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“The lonely are the prettiest of all, they burn from the inside.” (Thea Gilmore - ‘The List’)

Imaginary Friends

A Novel by Rol Hirst

Part One

One

Ticker came back the day the goose attacked.

Ben was crossing the yard from the hen hut when he slipped, the eggs spilling from his hands and bursting around him as he fell. At last, the goose saw its moment, rising and pterodactyling with a skwaaark like a slipping fanbelt. When it lunged for his face, Ben remembered.

Twenty years ago, fetching eggs from that very same hut, little Ben’s wellies had slipped from under him then as well. And another brutal goose – two or three bird-generations past – went straight for his throat. He’d parried as best he could, but the goose wasn’t picky – an arm was as good as a neck. Letting out a horror film screech, it drove his left wrist back into the mud with a surprising sharpness. As it rose again in triumph, Ben stared at its lipsticked bill, its white neck bib-splattered with blood.

“Geese are vegetarians,” he remembered his mum telling him. “Throw out a ham sandwich and the hens’ll eat it all – but the geese’ll pick out the meat and just eat the bread.”

Maybe that was why the bird backed off, he thought – it hadn’t wanted to eat him, just show him who was boss. Like with the drakes and the cockerels, it was simply reinforcing the pecking order.

Sitting up, he felt the spin of his head, a muffle like fingers stuffed in his ears, and his wet wrist throbbing. Then the yard fell dark and shivery, though the faraway sky seemed much, much brighter.

“Ticker…” he called, not sure what was happening - but sure it was bad, “quick, Ticker, get Dad.”

Only Ticker wasn’t there. Ticker was nowhere. And right then Ben realised, Ticker couldn’t help him now… it was true, what his parents kept telling him… Ticker was just an imaginary friend.

This had been his last thought before fainting.

Twenty years later and here he was again. Lying in the mud and the piped-icing birdshit, the yellows of broken eggs sprouting like zits all about him, a vicious white goose bearing down… and nobody to help him up.

Oh, let it have you, he thought, dropping his hands from the defensive. Maybe a good disfigurement’s just what you need. A talking point, an icebreaker - something interesting! The pity vote always worked for Quasimodo…

As the bird hissed forward, Ben pictured a beautiful young casualty nurse leaning close to stitch his bill-scarred face. And her blushing confession: “I’ve always been fascinated with The Hunchback of Notre Dame – both the original French text and Charles Laughton…”

Then, taking his hand in hers, warm and soft, she’d lean gently in to kiss his forehead… and there, the fantasy collapsed. As they always did.

What could someone like her possibly see in someone like him – beaked-face fetish or not? Even if she did get off on deformity, how long before some shirtless, Diet Pepsi window cleaner tripped head-over-heels through plate glass to steal her away? How long before some bearded, Harley-riding stud swept her off her pumps with a face dragged miles over tarmac? There was always going to be someone better than Ben, whatever your selection criteria.

Not to mention, he conceded, that Victor Hugo in the original French text… that put her waaay out of his league. Yes, he wanted a nice, quiet girl who liked books and tucked her feet beneath her on the sofa when she read, but if she required his opinion on Camus or Sartre… he couldn’t even have bluffed it.

Then there was the Hippocratic Oath… did that apply to nurses too? What if she lost her job to be with him? Oh, she’d say it was worth it, she’d say he was more important, but deep down she’d resent him for it always. She’d probably end up leaving him for a heart surgeon, or some deft gynaecologist. No, this hypothetical relationship, as all others… it was a non-starter.

This unprecedented surrender though, had the goose puzzled. It hesitated before him, its bill so close Ben could smell hot corn-breath from its nostrils. Peering myopically as it sniffed the air between them, the big white bird waited on the bell for round two… but thunking his head back on the rippled concrete where the yard met the path, Ben was through.

Twenty years earlier, Dad wrung that old gander’s neck before Ben was even home from the hospital.

“If the bugger’d found itself a taste for blood…”

Ben cried himself to sleep that night, and not from the pain of his stitches. He couldn’t stop thinking about the dulling white heap left to gather flies on the muck midden, its eyes flushed with milk and confusion. The next day he begged his father, but Alan Bramall said no, he wouldn’t have another goose on that farm, not ‘til his son was big enough to take care of himself. When Ben wouldn’t stop crying, Dad helped him dig a grave for the old fowl in the corner of the first field, then showed him how to chisel a crude epitaph on the dry stone wall. Two nights later, when foxes exhumed the body and scattered dirty feathers all across the field, the tears started all over again.

Squarrrrk!

“Oh, just get on with it!”

And so at last, satisfied its victim wasn’t just playing possum, the goose resumed the attack. Closing his eyes, Ben prepared for peck-holes…

That’s when he heard Ticker.

“What the bloody hell are you doing?”

Ben sat up immediately, surprising the goose into a flapping, honking two-step. He grabbed at its downy throat and flung it away. Across the yard, under the shabby beard of ivy growing from the back kitchen wall, Ticker was grinning.

Ben couldn’t speak. The shit squelched beneath him as a fist closed in his chest. He hadn’t seen Ticker in twenty years. He definitely shouldn’t be seeing Ticker now.

“Talk about timing,” Ticker said.

Something else from twenty years gone, that old song… his mum stroking his forehead, singing him to sleep… Timing. A-ticker-ticker-ticker-ticker—tiiiiming…

It’s just your imagination, he told himself. You were thinking about Ticker and then you hit your head and…

The goose veered in for one more try and Ben slapped it away, backhand. His palms squidged in the mud as he pushed himself up.

You hit your head when you fell and you…

He looked around. There was nobody there. Ticker was gone.

He breathed relief. Of course Ticker was gone. Ticker hadn’t ever been there in the first place.

Realising its time had passed, the goose redirected the offensive onto a split-beaked cockerel coming round the side of the barn. The cock ran, the goose hissed after it, and Ben was left alone in the yard.

Breathing slowly, hoping that’d brake the pounding in his chest, he stepped over the broken eggs, past the duckhut and the old, grass-sprouting tractor corpse. Pulling birdshit-gummed moleskin from the back of his legs, he headed for the kitchen.

It couldn’t have been Ticker. He hadn’t seen Ticker in twenty years. No… no, he hadn’t seen Ticker… ever. Because Ticker… Ticker - didn’t - exist.

He paused, his stomach squeezing. The windchimes on the back porch were clattering. Down in the valley, fog erased the town, but here on the hill, the sun was bright, drying the dew from the nettles and waking the yard. There was no wind.

The kitchen door stood open. He could have sworn he’d closed it when he came out to feed. He heard a milk lorry wheezing up the road in the distance and somewhere a magpie was laughing. He didn’t want to go inside.

No, that was stupid. He had to go in and change these dirty clothes. He didn’t have time to lose his mind, not this morning… he’d be late for work

He noticed that the kitchen light was on. (Hadn’t he switched it off?) Then he saw the shadow moving from inside, leading its owner to the door.

“You coming in, or what?” That voice, it was unmistakable now.

And there he was, filling the frame, flicking that endlessly colourful scarf theatrically back over his shoulders… exactly the way Ben remembered.

Ticker.

His imaginary friend.

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