Chapter 46
Standing on the Edge
Middlewood Hospital. An austere psychiatric hospital in the Sheffield suburbs that would one day become luxury apartments.
His mother spent six months there. In fact, she admitted herself.
So that was one thing Wilbur didn’t really need to feel guilty about, but he somehow did.
The second of the Ghost’s visits there was the day after the electroconvulsive therapy that triggered a seizure.
He saw himself try not to cry as she sat there, empty.
He was twenty-one now. Hair quite long and styleless.
Eyes shrewd and intense, as if continually looking for something that wasn’t there.
Edith watched him as he sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair, and finally spoke. Her voice was unusually tender.
‘Little boy.’
The train arrived as Wilbur wearily closed his eyes. He was on the verge of drifting to sleep as the train cab slid right by – through the walls – as immune to earthly physics as it always was. Agnes was there, and as ever she was urging him quickly onto the train.
‘Quick! Before he falls asleep!’
It sounded very urgent.
‘Why?’
‘I told you. You must never see yourself sleeping.’
‘I know. I remember. But you never told me why.’
‘Your living self would end up seeing his own future in a dream. All of it …’
‘And?’
‘Well, your eternity would be gone. You may not like the life you lived, but if you had lived it any other way then you – this ghost – would not be this ghost. Eternity is for ever. And no one wants to give that up.’
It was true. He didn’t. He was feeling weary from seeing how much he had lost, and who he had lost. The idea of eternity – of being able to commune for ever with the souls of people he cared about most – was so comforting.
So he hurried onto the train. And the next stop was barely six weeks later.
The Ghost stepped out of the carriage into the night air. He was on the roof of Park Hill high-rise flats, where he found Wilbur, alone, contemplating the thirteen-storey drop below.
Wilbur had known, deep down, that he was never actually going to jump that night. He just wanted to feel close to death for a little while. That was why he had walked so far across town after drinking a whisky and six lonely pints of stout in the Dog and Partridge.
‘You need to find a way to live,’ his unheard ghost told him as he was standing there, looking out at the city.
The dark shapes of the cathedral and Bramall Lane football ground could just be seen amid the scattering of city lights, which seemed like fallen constellations, reflecting the night sky.
He turned away from the direction of Middlewood Hospital, then again from the direction of Ecclesall Road.
There were whole areas of the city that leaked out a kind of pain for him now, and Ecclesall Road was obviously the worst. He had avoided it – completely – since the night of Dougie’s death.
At night he would sometimes wake up, having had a nightmare flashback of his brother’s body crumpled like a concertina at the base of the large sycamore tree.
His home city was full of alarming reminders, and yet he couldn’t leave. His work at Bagdale’s occupied him but his life felt stuck. He felt a kind of soul paralysis.
They were planning to put men on a rocket to the moon, and yet he couldn’t get a ticket out of Sheffield.
It was true that he needed to stay and be near his mother, but there was also something else enclosing him.
A tight claustrophobia, as though he didn’t aspire to anything any more.
He would have swapped every dream to have Dougie back, so the dreams had lost their power.
That night in the quiet and the dark, sobering up in the cold air and contemplating everything, he felt entirely alone.
A loneliness that was physical. He felt pathetic.
He thought of himself in some alternate timeline, studying on the sunny quad at Balliol College. He knew, logically, that it probably rained as much in Oxford as it did in Sheffield – or almost – but in his imagination Oxford was always basking in sunshine.
‘Listen,’ the Ghost said, walking across the concrete to him in his soundless sandals.
‘I know you can hear me. Even if you can’t actually hear me I sense these words can get in.
Over there is the Palace Cinema. And inside is Maggie.
And your future. And you will one day marry her …
And she is the very best thing that will ever happen to you.
And for a little while, you will make each other happy.
’ The Ghost thought about what he was saying.
And he also thought about the life that waited for his young self.
Suddenly, it all became clear, where he had gone wrong.
‘You aren’t going to jump. But you have to listen to me.
This darkness will chase you. You will race away from yourself …
But it could have been different … You could be different … ’
None of these words were heard, but the cold air was sobering and eventually Wilbur walked back down the fire escape.
There was a lot he wasn’t letting himself feel. And he hadn’t quite worked out the point of living. But at least he wasn’t ruling out the possibility there was one, and in fact he went home that night and began to read a long book that would slowly help to save his life.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
Wilbur wasn’t American. He wasn’t from Oklahoma and never had to endure the Dust Bowl or the Great Depression. But that tale of resilience and poverty and community was one he needed more than any other.
And the fact that he had chosen to take that book home, of all the books in the shop, made him eventually believe in some kind of higher power or cosmic order. No other book at that time would have been able to reach him, but that one did. It almost made him forgive himself.
‘There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do …’