Chapter 45
The Days
‘Do you know what it’s like,’ the Ghost asked Agnes, once back on the train, ‘to see the very worst moment of your life and be able to do nothing at all to stop it?’
Agnes was sitting beside him. He was closer to her than he had been, close enough to see the stitches in her hem.
She held her hat and stared down at it. He thought she was going to get strict with him and tell him once more about the importance of not meddling.
But she didn’t. At least, not right then.
‘I understand,’ she said, delicately. ‘I’m sorry.’
And the Ghost went quiet. He thought of Mr Bagdale – Arthur, her son – and wondered why he had been the way he was, and what had happened in Agnes’s life, and imagined there were probably just as many regrets as in his own.
And she had learned to accept all that, and hadn’t tried to tinker with anything. But that was Agnes.
Part of Wilbur knew he had lived his life and must go with the journey and accept it all, even the most savage bits. But another, stubborn, part of him was forming. He had the crazed urge to break through to the world of the living and change the course of things.
On went the train. It was as though the landscape of his life became so difficult now it was harder for the engine to pull them through. And they seemed to be stopping more than ever.
There was the day of the funeral, where he had to watch himself as a pall-bearer, helping carry his brother’s weight as he walked past their visibly shaking mother.
The day he watched his mother wash down her Valium with some sherry and Wilbur soothed her tears by telling her he wasn’t going to university.
The day Wilbur had to tell his mother, over and over, that the police weren’t waiting outside for her.
He got to see the shape of his misery, right at the points where he was most desperate.
He got to see himself sitting in a pub, drinking his wages away.
To see himself come back drunk to his spaced-out mother as she sat in the kitchen tearing off an advert in the Daily Mirror for a Philips cassette recorder that she would never buy.
‘Why did you let it happen, Wilbur?’
‘What, Mam?’
Edith looked down to her knees, shaking her head. ‘Why did you tell him to go out with you? Why did you get the tickets?’
He knew he couldn’t tell her the truth. That he wanted to soften the Oxford blow.
‘Why did you let him keep driving? That’s a thing I don’t understand.’
‘Oh, Mam, I’m sorry. I tried to grab the wheel. I tried to stop him … I didn’t know what was going to happen … I should have never took him out … Not just after he was released … Something was going to happen … I’m sorry, Mam … It’s my fault.’
‘It was hard.’
‘What was hard?’
‘When your dad died. Having to split everything between the two of you. All the love, all the money. And I didn’t have enough of either. Not at the time. I couldn’t be a mam to him because it was all such a burden.’
‘Me, Mam. You mean I was the burden.’
She looked at him and the truth was so strong she couldn’t deny it. Wilbur felt his mind go numb from the intensity of that, a creeping emptiness as his already claustrophobic world narrowed a little further.
And as the Ghost watched his own hurt, he understood himself in a way he’d never quite managed in life. He saw how much he’d been shaped and conducted by his youth. The striving for a success he thought he needed to justify his existence. And the struggle with a love he didn’t think he deserved.
Edith turned away and stared into space.
She started humming the title song from Singin’ in the Rain, which she had taken Dougie and Wilbur to when they were young.
Her voice had a faint and distant quality to it, as if she was singing not from pain but the place beyond that.
A place beyond sense itself. And as the Ghost watched her he realised how Dougie’s death had killed his mother too.
How it had also killed him, or at least a part of him. One that would never truly return.