Chapter 29
The Bench
The Ghost watched his young self walking through the trees.
He walked behind Wilbur at a similar pace now. He was out into the clearing. And that was when he saw Maggie. She was sat on a bench, overlooking the pond and the small rocky waterfall, with a sketch-pad on her knee.
She was so studiously paying attention to her drawing that Wilbur decided to leave her to it and walked right past. There had been an internal debate between his extrovert and introvert side, and the introvert had won.
She had looked so lost in the process of drawing he doubted she would want the interference.
‘Ignoring me now, are we?’
Unlike Wilbur himself, his ghost could see the smirk on her face as she said it, leaning over her sketch-pad.
‘No,’ said Wilbur, nervously, as he stopped. ‘Not at all.’ He turned to see her. It was like facing the sun. She made him feel warm. ‘Hello, Maggie.’
‘Oh. So you didn’t recognise me? Even though I said hello a few weeks ago at the library. I’m that forgettable.’
The Ghost watched his naive sixteen-year-old face turn a shade of crimson.
‘You’re not forgettable.’
Maggie couldn’t contain her laughter. ‘I’m just joshing with you. Don’t look so scared. It’s my twisted sense of humour.’
‘Oh. No. It’s fine.’
‘How have you been?’
‘Good. Grand, actually. I’ve just got a job. At the bookshop.’
‘That’s fantastic!’ she beamed.
‘Aye. Bagdale’s. Yeah. Selling books beats Hawke Street Steel Works.’
‘I can imagine.’ She covered her sketch-pad. Embarrassed of her drawing. ‘I like drawing but I’m not very good at it.’
‘Well, I get that,’ said Wilbur. ‘I write poems sometimes but I wouldn’t want anyone to actually read them.’
‘That’s a shame. What do you write your poems about?’
‘Oh. All sorts of things. Stupid stuff. Clouds. Crows. The war. I wrote one about the Freedom Riders. You know, in America.’
‘Ah. Politics.’
‘Sometimes. To be fair, it was a really bad poem.’
She smiled warmly and made room for Wilbur to sit next to her. It was the most natural thing in the world. That was one of the things he liked about her. The way she had an impulse to make the awkward feel normal. It was a kind of care.
She was always that person. The one who was just in tune. The one who knew that life was easier if you cared about people. She just made life more natural.
They talked about different things. They talked about the library and Bagdale’s Bookshop.
They talked about how they wanted to see the world.
They talked about how they quite liked to be spooked – her by Alfred Hitchcock films and him by Shirley Jackson novels.
They talked about how weird they sometimes felt, so out of place in their town.
‘I feel like no one wants you to think,’ she said, and he nodded.
‘Just do, do, do. No thinking. Get good marks. Dress smart. God Save the Queen. Then go to work as a secretary or be a housewife and stay home for ever and the lads go to the furnaces. I want a life of art, you know? Observing not just following … I don’t know.
I’m told I have ideas out of my station. ’
Wilbur smiled. ‘I like your station.’
They talked about a book they both loved, Around the World in Eighty Days.
‘When I was little that was who I wanted to be,’ she told him. ‘I wanted to jump bail and board a steamer to Hong Kong just like Phileas Fogg.’
‘You’d need a valet.’
‘You could be my valet, lad. I’d let you.’
They giggled.
They talked about Maggie’s friend Claudette, who came to Sheffield as a baby with her parents from somewhere called St Vincent in the Caribbean. They talked about old-fashioned attitudes.
‘But I think things are going to change,’ Wilbur said.
‘I think young people are different to old people. Seriously. I think we are. It’s not just the haircuts.
I think there is something behind it all.
I think the world will be better when we grow up.
My English teacher thinks there is a revolution coming. ’
‘I don’t know,’ said Maggie. ‘I think we like to think that. But maybe the revolution will just be internal. Like we learn to accept ourselves. Like, I dunno … trees and water. I like coming here because it seems more true. Don’t you think we aren’t so different to other animals?
’ She pointed to a duck. ‘Do young ducks become better ducks than their parents? What if a duck is just a duck and a human is just a human and we don’t change as much as we think?
