It took him a second or two to realise that this was no ordinary portrait. As the train kept moving, so did the portrait. His hair grew slowly and suddenly shortened and grew again. His face broadened and hardened a little.
It was ageing, in line with the journey through time.
He sat down opposite it to get a longer look.
‘It’s a good likeness, Old Bean.’
He jumped and turned to see Agnes, sitting there beside him on the seat.
She smiled. ‘Really captures you.’
She caught a glimpse of him outside the window, on his doorstep, reading Oscar Wilde.
‘But I should probably point out it’s not a portrait-in-the-atticsituation. Quite the opposite. You are getting older in line with the painting. It tells you precisely where – forgive me,when –you are. What is that shoddy miracle from the twenty-first century? Satellite navigation. Consider it like that … But more beautiful. Because you really are a handsome chap. Or you were, once upon a time. Even if you never realised it. So many young women dreamed of you … Even if, really, you only used to dream of one …’
The wheels started to clatter with more urgency and Wilbur grasped the seat, feeling a hollow kind of nausea only the dead can feel. ‘Why is everything speeding up?’
‘That’s what life does. Listen, Wilbur, I’d keep your focus out of the window. You don’t want to miss too much. These are your young years.’
‘Well, there will be some things I very much want to miss.’
‘Ah, but the more you pull away from something, the more it finds you.’
He nodded. ‘But what if it is something you could never really face? Something that pushed you off the rails every time you were near it?’
Agnes smiled, kindly. ‘The Midnight Train doesn’t have rails. Not once it is up and running. That’s the brilliance of it. It goes where you need to go, whenever that may be. Time is not even.’
Wilbur understood what she was saying. He had lived long enough to know that time and meaning were not shared out equally. Some personal eras were relatively empty. The temporal equivalent of air. And then you would come across a day – or even a minute – and it would have a whole decade’s worth of weight. It would be everything. It would have the power to change an entire life.
‘The Midnight Train,’ continued Agnes, ‘goes to the places that, together, at the end, will give you the truest assessment of your existence. That way, when you enter eternity, you will understand yourself completely. The deeper that understanding, the better. That’s what it is all about. It’s like that Kierkegaard quote. “Life canonly be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” And this train offers a solution. Liferelived forwards.’
She smiled again and her eyes shone like a new morning. A kind smile, garnished with equal parts warmth and worry. She was complicated, he realised. More complicated, possibly, than she had been in life. Maybe that was what death did, or eternity. Maybe it complicated a person.
He was going to ask about eternity, for her to tell him more. But she seemed to understand the question before he had spoken it, as though she could see the thoughts crossing his mind as easily as you could see clouds crossing a sky.
‘As I have told you,’ she said, ‘eternity is a movable concept. It is what you make it. To get the most out of it, you need to know yourself. And that is what these windows are for.’ She looked a little sad for a moment. But then put on a brisk and professional smile. ‘I’ll leave you to it. Toodle-pip.’
And it was then that she disappeared right before his eyes.
The Speed of Friendship
Days, weeks, months, years flashed by.
Sometimes it was a blur and sometimes something would appear so near and with such precision he would recognise it instantly.
He saw himself in his best friend Charlie Applewood’s living room, playing dominoes in front of a black-and-white game show.
He liked Charlie a lot.
But because he knew Charlie well into adulthood, he had kind of forgotten the teenage Charlie. The Charlie with smart, parted hair and the most pristine short-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the top and the nervous smile.
The one who had been bullied at school and loved comics and B-movies about flying saucers. The Charlie who dreamed of alien abduction and who stuttered when Miss Graham asked him to read out loud. The one for whom listening to music was a religion. The one who cried when Buddy Holly died. The one who always seemed to be nodding his head to a tune he was just playing in his brain. The one who had a mind that could travel far in any direction it was facing. The one who would later on end up an unacknowledged genius of maths and physics, a long-haired hippy, a lover of Joni Mitchell songs and Ursula K. Le Guin stories (thanks to Wilbur’s recommendation), then a deep David Bowie fan, then a married father of a daughter who wouldn’t be born for another three decades. The one who would work for him. The one who would continue being his best friend until Wilbur blew it.
He remembered the strange atmosphere at Charlie’s house. The quiet beyond quiet, even though his parents were in, all becausehis dad beat his mamexceptwhen Charlie had a friend round because they ‘put on a show’. It made peace. And Wilbur was not just Charlie’s best friend but hisonlyreal friend at that point in his life. Wilbur thought Charlie was amazing and that the world was stupid to only see the amazing in extroverts and fluent talkers and tough fighters. Charlie could name the square root of 169 and explain the structure of an atom, as well as being the kind of kid who would hum music without knowing he was doing it. They always talked a lot, but alwaysabout things. In knowing Charlie it became clear that a big reason books and comics and films and music exist is to give people a way to talk about things without talking about them.
He told Wilbur that his book recommendation –The Count of Monte Cristo –had made him feel like he could survive anything. But still, Wilbur didn’t like seeing his friend picked on. And he was picked on for everything as a thirteen-year-old. The stutter, the humming, the comic books, the narrow shoulders and general look of someone who would fly off in the wind.
Out of the window the Ghost saw his young self getting a bloody nose for sticking up for Charlie at school.
