Chapter 21
Dust
He was inside Bagdale’s Bookshop.
It was quite dark, darker than he could remember it, and dust hung in the air on shafts of sunlight.
There was a boy of about thirteen years perusing a shelf of books. A tall, slightly intense-looking boy, now pulling out a copy of The Old Man and the Sea.
The Ghost stood there watching as a man in a cardigan and thick-rimmed glasses spotted the boy and hobbled over to him.
‘Mr Bagdale,’ muttered the Ghost, as the man walked right through his ghostly body on something of a furious mission. The shop owner was only in his late forties but looked twenty years older. He had a lopsided gait and a croak in his voice attributable to pipe smoke and whisky.
‘You!’ said Mr Bagdale.
But young Wilbur was already on the first page, and lost in the simplicity of the sentences.
‘I said you there!’
The Ghost remembered this. Or at least thought he did. But this was not the only time it had happened. It was something of a pattern.
Wilbur turned around. ‘Oh. Hello, sir.’ This was, after all, the era when every adult man with a cross look on his face – there were a lot of them – was an automatic ‘sir’.
‘Is there any chance that you will be buying this book? The one which you are tarnishing …? Or is this your usual Saturday routine of clogging up the place without a penny in your pocket?’
Bagdale’s Bookshop was now a very different proposition to the one when Mrs Agnes Bagdale had been in charge.
Young Wilbur had never known what it was like back then, but he had overheard people talk about it.
His new English teacher, Miss Graham, for one, had reminisced about the ‘days when you could go in and trip over a dog and land in a happy pile of detective novels’.
It was a bit more formal now, and the books were all on shelves.
It had lost its chaos, but also its customers.
Unlike his mother, Mr Arthur Bagdale didn’t really care about books – or readers or authors – and was just running it like any other business. One where readers didn’t count unless they were spending. And, of course, Wilbur had no money to spend.
‘If you aren’t buying a book, get out of here, lad.’
Then came the sound of tutting from behind the counter. Wilbur turned – along with his ghost – to see an old and frail woman sitting there, reading a novel called The Long Goodbye.
‘Oh, Arthur, leave the boy alone,’ she said.
‘Agnes,’ said the Ghost, realising it was her.
‘Stay out of this, Mother, this isn’t your shop any more.’
Agnes smiled a sly little smile. ‘I know that. Because my shop had actual customers.’
Mr Bagdale reached for the hip flask in his pocket. Took a swig. ‘Well, this boy is not a customer. He is a browser. That is why I got rid of the chairs, Mother. We don’t want people just sitting there, reading …’
‘Oh yes, wouldn’t that be terrible,’ she said with a wheeze. ‘A bookshop with readers.’
‘Mother, please.’
‘Books are there to be read. And a good rule for a bookshop is to let people fall in love with books. Not that you have followed any of the rules I’ve told you …’
‘I am running a business here, Mother, not a public library.’
‘Thought you were running a distillery,’ she grumbled, ‘with all that tasting you are doing.’
‘I’ve tidied the place up. I don’t need your rules. It used to be a mess, Mother.’
‘It was a happy mess that followed some very strict thinking. Rules should be there to help. To let things live. You don’t have rules. You just have a grouchy temperament, Arthur. You need to read more.’
And then she looked at the young Wilbur, after Mr Bagdale yanked the book from him to squeeze it back on the shelf. She placed her book down on her lap. She had no hat, these days, but her white hair was short and elegant, and she wore a red knitted shawl.
‘Don’t worry about him, Old Bean.’
The Ghost smiled. It was strangely reassuring to remember that he had been called Old Bean by Agnes even when he was twelve years old.
And then – something else he remembered – the old lady pulled out her little purse and put some shillings down on the counter.
‘There. You should read it. It’s a good book … ’
Mr Bagdale gave her a scornful look. ‘Mother! We can’t be giving books away!’
‘It’s not giving … It’s paying. I am paying with my own pension for a book.’
Wilbur felt awkward, and a little ashamed. He knew his brother would not have hesitated to take it. Hell, Dougie would have already shoved the book up his jacket and walked out with it. ‘It’s all right. I can get it from the library …’
And Wilbur quickly walked out and into a grey afternoon as his ghost stood there, watching the front of the Midnight Train arrive right inside the shop.
Agnes’s ghost leaned out. She looked first to her old self and then to her son, taking another swig from his flask. It was hard to read her face, or what she was thinking. But her tight little smile seemed to be fighting back some powerful emotion. ‘Come on, Wilbur … Let’s be on our way.’