Ducks still keep quacking and humans still keep hating. ’
‘Oh! A cynic!’
‘I don’t know, Wilbur. Maybe I am. But there is still fun in observing it all.’
Emotion rose up like magma. The Ghost could hardly stand it. He felt like he needed to interrupt, but remembered Agnes telling him not to meddle. And besides, it was deeply unlikely to work, as he had been told.
But it felt so intensely strange, being there, watching this back. So lovely, so terrible, so innocent, so everything. Listening to their conversation was like watching someone learning a new language.
It was the start of something. Not that either of them knew it yet.
In fact, they wouldn’t know it for many years to come.
But he thought about it now. He imagined their conversations over the years as a vast plant, branching off all over the place, each conversation different but part of the same whole, growing from that first seedling on Glossop Road and trying to break out of the ground here.
‘We’re too young to be cynical.’
‘Well, Wilbur, sixteen is old for a duck,’ she said. ‘Quack.’
They laughed, then sat in silence for a little while.
‘Talk to her,’ implored the Ghost, pointlessly. ‘Come on, lad. Don’t be nervous. Ask her out. It would be the easiest thing in the world for you to just ask her out.’
Eventually, Maggie spoke. ‘My mam always said I was an old head on young shoulders. She said I had a different way about me. And I think she’s right about the old part.
I’m sixteen going on sixty-five. Mam said life is lived the wrong way round.
You need to be an old head in a young body to make the most of things. ’
‘Your mam sounds wise.’
Maggie looked sadly across the water. ‘Yes. She was. She died. Two years ago.’ She closed her eyes and winced a little, as if taking a shard of glass out of her foot. ‘They don’t even know what killed her. But she was in pain. Her stomach. They tried everything. It was horrible.’
‘Oh. I’m so sorry.’
‘That’s all right. Dad does his best. It’s just me and him. He works for the council. Parks department. He works here actually. I’m meeting him and we’re going to town. I come to the park. I like to come and just draw.’
She gave him a nervous look. But then she made the silent decision to show him her drawing. Wilbur stared at it and didn’t have to feign, even for a second, a polite response. It was a beautiful sketch of the scene in front of her. The lake, the trees, even the little waterfall.
‘I love it,’ he said. ‘It’s so good. I like the way you take the whole and then focus on the little details.’
‘Like the Midnight Train,’ muttered the Ghost, staring down at his honeymoon-wear – the short-sleeved shirt and sandals and flared jeans from years after this encounter.
‘Impressionistic but with focal points,’ Wilbur continued.
She looked at him, and needed to deflect the flattery. ‘Where did you get to talk like that?’
The Ghost cringed as Wilbur tried to sound suave. ‘And how do I talk?’
‘Posh. Long words. Impressionistic but with focal points.’
‘It’s not posh to use long words. That’s what Miss Graham, my English teacher, says.
I like her. She’s quite subversive. She says education is a tool used to prop up the class system.
She says we’re encouraged to equate the upper classes with cleverness in order for the lower classes to keep doing manual labour and not dream of anything bigger. ’
‘All right, Karl Marx. What do you dream of, then?’
Right then he wasn’t dreaming of anything at all. It was hard to dream within a moment that felt so right. ‘Well, I want to go to Oxford.’
‘To the university?’
‘Yes. After A levels. That is what I want to do. I want to study English Literature and History.’
‘I could see you as a historian. Like the one on TV who talks about Henry the Eighth and Christopher Columbus.’
Wilbur shrugged. ‘We don’t have a television.
Our mam struggles to pay the rent. Dougie has some money but Mam refuses to take any from him because she never trusts it.
He always has more than his wages, you see.
And they row about it and he says it’s for her and she ends up screaming or talking to herself. Sorry. Didn’t mean to say all that.’
She frowned. ‘Oh. I’m sorry. And I don’t mean to be rude, but if you can’t afford a television, Wilbur, how are you going to get yourself to Oxford University? Isn’t that pricey?’
‘Not if you get a scholarship.’ He pronounced ‘scholarship’ in an extra-posh, BBC Radio kind of voice.
