Chapter 24
The Broken Glass
‘Oh no,’ said the Ghost out loud to himself. ‘I remember this.’
And he looked and saw it before they did: the car, which would soon come and pull up right beside them.
Not just any old car either.
An all-gleaming, elegant black Wolseley smoothing along the road as ominously as a panther.
The kind of car that in the twenty-first century would only be seen carrying a bride to a wedding.
But this one had a blue and white sign saying POLICE on it just above the front windscreen.
Wilbur stood up, burning with shame, and started walking down the street a little way.
‘Wait up,’ said Maggie.
Wilbur didn’t know what to do, so he stopped and just stood there, facing the car and the two policemen on the front seats.
‘Have they come for you?’ whispered Doreen, making light of it. ‘For reading dull, fishy books in the street?’
‘No.’
Wilbur had already seen his brother on the back seat. The policeman in the passenger seat stepped out of the car. He had a long solemn face which stared straight at Wilbur.
‘Ooh,’ said Doreen, as the policeman opened the rear door and out stepped Dougie.
This was 1958 Dougie. Rebel-mode Dougie.
Greased-back hair and tightly buttoned shirt and drainpipe jeans and white socks and large brogues he called his beetle-crushers.
The one who pinned Wilbur up against the wall in arguments and stole his food when their mother wasn’t looking.
Doreen’s voice was deliberately loud enough for all to hear. ‘Who’s that wrong ’un?’
Wilbur shrugged. He turned back to the girls quickly, but not fast enough to avoid Dougie’s eye. ‘No idea.’
Dougie was sharp when he wanted to be. He’d heard all this. The Ghost could see the hurt in his face.
‘Well, that’s charming, Wilbo.’
Doreen laughed. Maggie grimaced at the awkwardness. Young Wilbur turned to face the scene.
‘Is your mam in?’ the police officer asked him.
‘I don’t know,’ sighed Wilbur.
‘Yes you do,’ said his ghost. ‘Don’t lie to the police officer.’
But, of course, it didn’t really matter. What was going to happen was going to happen, and he couldn’t do anything but watch. Which was all a ghost could do.
Wilbur stared at Maggie and wanted to telepathically convey that he wasn’t just a bad little brother ashamed of his sibling. That his life was complicated.
And somehow the way Maggie was looking at him made him feel she understood. That was one of her gifts. The way she could read the whole book of someone from a single page.
Dougie, meanwhile, was smiling a rare smile. Wilbur hadn’t caught that smile at the time but his ghost did now. It was an interesting character trait: that the closest Dougie ever got to contentment was when the trouble inside his head was aligned with the trouble he caused outside it.
‘You’re a dark horse, lad,’ he said, looking at Wilbur with the two girls, as both policemen dragged Dougie over to the door of number 77.
‘Ooh, we’re going to get a show,’ giggled Doreen, before getting a sharp elbow from Maggie. ‘A matinée.’
Wilbur and his ghost both felt the burn of shame and hurt as their mother answered the door. She had been drinking the sherry she got cheap from the pub: her cheeks red and her expression dazed. This was a new development. Normally she only drank on her days off or after her shift, not before it.
‘Oh Christ, what’s he done?’
‘Look,’ said Wilbur, ‘you two better go without me. My mam will need me.’
Doreen giggled. ‘We can stay. This is fun.’
‘Reenie.’
And with that Maggie tugged at her friend’s arm to leave, and the Ghost watched his young self stare at them as they walked away, towards ice cream and milkshake and a jukebox.
But suddenly she stopped. Looked around.
‘I’m Maggie, by the way,’ she said. ‘Maggie Shaw. And this is Doreen but I call her Reenie. What do they call you?’
He stood there in his ragged uniform. ‘Wilbur. I’m … Wilbur.’
‘All right, Wilbur.’
‘Careful walking down there,’ he added, with genuine concern. ‘Someone’s smashed a bottle and there’s glass all over.’
‘I see it. Thank you.’
‘Knight in shining armour!’ laughed Doreen. ‘Ashamed of his brother, mind.’
And Maggie giggled a little as they went down the gentle slope of the hill, then turned back and smiled at him.
As he watched Maggie leave he felt embarrassed for her having got a taste of his chaotic life.
She looked around once more, the concern and warmth clear and direct.
It wasn’t love at first sight. But it was a kind of deep and instant friendship, an invisible thread in the air between them that he didn’t know how to hold on to.
‘See you around, Wilbur.’
Meanwhile the professionally solemn police officer was taking Dougie’s flick-knife out of his own pocket.
‘We caught him in town, Mrs Budd. Causing trouble with some other lads. He had this on ’im. They’re making it illegal just to own one of these. So, if he gets caught again, he could end up in the nick.’
And the Ghost knew what was ahead. He remembered the family argument that evening.
He remembered his mam missing her shift and scratching her skin until the friction made a mark, and crying and becoming ferocious and calling his brother Satan and she seemed to believe it, and he remembered Dougie kicking walls and punching his fist through a window.
He remembered lying on his bed trying to escape into his book but unable to concentrate on a single sentence.
He remembered Dougie getting drunk on their mother’s sherry, and leaning over him and spitting on Wilbur’s forehead as he lay in bed.
‘You’re not better than me, Wilbur …’
But to his relief he didn’t need to relive all that because just then he heard the loud whistle of a steam train, ready to take him away.