Dougie pulled at a thread on his tatty tank top. Not even a flicker of response.
He just can’t see me. I really am a ghost.
A thought confirmed when someone kicked the football and he flinched as it headed in a low arc towards him, then through his chest and out his back without him feeling a thing.
Here, in the land of the living, he was a mere observer.
A tall boy ran through him too and collided with Dougie. Dougie went flying to the ground. And Dougie being Dougie, didn’t take it too well.
‘Hey, Bobby, watch it! Idiot!’
‘You mardy little pillock.’
Bobby Thomas. Thirteen years from now you will be arrested for a series of burglaries over on the Ecclesall Road and sent to Leeds Prison.
And as for Dougie …
The other boys stood around chuckling. Dougie pulled himself to his feet and swung at Bobby, a boy almost twice the size of him.Dougie pounded at him with an infinite fury and put up a reasonably even fight for a little while.
‘Oh, Dougie, lad,’ sighed Wilbur. ‘You really were always this way, weren’t you?’
‘Bobby, get off him,’ one of the boys said. ‘Get off him, that’s his mam.’
And then he saw it was true. There was a woman pushing a pram along the pavement.
Dougie’s mother. Wilbur’s mother. Edith.
She was wearing a floral summer dress that she would have made herself. She looked flush-cheeked and lost, in a kind of trance. Then she saw Dougie fighting and her face switched. Instantly hardened. She left the pram and walked over, as determined as a dog at the butcher’s.
‘Dougie, you little blighter, get here now!’
By this point Bobby had laid off but Dougie was still flailing at him. Wilbur watched Dougie grimace as their mother quickly reached for his ear and yanked him away.
‘Mam,’ Wilbur said, as she walked right through him.
Before she reached the pram, the baby began to cry.
It was only then that he realised the baby he was listening to was himself.
The Dead Gazing at Their Past
It was strangely reassuring, hearing himself cry. He didn’t really know why that was. Maybe it was because being a baby was the most optimistically pure phase of life: you would cry when you were distressed and expect a solution.
‘Mam, get off me …’ said Dougie, as the other boys resumed playing.
Wilbur followed them all along the street, right to number 77. He remembered the door having flaked and scabbed paint but it hadn’t got to that stage yet.
‘If your dad was here he’d knock you into next week.’
‘Dad’s dead, Mam. Hitler got him.’
She clipped the back of Dougie’s head. ‘Stop that talk out in the street.’
‘But he is.’
‘I bloody know that, lad. Left us with nothing but another mouth to feed, didn’t he.’
And she stared down at baby Wilbur, like he was another problem she could really do without. She’d found a way through her grief. And it was called resentment.
