The Midnight Train (The Midnight World, #2)(26)

‘I can’t face this.’

‘That is right. You never could, Old Bean. But now you have to. You must leave the train or you will feel like this for ever.’

‘Please. Just stop this feeling.’

‘Only you can do that.’

‘How do I stand up and leave the train?’

Agnes sighed. ‘By knowing it is way past time.’





27 July 1964


The Ghost knew he had to do it, to face it, and yet it felt almost impossible. It was, he realised, one thing to live through pain as it comes to you, but another thing to knowingly step off a train and revisit it. But he closed his eyes and did it. He stepped off the train and, opening his eyes again, stepped into City Hall and found himself surrounded by screams and music and chaos.

His spectral form seemed to be overlapping with four or five living, bouncing bodies at any one time.

The crowd was wild.

The Rolling Stones were doing a Chuck Berry song on stage, Mick Jagger in a white shirt with checkered trousers leaning into a long-fringed Brian Jones, who was jabbing away at his guitar. There was sweat and cigarette smoke and hysteria in the air. And then the Ghost felt it, even though he knew this was where he had been heading. He was swamped by the dread of what this was. Of what night this was: 27 July 1964. The summer before he was due to start Oxford.

Maybe, he muttered to himself, it won’t be the whole thing. Maybe it will just be the concert and end there.

This was the first night that City Hall had decided to have a concert without seating on the main floor. The crowd was jostling and pushing and there were Wilbur and Dougie right in the middle.

Mods, rockers, and everything in between.

Dougie was already drunk and tilting like a tree in a storm. He was wearing rather elegant pleated trousers and a dubiously expensive-looking grey turtleneck. Wilbur was dressed in a shirt done up to its top button. Unlike his brother, he looked a little tight and nervous. The Ghost remembered why. It was because he was already regretting talking Dougie into this. Wilbur had wanted to see the band and so had talked him into going with him. He thought it would be good, to buy him a ticket. He wanted to make more of an effort with his brother, after a short stretch in prison. But also he thought it would be a way to tell him that he had got into Oxford. He knew that wasn’t going to go down well. And, in truth, it didn’t.

When Wilbur had told him in the pub across the square he’d downed his pint and ordered another without saying anything. A stronger one. A Worthington’s. Then one more of the same.

‘Dougie? Dougie? Why aren’t you talking?’ Wilbur had asked.

Then, when he had drunk enough, Dougie’s mood changed.

He turned and stared at his little brother with manic exuberance. ‘Right, lad. Let’s have it. Forget all that Oxford stuff,’ he said. ‘Let’s just celebrate freedom. Let’s get to this concert.’

Wilbur nodded. ‘Yeah. That sounds good.’

After all, Dougie had just spent six weeks in prison – ‘total horror show’ – after being convicted of selling batches of stolen knives and forks while working at Viners’ cutlery factory. He had been working in various jobs all through the last year. The carpet factory, steel works, gas works, liquorice factory, even a week at the Queen’s Head until their mother caught him with his hand in the till. He had bought a second-hand Vauxhall Cresta. A few months after he’d started working at Viners it turned out that he had been selling cutlery for cheap all around Sheffield.

‘This is it, lad,’ Dougie was now shouting in his brother’s ear as the concert got into full swing. His beer sloshing over the glass onto Wilbur’s shoes. ‘This is the world. Right here. You don’t need that Oxford shite. You don’t need your duffel coat and your Shakespeare. You don’t need to become a southerner. Look! The Rolling Stones!’

‘Dougie, they’re from London.’

‘Aye. But now they’re right here, aren’t they. And next week the Beatles are back here. We have it all. Right here.’

‘Dougie! I’m not going to Oxford for the scene. I’m going to get a degree.’

‘I’ve met southerners, Wilbo. They’re not right in the head.’

The Ghost remembered silently thinking that maybe the inhabitants of Ford Open Prison might not be entirely representative of the inhabitants of Balliol College. And the thought was never spoken because someone was tapping on Wilbur’s shoulder.

And not just any old someone.

Maggie.

She was there with two of her friends.

Doreen Taylor, looking very different now she had reached womanhood and discovered eyeliner. And Claudette Campbell, a person Wilbur hadn’t met yet, but who had heard about that day in the park.

‘Hello, stranger!’ she shouted into his ear. ‘I hear you’re off to university.’

‘Yeah! In September.’

Dougie leaned in between them, cradling his beer. ‘Bloody everyone knows except me. We’re not good enough for him!’

‘Bugger off,’ Wilbur said, pushing him playfully away. He then turned to Maggie. ‘How’ve you been?’

Maggie strained to hear. Brian Jones and Keith Richards were in full force on the stage. ‘What?’

‘I was just asking, how have you been?’