‘Dougie! Look! Watch out!’
The Rabbit
He always wished he hadn’t called attention to the rabbit. Because maybe in that version of events Dougie would have never seen it, and he would have continued to drive in a straight line, or Wilbur would have gained control of the brake and everything would have been – probably, possibly – okay. Not totally okay. There would have been consequences. Dougie had, unmistakably, broken the law at least three times that night. With the fight, the knife, and now the car. But then again, all those things stemmed from Wilbur talking him into going out, and dropping the news about Oxford at the most inopportune moment – the start of a night out.
Dougie looked up and saw the rabbit hopping across the tarmac.
And this man, who was so tough in so many of the wrong ways, was at his core just a soft kid who wouldn’t hurt a rabbit.
He swerved wildly. Hands on the steering wheel passing over each other one, two, three times in succession.
It was all so fast and yet so beyond time.
As Wilbur had replayed it so many times, it had slowed with each silent evocation, but really it was just a moment.
The skid, the rough ride onto the verge, seeing the tree right there, front and centre on the pavement. The silent, oblivious terraced houses beyond. The sudden tightness in concentration like the air was solidifying around them. The terrible vulnerability of being flesh and bone, the deafening, fast crunch, and the impossibly violent whip and jerk as they smashed straight into the trunk of the tree.
In the lived version, Wilbur had no time to think, but the Ghostsaw now what had saved him. Unlike his brother, who was upright and facing the windscreen, Wilbur had been in a strange twisted position as he wrestled for control of the car. And this awkward contrapposto, with his leg trying to reach the brake pedal, meant that he was lower in his seat. So when he was thrown forward he hit the dashboard at such an angle that his arm and ribs took most of the force.
But still, his head took more of it than he ever realised. And now that the Ghost was watching it all happen, he could amend the memory of it, and also prolong it, as – unlike Wilbur himself – he wasn’t falling fast into unconsciousness.
So the Ghost could properly witness the thump and smash of the window that led to Dougie’s body suddenly being there, glittered with glass and contorted like a collapsed puppet, at the base of the sycamore tree. The kind of shape a body only makes if it has no life left in it.
The Magnetic Field
The Ghost saw the police car skid to a stop and the moustachioed policeman get out while his colleague called for help from the primitive two-way radio system in the car.
The outside police officer was now crouching beside Dougie, feeling his neck and wrist for a pulse. Residents were creeping out to watch the scene from the raised houses on the left side of the road, facing the park.
The tragedy was like a magnet. Even then, right at the start. It pulled everything into its field.
And that is how it stayed, throughout Wilbur’s life.
Even when he thought he was getting away from the horror.
Especially then, in fact. It never quite let him go. There was a horrible stillness inside the car before Wilbur made a low moan. The Ghost felt the need to say something with his unheard mouth. Even if it was the most hollow thing of all.
‘It will be all right. It will be all right. It will be all right …’
The Days
‘Do you know what it’s like,’ the Ghost asked Agnes, once back on the train, ‘to see the very worst moment of your life and be able to do nothing at all to stop it?’
Agnes was sitting beside him. He was closer to her than he had been, close enough to see the stitches in her hem. She held her hat and stared down at it. He thought she was going to get strict with him and tell him once more about the importance of not meddling. But she didn’t. At least, not right then.
‘I understand,’ she said, delicately. ‘I’m sorry.’
And the Ghost went quiet. He thought of Mr Bagdale – Arthur, her son – and wondered why he had been the way he was, and what had happened in Agnes’s life, and imagined there were probably just as many regrets as in his own. And she had learned to accept all that, and hadn’t tried to tinker with anything. But that was Agnes.
Part of Wilbur knew he had lived his life and must go with the journey and accept it all, even the most savage bits. But another, stubborn, part of him was forming. He had the crazed urge to break through to the world of the living and change the course of things.
On went the train. It was as though the landscape of his life became so difficult now it was harder for the engine to pull them through. And they seemed to be stopping more than ever.
There was the day of the funeral, where he had to watch himself as a pall-bearer, helping carry his brother’s weight as he walked past their visibly shaking mother.
The day he watched his mother wash down her Valium with some sherry and Wilbur soothed her tears by telling her he wasn’t going to university.
The day Wilbur had to tell his mother, over and over, that the police weren’t waiting outside for her.
