I had a red octopus on a length of elastic and a series of imaginary cats as my childhood friends.
The above is stated without bitterness, and nor do I accept this is the lot of an only child.
No, there was a choice to be made at the age of seven or eight, and I went with the elastic-powered octopus and not my peers.
The octopus had a name, Ochie, which I could pronounce but have never attempted to spell until today. Between us, we were the rulers of all the seas. When the sea was very rough, Ochie could make the motions of being tossed in a storm by jerking at his elastic.
The earthly seas became dull - we had all that was in them, and nobody could take it away. Yet we were greedy for more, this amulet and I. There were vast bodies of water in space, until I turned 11 or 12 and they dried up.
We swam them all, and never feared anything we encountered, not even aquatic dinosaurs. I don't even know how we got up there, because I was just a slender child in glasses with an eye-patch, but we'd make it a nightly ritual.
I loved to spend time with my octopus. It stopped the Turin Shroud falling in front of my face like the curtain marking the end of an act, stinking of death and piety.
It floated into my vision often, the shroud, the sacred relic of a godhead I could not be sure was not a hoax. Even the word - shroud - sounded ancient and final and frightening.
If such darkness caused a child to jump out of his skin and throw up because of the great, sapping sobs whose rhythm shifted my torso to its music, then why would I not choose Ochie, and the water, and the dinosaurs that fled, awe-struck, when we made an appearance? Swim away, you fucking cowards!
I'd go cold with fear when I even thought the word 'fucking.' God's watching you, boy, and he don't miss owt. God's watching you, and he'll turn your lungs to mush like in the anti-smoking advert. His celestial bullet with your name on it will cabbage you for that, like Kennedy, and they'll be spooning up your brains from the pavement.
Ochie, no surprise I turned to you. I think you still live in the wardrobe at my mother's, and the passing of time won't have aged you a day. You are the key to the sadness which I totter beneath even today, the other self which I fed the badness I splintered off.
Perhaps we ought to sleep together again one night soon, and see if I do better than normal with your elastic tied around my finger.
