The Midnight Train (The Midnight World, #2)(35)

‘I’m pleased for your mam. Always loved her.’

‘And she you, lad … But my point is that the universe is change. That’s the natural state of things. If you hold on long enough, something changes. Everything changes. Cassius Clay becomes Muhammad Ali. Dylan goes electric. Wednesday win the league. Change. That’s all life is. You’ve got to have patience. Wait it out. You’ve had a bad run and things are getting better, Wilbo. You’ve just got to hold on.’

Wilbur looked at his friend fondly. But the Ghost felt nothing but regret. He’d had a great friend in Charlie, and like everyone else, he had lost him further down the track. It seemed so ridiculous now. He should have made more effort. He should never have let him go.

Then Wilbur saw someone else. He saw the Ghost, standing there. The Ghost could see it. Wilbur was holding his gaze. Something he had only ever half remembered. Something he had put down to just another hallucinogenic experience.

‘Wilbur? It’s me …’

Wilbur gently slapped Charlie’s thigh with the back of his hand. ‘Do you see that?’

‘What?’

‘There’s a man there. A strange man. He looks like me. But longer hair.’

‘It’s a sign from the future. I’ve been telling you. You need to grow your hair. You look like Frank Sinatra or something.’

‘Wilbur?’ said the Ghost. ‘You need to be a good friend …’

But he wasn’t heard. Or even seen.

‘Oh,’ sighed Wilbur. ‘He’s gone.’

The needle reached the end of the record. Charlie switched on his little black-and-white TV and moved the aerial about to get a good picture. He never really got one. Charlie started laughing, at nothing in particular, and the laughter didn’t stop until the train came.

The Ghost heard Agnes. Her voice as clear as the whistle.

‘Hop on board! No time to waste.’

And in all the confusion, those words rang inside him like a tolling bell.

No time to waste.

And he thought about it, as he headed towards the train.

All that time. All that waste.

And he wondered why he hadn’t been better at it, at living in time, while he’d had the chance.





The Double


The Ghost felt frustrated. He thought of what Miss Graham had told him. Ignore what is expected of you. Even if it means breaking the rules. And as the life he was watching progressed he noticed an urge to derail the journey and try and change things.

He sat next to Agnes.

‘It is possible for me to see myself,’ he said, his voice flat but tense.

‘What?’

‘Not just when I was a baby.’ His eyes fixed on the carriage floor. ‘I think there have been times when my living non-baby self can see me … Once in a cinema when I was on a date with Alice. And in the bookshop when I asked myself to turn around to see Maggie and I turned around. And just then at Charlie’s while we were taking acid …’

Agnes nodded, and sighed a little. They passed Wilbur, tired from work, watching footage of Neil Armstrong stepping out of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module and onto the moon. ‘You were alive for eighty-one years. Did you ever see your own ghost?’

‘I don’t know … Maybe. Maybe not. But anyway, didn’t you say this past isn’t a memory – it’s a living thing?’

Wilbur stared at his sandals. They sent him, mentally, back to his honeymoon. ‘Actually, one time I did have a very odd thing happen. I was on honeymoon in Venice. It was otherwise a very happy day. Probably the happiest day I have ever known. But I felt for a moment like I saw my doppelganger in the crowd, on the Rialto Bridge. He was wearing identical clothes to me. These clothes. I thought at the time that it was nothing. I imagined I was just hallucinating. I’d recently read The Double by Dostoevsky – because this was back when I actually read books rather than just sold them – and it had made a big impression on me, so I imagined I was just thinking I was seeing my double. I hadn’t eaten for a while and I had drunk some wine. It was hot in Venice and I had never been abroad before. I thought it was all getting to my head. But now I think I was seeing me.’

Agnes seemed perturbed, momentarily. ‘Well, perhaps you were, Old Bean, and perhaps you were not. But it really makes no difference because nothing actually happened.’

Wilbur studied her uncertain expression with interest. ‘You say that as if there was another way it could have happened. As though I could have, somehow, changed things.’

‘An interesting hypothesis, but what on earth would you have wanted to change? It was your honeymoon. You had just married the woman you loved …’

The train slowed. Wilbur looked out of the window, then back to Agnes, but she had gone. She probably realised he was about to ask a question too difficult even for her.





The Cemetery


Once, somewhere in 1969, the Midnight Train stopped at the cemetery.

It was a strange thing, being a ghost amid graves.

He wondered about all the names on the headstones. What had their experiences been like? Had their lives sped and stuttered in front of them in a similar fashion? Were any of them here now?

He reached Wilbur.

He was sitting on a bench staring at a grave.