Superpowerless

by Chris Priestley

  Not that it isn’t a view of deadening dullness: a grid of long thin gardens separated by brick walls and panel fences, overgrown by climbers, shaded by trees and hedges.

  Mostly the gardens are laid to lawn. Some have a shed; some new, some rickety. A couple of people have little wooden offices. Trampolines and swings and climbing frames mark those houses with small children – or the memory of them. David’s own garden has a swing hanging from the tree, though no one uses it now and the rope is so old it would probably snap if anyone tried.

  Some gardens celebrate the green-fingered talents of their owners, others are overgrown or under-loved. David’s own is a mix of both and he stands for a while, gazing down in a kind of stupor, not really thinking about anything in particular, but letting the present and the past run together, unchecked.

  And then Holly Harper steps out into her garden in a bright sky-blue bikini.

  David feels his whole body quiver for a second – like he is a bowstring, plucked by the sight of her. He steps carefully to the scope standing on its tripod, waiting. He raises the blinds a fraction to clear the view in front of the lens.

  David has already focused the scope onto Holly’s lounger. He did that two days ago – the first time he saw her sunbathing. It really is breathtaking, the sharpness, the clarity. It is super-vision. He has actual super-vision, but he has decided that it would be wrong to use it for this. Very wrong.

  Holly is a tiny doll with his naked eye, but with the scope he can read the label on the bottle of suntan lotion she is squeezing into her cupped hand.

  Holly lives round the corner, down the street. She is five and a half years older than David. She has dropped out of university and is back at home. She is earning money babysitting and cleaning for people in the neighbourhood while she ‘gets her life back together’.

  David has always found her a bit scary. Not that she has ever really spoken to David for years – and even then … He’s just always found her to be the kind of girl who makes it plain in every curl of her lip and arch of her eyebrow exactly how low an opinion she holds of you.

  Holly is, however, in David’s considered opinion, spectacularly – supernaturally – gorgeous.

  She sits on the edge of the sunlounger, kicks off her flip-flops and bends forward, rubbing the lotion into her feet and ankles and shins. She moves up her body, higher and higher – and David follows the movement with his eyes. Now her smooth stomach, now her chest; her fingertips disappearing inside her bikini top.

  A banging pulse at the back of his eyes makes it hard to concentrate. Holly looks up warily, some sixth sense seemingly spooking her, peering up at the windows of the surrounding houses – or so it seems to David – and her gaze does appear to sweep round like a lighthouse beam, making David recoil even though he knows she can’t see him.

  Can she?

  He presses down onto the eyepiece. His throat is dry. Holly puts her sunglasses on and lies back, her skin glistening from the cream. He lets his gaze track up and down her body, lingering here and there, breathlessly gorging on what is revealed, feverishly imagining what is hidden.

  ‘Anything interesting?’ says his mother.

  ‘What?’ says David, standing up, almost knocking the scope over, fumbling, grabbing. His mother puts a cup of tea down on his cupboard.

  ‘I said I didn’t want one.’

  Holly’s beautiful body is not altogether excised from his mind. It sticks to his brain like a cobweb. His own body still pulses with the thought of her. It’s like she’s here in the room. His mother’s searching gaze hits him like a bucket of cold water and all at once she’s gone.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I forgot. What were you looking at?’

  Did she forget? Does she suspect?

  ‘I … I thought I saw the blackcap again.’

  David can hardly speak. His throat seems to be closing up. He sounds like he is stoned. His own voice seems distant to himself.

  ‘Lovely,’ says his mother, walking over.

  ‘I was wrong though,’ says David, picking up the scope and hurriedly moving it to one side.

  Chapter 3

  You Will Remember Nothing

  David hears the doorbell’s ding-dong chime far below. He sits up and realises he’s sweating. His mother was right about the room. It gets so hot in summer. Hot and stuffy. His father used to complain about it all the time.

  He looks towards the direction of the sound. He can just make out the sound of the front door slamming shut. After a few moments delay, he hears his mother’s voice calling up the stairs.

  ‘David! Joe’s here.’

  He waits a while, expecting to hear Joe’s footsteps on the stairs, but all he can hear is his mother and Joe talking in the distance. Eventually, reluctantly, he gets up from his bed and goes downstairs.

  ‘It’s alive!’ shouts his mother in mock alarm.

  This is an old joke and David does not deign to dignify it with a reaction. Joe laughs. Of course. David frowns. How he hated it when his mother showed off – and he hated it even more when Joe gave her encouragement.

  ‘Hi, Joe,’ he says, stifling an extravagant yawn.

  ‘Like I said,’ responds his mother, turning to Joe and rolling her eyes, ‘he’s on sparkling form. I’ll leave you to him.’

  Joe laughs again and slaps David on the shoulder. David flinches and moves away.

  ‘Your mum’s just been showing me that book she’s been working on. Her pictures are brilliant.’

  ‘I know.’

  What is this? Has David’s mother put Joe up to this?

  ‘So?’ says Joe.

  ‘What?’

  Joe lifts his tennis racket and waves it in David’s face as though trying to hypnotise him.

  ‘You will remember nothing …’

  He remembers.

