There were many times I told him to drop dead. He said worse to me. He was, indeed, my worst enemy. Everything I said, he would argue the opposite. What’s more, he would often insist that something had to be true simply because he believed it. Cavemen were obviously stupid, he once told me, because if he’d been around back then he would have harnessed up the dinosaurs and put them to work.
‘Not all of them, mind. Not the puny, wimpy, weedy ones like you. Just the useful ones.’
Another time he tried to convince me that birds could sleep mid-flight, and would keep on drifting through the slipstreams high above, like tiny satellites on autopilot orbit, until they woke hours later in a different continent and miles from home.
But what sticks most in my memory must have occurred when I was about ten or eleven. I was walking past the kitchen when I overheard the tail end of a discussion on the radio, and stopped briefly at the door to listen as a disembodied voice discussed the concept of ‘maya’, that reality is little more than an illusion: the idea that nothing is real, and that everything we see is made of the same malleable fabric as our dreams.
After hearing just that tiny snippet I felt so disorientated that suddenly I could no longer recall where I had been heading before I paused outside the kitchen door. The strange and wonderful idea was soon lodged at the back of my brain, like a tick that proves impossible to prise off.
When I had tried to explain it to Luke, though, his only response was to laugh and say, with a huge grin on his face, ‘Perhaps you’re just a stupid figment.’
I tried to start again, saying that this was not the point – but seeing that he had succeeded in annoying me a little, he broke in before I had a chance to finish, saying ‘Be quiet! You stupid figment!’
For the rest of the afternoon he followed me around, insisting I was just an illusion again and again at regular intervals until eventually I snapped and chased him round the garden, shouting that I would show him just how real I really was.
Many times Luke said that he was the only person in the world who was real, and challenged the rest of us to prove him wrong. It should go without saying that he would never accept any of our proofs – he simply could not bear the idea that he was not the centre of the universe. His goal, it seemed, was to be the largest planet in people’s memories and imaginations. To my infinite annoyance, he often succeeded.
How do we know what is real and what is just a figment of our imagination? The question no longer seems important. To me what matters now is only what I can remember and preserve of my brother. This is one of the reasons that I write: to keep him close, to stay connected to him and keep that connection alive. He is real on the page, and I am real because I’m there with him.
Beautiful work!