‘Don’t you have to be a genius?’
He kept the BBC voice going, because she seemed to find it amusing. And there was no magic on earth like making her smile. ‘Well, me and Albert Einstein are really good pals …’
‘Albert Einstein died years ago,’ she laughed. ‘So he was asking you to help with his theorems when you were five years old?’
‘Four, actually.’
‘Well, it’s great to meet a real-life genius,’ she said.
‘That is why I am planning to start smoking a pipe,’ Wilbur went on. ‘All geniuses smoke one, you know.’
She laughed at him as he began to cradle and puff on an invisible pipe.
He paused, and stopped being a clown. Something about her face encouraged honesty. ‘I don’t think you have to be a genius. Because I’m not one. Just work hard … That’s what I’m hoping.’
She stared at him deeply then. And he felt the rarest of things: seen.
‘I only know one thing that old Albert said,’ she told him, ‘because our headmaster always tells us. But it is a good quotation: “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” I have always liked that. Passionately curious.’
‘But it doesn’t apply to you,’ he said, nodding towards the sketchbook. ‘You do have a talent. A proper one.’
‘I don’t know. But I’d like to, you know, make a living at it one day. So what makes you want to go to Oxford?’
Wilbur frowned in thought. ‘I just want to get out. Do better, you know. I want to escape.’
‘Sheffield?’
‘Everything. I just want to do more than I’m supposed to do. I want to not have to spend Friday evening hiding behind the sofa with my mam because we haven’t got the rent. Or have to worry that Dougie is out doing something really bloody stupid. I want to see the world.’
‘Venice,’ she said. ‘I’d love to go to Venice. It just seems so romantic. Like a dream.’
‘Ah. Venice. I’d like to go too.’
‘One day you will,’ said the watching ghost. ‘And it will be the happiest time of your life.’
She nodded. ‘There’s a painter called Titian.
He is the best painter in my opinion. Better than Michelangelo.
Better than Leonardo da Vinci. I have only seen his paintings in a book from the library.
But they make you feel something just by looking at them.
Something you can’t explain.’ She drifted into thought for a moment.
Then: ‘Hey, Mr Oxford University, have you heard of chiaroscuro?’
‘No. What is that?’
‘It’s a fancy-pants term my art teacher told me about and I have never talked about it because I have never met someone so important as a Real Life Genius before.’
She was needling him but he liked it.
The Ghost, standing just beside the bench looking down on them like an unseen parent watching toddlers at play, hadn’t remembered the details of the conversation. Just the bench and her drawing and her face. So hearing it again was like being taken somewhere new.
It was interesting, to realise that even your own past was new territory to explore. That memories were no more the real event than flags were their nations.
He wished he could be back. Properly back. Sitting on the park bench next to her. He would have asked her out there and then. He would have saved all those wasted years.
‘So tell me,’ said the other Wilbur, ‘what is chiaroscuro?’
‘It’s the contrast of light and shade. And Renaissance painters were really good at this. Especially Titian. So if you see one of his paintings you might wonder how it seems to … shine out at you, and really it’s not about the light, it’s about the dark.’
‘Oh, I love that.’
‘That’s what Mrs Bray says. The dark shade all around the face in the background makes it more … magical. And I like that idea. About how you need the dark sometimes to make the other things brighter.’
The Ghost watched them stare at each other.
And Wilbur seemed on the cusp of saying something.
His mouth twitched a little with it, like an egg about to hatch.
But whatever it was never had the chance to be spoken.
Because that was the moment a park warden in a flat cap and green overalls drove over in his little van.
‘This is my dad. You’d better go. He’s suspicious of boys.’
‘Right.’ Wilbur stood up, fast as anything. ‘Quite a healthy suspicion, as a general rule.’
‘See you, lad.’
‘Yes. See you.’
And Wilbur walked away and his ghost stayed and watched the suspicious eyes of Maggie’s father as he stopped his van on the broad path. Alfred. A man with whom he would one day share pints and stilted conversation. A man he would see cry. But that was still to come.
And then, with the sound of the train, it was time to go.