Chapter 41
The Chase
The Ghost had arrived outside, on the street running along one side of the large city square.
It was so quiet out there, even though it was the centre of Sheffield.
A brown paper bag drifted past on the breeze.
A pigeon was looking curiously at a cigarette butt.
Music was faintly throbbing through the wall, but there was hardly anyone out here.
Hardly.
Then the Ghost realised he was standing right next to a police car. The new type. Smaller than the old ones. Modern at the time.
The car seemed almost ridiculous now – quaint and old-fashioned to the Ghost’s twenty-first-century eyes. Eggshell blue and milk white, and so small the policemen inside eating custard tarts looked like they could hardly fit.
They were there, of course, because of the concert, assured that there would be trouble at such a gathering of wild, young hedonists.
And trouble was coming their way sooner than expected.
The Ghost glanced left to see Dougie and himself burst out of the fire door and run with furious speed down the street away from the square, and towards him, the imperial vastness of City Hall towering beside them.
Dougie, insanely, still had the knife in his hand, even as they passed the police car.
Someone who may or may not have worked at City Hall had followed them out onto the pavement. ‘Police! Police! Stop that man! He’s got a knife on ’im!’
Dougie and Wilbur were already at Holly Lane.
The Ghost knew this would be the last time on his journey that he would see his brother, but he did not want to follow them. So he stayed standing there, in the middle of the street.
In doing so, he saw what he never had when he lived this evening the first time. He saw Maggie, on her own, stepping out into the street.
Her face was rendered gold under the street lamp, hair blowing across her face in the cold evening breeze. She didn’t shout or call out or do anything at all except look on in fraught concern as she saw Wilbur disappear out of view.
There was a screech of tyres as Dougie’s Vauxhall Cresta tilted back into the street – avoiding the dead-end roadworks of Holly Lane – with a mad-eyed Dougie and a panicked Wilbur in the front seats.
One of the police officers was out of the car, pastry crumbs still in his moustache. His face had always been pressed into Wilbur’s memory as an open mouth, yelling what he was now yelling, with his hand raised in front of him.
‘STOP! STOP NOW!’
But the car didn’t stop.
The Ghost was also standing there, expecting the car to go straight through him and out the other side – but that’s not what happened.
What happened instead was that the moment it met him he was suddenly on the back seat, behind himself and Dougie.
The past had its own gravity. It couldn’t be escaped.
‘I don’t want to be here!’ he shouted, and he had never meant anything more. ‘Agnes! Someone! Anyone! I don’t want to be here!’
But no one was listening. Certainly not his young self, staring at Dougie as he drove with fast recklessness uphill and away from the city centre.
‘You’ve got to stop! They’re following us!’
‘Who?’
‘The coppers! Who do you think?’
‘Well, we’re not bloody stopping! Are you mad? We’re getting the hell out of here, lad!’
The police car switched its siren on. Dougie made a wild imitation of the sound.
‘That!’ he laughed manically. ‘Listen to it. The siren.’
The Ghost remembered how new it felt in 1964 to hear a police car with a siren. Even one as old-fashioned as this.
‘I miss the bell, to be honest. Do you miss the police bell, Wilbur? Ding-a-ling-a-ling!’
‘You’re off your rocker!’ Wilbur tried to wrestle the steering wheel off his brother, who elbowed him in the face. Wilbur held his nose in shock.
They sped north out of town, passing the cathedral, then veering back south and west, through increasingly residential streets, trees on either side of the road going by in a blur.
They reached the Ecclesall Road, hurtling by the community centre and a pub called the Dark Horse, where a cockle-man in a white coat was stepping outside with a basket full of shellfish.
‘Slow down,’ Wilbur begged.
Dougie ignored him. ‘That knife at my feet. Look. By the pedals. Throw it out the window. Throw it hard!’
‘Jesus, they’re right there. Right behind us. They’ll see us do it. Dougie, slow down!’
Things shot by.
It was busier here among the pubs than the closed shops of the city centre.
The Ghost stared out with mounting horror as they passed the giant Midland Bank, closed for the day.
Men in flat caps, smoking. Women with freshly curled hair heading out of the bingo hall.
Men playing dominoes in the glowing warmth of a pub.
A fight brewing outside, the crowd now distracted by the speeding car and the police siren behind.
Just an ordinary Saturday night in 1964.
The police car was inching closer.
They sped around the roundabout with a screech and a skid, the car leaning like a craned neck.
‘They’re going to be massive,’ Dougie said, his frenzied eyes on the road ahead. Wilbur wondered what the hell he was talking about. ‘Bigger than the Beatles. The crowd. It was amazing.’