  ‘What? Oh! Was that today?’

  Joe shakes his head.

  ‘Yes. But if you’re not up for it …’

  ‘No,’ says David. ‘I’ll get some balls.’

  ‘About time,’ says Joe.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Nothing,’ says Joe. ‘It was a joke. Jesus. Lighten up.’

  David peers at him and then walks away to get his racket and a tube of tennis balls.

  ‘We’re off, Mrs D,’ shouts Joe.

  ‘OK!’ she calls, coming back into the kitchen. ‘Have a good game. Be gentle with him, Joe.’

  They have been walking down the street towards the park for about five minutes when David comes to a halt and puts out his racket to stop Joe. Joe asks if he’s forgotten something.

  ‘“We’re off, Mrs D?”’ mimics David. ‘What the hell?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who does that?’ says David. ‘Who shouts that to someone else’s mother?’

  Joe shrugs.

  ‘I don’t know. Me, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, it’s weird.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘Well, it just is.’

  ‘OK then,’ says Joe.

  ‘It is,’ insists David.

  Joe says nothing more despite David giving him room to. This is perhaps the character trait in him that David finds most irksome – his ability to simply end any kind of argument by a tactical show of agreement and move on, seemingly without a care in the world.

  If he was agreeing that he was wrong, that would be one thing. But he isn’t actually agreeing – David can tell – he is just saying the words that made any continuation of the argument seem aggressive and petty. He isn’t even agreeing to disagree. He is fake-agreeing. He is disagreeing to disagree.

  But whereas such regular infuriation might have been expected to kill off their friendship, there seems to be some unbreakable bond between David and Joe – an unspoken contract – that surprises both boys, but which both feel obligated to respect.

  They are certainly an odd, unlikely couple: David
pale and languid, long-limbed, long-haired; Joe black, stocky, hair always close-cropped. Joe is sociable, David not. Joe can move seamlessly through most of the factions at school, whereas David, as much through choice as anything else, remains doggedly on the outside of everything. But they had formed their friendship early at primary school – and it had stuck, surviving the difficult times of recent years.

  David and Joe play tennis every now and then during the holidays. They have done this for years. Neither of them is very good but that has never really mattered, because they are fairly equal in their lack of tennis skills.

  They play in an unloved tennis court at the local park. It’s free, but so badly maintained that no one with any ability or money would want to play on its pockmarked, fractured and leaf-strewn surface, so it is mostly available whenever they turn up to use it.

  As they approach the court on this occasion, however, they can see it is in use. A group of four boys aged about ten years old are playing there already.

  ‘We won’t be long!’ shouts the nearest of them without looking round, concentrating on returning the serve that is about to head his way.

  ‘OK!’ shouts Joe, and he and David put their rackets down and stand watching through the high chain-link fence.

  They recognise the boys. They’ve seen them on the court before and also seen them watching, waiting for their turn to play. Joe and David remember all too well being bullied off the court by older boys when they were that age and are disinclined to chase the younger ones off too quickly. The boys on court nod their appreciation of this benevolence.

  Something about the look and feel of the day – the light, the mood – whatever it is that triggers these wormholes in the memory – sets off a wave of nostalgia in David and before he knows it he is tumbling back to a day he had spent here years before. It is hallucinatory – hyper-vivid.

  ‘Do you remember,’ he says, quietly, as though anything but a hushed tone will spook the mood, ‘you know – when we played doubles with Ellen and Violet?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Joe, turning with a crooked smile, nodding. ‘Weird. I was just thinking about that too.’

  They both return to their separate reveries, each in a kind of trance, their minds freely flowing back in time to replay that match.

  Now it is two years earlier. He and Joe are at school and they’re talking about playing tennis that coming weekend when Violet, who sits at the same table, says she wouldn’t mind playing and then Joe says, ‘Why don’t you come along on Saturday?’ and David is annoyed that he hasn’t run this past him first until Violet says to Ellen that she should come along and then they could play doubles and she says, ‘Sure. OK. Why not?’ and then she gives David this kind of secret look and David can’t stop thinking about her for days afterwards.

  Ellen had long been a focus of David’s thoughts, waking and asleep. She is almost as tall as he is and rounded in her figure. She has a great smile too – dimples and big brown eyes that go from sweet to naughty in an instant.

  David looks forward to that tennis match with a manic intensity that shocks him. He feels super-sensitised. The only thing he’s ever had that had taken him over in that way previously is the flu. But this is the reverse of that. Where that deadened and stifled, this enlivened. It is like anti-flu.

  The presence of the two girls changes everything. Everything. David and Joe have been to that crappy tennis court so many times and yet suddenly it’s like David is wearing 3D glasses – everything takes on a hyper-real realness. He feels like his body has been in sleep mode all his life and only now – only now has someone found the remote and switched him on.

  They play mixed doubles. Violet partners Joe, and Ellen partners David. David can’t recall much about the game except that he and Ellen win and when the final, winning ball is hit, Ellen shouts ‘Yay’ and leaps at him, throwing her arms round his neck and they hug and jump up and down and her soft breasts are pressed against his chest and her bare arms slide across his shoulders and if he has ever felt better or more alive in his whole fucking life, before or since, he can’t remember. He can’t remember.

