The Dreamer wiped his eyes and allowed himself a smile of agreement. ‘Yeah. We are pretty shit.’
The challenge for Wilbur had been: how do you sum up a person you loved but who was complicated? How do you get through a tribute when you had been a real pain to her and had hardly seen her since that argument about Mr Parkin? When you pretended to have food poisoning to not go to their wedding? How? Especially when Cecil Parkin was right there on the front row? And why wouldn’t he be? He was her widower after all. How do you standthere and not wish you had been softer with her, even though she could be a nightmare?
The Ghost sighed. ‘How could I not see that underneath it all was a … a … sensitive woman who’d had more than most to deal with? I could. But I wasn’t ready to release all that pain into a church.’
The Dreamer was hardly listening. He was, after all, at his mother’s funeral for the first time and he was back to sobbing again.
‘It’s excruciating,’ continued the Ghost. ‘I just listed musicals she liked. A few of her favourite things. A Julie Andrews reference. I even misquoted Irving Berlin. Look – here. It’s coming …’
And it was. They watched on as Wilbur’s voice cracked.
‘Her favourite song was “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin. Another of his songs is, “The Song is Over, but the Music Lingers On”.’
The Ghost looked at Maggie. Even from behind, from just the tilt of her skull, he could read her completely. And he saw it all, perhaps better than the Dreamer could. All the complexity of it. All the love and sympathy for Wilbur, and also the sadness and frustrations that weren’t solely to do with that day in the church. Frustrations of a marriage that was dying the way things left untended do. She was standing beside Alfred. Alfred was holding her hand. He struggled with her being away, but it was chiefly expressed via gratitude at her being back.
A row behind and there was Charlie, in a brown suit but still with his long hair, fiddling with his Order of Service sheet and nodding his head in silent encouragement as Wilbur started to stumble a little. Beside him, Claudette was in a matching black skirt and jacket. The Ghost could see a bit of her face. She too was staring up with a warm sad smile of sympathy. They were good people. He missed them. He’d enjoyed working with Charlie during the seventies and eighties, and he and Maggie, at this point in their fraying relationship, still saw them most weekends. Charlie andClaudette had come up from London on a separate train just for this. To be there for Wilbur.
Meanwhile, Wilbur was concluding his speech: ‘And I’m sure Mam’s song will ring in our ears for a long time yet.’
Before leaving the pulpit he caught the gaze of Mr Parkin and looked quickly away. No look of recognition. No anything at all. Then he walked back to his seat where Maggie was waiting for him.
The Future Isn’t Real
The wake was held in the back room at the Queen’s Head. A barmaid had laid out some egg and cress sandwiches and there was a free bar.
The Ghost and the Dreamer didn’t speak, but they hung around, floating in and out of conversations.
Claudette had been explaining a bit about funeral traditions in the Caribbean, and St Vincent in particular. ‘The wake happens the day before the funeral – or something like a wake. And there is food, like this – notlike this, but food. And prayers and stories that can last all night. And spontaneous singing.’
‘Oh,’ said Wilbur. ‘You don’t want to hear me singing.’
Maggie nodded and did her best to join the banter. ‘True.’
Claudette laughed. ‘He must have been having lessons from Charlie!’
Charlie opened his mouth in mock offence while picking up a sandwich. ‘Look, it’s hard to sing Bowie. But you have to try, don’t you?’
Wilbur agreed. ‘His new albums especially. But I love them. “Heroes” is a good one to sing in the bath. And it’s all Charlie’s fault.’
The Ghost smiled at this. He remembered Charlie on his lunch break going to a record shop in Pimlico, near the London office of what was now Budd Books, and getting Bowie albums and singles on the day they were released. Charlie had a record player in his office and did the accounts while listening to music. He said the mathematics of music and accounting went together. And they seemed to. Charlie was brilliant, and used years of profit-and-loss numbers to make increasingly accurate projections.
Maggie slipped away from the group to see her father, who was standing waiting at the bar and looking over at Wilbur with an expression that fused sympathy with disappointment.
‘That’s really interesting,’ Wilbur was telling Claudette, ‘about the wake before the funeral.’
The Ghost wondered if he had been thinking it sounded more time-efficient.
‘Yes. And being the Caribbean, it’s often a celebration.’ She laughed. ‘And in St Vincent that means a lot of spiritual music. It tries to weave everything together. The whole life.’
Charlie washed down the remainder of his sandwich with his beer. ‘Speaking of weaving everything together, Wilbo, isn’t this pub where your mam and dad met?’
‘Aye. Yes. A long while back …’
‘That’s kind of nice, right? That the past is woven together like that …’
‘Yes, I suppose it is now I think of it … It’s hard to picture, given I only know my dad from stories and a couple of old photos.’
‘I’m reading this book on time,’ Charlie said. ‘I found it in the flea market on Farringdon Road. It’s by a Kenyan philosopher called John Mbiti.’
