The Midnight Train (The Midnight World, #2)(20)

‘I don’t know. But I’d like to, you know, make a living at it one day. So what makes you want to go to Oxford?’

Wilbur frowned in thought. ‘I just want to get out. Do better, you know. I want to escape.’

‘Sheffield?’

‘Everything. I just want to do more than I’m supposed to do. I want to not have to spend Friday evening hiding behind the sofa with my mam because we haven’t got the rent. Or have to worry that Dougie is out doing something really bloody stupid. I want to see the world.’

‘Venice,’ she said. ‘I’d love to go to Venice. It just seems so romantic. Like a dream.’

‘Ah. Venice. I’d like to go too.’

‘One day you will,’ said the watching ghost. ‘And it will be the happiest time of your life.’

She nodded. ‘There’s a painter called Titian. He is the best painter in my opinion. Better than Michelangelo. Better than Leonardo da Vinci. I have only seen his paintings in a book from the library. But they make you feel something just by looking at them. Something you can’t explain.’ She drifted into thought for a moment. Then: ‘Hey, Mr Oxford University, have you heard of chiaroscuro?’

‘No. What is that?’

‘It’s a fancy-pants term my art teacher told me about and I have never talked about it because I have never met someone so important as a Real Life Genius before.’

She was needling him but he liked it.

The Ghost, standing just beside the bench looking down on them like an unseen parent watching toddlers at play, hadn’t remembered the details of the conversation. Just the bench and her drawing and her face. So hearing it again was like being taken somewhere new.

It was interesting, to realise that even your own past was new territory to explore. That memories were no more the real event than flags were their nations.

He wished he could be back. Properly back. Sitting on the park bench next to her. He would have asked her out there and then. He would have saved all those wasted years.

‘So tell me,’ said the other Wilbur, ‘what is chiaroscuro?’

‘It’s the contrast of light and shade. And Renaissance painters were really good at this. Especially Titian. So if you see one of his paintings you might wonder how it seems to … shine out at you, and really it’s not about the light, it’s about the dark.’

‘Oh, I love that.’

‘That’s what Mrs Bray says. The dark shade all around the face in the background makes it more … magical. And I like that idea. About how you need the dark sometimes to make the other things brighter.’

The Ghost watched them stare at each other. And Wilbur seemed on the cusp of saying something. His mouth twitched a little with it, like an egg about to hatch. But whatever it was never had the chance to be spoken. Because that was the moment a park warden in a flat cap and green overalls drove over in his little van.

‘This is my dad. You’d better go. He’s suspicious of boys.’

‘Right.’ Wilbur stood up, fast as anything. ‘Quite a healthy suspicion, as a general rule.’

‘See you, lad.’

‘Yes. See you.’

And Wilbur walked away and his ghost stayed and watched the suspicious eyes of Maggie’s father as he stopped his van on the broad path. Alfred. A man with whom he would one day share pints and stilted conversation. A man he would see cry. But that was still to come.

And then, with the sound of the train, it was time to go.





The Blink of an Eye


Out of the window he saw himself as a seventeen-year-old, in a sunlit Oxford, walking through the pristine green oasis of the garden quad of Balliol College. The day of his entrance exam.

With the blink of an eye he was gone, and the Ghost looked out and saw himself and Charlie at the Milk Bar talking to Wilbur’s about-to-be girlfriend, Alice Dobson.

And then the landscape became more desolate. A desert, in fact, before descending into dark.





Coles Corner


The train came to a stop and the Ghost followed his eighteen-year-old self into town. He was smartly dressed in a suit and a black tie that he’d bought with money from his work at Bagdale’s. There was a spring in his step and a little white corner of an envelope sticking out of his front pocket.

It was a cold February evening.

He was at that section of Glossop Road where the squashed-up terraced housing disappeared and the shops began. The grocer, the butcher, the cobbler, the haberdasher.

This was the start of the town centre.

It was, back then, like a road to magic. A road to possibility. And especially this night.

This Saturday.

Because he had a date.

Eventually Wilbur (and the Ghost) reached Coles department store, which had closed for the day. But he was there, his ghost remembered, because it was where everyone arranged to meet their dates back in those days. Coles Corner.

And there was his date, Alice Dobson, waiting for him in a smart green dress, smiling beneath her blonde fringe. He couldn’t wait to tell her his news.

Alice was his girlfriend of about two months. A girl who he had seen at the Milk Bar over Christmas drinking a Vimto with a friend, and Charlie Applewood had dared him to talk to her, primarily because Charlie Applewood was shyer than him and had a tendency to stumble on first encounters and he fancied her mate.