Chapter 23
The First Time He Ever Saw Her
He was there again.
Glossop Road.
Looking around he saw he was in almost the exact same place the train had stopped before. Only on the road itself now.
He saw the rubble had been cleared away. In its place was a small row of newly built red-brick council houses.
And then the Ghost turned around and saw himself in his scruffy school uniform and tattered shoes with holes in the toes – sitting out on the doorstep reading Hemingway with a frowning expression of focus.
He did this a lot, he remembered. He probably read the whole library out there.
Books for kids, books for grown-ups. Ageless tale after ageless tale.
The Three Musketeers, Treasure Island, Frankenstein, The Moon and Sixpence, The Secret Garden, Rebecca, Moby-Dick, The Call of the Wild, Cold Comfort Farm, Kafka’s short stories, and a strange and exciting science-fiction novel called The Invention of Morel that he had picked up because the author was from Argentina and he wondered what imaginations were like so far away.
Stories were his playground. They were his freedom.
Through them he could imagine himself a rich man, an adventurer, a hero, a villain, or simply incredibly well-fed.
Depending on the tale, he could picture himself surviving hardship or living in greatness.
They gave him room to exist beyond the red bricks and restricted life of Glossop Road.
The Ghost remembered them all. Sometimes, like today, it was a book he had first laid eyes on in Bagdale’s, and sometimes just something he had happened upon while at the library.
‘Oh, Wilbur,’ sighed the Ghost.
Wilbur looked up from the page to have a little break to think about something. He was casting his eyes further along the pavement, seeing in the distance the glimmer of smashed glass from a beer bottle. Then he went back to reading again.
He had been encouraged by his English teacher, Miss Graham, to view books as a means to an end, towards opportunities in his life.
But for Wilbur, reading was more than that.
He didn’t read because he wanted a good job.
Though he absolutely did want a good job, when the time arrived.
But no. He read because stories gave him room to grow beyond the world he was given.
They helped him feel as if the lives he read about intertwined with his own, like threads in an ever-expanding rope. Stories made him strong.
Whenever the weather was warm or even mild he would sit outside on the street reading. He wasn’t and had never been the most social of creatures, but he had always liked to be out in the world rather than retreating from it.
Sometimes, if boys were playing football out in the street, he would get a jeer or two, but generally he was left alone.
Everyone knew who his brother was, and Dougie was nineteen now and would gladly and enthusiastically punch anyone in the face who disrespected his family.
He would possibly even bite them too, as he was something of an animal.
Wilbur the Ghost walked over.
Once there he stood for a little moment, then crouched down beside himself with ease. He had the hip mobility of a twenty-nine-year-old once more.
‘You loved that book, didn’t you?’ he said to his young self. ‘What’s this? Your second or third time reading it?’
Obviously there was no response. The consciousness of young Wilbur was on a different plane to the consciousness of his spectral form. But remembering how his baby self had followed him with his eyes, he held out hope and placed a hand in front of young Wilbur’s eyes. And waved it.
‘Come on. Look. Can you see me? You saw me once, little lad. Can you see me again?’
But no. Not a glimmer from those studious eyes.
Two girls were walking along the pavement.
They were in uniform but not that of Willow Park.
About the same age as Wilbur or a smidge older.
They were from De la Salle, the grammar school on the other side of town.
This wasn’t unusual. Glossop Road ran all the way into town and was often full of young folk from all over the city after school hours, heading to browse shops or sit in the Milk Bar listening to rock and roll.
The girl on the right had red hair and freckles and a scrunched-up expression that seemed to indicate a hard and humorous attitude to life.
The other girl was holding her satchel in front of her. In contrast to her friend there was a calmness to her. This was the first time he ever saw her, the first time he noted her smile or the intelligence of her eyes.
It was Maggie.
He remembered this day. And it was, he supposed, why he was stopping here.
There were days in life that rolled by and were never really thought of again.
And then there were days that were so beloved or important that they contained inside them everything that came after.
Russian doll days, that were always inside the expanding future.
And so now he was watching it all once more, in vivid detail.
The girl with the red hair – named Doreen Taylor, he would later find out – nudged her friend to point out the amusing sight ahead of them.
The strange skinny boy reading outside on the street.
And he could see now what he had never seen the first time.
The moment Maggie Shaw first laid her eyes on him.
Her expression seemed to contain amusement, curiosity and sympathy.
Then Doreen spoke up.
‘Flippin’ ’eck, Maggie, there’s a boy sitting out in’t street thinking it’s a library.’
‘Don’t worry ’bout her,’ said Maggie, needling her friend. ‘She’s never read a book.’
‘I can tell.’ Wilbur suppressed a slight smile.
Maggie laughed.
Doreen lost her humour. ‘Cheeky wazzock.’ And she elbowed Maggie towards the wall a little.
