‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s all about who you’re with.’
‘I’m very content with who I’m with,’ he said as they walked up the steps to the arched doorways. And he really tried to believe that.
The Ghost remembered feeling a flicker of anger. After all, Alice knew about his gangster brother and his home life and his dead father. He had a lot to escapefrom. And he really did want to escape it. That had been his motivation almost as soon as he had started school.
There was a crowd of people in the foyer. Men in suits and women in smart, belted day dresses and twinsets. Quite different from the Cineworld in Bedford, thought the Ghost with a chuckle, as he watched the bittersweet memory of this night.
‘I always like this carpet,’ said Wilbur, staring at the chessboard pattern of red and black. ‘Is it one of your dad’s?’
‘No, Wilbur, it isn’t.’
‘I forgot how bad you were at this,’ the Ghost chuckled as he moved, sometimes literally, through the gathering crowd.
In the end, they opted forThe Birds.During one tense early moment she held his hand. And Wilbur liked that feeling, of being a protector.
The Ghost stood beside them in the aisle. He had this sudden desire to be seen. Again, he knew it was unlikely, but also he felt that Agnes’s strong desire for him not to ‘meddle’ indicated that meddling was indeed possible. A concept which tantalised him. And the reason he wanted to be seen was because he knew he washeading into the crisis years. The years in which hope and longing and youth mixed into guilt and regret. The time of unspeakable tragedy. So he didn’t fully know if he wanted to change something, but he wanted to be reallythere. And besides, he had been seen as a baby, so he could be seen again, he was sure. He just had a sense of it. More than a sense. He remembered how he had often felt like he was watching himself from somewhere else, like he was a character in a novel more than a person in the world. And there was something else he was remembering too. His honeymoon. He hadn’t really thought about it for years but he was sure he had seen himself. There had been the moment where he had seen someone who looked precisely like him standing on the Rialto Bridge. It was just a fleeting thing that he’d shaken off at the time. But now he was viewing it differently, just as he was viewing everything differently, and so he tried again, he tried very hard to make his presence felt.
‘I am here. Look up. Right here, standing in the aisle. I have lived your whole life and I know where it went wrong, and I know how you could avoid that … Please. Hear me. See me.’ At one point Wilbur yawned, then twitched, then looked a little way towards the space the Ghost was occupying, then jumped a little in his seat. It was unclear what he had seen or heard or sensed.
‘Wilbur? It’s me – you. Can you see me? Like when you were a baby and Dougie showed you the train? I’m here … Just know, you are with the wrong girl …’
And meanwhile, Alice was asking in a whisper if he was all right.
‘Aye,’ Wilbur whispered back. ‘Someone just walked across my grave, that’s all …’
He concentrated back on the movie without much of a thought, and despite the Ghost’s continued attempts to be noticed, he couldn’t seem to make himself heard.
The Hidden History
During the intermission, an usherette appeared, walking up the aisle with her tray.
Long brown hair clipped beneath a peakless cap, red jacket and brass buttons. The face like an open book, the slight smile.
It was her.
The Ghost remembered this well. He remembered Alice raising her hand and beckoning Maggie over.
He remembered the nineteen-year-old Maggie noticing him and saying hello with her eyes. They had spoken once or twice since that afternoon in the park but, just like now, there had never been the right context to chat deeper.
‘Maggie,’ he said. Just that. Just her name. As if it was an elemental thing. Like water in a desert.
‘Hello, Wilbur. Good to see you.’ Professional. Only a quick double blink to reveal that she was feeling anything at all at the sight of him with a date.
‘Aye. You too.’
Alice, perhaps noting that Wilbur’s attention was wandering in that moment, got some ice cream. Lyons Maid vanilla choc ice. And after Maggie had gone, Alice called her back to complain it was too warm and that the chocolate was messy.
‘Look at the state of it. Look how warm it is.’
The Ghost remembered the discomfort he had felt in that moment. He watched himself staring intensely down at the dark carpet of the cinema and praying for it to divide and open up and swallow him whole.
Staggeringly, Alice wasn’t finished. And nor was Wilbur’s discomfort. ‘Where do you keep them? Down your bra?’
Wilbur looked up from the carpet, the embarrassment now replaced by a wish to protect Maggie. ‘Alice, come on, she’s just doing her job,’ Wilbur said, not seeing anything particularly wrong with the choc ice.
‘I’m really sorry,’ said Maggie.
‘That’s all right,’ said Wilbur. ‘It’s not a big deal.’
