Chapter 90
The Thing With Love
They were back on the train.
The view outside was speeding up. A blur of offices and speeches and rolling over in bed and feeling for a presence that wasn’t there.
‘The thing with love,’ the Ghost said, ‘is that it can feel so eternal that it can be mistaken for something that will be around for ever. Like a rock formation. Or the sky. But love is like every other human thing – it withers without attention. It’s like what Alfred told us. About it being a garden …’
This annoyed the younger, living, dreaming Wilbur on the train.
‘Oh shut up,’ he said, staring out of the window at his future self as he cried himself to sleep.
‘Just, please, for once, shut up … You said yourself you don’t have all the answers.
You seem to have screwed up your entire life, yet here you are acting like some phantom Prospero who knows everything. ’
The Ghost shrugged beside him on the velvet seat. ‘I’m just trying to help you.’
‘Yes, well, I don’t always need the commentary. Sometimes I can work things out for myself. Sometimes you can come across a little, I don’t know, pompous.’
‘I’m dead. It’s impossible not to be pompous when you are dead. Being dead is an incredibly pompous thing because after you die you know better. And I do know better.’
‘There you go again.’
‘Look, I know I don’t have all the answers.
I just know what I got wrong. And I don’t want you to get it wrong.
I’m here to help you. I am a ghost. You are not.
You are simply dreaming, and you get to wake up.
And I don’t. You are innocence and I am experience.
And I am doing all this for you. So, you know, a little bit of gratitude wouldn’t go amiss. ’
Now they could see Wilbur working at night in the office. His eyes were heavy, he was close to falling asleep, but he stayed at his desk. He didn’t want to go home.
‘All right,’ said the Dreamer. ‘I’m sorry. I just don’t like it. I don’t like seeing it. I don’t like seeing the end of us. I love her and I thought I was going to love her for ever.’
The Ghost slapped his hands together. ‘But that’s just it, Dreamer.
I still loved her, but it had become a useless kind of love.
A love as separate from reality as a stock market is from the people.
The trouble was that I was timid. I won’t say we were timid.
Because you don’t have to be. Your future is ahead.
The thing you have to think about is what she put in the letter.
Sometimes you have to let your heart break in order to stay alive.
She wasn’t just talking about herself. She was talking about us.
You have to accept what happened with Dougie.
You have to accept that you weren’t the perfect brother, and you weren’t the perfect son, but that you did the best with what you had.
You have to accept the grief inside your bones.
And that, yes, things could have been different.
Yes, you were held back. You could have gone to university, you could have done X and Y and Z, but in trying to prove yourself you forgot to be yourself. Maggie was right. You lost yourself.’
The Dreamer’s eyes beneath his shaggy hair were back to their default setting of wide confusion. ‘What were you scared of?’
‘Losing her. I’d lost everyone I’d ever loved.
And after Mam I thought I was going to lose her too.
And what is the opposite of love … Not hate.
Because hate is still emotion. It’s pointless ambition.
The abstractions of physics and mathematics.
The corporate world where everything can be quantified.
I was addicted to it. The false sense of importance you get from being at the top of a ladder.
They say power is an aphrodisiac but to me it was an anaesthetic.
I could almost stop being a sentient, vulnerable human. ’
The Dreamer shook his head and stared out at Wilbur in a board meeting. ‘No. There must be more to it.’
‘Maybe. There was always the idea that our real life was ahead of us. That we would get to fifty and I’d quit …’
‘But it was 1995. You were fifty and not quitting.’
‘I know, I know. The promises you make when young are the easiest to break.’
And outside, flashing by, there was more proof. Wilbur heading deeper into his fifties, then sixties, into another millennium, and still there, still in his office, still collecting awards, appearing on TV, attending functions, climbing into bed alone, drinking cough medicine just to sleep.
On and on and on.
Agnes came into the carriage. She sat down between them, straightened her hat, and spoke primarily to the Wilbur who was dreaming rather than the one who was dead. ‘You will notice that as the journey goes on, the ride becomes faster … The days speed by, flickering like sunlight through foliage …’
The variety of what could be seen became less and less. Just Wilbur at work. Locations changed. But he was always at work. Always on his phone. Always with the same frown. Wilbur’s expression lines deepening in the portrait.
The train slowed.
They got out to see Wilbur at his home desk. There wasn’t anything terrible to witness. But nor was there anything happy or interesting to see either. Just a moderately old man trying to set up a new computer and swearing to himself.
A little later, he went over to his old record player and put on Imagination, an album by Gladys Knight and the Pips that Maggie used to love. He walked around, aware suddenly of all the empty space.
‘I remember this,’ said the Ghost. ‘The next day I’m going to tell the board that I want to step down.’
On the train once again, the Dreamer leaned back on the velvet seat and stared bleakly out of the window. ‘I don’t want to end up like this. I don’t want to be miserable. I don’t want all this pain.’
The Ghost sighed. ‘A life without pain is not on the menu, lad. A life of avoiding pain becomes a life defined by pain. Pain and regret. And you have already lived through pain. You lived through Dougie dying … You will survive everything life throws at you. You’ve just got to get out from that bomb-shelter mindset, lad. ’
They were passing the 2010s now.
Wilbur was nominally retired but still did some consulting and speaking work. They passed a large function room in Canary Wharf where he was an old man on stage with a banner behind him that read: Gulliver Research – Inspiring Success – Spring Conference.
They passed him having a blood test.
They passed him walking around his future house in Bedfordshire with an estate agent.
They passed him grumpily flicking through Netflix.
‘It doesn’t matter how much knowledge hindsight gives me,’ said the Ghost wearily, ‘because I have no future left to play with. I am a dead man. But you – you are young and you are a dreamer. And the thing with dreamers is they get to wake up.’
It wasn’t that everything they whizzed past in his last two decades was oppressively bleak. He had after all enjoyed country walks. He became friends with the neighbours. He had conversations with the landlord of the Hare in Clophill.
He even, at the age of sixty-eight, acquired a playful, problematic beagle – Ringo – from a nice man called Dylan at Bedford Animal Rescue Centre.
But there was no contact with anyone he had known from his working years. The ones he had been close to, like Charlie, had been pushed aside or died.
He occasionally hired a baffled chauffeur to take him into Bedford in order to sit in an Italian restaurant by himself. Then he discovered a Mexican restaurant and went there too. Again by himself, only this time eating enchiladas. He liked enchiladas and wondered if Maggie had ever tried them.
He sat there, looking at her Facebook page. But she had never posted.