The Midnight Train (The Midnight World, #2)(4)

Still, he couldn’t help himself. ‘I would like to speak to you again. Would that be all right?’

‘Yes,’ she said, in her frail and aged voice. ‘I would like that.’





A Fragment


He put the phone down to find he was out of breath. As if having run a marathon. But he had the sudden urge to find something. He wanted her letter. Proof of their time as a couple, or rather, the first record of their separation.

He hadn’t looked at it in years. It was under the eaves of the attic, behind a door. He went there and crouched down on his hands and knees to crawl deeper into the cupboard, passing a chaos of old bills and documents and Trade magazines. Motes of dust floated around his head like a miniature galaxy.

‘What are you doing, Wilbur?’ he muttered to himself. ‘Silly old fool.’

Then he found it. Or at least one of its pages. The last page. He tried unsuccessfully to find the others, ignoring the fact he felt increasingly unwell. He was panting now and his head spun when he stood up. He gathered himself and went downstairs with the yellowed page in his hands.





The Last Page of Maggie’s Letter


… You are forever somewhere else, even when you are right next to me.

It is important for me not to succumb to fantasy. I doubt I will even travel the world. I imagine I will be consumed with looking after my dad’s increasing needs back in Sheffield.

Anyway, this is not easy.

I know you think of me as strong, but I am not.

I feel as fragile as a leaf in the wind right now.

It seems like I have been holding my breath through this whole letter.

I feel if I exhale I will cry and never stop crying.

I know you went through a lot when you were younger, as did I. But we can’t be trapped by that for ever. I can’t fix you. I can’t even fix myself.

This is heartbreaking. But sometimes you have to let your heart break in order to stay alive.

I want you to understand that.

I want you to understand too that our love is always still there. Can you remember my silly theory of art? That people grow old around art but the art stays fresh? Well, I think in a way that is true for memory. I don’t know how to explain it but I like to believe we are still, somehow, at the theatre when you walked over to me. Or on our wedding day. Or on our honeymoon. Or looking up at the stars one drunken evening. Or happy, pasting up wallpaper at Broomhill.

I love you, Wilbur.

But I am also leaving you.

I don’t know where the past hides, but I will meet you there.

Maggie

x





Miles Away


As he read the words, Wilbur was overwhelmed by a pain in his neck, running down his arm, coupled with a pressure in his chest. By the time he got to the end of the letter the pain was so intense it engulfed everything else, making his surroundings seem miles away. He staggered outside to get the help of Josh, the gardener, occupied on the tractor-mower. Wilbur reached the lawn before collapsing, while the letter lay back in the house on the kitchen tiles, never to be read again.





The Wilbur Station


Wilbur wouldn’t wake up in the ambulance. He wouldn’t wake up in Bedford Hospital. At one minute after midnight his heart beat for the last time.

He was dead.

And the interesting thing about death is how there is no thinking you are dead when you are dead. Like life, it arrives as its own self-evident fact.

That wasn’t to say it wasn’t confusing. Or troubling.

It certainly became that way.

But at first, the moment after he died, he had felt a light.

It wasn’t really the white light he had heard about. It wasn’t something to walk towards, but something already there. It was more of a soft yellow, like the sun through a thick layer of cloud.

He had a fleeting sense of calm.

A harmoniousness.

Maybe this was it. Maybe this was how it was going to be. Hovering in golden light for all eternity. A soul suspended in a happy void.

An existence outside time or pressure or concern.

But then, he was falling with nothing at all below him, gaining a kind of weight, until he landed back inside himself. Or something that felt like himself. Something like a body. He looked around. He was somewhere darker now but he could still see well enough. There was a red-brick wall behind him and paving below him. It looked a little like the first train station he had ever known, but instead of a sign reading ‘Sheffield’ there was one which said ‘Wilbur’.

The way he was experiencing his moment of death was as a kind of train station.

A desolate platform, in the middle of nowhere. Without a train.

‘This is …’ he said, gaspingly. But he was too shocked to finish the sentence. Even the fact that he was speaking was a shock. His mind was reverberating as if from some giant cosmic cymbal crash.

The paved ground ended a short way in front of him, in a drop towards the steel rails and wooden sleepers of a train track.

He saw something twirling through the air.

A small, rectangular piece of card. He reached out and caught it. A ticket, with the following typed words: Single journey

The Midnight Train

Departure Time: 00.01 Sunday 19 April ‘Hello?’

But there was no one around. There was nothing to do except wait.