My Unimaginary Friend by George Oliver

My friends had always been transparently envious of Molly, even if they weren’t verbalising this. But it was obvious.

It wasn’t like she walked off the page and suddenly interrupted everyone’s lives. Molly Bloom’s real-world genesis was a slow process, conducted in a far corner of the earth that was only accessible to most of us via the media. No-one was quite sure of how or why she started existing and what to do with the fact. News headlines and word of mouth informed my book club of her existence in the real world long before she appeared on our doorstep, a tattered copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses under her arm as a tool in her desperate appeal to the only people who might understand her. By bringing the novel that she’s a fictional character in, Molly thought these people might accept her.

Everyone else she came into contact with for the unknown months and years she was out of the picture either reported her to the police, laughed in her face, or pretended she and the social interaction they just had didn’t exist. Or worse: they didn’t even realise who she was, which was probably the most common interaction. These people went back to living their lives, while Molly returned to the streets, wandering aimlessly, hopeless, alone.

Once she was in the picture, Molly’s warmth and generosity was unparalleled. Perhaps this is why I was so drawn to her and why my friends who travelled from all over the country for the book club so swiftly turned on both of us. Try as I might, my friends had never received the same level of attention and interest, despite their attempts to impress me with their book tastes and photos of their room-filling paperback collections, which I always appreciated. Some even claimed that their favourite book, like mine, was Ulysses, which was an instant friendship clincher until it became such a repetitive opening gambit amongst new members of the club that I stopped believing those who made such a claim.

I remember the day Molly turned up: it was wet and autumnal despite being in the middle of summer. It was our usual fortnightly Wednesday evening slot of 19.00-20.00 at the town hall, just as that week’s session – a discussion of Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? – was drawing to a close. As was typical of our club, we had frantically skipped to the final page of Heti’s book in the final ten minutes of our discussion in the hope that it would provide some form of closure to the conversation.

Molly appeared at the window, drenched and dishevelled, banging against the glass so hard that she nearly gave us all heart attacks. We let her in, put the kettle on, and proceeded to run over our allotted time by eighty minutes while she told us everything. Her story in her own words, ending with a plea for secrecy, for privacy. She wanted a discrete existence that would allow her to be anonymous.

Annie, the town hall’s caretaker, cleaned up around us and we never got round to setting next session’s reading from the shortlisted books nominated and voted on by the group. We were collectively transfixed by this new story and the fact that the rumours were true and the fake news not fake: Molly Bloom existed beyond the page, alive and breathing. And she had chosen us as her refuge.

After everyone but me grew tired of Molly receiving all the attention and begun to feel very differently about her, she did everything she thought might win over the members of the club, despite her limited knowledge of how to socially interact in the twenty-first century, within the context of a book club and in just about every other one.

Over the weeks, she started nominating titles she loved from her era, written by the authors she admired as much as her own Joyce: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Molly’s selections were invariably downvoted and soon specifically addressed, despite the club’s unwritten rule not to pass judgement on both selected and disregarded book nominations. We were a democracy, as I had been reminding the group since the club’s inception nine years ago, no matter how many members came and went in that time.

Sophie (52, Berkshire) addressed the elephant in the room without naming it. It was a warmer Wednesday in September, shortly after I had begun reading out the unsuccessful nominations for that week and before diving into our discussion of the successful one, a continuation of our growing Canadian interest: Rachel Cusk’s Outline.
‘Why do we keep nominating ‘20s books?’

(Everyone knew who Sophie was talking to, even if she didn’t make eye contact with her).
‘Yeah, we covered that period years ago,’ Maddie (46, Gloucestershire) offered.
(I waited before diffusing the situation, as was a self-appointed responsibility of my leadership).

‘Yeah, and we’ve all read Faulkner,’ added David (50, Worcestershire).

Molly then tried the inevitable, hesitantly writing Dubliners in faint pencil on her small slip of A4 lined paper one Wednesday in October. When this was unsuccessful – which was unsurprising, as the group rarely favoured story collections on account of their range and multivalence – Molly scribbled down Ulysses, feeling that she had nothing to lose, thinking that the manoeuvre would be considered a generous opportunity rather than an egotistical self-interest.

‘Well…can’t say I’m surprised,’ began Miles (46, London) as I introduced the selections for next week at the end of that week’s session.

‘Yeah, she’s pulling our leg, right?’ added Marcus (44, London), going as far as giving the person we all knew he was referring to a pronoun.

‘How are we supposed to read seven-hundred pages in a fortnight?’ asked Karen (56, Yorkshire), genuinely incredulous, even though when I first met her she claimed to “love” the novel, telling me it was an “all-time fav”, ever since she “studied it at university.”

I made no secret of the fact that Molly had developed into my best friend over the weeks since that rainy Wednesday in August, so perhaps I had invited the waves of discontent and atmosphere of hostility. I rushed straight over to her after each session, audibly inviting her and no-one else out to drinks, meals at my place, trips to the cinema, more. Sensing that her precarious living arrangement at a youth hostel was about to run its course, I then invited her to move in with me while she figured out what to do.

On a chilly Friday night halfway through October, as we began eating the Thai food that was handed to us on our doorstep, Molly folded her entire hand and threw in the towel:
‘I can’t do this anymore. I can’t bear the looks and accusations. I can’t take any more exclusion. I… I want to leave the book club.’

(I didn’t even pretend to lie and say that she’d be missed, or that the club wouldn’t be able to go on without her. To be honest, I didn’t care. I’d lost interest in the club. I only cared about Molly. We could leave together).

‘I’ve been waiting for you to say that.’

Later that week, something strange started happening, and continued to happen for the days and weeks leading up to my generating the courage to step down as leader of the book club and tell the group that I’d no longer be coming… but also beyond that date, for the days and weeks after.

One day, Molly is the one to externalise her feeling of dread, which I admit to sharing as soon as she does so.

‘I… I, erm, think I’m being followed. Every time I go to the shop or into town, I see the same black Bentley Mulsanne. The worst part is that the driver saw me see him two days ago, but he was back again yesterday.’

(I begin formulating a comparison between this and the surveillance anxiety she and fellow Ulysses character Blazes Boylan might’ve felt while conducting their fictional affair, but scrap the idea while it’s still in my head, realising that it would be inappropriate right now).

‘I think I’m being followed too.’

‘Do you think Karen told someone? Or Sophie?’

‘I don’t know.’

We leave two cups of tea to go cold while I try to calm Molly down and help her plan next steps. We’re in this together, I reassure her.

I win her over, making it clear that she’s safe inside these four walls.

‘I…I can’t go back there,’ she says, even though I insist that we don’t know who’s following us nor what they want. They could be here to help, I suggest, optimistically.
‘I can’t go back there.’

‘Where? What do you mean, Molly?’

‘Everything black. Nothingness. Running down corridor after corridor of nothingness. A broken voice reverberating from all sides around me, stuck on a loop: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead.”’

‘I won’t let you go back there. I promise.’

‘Thank you.’

George Oliver

Image: A man with a pile of books in place of his head. Pixabay.com