He got to see the shape of his misery, right at the points where he was most desperate. He got to see himself sitting in a pub, drinking his wages away. To see himself come back drunk to his spaced-out mother as she sat in the kitchen tearing off an advert in theDaily Mirrorfor a Philips cassette recorder that she would never buy.
‘Why did you let it happen, Wilbur?’
‘What, Mam?’
Edith looked down to her knees, shaking her head. ‘Why did you tell him to go out with you? Why did you get the tickets?’
He knew he couldn’t tell her the truth. That he wanted to soften the Oxford blow.
‘Why did you let him keep driving? That’s a thing I don’t understand.’
‘Oh, Mam, I’m sorry. I tried to grab the wheel. I tried to stop him … I didn’t know what was going to happen … I should have never took him out … Not just after he was released … Something was going to happen … I’m sorry, Mam … It’s my fault.’
‘It was hard.’
‘What was hard?’
‘When your dad died. Having to split everything between the two of you. All the love, all the money. And I didn’t have enough of either. Not at the time. I couldn’t be a mam to him because it was all such a burden.’
‘Me, Mam. You mean I was the burden.’
She looked at him and the truth was so strong she couldn’t deny it. Wilbur felt his mind go numb from the intensity of that, acreeping emptiness as his already claustrophobic world narrowed a little further.
And as the Ghost watched his own hurt, he understood himself in a way he’d never quite managed in life. He saw how much he’d been shaped and conducted by his youth. The striving for a success he thought he needed to justify his existence. And the struggle with a love he didn’t think he deserved.
Edith turned away and stared into space. She started humming the title song fromSingin’ in the Rain, which she had taken Dougie and Wilbur to when they were young. Her voice had a faint and distant quality to it, as if she was singing not from pain but the place beyond that. A place beyond sense itself. And as the Ghost watched her he realised how Dougie’s death had killed his mother too. How it had also killed him, or at least a part of him. One that would never truly return.
Standing on the Edge
Middlewood Hospital. An austere psychiatric hospital in the Sheffield suburbs that would one day become luxury apartments.
His mother spent six months there. In fact, she admitted herself. So that was one thing Wilbur didn’t really need to feel guilty about, but he somehow did. The second of the Ghost’s visits there was the day after the electroconvulsive therapy that triggered a seizure. He saw himself try not to cry as she sat there, empty. He was twenty-one now. Hair quite long and styleless. Eyes shrewd and intense, as if continually looking for something that wasn’t there. Edith watched him as he sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair, and finally spoke. Her voice was unusually tender.
‘Little boy.’
The train arrived as Wilbur wearily closed his eyes. He was on the verge of drifting to sleep as the train cab slid right by – through the walls – as immune to earthly physics as it always was. Agnes was there, and as ever she was urging him quickly onto the train.
‘Quick! Before he falls asleep!’
It sounded very urgent.
‘Why?’
‘I told you. You must never see yourself sleeping.’
‘I know. I remember. But you never told me why.’
‘Your living self would end up seeing his own future in a dream. All of it …’
‘And?’
‘Well, your eternity would be gone. You may not like the life you lived, but if you had lived it any other way then you – thisghost – would not be this ghost. Eternity is for ever. And no one wants to give that up.’
It was true. He didn’t. He was feeling weary from seeing how much he had lost, and who he had lost. The idea of eternity – of being able to commune for ever with the souls of people he cared about most – was so comforting.
So he hurried onto the train. And the next stop was barely six weeks later.
The Ghost stepped out of the carriage into the night air. He was on the roof of Park Hill high-rise flats, where he found Wilbur, alone, contemplating the thirteen-storey drop below.
