The Midnight Train (The Midnight World, #2)(8)

He was back on the same street in the north of England he had known as a child. The one that had been bombed by the Germans at the start of the war and which still looked like a wasteland years later.

‘Oh my,’ muttered Wilbur. He had never been able to process the scale of things or the truth of difficult emotions. So even now, he was reliant on understated mutterings to comfort him. Oh my.

Then there was a noise. Or, more accurately, a collection of noises. Boys, yelling at each other. He looked a little further along the street and saw them.

Children dressed from another age – from the 1945 he was born in. Long grey shorts and high socks, shirts, one with a tank top, shouting and playing football.

A little further down from the football, there was a man with a sack of coal on his back.

The past. The actual past right there in front of him. As real as it was when he lived it.

Wilbur began to move across the rubble. It felt good to be walking. His legs and hips and back so young and loose again.

As he approached the street he recognised one of the boys. The smallest, reluctantly forced to stand in goal. The familiar resting scowl there on Dougie’s face. Thin as a rail. Knobble-kneed. One of his shoes coming off the sole at the front. Must have been about seven years old.

‘Dougie …? Dougie …’

He was close now. Close enough, surely, for his brother to see him.

‘Dougie … Dougie … it’s me, Wilbur … Dougie, lad!’

Dougie pulled at a thread on his tatty tank top. Not even a flicker of response.

He just can’t see me. I really am a ghost.

A thought confirmed when someone kicked the football and he flinched as it headed in a low arc towards him, then through his chest and out his back without him feeling a thing.

Here, in the land of the living, he was a mere observer.

A tall boy ran through him too and collided with Dougie. Dougie went flying to the ground. And Dougie being Dougie, didn’t take it too well.

‘Hey, Bobby, watch it! Idiot!’

‘You mardy little pillock.’

Bobby Thomas. Thirteen years from now you will be arrested for a series of burglaries over on the Ecclesall Road and sent to Leeds Prison.

And as for Dougie …

The other boys stood around chuckling. Dougie pulled himself to his feet and swung at Bobby, a boy almost twice the size of him. Dougie pounded at him with an infinite fury and put up a reasonably even fight for a little while.

‘Oh, Dougie, lad,’ sighed Wilbur. ‘You really were always this way, weren’t you?’

‘Bobby, get off him,’ one of the boys said. ‘Get off him, that’s his mam.’

And then he saw it was true. There was a woman pushing a pram along the pavement.

Dougie’s mother. Wilbur’s mother. Edith.

She was wearing a floral summer dress that she would have made herself. She looked flush-cheeked and lost, in a kind of trance. Then she saw Dougie fighting and her face switched. Instantly hardened. She left the pram and walked over, as determined as a dog at the butcher’s.

‘Dougie, you little blighter, get here now!’

By this point Bobby had laid off but Dougie was still flailing at him. Wilbur watched Dougie grimace as their mother quickly reached for his ear and yanked him away.

‘Mam,’ Wilbur said, as she walked right through him.

Before she reached the pram, the baby began to cry.

It was only then that he realised the baby he was listening to was himself.





The Dead Gazing at Their Past


It was strangely reassuring, hearing himself cry. He didn’t really know why that was. Maybe it was because being a baby was the most optimistically pure phase of life: you would cry when you were distressed and expect a solution.

‘Mam, get off me …’ said Dougie, as the other boys resumed playing.

Wilbur followed them all along the street, right to number 77. He remembered the door having flaked and scabbed paint but it hadn’t got to that stage yet.

‘If your dad was here he’d knock you into next week.’

‘Dad’s dead, Mam. Hitler got him.’

She clipped the back of Dougie’s head. ‘Stop that talk out in the street.’

‘But he is.’

‘I bloody know that, lad. Left us with nothing but another mouth to feed, didn’t he.’

And she stared down at baby Wilbur, like he was another problem she could really do without. She’d found a way through her grief. And it was called resentment.

She opened the door. Tilted the pram and pushed baby Wilbur inside. Dougie followed, picking at his tank top again. The door shut. Wilbur tried to push it open and found himself stepping right through.

He was back in the house where he was born. Back in the small living room, made smaller by brown wallpaper, the laundry drying on racks that didn’t fully fit in the kitchen, and the ridiculously oversized table.

It wasn’t really a table, he remembered. It was a steel air-raid shelter the government had given to people who didn’t have a garden, and therefore couldn’t have the larger and more secure outside shelters. When he was little he liked sitting under it. It made him feel safe, as though the father he had never known was still around.

Maybe he had been around. Maybe that was all ghosts were. The dead gazing at their past.