Hugo
Photo of a dirty, dark blue dog toy with a red nose laying in a bed of brown leaves.
Hugo was sad. I know he doesn’t look it as he hides it well, but he was sad. Sad from his head down to the space where his toes should be.
Cindy was her name and Cindy was what Hugo called over and over: on the hour, like clockwork. In fact, forest creatures of a particular bent used his cries to mark time. ‘Let’s build this section of the nest within three Cindys’, they’d say. Or, ‘In five moons and fourteen Cindys, let’s meet on the old Silver Birch for a jamboree!’ In this way, Hugo became a part of the forest, even though he was a migrant brought in the mouth of a savage canine invader.
It didn’t really console Hugo to be incorporated into the life of the forest. He didn’t want the forest, nor its inhabitants; he wanted Cindy and her warm bed near the fire. He wanted to lay forgotten under the garden table or down the side of the fridge, not on a path amidst the leaves and the rain. In the space in-between his cries, he imagined the way her teeth and tongue felt, breath smelt, and how her drool kept him moist on hot and sunny days. Cindy had made him feel wanted and needed and more than the sum of his stuffed parts.
Luckily for Hugo, I can see the future and so I know it won’t be too long until he’s gone from there. The forest creatures will miss him at first, one or two will go out in search, and a chaffinch will try their damned hardest to imitate him for a couple of weeks; but in the end, the forest creatures will settle down and go back to building things and hanging out according to their own spontaneous time.
Don’t tell Hugo, but it won’t be Cindy who rescues him, it will be a little girl named Frankie. Frankie will have lagged behind her family a bit, studying a particularly interesting conker, when she finds him. She will bend down and brush off the leaves and the dirt and she will name him Henry. Frankie, with her dirty knees and hands, will also see the future and observe her mother scolding her for bringing home ‘germs’, so she will shove our Hugo-now-Henry deep into her duffle coat pocket, then hurry to catch up with her family before anyone notices.
Back home, and after a surreptitious wash with Timotei in the bathroom, Hugo-now-Henry will be placed amongst the other stuffed toys in Frankie’s room. Her mother will never notice the new addition because Frankie’s woodland clairvoyance was her saviour. Nevertheless, some dirt will linger on. Truth be told, that Timotei will not be up to the job of removing the residual Cindy and months of the woods. Frankie isn’t to know that as she is only four, and that bottle of bubbles seems to make her hairs glowing and shiny, so why not Hugo-now-Henry’s?
So Cindy will live on deep down in Hugo’s stuffing. Hugo-now-Henry will try to adjust and he will reason that a house with humans is closer to his beloved than a woodland floor. Yet he will not be able to let go of Cindy, just as she once would not let go of him during a tug-of-war with one of the house humans. As such, Hugo-now-Henry will carry on his mournful, clockwork callings.
The parents of the house will begin to be worried about Frankie. They will notice she isn’t sleeping through the night. Not at first, of course, but later when Frankie’s attention begins to suffer and she starts to talk about ‘Cindy’. The parents will discuss how there is no teacher called Cindy, nor cartoon friend, and they will start to worry that someone is interfering with their daughter. Many hushed discussions will take place in evenings once their daughter is in bed.
The school will swear down that their safeguarding is impeccable, and it will be of course. So, eventually, the parents will move on to imaginary friends and wonder if Frankie is all right? Is this just make believe or is dear old Frankie somehow stressed? Is make believe like this even normal?
Of course, you and I know that make believe is very normal and is, in fact, one of the principal tenets of the book of A Meaningful Life. We also both know that dear future Frankie won’t be make believing a thing: she will just have an especially open and attuned level of hearing.
I want to tell you that there’s a happy ending to this story. That one day, Frankie will be playing in her front garden with Hugo-now-Henry when Cindy and her humans walk past. I want to tell you that Cindy at once recognises Hugo, leaps the white picket fence, and wrests him from his place in Frankie’s tea ceremony. I want to imagine that Frankie somehow knows that Cindy is Hugo’s rightful owner and therefore does not protest. I want to see her there, holding some other toy, waving a sincere goodbye to Hugo-no-longer-Henry.
Unfortunately, that is simply not what will happen. The truth is that Hugo will always pine for Cindy: he is a stuffed toy and therefore not capable of pronounced reasoning nor resignation, so he will go on calling for Cindy for the rest of his life. As a consequence, Cindy will burrow down deep into Frankie’s psyche in uninterrogated ways.
In turn, Frankie, when she becomes Ms Frankie and then later Dr Frankie and then finally Professor Frankie, will spend a lifetime researching the intersections between imagination and intuition. She will be certain that we imagine things we know on a level adjacent to sensory experience, and her career will be a series of attempts to prove this. She will put tin hats with electrodes on mice, attach sensors with tape to her subjects, write case study after case study of her clinical practice, and every dedication of every book will always be ‘To Cindy…’
Listen to me read Hugo: