She studied him in the near-dark of the room with the eyes of an attentive artist.
‘You don’t always have to be.’ She’d felt his pounding heart. ‘Was it about Dougie?’
‘No,’ he lied. ‘No, I don’t remember what it was about.’
Over time, the nightmares stopped and he began to feel courageous in a way he never had. And through this courage he wasn’t scared any more to give himself to her. The distraction of this new feeling felt like it would never end: the speed of his love swirled with the excitement of taking the bookshop from strength to strength, as if it was all part of the same rising force. Both gave him a self-esteem he had been lacking, and neither one ate into the other. He wasn’t quite able to head down Ecclesall Road or pass the sycamore tree, and the wound was still there, but he was somehow preoccupied enough to never press it. He had made their love into a blanket and burrowed deep under it. And so, for a fleeting moment in time, from around 1972 to 1974, it seemed to Wilbur he had finally worked out how to live.
Love’s Garden
The train dropped the Ghost off at a pub.
The Black Swan.
A cosy pub with an open fire.
Men fresh from the steel works sat at tables smoking cigarettes and playing dominoes and chatting about horses and football and the cold.
Then he saw himself.
He was talking to a man with thinning black and white hair and bushy sideburns and eyes that seemed to tilt away from each other. A man who had the air of a sad badger. Maggie’s father, Alfred. He was still in his green uniform from a day in Endcliffe Park, tending to litter and flowerbeds.
They drank Guinness and ate pork scratchings. Alfred studied Wilbur as he sipped his pint, as if it were a test. To be fair, that was how Wilbur had felt for much of the night, like he was being rigorously assessed. Not that Alfred had many questions. Indeed, he didn’t have much to say at all. He guarded his words as if they were money that would be spent once spoken. But the Ghost was there to hang around, and watched – and remembered – as Wilbur slowly managed to befriend him.
‘Maggie is very talented,’ Wilbur said. ‘Her drawing is brilliant.’
‘She doesn’t get that from me, I’m afraid,’ said Alfred, as he placed a pork scratching in his mouth.
‘Not much of an art person, then?’ Wilbur asked cheerfully. Too cheerfully, he felt, the moment he had asked it.
The older man shook his head. ‘No.’
The silence yawned before them. A man at the next table slammed down a domino in victory. The Ghost thought of his mother, across town, serving pints in the Queen’s Head. He remembered not wanting to meet there. And choosing here instead. A sign that he hadn’t really become a proper man, thought the Ghost. A sign that he was still in the shadow of Dougie, and still ashamed – not of his mother, exactly, but of himselfaroundhis mother.
The Ghost studied his own living face as he started telling Alfred, unprompted, about his work and how sales of art books at the shop had picked up and they were expanding the illustrated books section. Animated conversation that masked the slight twitch of Wilbur’s mouth. The strained eye contact with Alfred. The discomfort in his own skin. Yes. It was there. Even here in his happy years. That feeling of not being adequate, of not being able to bear what was really going on inside him.
‘You were never quite right,’ the Ghost said, unheard. ‘Were you? You could imagine you were, with Maggie, but there was something inside you. That grief and insufficiency.’
The Ghost realised again that he may have misunderstood how to live. He always thought that to succeed in life you just had to keep spinning. Like a sycamore seed on the wind. And that the faster you span the further you’d reach. That, provided you kept accelerating, you could outrun scarcity, outrun your past, outrun your nightmares. Yet he saw now, watching his young self, the lengths he had gone to avoid what the tender part of his heart was really feeling. Would it have been impossible to stop moving forward for one moment and just sit, with his pain and shame and woe? To face it head on. It wouldn’t have been impossible – for instance – to just hold on to Sheffield, and their life here. Or even to move away from the place, but not from all the feeling.
‘Her mother,’ Alfred said eventually after Wilbur’s monologue ground to a halt. His words arriving almost as a sigh. ‘She was the one into art and that. Not me.’
Wilbur didn’t know quite what to say. He knew he was on delicate ground. ‘I would have loved to meet her. The way Maggie talks about her I know she was a very special person.’
Alfred gave Wilbur a testing look. ‘Aye. She was.’ His face softened with sympathy and sadness. ‘Maggie told me about you losing your dad and your brother. I’m sorry about that, son. That’s a lot for a young man to carry. It’s hard when you’ve known someone so well.’
Wilbur nodded. ‘Actually, I never knew my dad. He died in the war.’
A considered pause. A scratch of his sideburns. ‘I’m sorry, lad.’
‘And my brother, he was a bit of a tearaway to be honest, Mr Shaw. You see, Dad was his hero and then he died really young and Dougie took it bad.’
There was another silence, but a more natural one. ‘Gardening,’ Alfred said eventually. ‘That’s what helps me. Looking after things. Even simple things.’
‘Right.’
‘Look after things, lad. That’s my advice. Anything that comes your way.’
‘Right. Yes. Good advice. Like the shop. I’m making a good go of it. I might expand. We’re doing really well. Last month our turnover was double what it was for February.’
