The Midnight Train (The Midnight World, #2)(63)

‘Get off me.’

The Dreamer looked down at his sandals in shame.

‘This world is full of folk who look but never see,’ said the Ghost.

‘I remember those words. But not who said them.’

‘It was Victor. Victor Willows. You know, the homeless bloke in Sheffield who’d lost everything in the war. The one we used to chat to.’

‘Ah, yes, I remember him.’

The Ghost nodded. ‘It’s a pity he doesn’t,’ he said as they watched the other Wilbur climbing into the taxi and telling the driver to head to the Budd Books offices on Haymarket.

And the two spectres stood there in the road as the taxi drove right through them.

‘Okay,’ the Dreamer said, ‘I see it now.’





A Thought While Looking Out of the Window


The incredibly annoying thing about being dead was that you got all your priorities in order, just when it was too late to do anything about them.





Maximum Speed


The Dreamer was dumbfounded. ‘You just carried on? You didn’t slow down your life … even after all that?’

‘I sped up, if anything. I had mistaken being caffeinated and adrenalised with being alive. I had mistaken an addiction for purpose. There was no balance. I got greedy. The old gain, gain, gain. Our strategy became one of takeovers … We went hard on the discounts … We got into trouble with local booksellers because we were moving next door to them and taking their customers. I felt a kind of calm when competitors closed down, never thinking of what that meant to people’s lives. I wanted a world of no competition, no variety. Just Budd Books everywhere, my name on everything. I’d totally lost what I was in this for and it was as far away from Agnes Bagdale’s original shop as it was possible to be. I was Thomas and Ebenezer together at times … But a new era had dawned. And there were no punishments for greed. Only rewards.’

Something caught his eye through the window: Wilbur – suited, with slicked-back hair – on stage at the Excellence in Business Awards at the Metropolitan Hotel on Park Lane in London, forgetting to mention Maggie in his speech, while she sat on a table next to his empty chair, trying not to worry about the lump she had found.





Live How the Dead Would If Only They Had the Chance


As the train continued along its track, the man who was dead explained himself to the man who was merely dreaming.

‘It is ironic,’ he told him, ‘that it only takes a moment to die, but a whole lifetime to learn how to live. And it’s been occurring to me, just as it’s too late, that I may have lived in entirely the wrong fashion for who I was inside.’

‘So you’re telling me my future is a waste of time?’

The Ghost shook his head imploringly. ‘You are still alive. Just asleep. It’s not too late for you.’

‘Not too late for what?’

‘To live how the dead would if they only had the chance. But to do that, you need to see what happened … to you and Maggie.’





Empty Rooms


The train pulled up outside a large, intimidatingly grand house on Sumner Place in South Kensington on a sunny evening in August.

The house was set back from the street behind a wide front garden, laid with immaculate tiles, and home to three large square pots, each containing a laurel tree.

It was an impressive house.

The Dreamer looked at it with mouth agape. ‘This is ours?’

‘Uh huh. Oh yes. Six bedrooms. Five absolutely unnecessary.’

Wilbur, suited, wearily climbed the steps. He was talking into an old (new) Motorola mobile phone, with a little bulbous aerial sticking out of the top.

‘Wow,’ said the dreaming honeymooner of 1974, ‘a portable phone!’

‘Yes,’ Wilbur was saying, ‘we need the projection reports by Tuesday … Yes … Okay … Bye, Sheila.’

The Dreamer looked to the Ghost. ‘Who’s Sheila?’

‘My PA.’

They followed forty-nine-year-old Wilbur inside the house. A wide hallway led into a vast living room with expansive bay windows, a large opulent sofa and framed art on the wall, including Maggie’s poster for the Sheffield Crucible’s production of The Cherry Orchard.

And there was Maggie herself on the sofa. She was as beautiful as she had ever been. She was exactly herself, so looking at her could only ever feel like looking at home. Yet there was a barrier up. And now there was a sense of guilt as he looked at her. The way someone watches a wound that they inflicted.

The Ghost observed she was wearing a white T-shirt advertising a Kandinsky exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. She had done a little freelance design work for them, helping with a catalogue.

The Ghost thought about her in a way that he never properly did when he was alive, at least not during this time. He had the desire to be tuned in, calm, just focused entirely on her. Rather than his head lost in digital economic graphs.

‘Oh, Maggie, I’m sorry. I missed you,’ said the Ghost.

That was what was coming to mind now. Not just how much he didn’t know about what happened to her after the divorce, but all those years before it. How much he missed.

He knew the basics. He knew she had been struggling, really, ever since she had left Sheffield. She hadn’t worked full time in-house since she arrived in London nearly two decades before. She had initially said she enjoyed the freedom of being freelance, but he doubted that was still true. That was before the withering of her friends in the north, before the miscarriage, before Claudette snubbed her after Charlie was sacked, before they tried one more time for a baby, and before – not long after – she realised she was now only wanting a baby to reach a husband who didn’t want to be reached. Before she swallowed her dreams, one morsel at a time, all while feeling enough guilt not to moan.