The Midnight Train (The Midnight World, #2)(19)

It was the start of something. Not that either of them knew it yet. In fact, they wouldn’t know it for many years to come. But he thought about it now. He imagined their conversations over the years as a vast plant, branching off all over the place, each conversation different but part of the same whole, growing from that first seedling on Glossop Road and trying to break out of the ground here.

‘We’re too young to be cynical.’

‘Well, Wilbur, sixteen is old for a duck,’ she said. ‘Quack.’

They laughed, then sat in silence for a little while.

‘Talk to her,’ implored the Ghost, pointlessly. ‘Come on, lad. Don’t be nervous. Ask her out. It would be the easiest thing in the world for you to just ask her out.’

Eventually, Maggie spoke. ‘My mam always said I was an old head on young shoulders. She said I had a different way about me. And I think she’s right about the old part. I’m sixteen going on sixty-five. Mam said life is lived the wrong way round. You need to be an old head in a young body to make the most of things.’

‘Your mam sounds wise.’

Maggie looked sadly across the water. ‘Yes. She was. She died. Two years ago.’ She closed her eyes and winced a little, as if taking a shard of glass out of her foot. ‘They don’t even know what killed her. But she was in pain. Her stomach. They tried everything. It was horrible.’

‘Oh. I’m so sorry.’

‘That’s all right. Dad does his best. It’s just me and him. He works for the council. Parks department. He works here actually. I’m meeting him and we’re going to town. I come to the park. I like to come and just draw.’

She gave him a nervous look. But then she made the silent decision to show him her drawing. Wilbur stared at it and didn’t have to feign, even for a second, a polite response. It was a beautiful sketch of the scene in front of her. The lake, the trees, even the little waterfall.

‘I love it,’ he said. ‘It’s so good. I like the way you take the whole and then focus on the little details.’

‘Like the Midnight Train,’ muttered the Ghost, staring down at his honeymoon-wear – the short-sleeved shirt and sandals and flared jeans from years after this encounter.

‘Impressionistic but with focal points,’ Wilbur continued.

She looked at him, and needed to deflect the flattery. ‘Where did you get to talk like that?’

The Ghost cringed as Wilbur tried to sound suave. ‘And how do I talk?’

‘Posh. Long words. Impressionistic but with focal points.’

‘It’s not posh to use long words. That’s what Miss Graham, my English teacher, says. I like her. She’s quite subversive. She says education is a tool used to prop up the class system. She says we’re encouraged to equate the upper classes with cleverness in order for the lower classes to keep doing manual labour and not dream of anything bigger.’

‘All right, Karl Marx. What do you dream of, then?’

Right then he wasn’t dreaming of anything at all. It was hard to dream within a moment that felt so right. ‘Well, I want to go to Oxford.’

‘To the university?’

‘Yes. After A levels. That is what I want to do. I want to study English Literature and History.’

‘I could see you as a historian. Like the one on TV who talks about Henry the Eighth and Christopher Columbus.’

Wilbur shrugged. ‘We don’t have a television. Our mam struggles to pay the rent. Dougie has some money but Mam refuses to take any from him because she never trusts it. He always has more than his wages, you see. And they row about it and he says it’s for her and she ends up screaming or talking to herself. Sorry. Didn’t mean to say all that.’

She frowned. ‘Oh. I’m sorry. And I don’t mean to be rude, but if you can’t afford a television, Wilbur, how are you going to get yourself to Oxford University? Isn’t that pricey?’

‘Not if you get a scholarship.’ He pronounced ‘scholarship’ in an extra-posh, BBC Radio kind of voice.

‘Don’t you have to be a genius?’

He kept the BBC voice going, because she seemed to find it amusing. And there was no magic on earth like making her smile. ‘Well, me and Albert Einstein are really good pals …’

‘Albert Einstein died years ago,’ she laughed. ‘So he was asking you to help with his theorems when you were five years old?’

‘Four, actually.’

‘Well, it’s great to meet a real-life genius,’ she said.

‘That is why I am planning to start smoking a pipe,’ Wilbur went on. ‘All geniuses smoke one, you know.’

She laughed at him as he began to cradle and puff on an invisible pipe.

He paused, and stopped being a clown. Something about her face encouraged honesty. ‘I don’t think you have to be a genius. Because I’m not one. Just work hard … That’s what I’m hoping.’

She stared at him deeply then. And he felt the rarest of things: seen.

‘I only know one thing that old Albert said,’ she told him, ‘because our headmaster always tells us. But it is a good quotation: “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” I have always liked that. Passionately curious.’

‘But it doesn’t apply to you,’ he said, nodding towards the sketchbook. ‘You do have a talent. A proper one.’