Life and Soul

Happy Birthday

Today Jamie would have been 42.

Consequently, although he remains rarely distant from my thoughts most days, today I have allowed myself to think much more.
Whist I was thinking a picture came into my head; Jamie has since been joined in heaven/the afterlife/the next dimensional universe that makes up whatever comes next [delete to taste] by our father, John – but most of you may have never known that tragically, our little brother was lost at full term, stillborn. His name was Jacob. So when I think of my lost brother and father I now think of three.

In this place that came into my daydreams today, I can see a white painted iron garden set:a perfect round table and high backed chairs with a weaved pattern twisting the metal so it looks almost soft.
Strangely (perhaps in strange and magical mixture that happens in dreams, of houses from my brother and I’s childhood) there garden set sits on a green lawn at what seems the very end of a walled garden. Some tall iron gates, with large holes created by their pattern, allow you to see through to a long white beach beyond with very, very blue water. The almost white sun is in the process of hitting the water, creating a perspective-perfect path of light over the waves . Its over-brightness is like something Dali might gave imagined – hyper real colours and overtly smooth perfections.

On the garden table is a old chess set, a slightly overflowing ash tray (obviously) and some glasses green liquid – possibly Absinthe.
Jamie liked the connotations but I don’t remember if he liked the drink itself. It might just be my strange visual-based brain giving me another vibrant colour to this dream-scape.

In one chair, his back to the gate, my father sits, well lolls, magically transformed back to his thirties with only a slight rise of a beer belly under his polo shirt. His arms are tanned and crossed and he is obviously deeply asleep, a white panama hat, placed completely over his face. I am betting the half burned-out cigarette in the ashtray is his, although one of the two young men sitting to his right and left soon pick it up with a ‘waste-not-want-not’ attitude.

Jamie is in the chair facing me (in a way that is both painful and wonderful to my dreaming heart) is slightly plump in the face, his messy, sun-kissed hair would make Harry Potter’s look tidy. Perhaps they had been swimming earlier, the way the salt used to turn his hair to straw in the summer as children? The sun is highlighting his features. He has a half smile of a man who know he is going to win.
If the man opposite is my younger brother, Jamie will certainly win.
Because James will have cheated outrageously.
Take it from the younger sister.

James wears a short-sleeved, slight loved-worn shirt worn almost as a jacket over the T-shirt below. The hand not clutching some kind of smoke or other, is playing absently with what looks like a mobile phone. (They must have these, wherever he is, or he would have had his -“this isn’t good enough” face on within 30 seconds of arriving) His eyes twinkle, echoing the sea beyond but brighter. There is no sound in my dream but he appears to be slightly nodding his head. He likes the music. He probably chose it.

I am unable to see the man sitting with his back to me but I expect is the brother I never knew, though I am guessing. Some clues are the that back of his auburn-tinged is distracted by a mad ‘cows-lick’ parting. He has long body that suggest he is much taller than her really is, as Jamie did. His head also seems to be moving. Is he singing? Talking? I wish this dream was at night  and not during the afternoon so I can turn the sound to 5:1 surround.

Its just a picture, but it helps.
When I see things like that it feels again like Jamie is just away in another country, having a well-earned break after a gig, gathering his thoughts before he moves on to his next project.
In that daydream I can forget for a while that flights back are cancelled and the price to visit is one I can’t afford to pay – not yet.

If you have a memory or a daydream like mine, please on what was his birthday, the start of my family and the celebration of the first child, take a few minutes off and stay there for a while.
Raise a glass. Blow smoke rings to the heaven whether under a wet September sky or a bright Thai sunbeam.
We miss you James – John – Jacob.
Happy Birthday, big brother.