The Midnight Train by Matt Haig. (Photo: Penguin Random House) When your life flashes before your eyes, what will matter most? For Wilbur it was his time with Maggie, the love of his life. Before he threw it all away. Years later, on the brink of his own death, a train arrives. It can take Wilbur back in time. Here is an excerpt from Matt Haig’s The Midnight Train.
***
Wilbur wouldn’t wake up in the ambulance. He wouldn’t wake up in Bedford Hospital. At one minute after midnight his heart beat for the last time.
He was dead.
And the interesting thing about death is how there is no thinking you are dead when you are dead. Like life, it arrives as its own self-evident fact.
That wasn’t to say it wasn’t confusing. Or troubling.
It certainly became that way.
But at first, the moment after he died, he had felt a light.
It wasn’t really the white light he had heard about. It wasn’t something to walk towards, but something already there. It was more of a soft yellow, like the sun through a thick layer of cloud.
He had a fleeting sense of calm.
A harmoniousness.
Maybe this was it. Maybe this was how it was going to be. Hovering in golden light for all eternity. A soul suspended in a happy void.
An existence outside time or pressure or concern.
But then, he was falling with nothing at all below him, gaining a kind of weight, until he landed back inside himself. Or something that felt like himself. Something like a body. He looked around. He was somewhere darker now but he could still see well enough. There was a red-brick wall behind him and paving below him. It looked a little like the first train station he had ever known, but instead of a sign reading “Sheffield” there was one which said “Wilbur”.
The way he was experiencing his moment of death was as a kind of train station.
A desolate platform, in the middle of nowhere. Without a train.
“This is...” he said, gaspingly. But he was too shocked to finish the sentence. Even the fact that he was speaking was a shock. His mind was reverberating as if from some giant cosmic cymbal crash.
The paved ground ended a short way in front of him, in a drop towards the steel rails and wooden sleepers of a train track.
He saw something twirling through the air.
A small, rectangular piece of card. He reached out and caught it. A ticket, with the following typed words:
Single journey
The Midnight Train
Departure Time: 00.01 Sunday 19 April
“Hello?”
But there was no one around. There was nothing to do except wait.
The Midnight Train
The strangest thing of all, given that it was death, was that he could breathe better than he had been able to for years.
It wasn’t – obviously – actual breathing. But it had the feel of it. Some kind of procedural memory of the soul. Just as he had the feel of his own body. But, no. Not really the feel of his actual body. This body he was in now wasn’t aching or stiff. His fingers felt like they would be able to play the piano with ease.
He looked down and saw he was wearing flared jeans, a short-sleeved green polyester shirt and a light suit jacket with wide lapels. Toes stuck out of sandals he hadn’t worn since the 1970s. He had no bunions. He saw his arms, tanned and young.
He felt the young skin of his face. Not really young – he could feel his closely shaved stubble – but tight, and relatively untextured. Apart from the two large sideburns.
There was an energy inside him. It was quite remarkable. A kind of flame that had flickered and faded over the years but which was now back, and ready to be appreciated. That was the whole trouble with life. It gave you every day in succession, so that every miracle to be cherished became a norm to be ignored. But now he felt it again.
Alive.
And next he heard something in the air.
A whining sound, growing slowly.
A mechanical chug. A rising rhythm growing in force, accompanied by a whistle. A train.
As it approached he saw plumes of vapour. It was a steam engine. He recognised it as a three-cylinder passenger express engine, specifically, complete with carriages trailing behind. He knew this because as a boy he’d had this precise train, but in miniature. It had been his pride and joy. The Duke of Gloucester. It looked exactly the same, but larger, gleaming with deep, dark-blue magnificence.
But in place of Duke of Gloucester written on the grey nameplate on the side of the boiler, it said, in bold black letters:
THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN
Someone stepped off the first carriage. An old-fashioned but not particularly old-looking woman. She was dressed in the style of a former time. Possibly the same time as the train. Long pencil skirt, prim blouse, cloche hat. She had perfect posture and a small, stern mouth. He felt like he recognised her from somewhere.
“Good day there, I’ve been expecting you,” she said in a mildly tremulous voice, a clipped, old-fashioned English that was instantly familiar but from where he couldn’t recall.
“Sorry,” Wilbur said. “If you don’t mind me asking – who are you?”
“Let’s start on a first-name basis. I’m Agnes, and this is the Midnight Train.”
Death was also the death of sense, it seemed. “I’m really sorry,” he said. Exasperated, bewildered, scared. “But – I hope you don’t mind me asking – what the bloody hell are you talking about?”
What Agnes was talking about
“When you came into Bagdale’s Bookshop as a little boy, years before you worked there, you used to see an old woman who once ran the shop,” said Agnes. “Well, that woman was me.”
“Mrs Bagdale!” said Wilbur, as it all fell into place.
Mrs Agnes Deborah Amaryllis Bagdale of Bagdale’s Bookshop, Commercial Street, Sheffield. In her day – before Wilbur had known it – the shop had been a delight on the inside, but a rather unassuming place from outside except for the fact that it was next to a bakery. Passers-by who stopped to browse the books in the window also inhaled the scent of bread, which had the rather magical effect of giving the stories they were looking at a fittingly well-baked scent.
It was a bookshop that had thrived for three reasons.
First, there was no competition; it was the only bookshop in a city of nearly five hundred thousand people.
Second, it was the kind of shop no one was intimidated to enter. Partly because there was a wire-haired fox terrier called Clementine who always lay on whatever patch of floor hadn’t been colonised by piles of detective novels.
And the third reason, the main reason, was the bookshop owner, Mrs Bagdale herself. She was from Norwich but had moved to Sheffield and set up a bookshop after her husband died in the trenches at Ypres.
Agnes Bagdale loved books and loved people and believed that life could be improved by having more people read more mystery novels. Besides this, or because of this, she had an almost supernatural ability for pairing the right person with the right book. She could chat to a steelworker who hadn’t read a book since childhood and know within a minute the perfect book for him. If they had a certain nostalgic twinkle in their eye, she might give them The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, for instance. If they were particularly interested in Clementine, she might recommend Hugh Lofting’s The Story of Doctor Dolittle.
“Books,” she once said, “are mirrors for the soul. So if you catch a glimpse of someone’s soul, you will know the mirror for them.” DM
The Midnight Train by Matt Haig is available at a retail price of around R435.