Terry

Terry is dead. I knew it positively on the instant. I am free!

It is quite common for a solitary child to have an imaginary friend and Terry was mine. Mum and Dad had two girls and then a son in fairly short order and then an eight year gap to me. And of course, one is always the baby of the family.

That Terry was different from the rest of the famil;y was something that I just took for granted seeing nothing strange in the fact that no-one else could see or hear him. He certainly looked solid enough although my punches met with nothing—as did his. Even friends fall out sometimes and there were times when we were anything but friends. Quite early on, we decided that we must be twins. Side by side at the mirror, we looked rather similar and were dressed exactly alike. And, since mothers tend to dress their twins alike, childish logic said that we definitely had to be twins.

My parents and older siblings pretended to accept the reality of Terry and I didn’t realise then that they were simply playing a game along with me. Terry became a handy scapegoat.

“And I suppose Terry did it,” or “That—naughty—Terry!” the family would say.with a suitably disapproving look. I didn’t have to even offer the excuse. Just say,”YES.” But what was cute when I was very young became less so as I grew older and Terry sensed this before I did. Even then he was the smarter of the two of us. He would feed me with suggestions for mischief and idiot me took them up even though I seemed to be quite capable of getting into trouble without help. To say afterwards that, “Terry told me to,” more often now brought anger with Terry gloating in the background. I realised only belatedly that Terry didn’t exist for them. In later years the family would say, “Do you remember when you had a little friend called Terry?” and I would laugh along with them at my infant foolishness.

At school Terry was a mixed blessing. Perhaps overall he was no blessing at all. When the teacher asked a question Terry could nearly always supply me with the answer and up would go my hand. In later years, in tests, if he didn’t know the answer himself he could go around and look at everyone else’s answers and if there was an answer sheet on the teacher’s desk he could read the upper face of it. I did well but I was a cheat.

Being a star pupil did not make me popular with my fellow pupils and there was a more important factor that separated me from them. It was Terry’s jealousy and anger. Up until starting school we had always been one on one. There had been no-one else of our age at home. Now I was in a position to make additional friends, something that he could not do himself. Any other friendship was a dilution of our rocky relationship. The least sign of attachment to any of my peers and I would get the reproachful, silent treatment. Lacking physical weapons, he was a master at emotional blackmail. I am afraid that I always gave in. At school, then high school, at university, and throughout my professional career, I gave in.

It was as star pupil that I was chosen to represent our high school in a radio quiz show called High School Challenge. I won of course, the heat, and the Grand Final. I could not help but win when I had someone looking over the Quiz-Master’s shoulder. But Terry being Terry was not going to let me have it too easy. He would hold off giving me an answer until the very last second of my allotted time. Several times, he gave me no answer or fed me the wrong answer. The Marquis de Sade had nothing on Terry. At the end of it I said, “Never again!”

And of course, I did it again. I liked being thought a brain-box. The first High School Challenge had been only a city-wide affair with a single representitive from each school. The new quiz was national with teams. Naturally, I was pressured to be part of our school’s team. Even Terry was insisting that I, or that is that we, enter. We were going to clean up. Which just goes to show that even Terry could get things wrong at times. The individual teams were widely dispersed in their own local radio stations meaning that we could not see each other. The Quiz Master was somewhere else again. This time, there could be no looking over his shoulder. And this time, Terry was sweating too. We didn’t win in spite of our extra member but then we didn’t do too badly either.

Terry’s sulks, his hostility, are I suppose, understandable. One can imagine the frustration he must have felt in having only the one interface with the world and one that he didn’t think much of anyway. He could see a world around him but it had no substance for him as he had no substance for the world: a world that he was powerless to affect except indirectly through me. He had to rely on me even for the simple function of changing the television channel. His ability to go anywhere unhindered and to pass through any barrier, see anything he wanted to see, was no compensation at all. What happened when we reached puberty is a good example of this. It is a little hard to imagine how an imaginary friend could become driven by hormones unless they were somehow a projection of my own hormones. Never-the-less we both developed the usual sudden interest in the opposite sex and Terry could follow a girl home and right into the shower. Possibly every young lad’s dream but for Terry it was just a further frustration. So close and he could see but not touch. To him girls were tantalising apparitions with no corporeal substance. He could not even get wet.

And was Terry, as I have said, just an imaginary friend? Clearly not. And hardly friend. But just what was he? Insubstantial as he was, he was not a regular ghost. As he pointed out himself, I could see his reflection in mirrors. Nor was he a product of my imagination. He claimed to have his own reality when out of my presence and thoughts and I have every reason to believe him. He could tell me things that I could not know under ordinary circumstances unless I was a psychic or a mind reader and I am neither. He could describe the showering girls in graphic detail to make me a voyeur at second-hand and that he spoke the truth was proved by those appendix scars that could be confirmed by discreet enquiry.

