No time to waste.
And he thought about it, as he headed towards the train.
All that time. All that waste.
And he wondered why he hadn’t been better at it, at living in time, while he’d had the chance.
The Double
The Ghost felt frustrated. He thought of what Miss Graham had told him.Ignore what is expected of you. Even if it means breaking the rules. And as the life he was watching progressed he noticed an urge to derail the journey and try and change things.
He sat next to Agnes.
‘It is possible for me to see myself,’ he said, his voice flat but tense.
‘What?’
‘Not just when I was a baby.’ His eyes fixed on the carriage floor. ‘I think there have been times when my living non-baby self can see me … Once in a cinema when I was on a date with Alice. And in the bookshop when I asked myself to turn around to see Maggie and I turned around. And just then at Charlie’s while we were taking acid …’
Agnes nodded, and sighed a little. They passed Wilbur, tired from work, watching footage of Neil Armstrong stepping out of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module and onto the moon. ‘You were alive for eighty-one years. Did you ever see your own ghost?’
‘I don’t know … Maybe. Maybe not. But anyway, didn’t you say this past isn’t a memory – it’s a living thing?’
Wilbur stared at his sandals. They sent him, mentally, back to his honeymoon. ‘Actually, one time I did have a very odd thing happen. I was on honeymoon in Venice. It was otherwise a very happy day. Probably the happiest day I have ever known. But I felt for a moment like I saw my doppelganger in the crowd, on the Rialto Bridge. He was wearing identical clothes to me.Theseclothes.I thought at the time that it was nothing. I imagined I was just hallucinating. I’d recently readThe Doubleby Dostoevsky – because this was back when I actuallyreadbooks rather than just sold them – and it had made a big impression on me, so I imagined I was just thinking I was seeingmydouble. I hadn’t eaten for a while and I had drunk some wine. It was hot in Venice and I had never been abroad before. I thought it was all getting to my head. But now I think I was seeingme.’
Agnes seemed perturbed, momentarily. ‘Well, perhaps you were, Old Bean, and perhaps you were not. But it really makes no difference because nothing actually happened.’
Wilbur studied her uncertain expression with interest. ‘You say that as if there was another way it could have happened. As though I could have, somehow, changed things.’
‘An interesting hypothesis, but what on earth would you have wanted to change? It was your honeymoon. You had just married the woman you loved …’
The train slowed. Wilbur looked out of the window, then back to Agnes, but she had gone. She probably realised he was about to ask a question too difficult even for her.
The Cemetery
Once, somewhere in 1969, the Midnight Train stopped at the cemetery.
It was a strange thing, being a ghost amid graves.
He wondered about all the names on the headstones. What had their experiences been like? Had their lives sped and stuttered in front of them in a similar fashion? Were any of them here now?
He reached Wilbur.
He was sitting on a bench staring at a grave.
DOUGLAS JAMES BUDD
1939–1964
A beloved son and brother
NOW AT REST
Wilbur was looking a bit different now. Though in the kind of relatively smart shirt and trousers he wore at Bagdale’s, his hair was longer than it had been. He had a looser look. The shirt had two open buttons. He had a half-read book beside him, open face down on the green wooden bench.
The Society of the Spectaclebecause he was in his French Marxist philosophy phase.
He had just finished work. He was picking at a scab of paint on the bench that was annoying him.
