She opened the door. Tilted the pram and pushed baby Wilbur inside. Dougie followed, picking at his tank top again. The door shut. Wilbur tried to push it open and found himself stepping right through.
He was back in the house where he was born. Back in the small living room, made smaller by brown wallpaper, the laundry dryingon racks that didn’t fully fit in the kitchen, and the ridiculously oversized table.
It wasn’t really a table, he remembered. It was a steel air-raid shelter the government had given to people who didn’t have a garden, and therefore couldn’t have the larger and more secure outside shelters. When he was little he liked sitting under it. It made him feel safe, as though the father he had never known was still around.
Maybe hehadbeen around. Maybe that was all ghosts were. The dead gazing at their past.
It was dawning on him: he was really back here. Being dead wasn’t to step out of time, but to step out of its usual rules.
He walked into the room.
Dougie was sulking in the armchair, while their mother picked baby Wilbur out of the pram. She put him on her shoulder as Wilbur walked closer. He had a good look at himself.
‘Hello, me,’ he said.
Then he realised something. Something quite remarkable. The baby’s eyes had been floating around and then they had fixed. The baby was looking at him. This little living Wilbur was, somehow, staring at his dead self.
The Ghost
‘Hello? Wilbur? It’s me … you.’ He waved at his baby self. Then moved a little. The baby’s eyes followed him, there was no doubt about it. ‘I’m the ghost of you. Yes. You are me and I am … the Ghost.’
He could no longer think of himself as Wilbur, but as a ghost of who he had been.
‘I was once you … My life is over now. And what happens at the end of life is you get to travel through your life.’
The Ghost smiled broadly. Then the baby began to cry.
‘I’m sorry,’ the Ghost soothed. ‘I’m so sorry.’
His mother went to the kitchen and tipped out her purse. And then, with great worry and care and trembling hands, she meticulously put every single coin, even every halfpenny and farthing, into separate piles to be counted. The Ghost stood beside her and pointlessly told her that one day he was going to buy her a house.
‘Oh, George,’ she said, softly, as the tenderness got the better of her. ‘I wish you were here. I wish you hadn’t left me alone with another mouth to feed.’
She stood there a while, lost to emotion, and then brought her attention back to Dougie.
‘Now, listen. I’ll be back later. I will be back at nine when I finish at the Queen’s Head. You look after Wilbur.’
‘But what if he’s hungry?’
‘He won’t be hungry.’
‘What if I’m hungry?’
‘Dougie … you had your dinner.’
‘Mashed potatoes! Jimmy Gower gets steak and kidney pie.’
Edith sighed. ‘Good for Jimmy Gower …’
Two minutes after Edith left the house, the Ghost was watching his brother trying to cope with a crying baby.
‘Wait there, Wilbur,’ he told the baby tenderly. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
And then he thundered up the narrow staircase. The Ghost looked behind. Saw Dougie’s shoes in the kitchen, the sole hanging off one and the leather dusty and cracked.
Dougie stepped down the stairs seconds later, delicately this time, with a toy train, precariously holding the front and three carriages, letting the two in the middle dangle a little in the air.
‘Do you know what this is?’
