The Unexplained Knowledge
Wilbur closed the door before they reached the house but they walked straight through the wall, then over the flagstone floor and across the living room to the piano, where Wilbur sat down to play the easy version of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’.
Wilbur strained to reach the E flat with his little finger, and the phone duly rang.
‘Oh yes,’ said the Ghost. ‘I remember this. Here we go.’
They watched their twenty-first-century self answer the phone. Watched his face shift from frustration to confusion to shock.
‘Maggie. Oh lord. Maggie, is that you?’
The two unseen witnesses followed Wilbur as he took the receiver and went to sit in the other room. The one with the wedding photograph and the trophies.
‘How did you get the number? … Oh. Oh yes. Oh yes, I did. I did. I thought you never saw that message … Where are you? … Yes. Clophill. It’s a lovely little village … Maggie, it is good to hear from you … I have things I have been wanting to say. To ask you. To make amends for …’
The Dreamer looked even more confused than he had done. ‘Why are we talking like that? It’s like I don’t even know her.’
‘We haven’t spoken to her for nearly thirty years. That’s the length of your whole lifetime up to 1974. This is now the year 2026 and you haven’t spoken to her since the nineties. That’s a long time. And time turns houses into museums and lovers into strangers and songs into sadness.’
‘What does that—?’
‘Shh. I think we’re about to witness our own death.’
Wilbur was looking at his old, time-weathered hands and telling Maggie he had started to learn the piano.
‘I have lessons every Saturday. And I’ve just been playing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and remembering how you loved it.
It did rather take me back. Yes. The good old days …
I’m sorry, Maggie. How are you? It’s been so long.
I saw on the internet that you had an exhibition for your art in— What’s silly? … It’s nice to hear from you …’
The Dreamer leaned towards the phone to try and hear Maggie. ‘Why was she calling?’
‘She’d had a dream. She had a dream of her and us, happy. Then she had felt a need to call us. It’s like she knew we were about to die.’
The Dreamer followed his old self ’s stare towards the wedding photo.
Maggie and Wilbur stepping out of St Timothy’s Church, into that cloud of confetti. Charlie, Claudette, Doreen also in shot. Wilbur smiling and glancing over at Maggie, soaking in her happiness.
‘I would like to speak to you again. Would that be all right?’
The Ghost and the Dreamer looked at each other with identical expressions of pain. After the phone call Wilbur went to get Maggie’s letter, then came back downstairs to read the one page he had found. The final one. He mumbled some of it aloud to himself.
‘“I don’t know where the past hides, but I will meet you there …”’
This was the moment that his pain became visible, if not audible.
He grimaced and clasped his hand to his neck.
‘Oh no. This looks bad,’ said the Dreamer.
‘Yes, Dreamer. I’m pretty sure this is it.’
The old man was becoming pale and sweaty as he headed outside to try and get the attention of Josh the gardener.
‘You wanted to feel powerful enough not to be hurt,’ said the Ghost to Wilbur, to himself, to the world. ‘But you couldn’t stop that …’
It seemed like Wilbur heard him, but it was difficult to tell for sure, as he was so preoccupied with the pain and the pressure in his neck and his shoulder.
‘Oh yes, oh my goodness,’ said the Ghost. ‘I remember now. This is when I saw us. I saw us standing there.’
Then they saw Josh turn the tractor-mower around and catch sight of Wilbur lying there.
He jumped off and ran, arrow-straight through a flowerbed, to crouch beside him. ‘Wilbur? Wilbur? Mr Budd? Can you hear me?’
He checked his pulse. It was still there. He called for an ambulance. One came. The Ghost and the Dreamer went in the ambulance all the way to the chaos of Accident and Emergency at Bedford Hospital.
The dreaming Wilbur was especially disturbed by events that night, staring at the ECG machine and listening to doctors and nurses mutter things about atrial depolarisation and T-waves over the unconscious body.
But even more so when the signals sent from Wilbur’s heart via the electrodes started to stutter and swing wildly, rising to a final crescendo, before falling into ominous stillness as the clock reached a minute after midnight.