‘So what are you reading?’ said Maggie, tilting her head to see the cover.
‘The Old Man and the Sea.’
‘What’s that about, then?’
‘It’s about this old fisherman who’s really unlucky because he hasn’t caught a fish in ages but then one day he catches a fish but it’s too big to put on his boat and—’
‘That sounds as dull as owt,’ said Doreen.
‘Aye, it does a bit, to be fair,’ Maggie agreed. ‘I’ve been reading How Green Was My Valley. I like it. The characters are like people but better because you don’t have to talk to them.’
Wilbur looked up at her and stood up. There was something about her that made him want to be taller. ‘Yes. Not many folk are worth talking to.’
Doreen nodded. ‘My dad says that. He’s miserable too.’ Then, randomly: ‘He’s a foreman at Hawke Street.’
‘It’s the steel works,’ explained Maggie.
‘I know.’
‘Does your dad work there?’ Doreen asked. ‘Maybe my dad’s your dad’s boss?’
‘No. Well, he used to. He died in the war. He was in the air force. I never knew him.’
And Maggie’s face flinched just a little, as if some of his pain had splintered and shot through the air just by saying it.
She was then and always as incapable of hiding emotion on her face as a river was able to hide the ripples from a fallen stone.
And the Wilbur of 1958 clearly felt rotten for sending the conversation downward.
‘Sorry,’ Doreen said. She wasn’t too bad underneath it all. ‘That’s horrid.’
‘Don’t be. It’s all right. You can’t miss someone you never knew.’ Possibly the biggest lie he ever told. He wanted to change the subject. ‘I’d like to be a writer.’
He didn’t know, even at the time, if that was what he wanted to be. But in that moment he did. In that moment he wanted to be whoever had written How Green Was My Valley.
‘Nah. Really?’ said Doreen. ‘Do you, honest like? Aren’t writers lettuces?’
‘Lettuces?’ Maggie asked.
‘Aye, big and boring wet things that people say do you good.’
He showed her the front cover of his book, and remembered something Miss Graham had told him. ‘Ernest Hemingway is not a lettuce. He blew up Nazi submarines in his own boat with his own explosives.’
‘Marilyn doesn’t think writers are dull,’ added Maggie. ‘She’s married to one.’
Doreen tilted her head. ‘Is she ’eck as like!’
‘She is!’
‘Marilyn Monroe?’
‘Aye. Unless you know of any other Marilyns.’
‘But she could have Rock Hudson. She could have Marlon Brando …’ Her eyes widened at her own expanding revelations. ‘She could have Elvis Presley. What is she doing with a writer?’
The mystery hung in the air for a while.
‘I don’t know,’ Maggie said. ‘It’s odd. Maybe she just likes him.
’ She smiled at Wilbur and he smiled back and his ghost stood there understanding, like they didn’t, the enormity of this moment.
‘I think I’d like to be a writer, actually,’ she continued.
‘Better than being a secretary or a housewife.’
Doreen looked disgusted. ‘Is it? I can’t wait to be a housewife. I’m going to be like a Catholic and have twenty babies.’
As the Ghost watched, he thought of Doreen the last time he saw her, in about 1980.
She had just left her slob of a husband and their fish and chip shop to finally find love and self-acceptance with a woman called Rosie who she had met on holiday in Lyme Regis, while perusing postcards.
Looking at her now, Wilbur could see the sadness in her, a desperate and overcompensating effort to be something society was ready to accept.
Meanwhile, young Wilbur watched Maggie laugh and was momentarily mesmerised.
‘Nineteen boys and one girl,’ Doreen said. ‘Called Jacqueline. Little Jackie. I can see her pigtails. Anyway, I thought you wanted to be an artist.’
Maggie was a bit embarrassed then. ‘Not really …’
‘She likes drawing,’ Doreen explained. ‘She’s really good. She can even do horses.’
Maggie changed the subject. ‘We’re off into town. You can come with us if you want. We’re off to the Milk Bar.’
‘Aye,’ said Doreen. ‘You look like you need a milkshake.’
Wilbur thought about this. His mother wouldn’t care. She would be off out in a minute anyway to begin her shift. But he had no money at all except a few farthings in his jam jar upstairs, and he doubted that would be enough for a drink.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
Maggie looked at his shoes. At the small hole in one of the toes. He felt the shame of it.
‘Our treat,’ she told him, meeting his eyes.
And there was something about the way she looked at him that made him feel better, like she didn’t judge him in the slightest. And that might have been it, that might have been the seed that was planted in his mind, that would years later bloom into the courage needed to ask her out.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I will come along.’
But then, as so often when young Wilbur had been on the cusp of happiness, reality snatched it from him. As though he had a reverse guardian angel, trying to test him, trying to sour him and make him bitter ahead of time.