Maybe, thought the Ghost, the world was full of this. Chaos trying too hard to be order. Violence trying to be peace. Maybe sometimes bad actions were just good motives without a map. And now the pressure had built and broken through and Dougie was in this speeding car, with the young brother he had once looked after, and yakking ten words a second like he needed to get it all out, leaping from one thing to another while he kept his foot on the pedal. ‘That siren sounds like a flying saucer!Plan 9 from Outer Space. Can you remember when we went to see that, Wilbo? With your pal Charlie? That was a good day. I’d just got the job at the furnaces. You remember?’
Wilbo.Hearing it now as a Ghost, even passing road signs in a blur, he heard the affection in it.
‘Dougie, please, focus – this is dangerous.’
‘Dad was like you. Wanted to bite off more than he could chew. Everyone else joined the army. But he wanted to be with the toffs up in the sky. You were meant to train for three years before they let you into air combat. They changed it to six months! You know that? Six bloomin’ months! All to go and die for Churchill.’
‘Dougie, stop your rattling and slow down. I don’t want to die.’
‘You’re not going to.’
‘Just slow the hell—’
‘Them coppers are in a Triumph. This is a bloomin’ Vauxhall. We can’t slow down.’
The Ghost was petrified. When he was younger he had been scared of ghosts. He had been worried he would see his dad out on the landing. But he’d had it all wrong. The dead were nothing to fear. It was the living that contained unknown terrors.
‘That girl liked you, lad,’ Dougie told him, as Wilbur nursed his bleeding nose. He was slurring his words.
‘You’re drunk. You’re so bloody drunk.’
‘You never know what’s in front of you. You always want more. Like Dad did. You’ve got it all, Wilbo. You’ve got it all. You just don’t see it. Life just falls your way. That’s how it is for some people. That’s what’s different about you and me. Things fall your way and you don’t see them.’
Things fall your way.
‘I work bloody hard, Dougie.’
Dougie turned away from the road and looked at his brother with a desperate kind of love. And the Ghost wished he could reach back through time to tell him how much he was loved.
The Threads of Time Were Frayed But Holding
Wilbur was almost crying as his eyes stayed on the road. He was holding it back with effort, as if to let out a single tear would be to end the world.
Dougie was six years older than Wilbur. He was twenty-five. But to the Ghost and maybe to the living Wilbur he looked like a child. He looked like someone to look after, because no one really had. He looked like the little boy who had handed him a train. The threads of time were frayed but holding.
Nothing ever just happened, realised the Ghost. Even the most reckless action was a consequence of what had gone before, just as every loud mistake in the world was the product of some quiet and secret pain.
‘Oh, Dougie,’ sighed the Ghost, while his living self was trying to grab the wheel again and being elbowed hard away.
It was a tragedy of life that you had to die before you could truly see the whole of someone.
The Ghost leaned forward in the back seat. ‘I love you, Dougie. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry you didn’t calm whatever demons were in your head. I’m sorry you didn’t get the help you needed …’
The road was getting steeper. And this seemed to be the reason Dougie’s car was struggling to stay ahead. The police car was now in the other lane, beginning to overtake.
Wilbur saw this and panicked.
The Ghost held whatever it was that felt so much like breath. Wilbur’s leg was now reaching over Dougie’s for the brake pedal. And that was when Dougie looked fully at him with mad desperation.
A lot could be felt in the smallest fraction of a second.
Wilbur loved his brother. He loved him more than he was infuriated by him, though the infuriation was so intertwined with the love, and was so often spun directly from it, that it was hard to know where one ended and the other began. Just as it was impossible for the Ghost to know how much of the love he was feeling in that second towards him had been felt then, and how much was overlaying it through the tragedy of time.
While Wilbur’s foot was battling Dougie for control of the brake, Wilbur noticed a rabbit hopping out across the road from Endcliffe Park.
‘Just don’t say it!’ implored the Ghost, pointlessly, through the barrier of time.
But, of course, it happened.
