‘The second of June 1953,’ he said aloud, as if answering a question in a pub quiz instead of sitting alone in a carriage. The Queen’s coronation, he remembered. Mrs Yelland’s house. Number 40. The first on their road to get a television. All he really remembered about that day was food. It was one of the rare days of his childhood where his stomach didn’t rumble even once. Fish-paste sandwiches and coronation chicken.
And then it disappeared out of view as the train moved on through time.
This troubled him. The speed he was travelling. He hadn’t had that many truly monumentally good days in his childhood, but that had been one of them and so he wondered why the train hadn’t stopped. Maybe there would be no stopping again until his death. Maybe that was it. Maybe you see yourself as a baby and you see yourself dying and everything flashes in between. Perhaps there were only bookends.
But, no, he felt the train begin to slow again and he saw himself on his bed, reading.
He looked out of the opposite window.
An Elvis Presley record spinning on the old turntable at the Milk Bar, where Dougie took him one Saturday.
Then that faded, dissolved into nothing along with everything else, and in no time at all, the Midnight Train had come to a stop.
Dust
He was inside Bagdale’s Bookshop.
It was quite dark, darker than he could remember it, and dust hung in the air on shafts of sunlight.
There was a boy of about thirteen years perusing a shelf of books. A tall, slightly intense-looking boy, now pulling out a copy ofThe Old Man and the Sea.
The Ghost stood there watching as a man in a cardigan and thick-rimmed glasses spotted the boy and hobbled over to him.
‘Mr Bagdale,’ muttered the Ghost, as the man walked right through his ghostly body on something of a furious mission. The shop owner was only in his late forties but looked twenty years older. He had a lopsided gait and a croak in his voice attributable to pipe smoke and whisky.
‘You!’ said Mr Bagdale.
But young Wilbur was already on the first page, and lost in the simplicity of the sentences.
‘I saidyou there!’
The Ghost remembered this. Or at least thought he did. But this was not the only time it had happened. It was something of a pattern.
Wilbur turned around. ‘Oh. Hello, sir.’ This was, after all, the era when every adult man with a cross look on his face – there were a lot of them – was an automatic ‘sir’.
‘Is there any chance that you will be buying this book? The one which you are tarnishing …? Or is this your usual Saturday routine of clogging up the place without a penny in your pocket?’
Bagdale’s Bookshop was now a very different proposition to theone when Mrs Agnes Bagdale had been in charge. Young Wilbur had never known what it was like back then, but he had overheard people talk about it. His new English teacher, Miss Graham, for one, had reminisced about the ‘days when you could go in and trip over a dog and land in a happy pile of detective novels’. It was a bit more formal now, and the books were all on shelves. It had lost its chaos, but also its customers.
Unlike his mother, Mr Arthur Bagdale didn’t really care about books – or readers or authors – and was just running it like any other business. One where readers didn’t count unless they were spending. And, of course, Wilbur had no money to spend.
‘If you aren’t buying a book, get out of here, lad.’
Then came the sound of tutting from behind the counter. Wilbur turned – along with his ghost – to see an old and frail woman sitting there, reading a novel calledThe Long Goodbye.
‘Oh, Arthur, leave the boy alone,’ she said.
‘Agnes,’ said the Ghost, realising it was her.
‘Stay out of this, Mother, this isn’t your shop any more.’
Agnes smiled a sly little smile. ‘I know that. Because my shop had actual customers.’
Mr Bagdale reached for the hip flask in his pocket. Took a swig. ‘Well, this boy is not a customer. He is a browser. That is why I got rid of the chairs, Mother. We don’t want people just sitting there, reading …’
‘Oh yes, wouldn’t that be terrible,’ she said with a wheeze. ‘A bookshop with readers.’
‘Mother, please.’