  After the game they go to the shop, they buy drinks and take them into the woods by the river and hang out all the rest of the morning, talking and laughing and David tries to keep as physically close to Ellen as he possibly can, and whenever her skin pulls apart from his he feels it as keenly as a slap.

  Then as he and Ellen talk – what the hell did they talk about? He can’t remember – they both turn to see Joe and Violet wrapped in a long kiss, arms round each other, hands clambering, and Ellen turns to him with a half-smile of an invitation and David wants so much to reach out and pull her towards him, but the world just seems to freeze and Ellen’s half-smile slowly fades and Joe and Violet pull apart and then suddenly it starts to rain and everyone is heading home.

  ‘That was such a great day,’ says Joe. Then almost immediately he adds, ‘Sorry. But you know what I mean.’

  ‘It’s OK. I wish it was that day again,’ says David. ‘I wish I could go back to before, you know? Pretty much all the time.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Joe.

  Because he knows that was not the only thing that happened that day …

  ‘How come you and Ellen never ever went out?’ says Joe eventually, in a desperate urge to say something. David says he knows why. All the joy of the recollection is draining away.

  ‘Later I mean.’

  David shrugs. What was there to say? She was different now. He was different now. Everything was.

  The boys finish their game and leave the court to David and Joe. They play for an hour or so but the memory of that day has ruined David’s concentration. He suffers a resounding defeat.

  Afterwards they sit on a bench, sweating and panting and drinking water. Neither of them mentions that day again.

  ‘Look who it is,’ says Joe, nodding towards a group of teenagers sitting on the grass in the distance.

  David looks and sees that they’re all kids from school. Not just any kids, but the higher echelons of school society. The elite. A couple of them turn round and look in their direction. Someone waves.

  ‘I suppose we ought to go and say hi,’ says Joe.

  ‘What?’ says David. ‘Why?’

  Joe laughs.

  ‘Because that’s what people do, you weirdo.’

  David looks away.

  ‘They’re not that bad,’ says Joe, smiling, annoyed with himself for calling David a weirdo. ‘Harry’s OK. Ben’s not that –’

  ‘Yeah – and Matt McKenzie is a bastard,’ says David. ‘Why are you even sticking up for them anyway?’

  ‘I’m not sticking up for them. They just don’t bother me as much as they do you. You used to hang out with them yourself. You used to play football with Ben. Remember?’

  David snorts and shakes his head.

  ‘You need to just relax a bit, you know?’ says Joe.

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes!’

  David takes a deep breath and lets it out with a sigh.

  ‘I’m not going to pretend I like those people,’ says David.

  ‘Ellen’s there,’ says Joe with a grin.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Don’t pretend you’re not still interested in her.’

  David looks away. It’s true, but how does Joe know? Has David made it that obvious? His whole body is racked by an involuntary cringe.

  He’s barely spoken to Ellen in ages. Everything has changed – and not just David’s world. She barely even looks the same. She’s thinner now. Her hair is longer. She even sounds different. It’s not the Ellen sitting over there he’s interested in – it’s the old Ellen. It’s a memory he fancies.

  ‘They’ve seen us. We can’t just ignore them.’

  ‘Why not?’ says David.

  Joe sighs and gets to his feet.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Don’t be such a misery.’

  ‘A misery?’

  ‘Yes – a misery!’ />
  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on. It’s only –’

  ‘Look, I’m not going, OK?’ says David. ‘And what was that dig about getting some balls?’

  ‘It was a joke! Jesus!’

  ‘If you want to go and stick your head up their arses then go ahead. Maybe they’ll let you be their mascot.’

  Joe shakes his head wearily.

  ‘See you later, David,’ he says, walking away. ‘Text me if you fancy doing something.’

  He keeps walking, getting smaller and smaller until he merges right in with the group on the ground and David soon can’t really distinguish him from any of the others. He finds this troubling.

  David wishes he hadn’t made the jibe about Joe being a mascot. He could see he was upset. He gets up and heads home. Alone again, his thoughts immediately return to that day two years before – to Ellen and to the softness of her body next to his.

  He had been dazed by the time he got back home. He had been exhausted too. His body had been on turbo-boost. He keeps seeing Ellen’s face in his mind’s eye, and each time he sees it he knows for sure that he would grab her and pull her forward and they would kiss and kiss and why couldn’t he have done that in real life when it mattered?

  But it didn’t matter, because he saw a spark in Ellen’s eye that even his painful ineptitude had not entirely extinguished. He would have another chance, he remembered thinking. There’s always tomorrow.

  He had walked a deliberately long way home, despite the rain, and his mother had called him into the kitchen when he walked in, soaked to the skin, cold from the rain, asking him why he never took his phone with him.

  His dad’s friend Mark Miller had been there with her. They’d sat him down at the kitchen table, neither seemingly able to actually broach the subject – whatever the subject was. His mother’s red-rimmed eyes had been leaking tears.

  David had assumed it was about him – that he had done something wrong. He had done a quick scan of all his recent activity, none of which had contained anything that merited this degree of gravitas. His mother bursts into tears.