R - The Rainbow Man

Children have many worlds through which they are free to roam. It is an
ability that rapidly fades with age in most of us, for it is feared and
discouraged by the adult world. Yet occasionally if it is properly
nurtured and exercised, this faculty can survive in a person for as
long as life itself.

My childhood was spent in a little market town named Ballyrowan on the
border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. It was also a
smuggling town and a recruitment and training centre for the IRA, but
none of that mattered to me. Ballyrowan was simply my world, the only
place of which I had any direct knowledge. It had a river where you
could swim in the summer and woods where you could play chasing games
and cowboys and Indians, a graveyard where you could play ghosts and
vampires in the winter evenings and lots of derelict and abandoned
farmhouses on the outskirts where you could play king of the castle or
knights and dragons or "house" if you were a girl. There were a few
adults around, including my father and mother, but they didn't count
for very much and we only interacted with them when we needed something
or when they had demands to make of us, such as going to school or
going to bed or looking after little brothers. They weren't of any real
significance in our lives. All, that is, except one, the old man we
called the Rainbow Man.

It was no great mystery how he got that name, because he was to all
outward appearances a walking rainbow. He had an obsessive love of
brightly coloured pieces of cloth, the brighter the better, and gaudy
costume jewellery of all kinds, and knowing this people would give him
their unwanted garishly coloured curtains or chair covers or scraps of
fabric, or the play-jewellery that their children had outgrown; partly
out of kindness and partly out of curiosity to see what use the Rainbow
Man would find for them. For the Rainbow Man was an artist, and his
canvas was himself. He would find ways to wrap gaily coloured pieces of
old fabric around his head to simulate a Maharajah's turban, and ways
to turn discarded beach-towels and chair coverings into elegant kilts
and togas and flowing caftans. Nothing was wasted. A thin left-over
strip of some lurid purple artificial fibre would find a role as a belt
or a scarf or a headband or an accessory worn around the ankle or the
wrist. Every day the Rainbow Man would wander the streets and
surrounding lanes of Ballyrowan wearing a new ensemble, each one more
dazzling and inventive than the last.

Families driving through the town would alert their children in advance
to look out for him, and if they were lucky enough to spot him the
youngest child would be handed a threepenny bit or a sixpence to give
to him. Offerings of this kind he always accepted with a polite "God
bless you", and nobody saw any harm in it, the notion of slightly
deranged adult males posing a threat to children having yet to enter
the public consciousness.

The Rainbow Man was a local tourist attraction, like the monument to
William Allingham in the town square or the carving of the Fiddler of
Dooney on the Sligo Road.

As children we were able to get to know the Rainbow Man a lot better
than the adults, and to listen in to the complex one-sided
conversations that he carried on with his ever-present invisible
companions.

"Oh, youse won't be laughing tomorrow, when they crown me king," he
would tell them, or "Only one of youse is coming with me when I go to
Mars" or "I know youse have got my son's head in a bucket, but I don't
care, what did that boy ever do for me?" and so on. The mere
contingencies of reality were never allowed to impinge on the
conversations between the Rainbow Man and his voices.

As we followed him around we joined in these conversations with
enthusiasm, either inventing our own unseen respondents or attempting
to contribute something to the Rainbow Man's dialogues. Occasionally he
would acknowledge our presence also, and he was never lacking in
courtesy even to the youngest of us, but usually he was too preoccupied
with some more ethereal exchange of his own to pay us very much
heed.

With the passage of time and under the influence of his fine example we
developed our own techniques of communication with the unseen world,
and tried to create voices with particular interests and attributes and
consistent personalities. The people I spoke to included St. Francis of
Assisi whose life we had been learning about at school, a robot space
traveller from a remote galaxy, and a beautiful fairy princess who
could sprinkle me with star dust that enabled me to fly like Peter Pan
and Wendy.

The fashion for children to carry on conversations with their invisible
companions spread rapidly through the nine and ten year old age group
in Ballyrowan.

Fathers and particularly mothers started to become alarmed and the
phenomenon became talked about in the local Women's Institute and
obscure sub-committees of the Roman Catholic Church. Inevitably, the
Rainbow Man became ostracised, no longer to be accepted or encouraged
by respectable society in Ballyrowan. Unwittingly, our mimicry of the
Rainbow Man's interesting affliction had sewn the seeds of his
destruction. Madness in a (literally) colourful vagrant might be viewed
as quaint, but if it was of a contagious kind that infected the
children of the town then it had to be viewed as an evil.

Alarmed mothers forbade their offspring to talk to the Rainbow Man, or
to themselves, or to have anything more to do with him. The flow of
threepenny bits and sixpences diminished to a trickle, as did the gifts
of cloth and baubles from previously well-meaning members of the adult
community. Of course there were children who still managed to smuggle
scraps of food to the Rainbow Man, rather in the manner of Red Cross
parcels for political prisoners, and sometimes they even managed to get
him what he seemed to hunger for even more, his beloved scraps of
brightly coloured cloth. But with the odds so heavily stacked against
them those responsible for these kindly acts of insubordination were
quickly brought into line.

The Rainbow Man was seen less and less in the streets of Ballyrowan.
When he was he seemed subdued and less colourful, his retinue of
children missing, his dazzling attire slowly fading to pastel due to
non-renewal and the slow accumulation of dust and grime. He spoke more
quietly to his voices and walked more slowly, unable to comprehend the
reasons for the sudden change in his fortunes.

Then came the inevitable. Late one Saturday night, down a narrow alley
by the side of the local cinema, two old men who had gone down to have
a pee discovered the body of the Rainbow Man, small and crumpled and
faded to a neutral grey. From the loudspeakers behind the screen
powerful and distinct voices filled the night air, but the Rainbow Man
was no longer able to hear them.

But those who have never lived are in the end the hardest of all to
kill, and in the minds of that uniquely privileged generation of
Ballyrowan's children at least some of the voices lived on and grew
stronger with every passing year, until they moved out to populate the
pages of a hundred novels and a thousand stories, and thus became
immortal.