Chapter 17
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.
‘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.
It was dawning on him: he was really back here. Being dead wasn’t to step out of time, but to step out of its usual rules.
He walked into the room.
Dougie was sulking in the armchair, while their mother picked baby Wilbur out of the pram. She put him on her shoulder as Wilbur walked closer. He had a good look at himself.
‘Hello, me,’ he said.
Then he realised something. Something quite remarkable. The baby’s eyes had been floating around and then they had fixed. The baby was looking at him. This little living Wilbur was, somehow, staring at his dead self.