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Bluebagger – a cautionary fable.
He was famous. He was certain of it.
Very famous.
Perhaps the most famous of all.
It was undeniable.
And his memories contained all the things that had made him famous — his triumphs over adversity — his bravado and vigour and his knack for plucking victory out of failure’s swallowing throat.
He would lie in bed some nights and when he was done with imagining the stars swirling outside his roof he would think back upon his fame and he would find it thee in his mind, a web that connected all that he was.
At least…he did.
Then things began to change. He could even name the moment when he cange begun which was striking really because the usual thing about change was tat yu never noticed until it was done.
But he could. He could pinpoint it.
It began with a photograph — or, more accurately, with its absence.
Everyone had a photograph…each and every one of them. They were for an album, an album to celebrate the past. Everyone happily produced a photograph but when he looked he could not find a one.
He did not panic. He had been famous. Others would produce a photograph of him.
But none did.
He enquired and though everyone remembered him none had evidence.
And that was when everything began to change. He began to doubt. When he lay in bed at night he could see the web fading...he believed he could even feel bits of himself drifting away…the famous bits.
Not that it mattered. Others remembered and soon, he knew, evidence would be produced and all would be right with the world.
Then came the second event.
This time is was a collection of newspaper articles collected for a magazine article. And it happened again. No articles. None. It was as if he had never existed…and that’s what started to happen. He could feel it. He could feel himself growing thinner — there was no other word for it. He was approaching a state of translucence…people were already beginning to fail to see him…or hear him.
At night he lay in his bed and he could feel that he made no indentation on the mattress. When he woke in the morning the bed appeared as if it had not been slept in…and all the while the web in his mind fragmented, disappeared and his memories, like the stars, were flung outwards into the cosmos and drifted further and further away from each other.
He went on a search then before it as too late…a search for his fame…for proof that what he remembered, and what others told him they could recall, did happen. He searched in libraries. He searched through newspapers clipping and old television newsreels. He went into houses and poured over photo albums, attended school fairs and car boot sales. He went to actions and to markers and he searched and he searched but he did not find a thing…and all the while he felt himself growing thinner…felt his very skin begin to fall away from his body, like dust motes caught in the sunlight. He knew he was vanishing and that soon he would be gone and still he searched and still he found no proof at all.
His eyes began to fail him. He hands shook. He legs struggle to touch the earth and his voice became a whisper lost in the city’s bustling noise.
At night, he lay in his bed and whispered “but I am the bluebagger,” over and over again but when he thought about it he wondered what did that even mean? What was a bluebagger? Why did he call himself such a strange term and that was when he knew the end was near and then he didn’t even know that.
One day a relative visited but there as no sign of him. His bed was untouched. His clothes were all still there. Missing it was reported in the newspapers but with not a mention of who he had been.
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This type of slight is alien in the more cultured part of the world - Walsh. Its up there with mad dogs, Englishmen and the midday sun!
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