The Palace
It looked as grand as the Ghost remembered it as a child. Maybe more so.
A solid-looking building with ornate features. A white-glazed facade decorated with columns and fanlight windows and arches, and doors within them.
As a boy, it had seemed to him like something straight from heaven, so perfect and palatial and bright.
The Ghost remembered a visit to see An American in Paris when he was about seven years old.
His mam rarely did much with them, but she always scraped enough together to take her sons to the pictures.
He thought of her quietly singing along to ‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise’, a tear rolling down her face.
He looked up above the arches, and saw two banners.
One was advertising The Great Escape and the other was for The Birds.
He had read the story, ‘The Birds’, during a break at the bookshop.
It was by one of his favourite writers, Daphne du Maurier, and he was leaning towards it, but he wondered if it would be too unsettling for Alice, who was clearly troubled by pigeons and, possibly, birds in general.
The Great Escape had been out for a few months now, but had been a massive hit and would play for many weeks more.
‘What do you want to see?’ asked Alice, with a tone to her voice Wilbur wasn’t used to.
‘I’m easy either way.’
‘You choose.’
‘The Great Escape is meant to be good,’ Wilbur said, eyebrows raised.
‘The Great Escape is your sort of film, I imagine.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘You know what I mean by that.’
‘You think I want to escape Sheffield?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s all about who you’re with.’
‘I’m very content with who I’m with,’ he said as they walked up the steps to the arched doorways. And he really tried to believe that.
The Ghost remembered feeling a flicker of anger. After all, Alice knew about his gangster brother and his home life and his dead father. He had a lot to escape from. And he really did want to escape it. That had been his motivation almost as soon as he had started school.
There was a crowd of people in the foyer. Men in suits and women in smart, belted day dresses and twinsets. Quite different from the Cineworld in Bedford, thought the Ghost with a chuckle, as he watched the bittersweet memory of this night.
‘I always like this carpet,’ said Wilbur, staring at the chessboard pattern of red and black. ‘Is it one of your dad’s?’
‘No, Wilbur, it isn’t.’
‘I forgot how bad you were at this,’ the Ghost chuckled as he moved, sometimes literally, through the gathering crowd.
In the end, they opted for The Birds. During one tense early moment she held his hand. And Wilbur liked that feeling, of being a protector.
The Ghost stood beside them in the aisle.
He had this sudden desire to be seen. Again, he knew it was unlikely, but also he felt that Agnes’s strong desire for him not to ‘meddle’ indicated that meddling was indeed possible.
A concept which tantalised him. And the reason he wanted to be seen was because he knew he was heading into the crisis years.
The years in which hope and longing and youth mixed into guilt and regret.
The time of unspeakable tragedy. So he didn’t fully know if he wanted to change something, but he wanted to be really there.
And besides, he had been seen as a baby, so he could be seen again, he was sure.
He just had a sense of it. More than a sense.
He remembered how he had often felt like he was watching himself from somewhere else, like he was a character in a novel more than a person in the world.
And there was something else he was remembering too.
His honeymoon. He hadn’t really thought about it for years but he was sure he had seen himself.
There had been the moment where he had seen someone who looked precisely like him standing on the Rialto Bridge.
It was just a fleeting thing that he’d shaken off at the time.
But now he was viewing it differently, just as he was viewing everything differently, and so he tried again, he tried very hard to make his presence felt.
‘I am here. Look up. Right here, standing in the aisle. I have lived your whole life and I know where it went wrong, and I know how you could avoid that … Please. Hear me. See me.’ At one point Wilbur yawned, then twitched, then looked a little way towards the space the Ghost was occupying, then jumped a little in his seat.
It was unclear what he had seen or heard or sensed.
‘Wilbur? It’s me – you. Can you see me? Like when you were a baby and Dougie showed you the train? I’m here … Just know, you are with the wrong girl …’
And meanwhile, Alice was asking in a whisper if he was all right.
‘Aye,’ Wilbur whispered back. ‘Someone just walked across my grave, that’s all …’
He concentrated back on the movie without much of a thought, and despite the Ghost’s continued attempts to be noticed, he couldn’t seem to make himself heard.