted her. You were doing your own thing. And then you left and she was all alone with only sad memories. And I had grown to feed on those memories. The house was empty but I filled it up. I ate the sorrow and grew strong on it. I hid when you made your once in a blue moon visits. That was painful. It was my house. My mother. And you were making her give me up again. I was always resentful, but now I hated you.”
    If he was real, he was a lunatic. If he was some spirit my mother had conjured up, he was even more dangerous. I knew what he wanted. My life.
    But I realised that madman or not, what he said was true. I had thought I was moving towards a new life, but part of me was running away. My mum was trapped and I didn’t want to be trapped with her.
    So I stepped towards my imaginary brother and embraced him.
    As we touched I felt his palpable rage and sorrow run through his body and into mine. I suddenly knew all of the things I had pushed away. I could have been him if I had stayed and he was the path I had not taken.
    I felt my body ache and age as he and I merged. The years of pain and frustration hit me like a hammer to my brain and frame, and sorrow flamed through my mind and veins. I could hardly bear to stand up and collapsed to my knees on the sand. As I bent my head forward I saw water drops falling and realised I was crying.
    Then I felt a fire in my stomach. I remembered my wife and child and the love we shared, and realised this pain was not mine. He was a product of my mother’s self isolation. We had tried to get her to come and live with us a dozen times or more, but she preferred to stay in the home she had grown up in. She chose the past over the present, whereas I had chosen the future. And I could forgive that, even if I didn’t understand it.
    And as I thought about love and forgiveness, the weight of my imaginary brother lifted, and I could feel his anger and pain leave me like a weight lifting from my shoulders. My mother had made choices and so had I, and we were responsible for our own and not the other’s. Perhaps my imaginary brother was the last of her desperation to hold onto the time when my father was still alive and she was happy. But I was happy now, and I couldn’t accept that pain.
    I walked away from the beach, and back into my own story.

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