In my case too, girls, and later women, have had to be tantalising unreachables. With Terry forever at my elbow there could never be privacy: no intimate moments. If I should give as much as a second glance at a woman Terry would begin slagging her. Every time! He would recognise my interest before I recognised it myself. He could not have me less than his total possession. It does not need to be said that I have never married or that I have never even had a girl friend. Now that I am free I suspect that that will continue to be the case. An invisible barrier remains and my now ingrained lack of social skills doesn’t help. Maybe if I’d gone to parties during my university years and got drunk I might have lost some of my inhibitions, ignored Terry for a while, and learned to chat up the girls. But to enjoy anything that Terry could not enjoy was grossly unfair to him. He was my omnipresent incubus.

I read law at university. Or to be more accurate, we read law. As I have said, Terry was the clever one. I turned the pages and wrote papers at his dictation. Admittedly, I did pick up quite a bit in the progress myself. Anyway, I was capped and eventually admitted to the bar. I have often wondered since whether I would have got there under my own steam.

It is as a barrister that I have made my name. Who could ever imagine that I have simply been Terry’s ventriloquist dummy? No-one could be more incisive than Terry in dissecting a specious argument and high-lighting its inherent foolishness. He could be merciless. Even though I tempered the received version to bring it more into line with court etiquette it still had a tendency to be overly cutting. And he could sit, as it were, at the opposing counsel’s table taking in every whispered aside, learn the line they were going to take, and shout counter arguments to me across the court.

A problem was that he was at the same time making almost continuous comments on everyone and everything going on around him. Cruel disparaging comments but, unfortunately, at the same time hilarious and I, as the only audience for his stand-up comedy, have frequently had difficulty in keeping a straight face. As always it has been a deliberate attempt to unsettle me: to demonstrate his contempt for me. We have needed each other but been imprisoned by the relationship.

Opposing cousel hated my guts, there was no love lost there, but solicitors fought to retain me for their clients so that financially I have done well. Yet, even there, I was without respect. I have been a pariah to the legal profession and considered a queer fish. I no longer care. I have recently retired for health reasons. Terry would have had me go on, it has always been more a matter of feuding than of justice to him. He has enjoyed scripting the verbal clashes and the winning has been everything, but several heart-attacks negated his wishes. There has, of course, been no testimonial dinner.

But to get back to the events leading up to Terry’s death. Dad died a long while back, lost at sea, and, up until about twelve months ago, Mum lived by herself in the family home. She was well into her eighties and apparently managing satifactorily when she was overcome by dementia. It is really heart-breaking to see someone you love in this condition. We, that is the family, put her in a home that specializes in the care of the elderly who have this problem. By then she didn’t know us and the others, my sisters and brother, soon gave up visiting her seeing it as rather pointless since our presence could give her no pleasure. That was true enough but I still kept going there at least once a week. It seemed my duty. Admittedly, I live closer than the others. I would sit there holding her hands and, even though I seemed to make no contact, I would talk to her. It is not easy to keep talking when one meets a blank stare and no response.

What I’m getting to is my last visit. Mum that day was just so different. She was suddenly lucid, almost her old self. But the strange thing is that she insisted on talking to Terry and not to me. I am quite sure that she had never seen or heard Terry before. Now she not only saw and heard him but knew exactly who he was. I was the one that she didn’t know.

“And who is your friend here Terry?”

“It’s Gary Mum,” but the name meant nothing to her and her glance said clearly that she didn’t like the look of me. We had both always referred to her as ‘Mum’ but now I felt that he was laying some sort of exclusive claim to her and it annoyed me intensely. But I was seeing a softer side of Terry that I had not even suspected.

My attempts to join the conversation were firmly snubbed by Mum. At one stage she seemed to take a turn and I rushed off to get help and yet, when I returned with a nurse, she had apparently recovered. I suspect now that it was a ploy to get me out of the way so that she could tell Terry something. She died that same night.

The rest of the family insisted that she should be cremated: that that had been her expressed wish. But, “Not so!” Terry told me. “It’s not what she wanted at all.” And he seemed to be pretty certain of that. It was not what I wanted either. Our Mum deserved the best plot available and a decent memorial and I was prepared to pay for them myself if the others were too mean to front up. But Terry and I were only one vote against three.

There was a good turn-out for the service at the crematorium and not just by relatives. Mum was remembered and thought well of by many. But why not a church funeral? Mum had been a regular and deserved better than this. If I was feeling down, Terry appeared to be more so. Haggard would be the best way to describe him. He seemed to have fallen in on himself. The way Uncle Harry looked in the last few days before the cancer took him.

The service over, a button was pushed, and Mum’s coffin on a conveyor passed slowly through the curtains and out of our sight.

“I have to go with Mum,” Terry said and with no further explanation floated forward and passed through the curtain. It was perhaps half an hour later that I knew that he was dead and that I was free. But am I free? I know nothing but my cage.

And that half hour! I understand that the first thing they do is take the metal handles off the coffin. That could take maybe half an hour. Which leaves me wondering. Could it be that we were right all those years ago in thinking that we were twins? Was Mum Terry’s mum too? Did we divide off from the same egg? And did I develop and come to term while Terry’s embryo stalled for some reason to become calcified or whatever happens in such cases? Was our mother carrying a stone- child to the furnace?