The Midnight Train (The Midnight World, #2)(34)

This was 1966.

A young couple stepping out of a brand new clothing shop called Gear Box were lighting cigarettes. The woman in a colourful kaftan dress, the man in a slim mod-style suit.

Some university students. Not quite hippies, but getting there.

A young smiling man in a yellow polo neck and a fisherman’s cap with the Beatles’ Rubber Soul under his arm, walking past an old woman with her hair in curlers. An old, faded poster advertising Malcolm X’s talk at Sheffield University Union. A bright sign in the council office window: ‘Park Hill Flats – Say goodbye to outside lavatories and the slums of yesterday with modern, clean living!’

A monochrome world was starting to leak colour.

He had never appreciated it really. The excitement and hope of that time. Sure, he had the excuse of grief. But the Ghost wondered: does any person in their youth truly appreciate the time they live through? Doesn’t the mundane starch of reality always turn to sugar with memory? Wasn’t that just what nostalgia was?

He turned back to himself. Still at the display table. Replacing Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery with a book that he would soon read and relish called Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. He was smiling, naturally, for the first time in about a year.

Sometimes you needed to nearly lose something in order to appreciate it. And Mr Bagdale’s decision to fire then keep him, within the space of a minute, had been what he needed. This had been the day that something changed inside him. The moment he stepped off rock bottom and felt ambition kindle into life.

Outside, two young women were walking by. Claudette and Maggie. Claudette was busy in chatter, but Maggie turned towards Bagdale’s. Not the display in the window, but beyond and into the shop. She was looking for someone. And then she saw him, and there was the smallest of smiles.

‘Look at her,’ whispered the Ghost. ‘Turn around. She’s smiling at you.’

Wilbur stopped. He did indeed turn around. He looked right through the Ghost to the street outside. But it was too late. She was gone.

And the Ghost stayed another moment before hearing the whistle of a train.





Why Sunsets Are Beautiful


The forwardness of life was a problem, thought the Ghost.

If days could be scattered all over, so on Monday you were forty and on Tuesday you were nine and on Wednesday you were eighty-one, that would be more helpful. You would know the fleeting nature of things, realise how many versions of ourselves a lifetime contained. It would make life’s beauty so abundantly clear. The way a sunset was so beguiling because it tells us that every day eventually sinks into night.





The Possibilities That Life Contains


The Ghost stood over himself on the floor of a flat full of beanbags and incense.

Charlie Applewood was now a student of physics at Sheffield University.

It was Sunday tomorrow. So they had dropped acid, and were listening to the Doors as the patterned wallpaper started to shift.

‘Reality is always moving,’ said Charlie with an intense focus. He had long hair now. Far longer than Wilbur’s. His mam always seemed to be upset when he grew it, so he didn’t. But Charlie’s was almost down to his waist. He wasn’t the nervy, bullied kid any more. He had left his stutter behind. ‘Everything is particles and particles aren’t still. They move around in a wave. The quantum wave function.’

Wilbur stayed staring at the wallpaper. ‘This is good acid.’

‘This isn’t the acid. This is physics.’ He watched Charlie take a shilling from his pocket. ‘See this. When it’s in the air it could land either side up. So it is both heads and tails.’ He flicked it and it landed on the stained purple carpet next to a packet of cigarettes with the Queen facing up.

‘Heads,’ Wilbur said from his beanbag.

Charlie stared at the coin with wide eyes, entranced by its shining beauty. He took a long drag of his cigarette.

‘Yeah but listen, Wilbo, with life the coin is always spinning in the air in the present and it has always landed in the past. Like when I just put on the Doors I very nearly put on Jimi Hendrix …’

‘Right.’

‘We are the spinning coin, Wilbo.’

‘I like that you call me Wilbo these days.’

‘I got that from Dougie.’

Wilbur thought of his dead brother as he stared at the landed coin.

Charlie thought of another way to explain it. ‘Like when the Beatles sing “Sergeant Pepper” they are the Beatles but they are also Sergeant Pepper. Like that is what they are telling us. They are telling us reality is a spinning coin. It contains many things.’

Charlie moved away from the chaos of records on the floor. ‘What you need is to open your mind. You need to leave your little hobbit hole, Wilbo Baggins … The existence of tragedy in your life does not mean that your whole life has to be that way. You’re the spinning coin …’

Charlie looked suddenly blank, now distant. Lost in thought. He said something he’d never said out loud but which had always been understood. ‘My dad hit me and my mam.’

‘I know. I’m sorry, Charlie.’

He didn’t seem sad, or scarred, or anything at all. The psychedelic experience he was having allowed him to tell his best friend the truth, with no boundaries. And absolutely no trace of stutter. ‘I thumped him back. Last year. And I couldn’t stop. It was like it had been stored up by time. All that energy and anger. I just kept hitting until he was on the floor. That’s why he left us. But Mam is happy now. Well, she’s getting there. Got work at Cole Brothers. Shop floor. Selling make-up with the young lasses. They all love her. She says she’s their Mother Hen …’