‘I’m sorry about all that.’
‘Water under the bridge.’
The Ghost sighed to himself. ‘Water under the bridge. It’s always water under the bridge … There is a lot of water under that bridge.’
Wilbur, yellow under the street lamp, looked mournfully at his old friend. ‘Was it a good concert?’ he asked.
Charlie nodded. ‘Really good. One of the best … Listen, will you be all right, Wilbur?’
‘Of course! I’ll be grand. Business is booming.’
‘That’s not what I asked.’
‘No. I will be fine, I will be fine …’
‘Listen, call me if you need anything.’
‘Thanks. See you later, Charlie.’
And Charlie stayed out on the pavement watching his old friend walk away, into the night, with an expression between confusion and sympathy. ‘Yes. Maybe. See you.’
And Charlie went back inside. The two unseen observers saw him stroke Claudette’s arm. ‘Well, that was weird.’
The Thing With Love
They were back on the train.
The view outside was speeding up. A blur of offices and speeches and rolling over in bed and feeling for a presence that wasn’t there.
‘The thing with love,’ the Ghost said, ‘is that it can feel so eternal that it can be mistaken for something that will be around for ever. Like a rock formation. Or the sky. But love is like every other human thing – it withers without attention. It’s like what Alfred told us. About it being a garden …’
This annoyed the younger, living, dreaming Wilbur on the train. ‘Oh shut up,’ he said, staring out of the window at his future self as he cried himself to sleep. ‘Just,please, for once, shut up … You said yourself you don’t have all the answers. You seem to have screwed up your entire life, yet here you are acting like some phantom Prospero who knows everything.’
The Ghost shrugged beside him on the velvet seat. ‘I’m just trying to help you.’
‘Yes, well, I don’t always need the commentary. Sometimes I can work things out for myself. Sometimes you can come across a little, I don’t know,pompous.’
‘I’m dead. It’s impossiblenotto be pompous when you are dead. Being dead is an incredibly pompous thing because after you die you know better. And I do know better.’
‘There you go again.’
‘Look, I know I don’t have all the answers. I just know what I got wrong. And I don’t want you to get it wrong. I’m here to help you. I am a ghost. You are not. You are simply dreaming, and youget to wake up. And I don’t. You are innocence and I am experience. And I am doing all thisfor you. So, you know, a little bit of gratitude wouldn’t go amiss.’
Now they could see Wilbur working at night in the office. His eyes were heavy, he was close to falling asleep, but he stayed at his desk. He didn’t want to go home.
‘All right,’ said the Dreamer. ‘I’m sorry. I just don’t like it. I don’t like seeing it. I don’t like seeing the end of us. I love her and I thought I was going to love her for ever.’
The Ghost slapped his hands together. ‘But that’s just it, Dreamer. I still loved her, but it had become a useless kind of love. A love as separate from reality as a stock market is from the people. The trouble was that I was timid. I won’t saywewere timid. Becauseyoudon’t have to be. Your future is ahead. The thing you have to think about is what she put in the letter.Sometimes you have to let your heart break in order to stay alive. She wasn’t just talking about herself. She was talking about us. You have to accept what happened with Dougie. You have to accept that you weren’t the perfect brother, and you weren’t the perfect son, but that you did the best with what you had. You have to accept the grief inside your bones. And that, yes, things could have been different. Yes, you were held back. You could have gone to university, you could have done X and Y and Z, but in trying to prove yourself you forgot to be yourself. Maggie was right. You lost yourself.’
The Dreamer’s eyes beneath his shaggy hair were back to their default setting of wide confusion. ‘What were you scared of?’
‘Losing her. I’d lost everyone I’d ever loved. And after Mam I thought I was going to lose her too. And what is the opposite of love … Not hate. Because hate is still emotion. It’spointless ambition. The abstractions of physics and mathematics. The corporate world where everything can be quantified. I was addicted to it. The false sense of importance you get from being at the top of a ladder. They say power is an aphrodisiac but to me it was ananaesthetic. I could almost stop being a sentient, vulnerable human.’
The Dreamer shook his head and stared out at Wilbur in a board meeting. ‘No. There must be more to it.’
‘Maybe. There was always the idea that our real life was ahead of us. That we would get to fifty and I’d quit …’
‘But it was 1995. You were fifty and not quitting.’