This was Dougie. The creator of chaos who pretended things were normal, even as they had spiralled far beyond control.
‘You waved your knife at half the crowd … Jesus, Dougie. Who cares if the band we just saw are going to be big or not? Just stop the car. They won’t send you back down. You haven’t hurt anyone. Well, Tommy. But he won’t go to the law. Look … just pull over.’
‘Too late now. Listen, Wilbur – listen, lad. Here’s the plan.
We keep going down here till we’re out of county.
Soon as we’re in the Peak District there are no lights.
No street lamps. No cars. Nowt. What we do …
LISTEN TO ME … What we do is we drive off the road into the middle of nowhere.
Just foot it over the moors as far as we can.
No lights on the car. Then we make a fucking run for it.
It will be pitch black … LISTEN … it’ll be dark and we can just stay out there, ditch the car, then circle back to town on foot … ’
He was looking at Wilbur with wide, wide eyes as if this was a genius idea. Desperation made you cling to the worst idea if it was the only one.
‘Every second we stay in this car we are getting deeper into shit, Dougie—’
‘You’re leaving me in the lurch, lad.’
The Ghost tried to unpick what he had meant here – Oxford? Leaving him with their mother?
‘Slow the hell down.’
‘I know what you’re thinking.’
‘I’m thinking stop the fucking car.’
‘You think you’re above me.’
‘Dougie—’
‘Having a thick little thief as a brother.’
‘You’re not thick, Dougie, you just don’t try … Jesus. Slow down.’
‘But everything I know, I know. School of hard knocks. I was never a kid, Wilbo. Mam didn’t understand things. I saw it how it was … with her and Parkin.’
‘Mr Parkin?’
‘Aye. Making eyes at him.’
The Ghost remembered how he had taken these words and fully signed up to Dougie’s lifelong grudge against their old landlord.
‘Dougie …’
‘It’s all right for you. I have to look after her.’
‘Oh, Dougie …’ The Ghost was realising what this was all about. Dougie felt abandoned. And by all of them. By their father for dying, by their mother for her retreating mind, and now by Wilbur himself.
Every mistake Dougie had made, right down to him wanting to fight the world, could be explained by having to take this on.
Too much, too young. If you felt like everything was under threat, then everything was a fight.
He wasn’t jealous of Wilbur. Not wholly, anyway.
He just wanted to keep everyone together, because all he had known since their dad died was a sense of pulling apart.
Maybe, thought the Ghost, the world was full of this.
Chaos trying too hard to be order. Violence trying to be peace.
Maybe sometimes bad actions were just good motives without a map.
And now the pressure had built and broken through and Dougie was in this speeding car, with the young brother he had once looked after, and yakking ten words a second like he needed to get it all out, leaping from one thing to another while he kept his foot on the pedal.
‘That siren sounds like a flying saucer! Plan 9 from Outer Space. Can you remember when we went to see that, Wilbo? With your pal Charlie? That was a good day. I’d just got the job at the furnaces. You remember?’
Wilbo. Hearing it now as a Ghost, even passing road signs in a blur, he heard the affection in it.
‘Dougie, please, focus – this is dangerous.’
‘Dad was like you. Wanted to bite off more than he could chew. Everyone else joined the army. But he wanted to be with the toffs up in the sky. You were meant to train for three years before they let you into air combat. They changed it to six months! You know that? Six bloomin’ months! All to go and die for Churchill.’
‘Dougie, stop your rattling and slow down. I don’t want to die.’
‘You’re not going to.’
‘Just slow the hell—’
‘Them coppers are in a Triumph. This is a bloomin’ Vauxhall. We can’t slow down.’
The Ghost was petrified. When he was younger he had been scared of ghosts. He had been worried he would see his dad out on the landing. But he’d had it all wrong. The dead were nothing to fear. It was the living that contained unknown terrors.
‘That girl liked you, lad,’ Dougie told him, as Wilbur nursed his bleeding nose. He was slurring his words.
‘You’re drunk. You’re so bloody drunk.’
‘You never know what’s in front of you. You always want more. Like Dad did. You’ve got it all, Wilbo. You’ve got it all. You just don’t see it. Life just falls your way. That’s how it is for some people. That’s what’s different about you and me. Things fall your way and you don’t see them.’
Things fall your way.
‘I work bloody hard, Dougie.’
Dougie turned away from the road and looked at his brother with a desperate kind of love. And the Ghost wished he could reach back through time to tell him how much he was loved.