A short while away, down the track, Wilbur was in a grey suit in a phone box by the river in Newcastle. He could see his wide eyes and open mouth as he held the receiver and put in another coin. The Ghost remembered hearing the news. The news that knocked him off guard. That Maggie had missed her period and gone to the chemist for one of the new, expensive home tests. She hadn’t said anything until she had gone to the clinic for another test, and that was today. Now it was official. They could start thinking of names for a baby.
‘Oh, Maggie, I’m so happy,’ Wilbur had said, and it was true. Yet strangely, as the view out of the window made clear, over the next few weeks he accepted every excuse or reason to not be at home.
The Death of John Lennon
When the train next stopped, Wilbur was in a hotel in Manhattan.
The Waldorf Astoria, according to the embroidered dressing gown. Skyscrapers shone impressively outside the window, like a galaxy made solely of squares and rectangles.
Wilbur was sitting on the end of the bed and looked quite different now to his honeymoon self. The last traces of boyish youth and hippyish optimism had waned. He had shorter hair. No sideburns. His face looked a little doughy around the jowls. His eyes were tired from jetlag and he had a typed-out speech on his knee that he was trying to learn for the next day for an audience filled with members of the American publishing industry.
The Ghost and his slumbering honeymoon self were there too, watching him.
‘Look at me. How old am I here?’
‘Thirty-five.’
‘I’m in New York. In the fanciest hotel I have ever seen. Wow.’
‘Oh no,’ sighed the Ghost. ‘I know what this is. I don’t want to watch this.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s just … Oh God.’
Wilbur had turned on the television and was watching it quite fixedly.CBS Evening Newswith Walter Cronkite, as the opening titles declared in bold, curled, early-eighties type.
Cronkite – grey hair, dark suit, sombre face – sat in front of a giant picture of John Lennon in his otherwise beige studio.
‘Good evening,’ he said, in the heaviest tones. ‘The death of a man who sang and played the guitar overshadows the news from Poland, Iran and Washington this evening. The former Beatle John Lennon, who was forty, was shot and killed last night outside his luxury apartment in New York …’
The Dreamer stared at the screen, mouth agape. ‘Blimey. Lennon. That’s bloody dreadful. And in New York too.’
‘I don’t think that’s why we’re here.’
The Ghost pointed at the phone. It began to ring in long, low bleats. They watched their other self walk over in reluctant strides to get it.
‘Hello?’
A pause. The hotel operator told him he was putting through an international call. And then it was her, Maggie, on the end of the line. Even the Dreamer could hear the heavy breath.
‘Maggie? Maggie, what’s wrong? It must be the middle of the night back home. Why are you crying? Is this about the news? They’ve caught the gunman … There’s no danger …’
‘No! This is not about the news …’Maggie was so loud and distraught her voice could be heard faintly, in the room.
‘What’s happened?’
Her voice was indistinct now. Even to the Wilbur who had the phone right next to his ear.
‘Maggie, darling, I’m sorry, I can’t hear you … did you say blood? You’re bleeding? I don’t understand what you’re saying …’
As Maggie spoke Wilbur sat on the bed. Put the weight of his head on his hand. ‘Oh no, oh, Maggie …’
The Dreamer stared anxiously at the scene. ‘What’s happening?’
‘I don’t know what to do, Wilbur … I think we’ve lost it …’
The Ghost was hardly paying attention. He was feeling the vertigo of that moment, the precise point one future closed down and another one began.
