Chapter 58
The Courage It Takes to Love
They sat beside each other in the theatre. And then they went for another drink afterwards.
‘Kiss me, Wilbur,’ she told him, out on a quiet street. ‘Just kiss me.’ So he kissed her, and felt the relief of it, like she was air he needed to breathe. He wanted her that night more than he had wanted anyone.
The train arrived, and despite his sluggish reluctance to leave, the Ghost smiled as he climbed the metal steps and opened the blue door and stepped on board.
He realised there were moments that weren’t just appreciated in retrospect, but that he’d truly loved at the time. And this evening was one of them.
Out of the train window, he caught a glimpse of their silhouettes behind the glow of curtains.
They spent the night together in his bedroom at the house he’d bought for his mother. He remembered how the need to be quiet added to the innocence and excitement.
How they spent the night naked under the sheets and leaning over each other in euphoric and secret whispers and giggles.
The clumsy clashing of limbs and the pulling at each other’s clothes.
Kisses of unending depth. Bodies melting into thoughts and thoughts melting into bodies. Friends becoming something deeper.
The fusion of worlds. The scent of skin and new carpet. The sudden stillness and silence when they thought they heard his mam.
He remembered the feel of her voice warm in his ear as she said his name.
He remembered a shared cigarette outside the window, their bodies wrapped in bedsheets.
He remembered her head on his shoulder as she fell asleep.
He remembered the happiness as he felt the soft slow tide of her breath.
He missed it. He missed her. He missed her so much.
He missed the adventures they had and the ones they never finished.
He watched time speed by as they started dating.
They went to pubs, restaurants, to the cinema where she no longer worked to watch The Exorcist. They walked around duck ponds and the local art gallery.
He made her laugh. He had forgotten that, but as he looked out of the window he was seeing it so much. One thing he did remember was how it made him feel so close to her.
Sometimes her laugh was affectionate in the right way and sometimes it was affectionate in a way that made him feel a little silly. It was, he told her once, the kind of laugh you give a dog when he had taken a shoe and put it somewhere. But he liked it.
They became their own island in the storm. And he felt lucky just to be with her. She was as warm as June and as tough as steel and as funny as hell.
He saw them chatting in pubs over beer and gin. He saw her meeting him as he closed up shop for the day. He saw them chatting on a walk through town one evening, when they decided to stroll through the concrete underpass, which still felt like the future.
They talked and talked, as though a relationship was really just a conversation that never wants to end. She taught him about things, he remembered. She taught him about nature. She knew the name of every tree and plant and flower, and she said their names as if they were old friends.
They were walking through Endcliffe Park and she was pointing out everything from the weeping beech tree to the hawthorn and cotoneaster.
He had understood what love really was, back then.
It was meaning.
It was that state of being where someone else was more important than himself, even though they were away from each other all day, even though he was working hard to make a success of Bagdale’s Bookshop.
He was ambitious – he wanted it to be the greatest bookshop in the north of England – but back then his ambition was matched by his love.
He was somehow never alone. He was with her when he wasn’t with her.
This had also been hard for him. His instinct was for self-reliance but somehow, in his late twenties, he was brave enough to truly love.
For the world’s centre to be outside his body.
For his contentment to be dependent on someone else’s.
That was the gamble of it, but also the beauty of it.
Love had made the world real and helped him move from internal woes to external cares.
Wilbur felt slower with her. His mind had always been racing since Dougie died, like a sentence without punctuation. Maggie gave him the commas and the full stops. And maybe that was why the train seemed to be going at a gentler pace for a little while, as he watched it all back.
This young self he was watching felt something real and dangerous and beautiful.
A kind of shifting of gravity, a falling into the pull of her orbit.
And the fact that she felt the same about him gave him a sense of responsibility, that if he was her world, then he needed to make sure it was a good one.
It made him work harder at the shop. He wanted her to be proud.
They were fundamentally different people but it had worked.
Maggie could float through life, and be happy with whichever direction the wind took her, and somehow land where she needed to be. Wilbur needed a continual focus, a light to head to, a sense that he was working towards a shared future, knowing that he would lose himself into darkness otherwise.
He saw himself jump awake.
The Ghost suddenly remembered. It came back to him, vivid and firm.
He’d had a nightmare about Dougie and the accident.
His body against the tree. The tree itself becoming a kind of monster.
All dark and burnt-out, as if made of charcoal, its branches reaching towards him and wrapping around him like vines, stopping Wilbur from breathing.
He’d had this precise nightmare before many times, but this was the first time it had happened with her.
Maggie placed her hand on his chest.
The Ghost couldn’t hear the words through the train window but he remembered the conversation.
‘I’m fine,’ he’d said.
She studied him in the near-dark of the room with the eyes of an attentive artist.
‘You don’t always have to be.’ She’d felt his pounding heart. ‘Was it about Dougie?’
‘No,’ he lied. ‘No, I don’t remember what it was about.’
Over time, the nightmares stopped and he began to feel courageous in a way he never had.
And through this courage he wasn’t scared any more to give himself to her.
The distraction of this new feeling felt like it would never end: the speed of his love swirled with the excitement of taking the bookshop from strength to strength, as if it was all part of the same rising force.
Both gave him a self-esteem he had been lacking, and neither one ate into the other.
He wasn’t quite able to head down Ecclesall Road or pass the sycamore tree, and the wound was still there, but he was somehow preoccupied enough to never press it.
He had made their love into a blanket and burrowed deep under it.
And so, for a fleeting moment in time, from around 1972 to 1974, it seemed to Wilbur he had finally worked out how to live.