‘Well, I get that,’ said Wilbur. ‘I write poems sometimes but I wouldn’t want anyone to actually read them.’
‘That’s a shame. What do you write your poems about?’
‘Oh. All sorts of things. Stupid stuff. Clouds. Crows. The war. I wrote one about the Freedom Riders. You know, in America.’
‘Ah. Politics.’
‘Sometimes. To be fair, it was a really bad poem.’
She smiled warmly and made room for Wilbur to sit next to her. It was the most natural thing in the world. That was one of the things he liked about her. The way she had an impulse to make the awkward feel normal. It was a kind of care.
She was always that person. The one who was justin tune.The one who knew that life was easier if you cared about people. She just made life morenatural.
They talked about different things. They talked about the library and Bagdale’s Bookshop. They talked about how they wanted to see the world. They talked about how they quite liked to be spooked – her by Alfred Hitchcock films and him by Shirley Jackson novels. They talked about how weird they sometimes felt, so out of place in their town.
‘I feel like no one wants you to think,’ she said, and he nodded. ‘Just do, do, do. No thinking. Get good marks. Dress smart. God Save the Queen. Then go to work as a secretary or be a housewife and stay home for ever and the lads go to the furnaces. I want a life of art, you know? Observing not just following … I don’t know. I’m told I have ideas out of my station.’
Wilbur smiled. ‘I like your station.’
They talked about a book they both loved,Around the World in Eighty Days.
‘When I was little that was who I wanted to be,’ she told him. ‘I wanted to jump bail and board a steamer to Hong Kong just like Phileas Fogg.’
‘You’d need a valet.’
‘You could be my valet, lad. I’d let you.’
They giggled.
They talked about Maggie’s friend Claudette, who came to Sheffield as a baby with her parents from somewhere called St Vincent in the Caribbean. They talked about old-fashioned attitudes.
‘But I think things are going to change,’ Wilbur said. ‘I think young people are different to old people. Seriously. I think we are. It’s not just the haircuts. I think there is something behind it all. I think the world will be better when we grow up. My English teacher thinks there is a revolution coming.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Maggie. ‘I think we like to think that. But maybe the revolution will just be internal. Like we learn to accept ourselves. Like, I dunno … trees and water. I like coming here because it seems more true. Don’t you think we aren’t so different to other animals?’ She pointed to a duck. ‘Do young ducks become better ducks than their parents? What if a duck is just a duck and a human is just a human and we don’t change as much as we think? Ducks still keep quacking and humans still keep hating.’
‘Oh! A cynic!’
‘I don’t know, Wilbur. Maybe I am. But there is still fun in observing it all.’
Emotion rose up like magma. The Ghost could hardly stand it. He felt like he needed to interrupt, but remembered Agnes telling him not to meddle. And besides, it was deeply unlikely to work, as he had been told.
But it felt so intensely strange, being there, watching this back. So lovely, so terrible, so innocent, so everything. Listening to their conversation was like watching someone learning a new language.
It was the start of something. Not that either of them knew it yet.In fact, they wouldn’t know it for many years to come. But he thought about it now. He imagined their conversations over the years as a vast plant, branching off all over the place, each conversation different but part of the same whole, growing from that first seedling on Glossop Road and trying to break out of the ground here.
‘We’re too young to be cynical.’
‘Well, Wilbur, sixteen is old for a duck,’ she said. ‘Quack.’
They laughed, then sat in silence for a little while.
‘Talk to her,’ implored the Ghost, pointlessly. ‘Come on, lad. Don’t be nervous. Ask her out. It would be the easiest thing in the world for you to just ask her out.’
Eventually, Maggie spoke. ‘My mam always said I was an old head on young shoulders. She said I had a different way about me. And I think she’s right about the old part. I’m sixteen going on sixty-five. Mam said life is lived the wrong way round. You need to be an old head in a young body to make the most of things.’
‘Your mam sounds wise.’
Maggie looked sadly across the water. ‘Yes. She was. She died. Two years ago.’ She closed her eyes and winced a little, as if taking a shard of glass out of her foot. ‘They don’t even know what killed her. But she was in pain. Her stomach. They tried everything. It was horrible.’
