The Wilbur Station
Wilbur wouldn’t wake up in the ambulance. He wouldn’t wake up in Bedford Hospital. At one minute after midnight his heart beat for the last time.
He was dead.
And the interesting thing about death is how there is nothinkingyou are dead when you are dead. Like life, it arrives as its own self-evident fact.
That wasn’t to say it wasn’t confusing. Or troubling.
It certainly became that way.
But at first, the moment after he died, he had felt a light.
It wasn’t really the white light he had heard about. It wasn’t something to walk towards, but something already there. It was more of a soft yellow, like the sun through a thick layer of cloud.
He had a fleeting sense of calm.
A harmoniousness.
Maybe this was it. Maybe this was how it was going to be. Hovering in golden light for all eternity. A soul suspended in a happy void.
An existence outside time or pressure or concern.
But then, he was falling with nothing at all below him, gaining a kind of weight, until he landed back inside himself. Or something that felt like himself. Something like a body. He looked around. He was somewhere darker now but he could still see well enough. There was a red-brick wall behind him and paving below him. It looked a little like the first train station he had ever known, but instead of a sign reading ‘Sheffield’ there was one which said ‘Wilbur’.
The way he was experiencing his moment of death was as a kind of train station.
A desolate platform, in the middle of nowhere. Without a train.
‘This is …’ he said, gaspingly. But he was too shocked to finish the sentence. Even the fact that he was speaking was a shock. His mind was reverberating as if from some giant cosmic cymbal crash.
The paved ground ended a short way in front of him, in a drop towards the steel rails and wooden sleepers of a train track.
He saw something twirling through the air.
A small, rectangular piece of card. He reached out and caught it. A ticket, with the following typed words:
Single journey
The Midnight Train
Departure Time: 00.01 Sunday 19 April
‘Hello?’
But there was no one around. There was nothing to do except wait.
The Midnight Train
The strangest thing of all, given that it was death, was that he could breathe better than he had been able to for years.
It wasn’t – obviously –actualbreathing. But it had the feel of it. Some kind of procedural memory of the soul. Just as he had the feel of his own body. But, no. Not really the feel of his actual body. This body he was in now wasn’t aching or stiff. His fingers felt like they would be able to play the piano with ease.
He looked down and saw he was wearing flared jeans, a short-sleeved green polyester shirt and a light suit jacket with wide lapels. Toes stuck out of sandals he hadn’t worn since the 1970s. He had no bunions. He saw his arms, tanned and young.
He felt the young skin of his face. Notreallyyoung – he could feel his closely-shaved stubble – but tight, and relatively untextured. Apart from the two large sideburns.
There was an energy inside him. It was quite remarkable. A kind of flame that had flickered and faded over the years but which was now back, and ready to be appreciated. That was the whole trouble with life. It gave you every day in succession, so that every miracle to be cherished became a norm to be ignored. But now he felt it again.
