While trying to flag a taxi, a homeless man came up to Wilbur asking for change. Wilbur was so fixated on the black cab he ignored the man completely. Then the man tapped him on the arm and Wilbur jerked away and scowled at him.
‘Get off me.’
The Dreamer looked down at his sandals in shame.
‘This world is full of folk who look but never see,’ said the Ghost.
‘I remember those words. But not who said them.’
‘It was Victor. Victor Willows. You know, the homeless bloke in Sheffield who’d lost everything in the war. The one we used to chat to.’
‘Ah, yes, I remember him.’
The Ghost nodded. ‘It’s a pity he doesn’t,’ he said as they watched the other Wilbur climbing into the taxi and telling the driver to head to the Budd Books offices on Haymarket.
And the two spectres stood there in the road as the taxi drove right through them.
‘Okay,’ the Dreamer said, ‘I see it now.’
A Thought While Looking Out of the Window
The incredibly annoying thing about being dead was that you got all your priorities in order, just when it was too late to do anything about them.
Maximum Speed
The Dreamer was dumbfounded. ‘You just carried on? You didn’t slow down your life … even after all that?’
‘I sped up, if anything. I had mistaken being caffeinated and adrenalised with being alive. I had mistaken an addiction for purpose. There was no balance. I got greedy. The old gain, gain, gain. Our strategy became one of takeovers … We went hard on the discounts … We got into trouble with local booksellers because we were moving next door to them and taking their customers. I felt a kind of calm when competitors closed down, never thinking of what that meant to people’s lives. I wanted a world of no competition, no variety. Just Budd Books everywhere, my name on everything. I’d totally lost what I was in this for and it was as far away from Agnes Bagdale’s original shop as it was possible to be. I was Thomas and Ebenezer together at times … But a new era had dawned. And there were no punishments for greed. Only rewards.’
Something caught his eye through the window: Wilbur – suited, with slicked-back hair – on stage at the Excellence in Business Awards at the Metropolitan Hotel on Park Lane in London, forgetting to mention Maggie in his speech, while she sat on a table next to his empty chair, trying not to worry about the lump she had found.
Live How the Dead Would If Only They Had the Chance
As the train continued along its track, the man who was dead explained himself to the man who was merely dreaming.
‘It is ironic,’ he told him, ‘that it only takes a moment to die, but a whole lifetime to learn how to live. And it’s been occurring to me, just as it’s too late, that I may have lived in entirely the wrong fashion for who I was inside.’
‘So you’re telling me my future is a waste of time?’
The Ghost shook his head imploringly. ‘You are still alive. Just asleep. It’s not too late for you.’
‘Not too late for what?’
‘To live how the dead would if they only had the chance. But to do that, you need to see what happened … to you and Maggie.’
Empty Rooms
The train pulled up outside a large, intimidatingly grand house on Sumner Place in South Kensington on a sunny evening in August.
The house was set back from the street behind a wide front garden, laid with immaculate tiles, and home to three large square pots, each containing a laurel tree.
It was an impressive house.
The Dreamer looked at it with mouth agape. ‘This isours?’
‘Uh huh. Oh yes. Six bedrooms. Five absolutely unnecessary.’
Wilbur, suited, wearily climbed the steps. He was talking into an old (new) Motorola mobile phone, with a little bulbous aerial sticking out of the top.
