The Midnight Train (The Midnight World, #2)(65)

‘I don’t know. I’m just tired. I’m just being unreasonable.’

‘Yes. I can see that.’

The observer who watched this from a dream was confused. ‘Why are we being like this?’

The Ghost sighed the kind of sad, defeated sigh that only the dead can manage. ‘Well, Dreamer, because she was right. She was right. I had lost my compass.’





Something Changed


‘I just think it’s quite exciting. The plans for the shopping centre. It’s good for the city. It’s actually where the second Sheffield shop is going to be …’

Maggie smiled a distant smile. ‘Isn’t that strange, how the cinema is being knocked down and a Budd Books is going to be in its place.’

Wilbur was beginning, slowly, to realise he was in some kind of trouble.

His mind shifted away from thoughts of the initial public offering he was preparing towards his wife.

‘I’m sorry I’ve been so busy recently.’

‘Recently? You’ve been busy since the seventies.’

‘Well, yes, I have. I underestimated how much it would take of me.’

The Dreamer noted the way Maggie was staring at her husband. Like she wanted to see more in him than was there.

‘Something changed inside you when your mam died,’ Maggie said. ‘I should have recognised it, but I didn’t. Obviously Dougie dying was the root of it all, and never knowing your dad, but I think there was still hope you could get through that. Even inside your ambition. But when your mam died the lights went out. Before that I liked you focusing on work because I believed you when you said it was about us. You were wanting to make a better future for us. We were going to retire young. And travel the world.’

‘That can still happen.’

‘My dad has Parkinson’s.’

‘Oh God, poor Alfred,’ said the Dreamer.

But the Wilbur in the room said nothing.

‘I found out a month ago but there was never the right moment to tell you. I want to be near him. I want to go to Sheffield. I want to move back.’

The Ghost told his younger dreaming self to watch closely. ‘Look. Look at our first reaction. It isn’t about Alfred. It isn’t about Maggie. Look.’

And, indeed, it wasn’t.

‘I can’t move back, Mags. I can’t. I need to be in London to oversee the IPO. The company’s going public. We’re going to be on the stock market. After that I can take a back seat. But right now, I have to be in London … There’s no way I can’t be here.’

Maggie stared at him as tears glazed her eyes. ‘There is a way. You just can’t see it. We’re nearly fifty. You always said you would quit at fifty.’

‘Well, I’m nearly able to. I just have to make sure everything is handled right, and if the market flotation goes well—’

‘You didn’t used to talk like this.’

Wilbur looked around at their plush living room. ‘Look what we’ve achieved, though. Look at this place.’

‘This wasn’t my dream, Wilbur.’

‘It’s a comfortable life. A dream life.’

Maggie laughed bitterly. ‘Whose dream? I haven’t worked for this. You know I never wanted this. To rattle around all day, in guilty luxury, with nothing to do apart from Tuesdays when I go to Newham and help out at the trust … That’s it. I don’t have any contact with old friends. I haven’t seen Doreen in years, and have only met her Rosie once. Claudette won’t speak to me because of the Charlie business. And everyone round here is a millionaire’s wife …’

‘You are a millionaire’s wife. It doesn’t define you.’

She stared at him as a tear fell. ‘To be a wife you have to have a husband. Someone who doesn’t want to avoid you. Someone, you know, who looks out for the broken glass.’

‘Broken glass? What are you talking about?’

The Ghost and the Dreamer knew what she was talking about. But the middle-aged Wilbur in the room was struggling.

‘Remember when we were kids and I first met you? When I was with Doreen on Glossop Road.’

‘When I denied I had a brother,’ Wilbur said, full of self-loathing.

‘No. I don’t mean that part. I mean the part where you told me to look out for some broken glass on the street. I thought it was the most romantic thing ever. To have a boy think of me like that.’

‘I can’t remember. But, Maggie, you are still everything.’

She shook her head firmly. She shut away tears. ‘No. I am just a woman who makes macaroni cheese for one till the rest of time. I just sit here reading and trying not to go insane.’

‘You do tons. You have your art, you have the charity, you have the book club—’

‘The book club?’

Of all the stupid and patronising things Wilbur was saying, the one he regretted most was bringing up the book club. She didn’t like the book club. She had told him that. She wanted to get out but was too polite to leave.

‘Do you ever feel this isn’t our real life?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, this wasn’t the plan. This wasn’t what we got married for. To spend no time together. I feel like there is a real us, somewhere else … An us that was content with the world we had and didn’t need the moon and the stars as well. An us that is happy at least some of the time. We left that couple somewhere else. We aren’t us any more. We didn’t need luxury once upon a time. We just needed a bench.’