Chapter 16
The Time Traveller
He opened the carriage door.
He was now somewhere quite light.
Sunshine and pretty cotton-wool clouds. He looked around and saw the rubble. Acres of dust and bricks. Fragments of walls, like lost pieces of a giant jigsaw.
There was a billboard on one wall, still mostly intact. An old-fashioned advert. An elaborate illustration of a swan standing on a box of matches.
It was all distantly familiar, but he couldn’t place it until he caught sight of the row of Victorian houses.
He knew this street. It was Glossop Road. In his hometown. Sheffield.
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.