Instinctively, he closed his eyes.
Agnes spoke to him.
‘It’s a lot to absorb, admittedly. I understand that. But you must look out of the window where possible. I don’t mean to be pedantic, but the whole point of a life flashing before your eyes is that you see it.’
So Wilbur forced himself to look.
Outside, things were getting a little more real. The shape of a city was emerging. Low roofs of terraced houses. A distant steeple. The clock tower of a town hall. Wilbur noted the landscape was no longer bobbing about.
And then, with a mechanical sigh and wheeze, the train came to a halt.
‘So what happens now?’ Wilbur asked, his heart still racing from witnessing his father’s death in the sky.
‘You get off the train. And then, when you hear it again, you get back on. It’s really very simple.’
Outside the window he saw a broken wall and an expanse of rubble. At first, he saw nothing much else.
Agnes smiled, like an apprehensive parent at the school gates. ‘Off you go, Old Bean. Your past is waiting. But promise me one thing: you get back on the train when it arrives. Promise?’
Wilbur didn’t have a reason not to return to the train. He didn’t want to miss eternity, after all. ‘I promise.’
And then he walked to the door at the front of the carriage, ready to step off.
The Time Traveller
He opened the carriage door.
He was now somewhere quite light.
Sunshine and pretty cotton-wool clouds. He looked around and saw the rubble. Acres of dust and bricks. Fragments of walls, like lost pieces of a giant jigsaw.
There was a billboard on one wall, still mostly intact. An old-fashioned advert. An elaborate illustration of a swan standing on a box of matches.
It was all distantly familiar, but he couldn’t place it until he caught sight of the row of Victorian houses.
He knew this street. It was Glossop Road. In his hometown. Sheffield.
He was back on the same street in the north of England he had known as a child. The one that had been bombed by the Germans at the start of the war and which still looked like a wasteland years later.
‘Oh my,’ muttered Wilbur. He had never been able to process the scale of things or the truth of difficult emotions. So even now, he was reliant on understated mutterings to comfort him.Oh my.
Then there was a noise. Or, more accurately, a collection of noises. Boys, yelling at each other. He looked a little further along the street and saw them.
Children dressed from another age – from the 1945 he was born in. Long grey shorts and high socks, shirts, one with a tank top, shouting and playing football.
A little further down from the football, there was a man with a sack of coal on his back.
The past. The actual past right there in front of him. As real as it was when he lived it.
Wilbur began to move across the rubble. It felt good to be walking. His legs and hips and back so young and loose again.
As he approached the street he recognised one of the boys. The smallest, reluctantly forced to stand in goal. The familiar resting scowl there on Dougie’s face. Thin as a rail. Knobble-kneed. One of his shoes coming off the sole at the front. Must have been about seven years old.
‘Dougie …? Dougie …’
He was close now. Close enough, surely, for his brother to see him.
‘Dougie … Dougie … it’s me, Wilbur … Dougie, lad!’
