The Midnight Train (The Midnight World, #2)(29)

He was looking at Wilbur with wide, wide eyes as if this was a genius idea. Desperation made you cling to the worst idea if it was the only one.

‘Every second we stay in this car we are getting deeper into shit, Dougie—’

‘You’re leaving me in the lurch, lad.’

The Ghost tried to unpick what he had meant here – Oxford? Leaving him with their mother?

‘Slow the hell down.’

‘I know what you’re thinking.’

‘I’m thinking stop the fucking car.’

‘You think you’re above me.’

‘Dougie—’

‘Having a thick little thief as a brother.’

‘You’re not thick, Dougie, you just don’t try … Jesus. Slow down.’

‘But everything I know, I know. School of hard knocks. I was never a kid, Wilbo. Mam didn’t understand things. I saw it how it was … with her and Parkin.’

‘Mr Parkin?’

‘Aye. Making eyes at him.’

The Ghost remembered how he had taken these words and fully signed up to Dougie’s lifelong grudge against their old landlord.

‘Dougie …’

‘It’s all right for you. I have to look after her.’

‘Oh, Dougie …’ The Ghost was realising what this was all about. Dougie felt abandoned. And by all of them. By their father for dying, by their mother for her retreating mind, and now by Wilbur himself.

Every mistake Dougie had made, right down to him wanting to fight the world, could be explained by having to take this on. Too much, too young. If you felt like everything was under threat, then everything was a fight. He wasn’t jealous of Wilbur. Not wholly, anyway. He just wanted to keep everyone together, because all he had known since their dad died was a sense of pulling apart.

Maybe, thought the Ghost, the world was full of this. Chaos trying too hard to be order. Violence trying to be peace. Maybe sometimes bad actions were just good motives without a map. And now the pressure had built and broken through and Dougie was in this speeding car, with the young brother he had once looked after, and yakking ten words a second like he needed to get it all out, leaping from one thing to another while he kept his foot on the pedal. ‘That siren sounds like a flying saucer! Plan 9 from Outer Space. Can you remember when we went to see that, Wilbo? With your pal Charlie? That was a good day. I’d just got the job at the furnaces. You remember?’

Wilbo. Hearing it now as a Ghost, even passing road signs in a blur, he heard the affection in it.

‘Dougie, please, focus – this is dangerous.’

‘Dad was like you. Wanted to bite off more than he could chew. Everyone else joined the army. But he wanted to be with the toffs up in the sky. You were meant to train for three years before they let you into air combat. They changed it to six months! You know that? Six bloomin’ months! All to go and die for Churchill.’

‘Dougie, stop your rattling and slow down. I don’t want to die.’

‘You’re not going to.’

‘Just slow the hell—’

‘Them coppers are in a Triumph. This is a bloomin’ Vauxhall. We can’t slow down.’

The Ghost was petrified. When he was younger he had been scared of ghosts. He had been worried he would see his dad out on the landing. But he’d had it all wrong. The dead were nothing to fear. It was the living that contained unknown terrors.

‘That girl liked you, lad,’ Dougie told him, as Wilbur nursed his bleeding nose. He was slurring his words.

‘You’re drunk. You’re so bloody drunk.’

‘You never know what’s in front of you. You always want more. Like Dad did. You’ve got it all, Wilbo. You’ve got it all. You just don’t see it. Life just falls your way. That’s how it is for some people. That’s what’s different about you and me. Things fall your way and you don’t see them.’

Things fall your way.

‘I work bloody hard, Dougie.’

Dougie turned away from the road and looked at his brother with a desperate kind of love. And the Ghost wished he could reach back through time to tell him how much he was loved.





The Threads of Time Were Frayed But Holding


Wilbur was almost crying as his eyes stayed on the road. He was holding it back with effort, as if to let out a single tear would be to end the world.

Dougie was six years older than Wilbur. He was twenty-five. But to the Ghost and maybe to the living Wilbur he looked like a child. He looked like someone to look after, because no one really had. He looked like the little boy who had handed him a train. The threads of time were frayed but holding.

Nothing ever just happened, realised the Ghost. Even the most reckless action was a consequence of what had gone before, just as every loud mistake in the world was the product of some quiet and secret pain.

‘Oh, Dougie,’ sighed the Ghost, while his living self was trying to grab the wheel again and being elbowed hard away.

It was a tragedy of life that you had to die before you could truly see the whole of someone.

The Ghost leaned forward in the back seat. ‘I love you, Dougie. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry you didn’t calm whatever demons were in your head. I’m sorry you didn’t get the help you needed …’