The Ghost was confused for a moment.Did I sincerely believe that?
‘Look, Maggie, most of my life I was poor. My entire childhood I was poor. I had holes in my shoes and I was hungry and I saw my mam counting out farthings on the kitchen table to pay Mr Parkin the rent … If I go for this, it means we’ll never have to have those worries.’
The Ghost was despairing by this point. ‘Jesus, Wilbur. You’rerunning the most successful bookshop in the country. You’re paying off your own house. This is not a Mr Parkin situation.’
Wilbur stared towards where his ghost was, squinting a little. Had he heard him? It was hard to tell.
‘Well,’ said Maggie, with a doubtful tone Wilbur wasn’t choosing to hear, ‘if you think it’s the right thing, then you have to do it.’
They walked back to the hotel to get ready for the evening. Behind them was a ghost, and in front of them was a future about to change.
The Tune She Was Humming
Maggie was having a bath. They had half an hour before they had to leave for the restaurant. Wilbur hadn’t changed his clothes. He was lying on the bed, still in his sandals and the same flares and shirt as the Ghost. He felt suddenly quite tired. His eyes were dry from the flight, and he was feeling the consequences of the wine they had drunk earlier.
He picked up their guidebook.The Companion Guide to Venice.
A section on jazz bars. There were quite a few of them, and they were popular places to hang out, apparently, and one was close to the restaurant they were going to tonight.
Maggie liked jazz more than he did, so he thought he could surprise her by walking past there later on, after the meal. And then they could walk back to the hotel via the Piazza San Marco.
He heard Maggie gently humming to herself in the bath. He was sleepily trying to work out the tune she was humming, smiling to himself, no longer thinking about the ghostly doppelganger he had seen earlier. The one who was watching him now as he fell asleep in his clothes on the bed.
Death’s Brother
As a thousand writers have observed a thousand times over, death and sleep are closely related. ‘To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream’ was how Shakespeare put it. But the line the Ghost was thinking of was from the novel that had found him when he had needed it,The Grapes of Wrath: ‘Death was a friend, and sleep was Death’s brother.’
And that was how he felt right then. A brother to himself.
He felt like his own protector. And that was a comforting feeling, given he had lost his protecting big brother. But now he realised what he was doing. He was protecting himself. Sacrificing one self to save the other.
Because sleep was where the world of ghosts and the living could meet.
The truth was that he was not really any different to the Wilbur lying asleep on the bed. He was Wilbur – he had always been Wilbur.
He wondered what was going to happen when Wilbur fell asleep. And he kept wondering, right until it was too late to stop.
The Dreamer
What happened was that things started disappearing around him, and it happened quite quickly. The wardrobe, the table lamp, the table itself. Then the carpet, the walls, the door, the open suitcase, the clothes, the window, the view, the camera, the bed. Everything was replaced by darkness. Everything apart from Wilbur himself. He was still in a lying position, right in front of him, hovering in space.
He thought of what Agnes had said.There is no knowing anything.
And then things really changed.
Slowly, the world around them was being made again. Instead of striped wallpaper, there was now a long wall of red brick. Instead of carpet there was tarmac. Instead of a bed, the sleeping Wilbur was now lying on a bench.
‘So we are back here,’ whispered his ghost tentatively, as he wondered what was going to happen next. He caught sight of the sign he had seen the first time. The one which said ‘Wilbur’.
The dreaming Wilbur opened his eyes. He stared at his ghost.
‘You,’ he said. He wasn’t scared. He had the kind of acceptance he would never have had if awake.
‘Me,’ said the Ghost, looking around anxiously and wondering whether the train was coming.
‘Am I dreaming?’
It was a hard question to answer, especially as the Ghost was worried about what he had just done. He decided to say what he thought was true. The answer itself a spinning coin. ‘Sort of. You are still Wilbur Budd. You are still asleep in the hotel bed in Venice.But I am going to show you something I want you to see. Or try to. If the train comes.’
