The Unlikely Heroics of Sam Holloway

by Rhys Thomas

  His mind was scrambled. The punch to the head had left a pulsing behind his eyes. Noise everywhere, drunken laughing, faces peering in. Yet at the centre of him, down in the sixth layer of thought, the deep machines worked calmly. This thought: What have I done? Not the getting into a fight, not even being floored by the police; more far-reaching. Faced by the world of upside-down neon nightclub signs and litter-strewn streets, he remembered the quiet spring afternoon, staring into the mirror at his costume. And then he thought of Sarah.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  His powerlessness under the brute force of the policeman made him feel how he’d felt in school: weak and pathetic and small. He heard himself say he was called the Phantasm.

  ‘Get his mask off him.’

  He panicked. All the faces staring at him as he tried to wriggle out, his cheek scraping the pavement. The two cops tightened their grip on him and one reached down to his mask and hooked his fingers under it.

  The life fell out of him.

  ‘Please . . . don’t.’

  He lay there and felt all the energy of the Phantasm dissipate. The fingers tightened on the mask and he closed his eyes. ‘No.’ Tears welled now but not in a dramatic way, rather in a slow, steady grieving. He willed the protective numbness to come and save him, but it did not. The mask came up and a cold wind whipped across the street and into his face. He turned away; as the mask came off, there was the sound of cheering.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  This time the voice was kinder, obviously because Sam was crying now.

  ‘Sam,’ he heard his own voice say.

  He hated it, being cleft open like this.

  ‘OK, Sam,’ said the voice into his ear, the whole world condensing down to just one square foot. ‘We’re going to lift you up and search you, OK?’

  Head down, he nodded.

  The two cops dragged him to his feet. Another cheer. The flashes of camera phones. He put his chin to his chest so they couldn’t see and tasted the make-up running from his eyes.

  ‘Have you got any needles on you?’

  He shook his head. They went through his things but so weird were the contents of his utility belt and assault vest, they couldn’t decide if they were weapons or not. The thought of people finding out about this was unbearable and the great hand of loneliness, of having to deal with this alone, was even worse.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  The two policemen glanced at each other.

  ‘Have you got anyone we can call for you?’ said the kind one.

  He shook his head again. He felt so tiny among these giant men.

  ‘Wait,’ said the other one. ‘Let’s get him in the van.’

  He hadn’t even seen the riot van, with its blue lights spinning silently. The back door swung open and he went into the brilliant light. He caught a glimpse of himself in a strip of steel. The running eyeliner made his face look like a Rorschach test. The last thing he saw of the street were the faces of people leaning in, like sunflowers in the breeze, before the doors slammed shut.

  ‘No family or friends?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Sam.’

  ‘Your full name.’

  ‘Samson Holloway.’

  A pause.

  ‘Your address, Sam?’

  In the comics it didn’t happen like this. In comic books they would do anything, go to any length to protect their identities. In the comic books everything always ended up OK.

  He gave them his address and one of the officers left the van to check his details. Grainy voices crackled from the other cop’s radio. Sam’s breath was loud and the song of sleep drifted into his mind.

  When the second cop came back he said, ‘OK, Sam. We’re going to arrest you for a Section Five Public Order offence, OK?’

  Each word after the word arrest was like a thunderbolt. Nerves fired sugars down his bloodlines and made him feel dizzy.

  ‘We’re taking you to a custody suite, OK?’

  Why did they keep phrasing it like a question? Like there was an option. When he didn’t respond they started reading him his rights, and this couldn’t be happening, he hadn’t done anything wrong. Street lights through the tiny window making spokes on the floor of the moving van, swaying round corners, and the thrum of rubber on tarmac.

  ‘What were you doing out there?’

  ‘I . . . don’t know.’

  Down corridors, through doors. They took him to a cell and he lay down on the uncomfortable bunk and tried to block out the sound of heavy doors clanking shut, tried to block out his thoughts, all the thoughts.

  Do you have someone to call?

  No.

  I’ll never do this again, he told himself, almost in chastisement. The Phantasm is over. It’s over. And yet this idea was instantly more disturbing than he thought. It was, in fact, breaking his heart.

  During the long summer following the plane crash Sam visited the empty swimming pool in next door’s garden a lot. He paid attention during those days to the nature of loneliness and its impact on the mind. Being alone was making him sick, and he could feel it, like a cloud unfurling at the edges, pulling apart.

  He needed something to propel him back to the real world and, over the slow days, when the leaves browned and fell and became brittle, he tried to think of an alternative to the plan hatching in his mind.

  Putting the house on the market felt like a catastrophic betrayal, a grand turning away from the memory of his family, but the idea of moving into a brand-new house seemed so obvious. A crisp, fresh house where no one had ever lived, with pristine carpets, newly plastered and painted walls, bright lights set unobtrusively into the ceiling, everything finished to a high standard; a house with no baggage or memories or ghosts.

  It wasn’t long before the call came from the estate agent with a serious offer on the family home, and as soon as it ended Sam went to the back of the house and opened the door. As he lay in the deserted swimming pool a cat popped its head over the rim and jumped in. It was grey-and-black striped, with paws the white of virgin snowfields, and it came over to Sam and nuzzled its head against his arm. Sam could hardly control the tears as he lay on his back looking at the sky, with the cat sitting on his chest, thinking, I’m going away from the only place I feel safe.

  Finally, the removal company came and took the contents of the house. Everything was loaded up. Everything. All the furniture, electronics, kitchen equipment, the letters, all the presents he’d ever bought and received, everything his little brother and sister owned, their toys and colourful chairs, their books, their tiny clothes, to be taken anywhere, he didn’t care, he just needed for it to go. Be scrapped or sold – whatever the removal company wanted to do with it.

  At dusk on that last day he collected up the small box with family memories he’d saved, things like cards and photos and some heirlooms, and stood in the living room with a blood-red sky beyond the window. For everything he loved – this was the centre.

  And he left the house. He left the woods and the swimming pool and the cats, and he moved to his new house with his new car and new furniture and new entertainment system and new life, and he felt, at last, like he was ready to get better. At least, that’s what he’d told himself.

  An unfathomable stretch of time concertinaed and then the heavy door of the cell opened and a doctor came in with a couple more officers, bringing him back to reality.

  ‘Sam, isn’t it?’ said the doctor.

  Sam stared at him.

  ‘It’s OK, I just want to talk.’

  They took him down some corridors to a small, comfortable room with a sofa, two tub chairs and a low coffee table. A Van Gogh print hung in a cheap frame. A bookshelf with leather-bound books was against one wall, a TV played BBC News 24 in silence.

  ‘You can leave us,’ said the doctor to the officer, the one who’d spoken in a kind voice to Sam before arresting him.

>   ‘Am I going to get into a lot of trouble?’ he said.

  The doctor, a good-looking man with tremendous confidence, said, ‘No, not at all. They’re going to release you without charge.’

  Sam didn’t say a word.

  ‘Listen, Sam, they wanted me to talk to you.’

  It was nice in this room, surprisingly cosy for a police station. Surely not every station had a room like this. The Van Goch print was of rain falling over rolling fields. The carpet was light grey in colour, a nice tight weave.

  ‘The officer who brought you in recognised your name.’

  It wasn’t the sort of carpet you could have in a home, too formal, too efficient, but it was a good carpet. It seemed new, still had a little fuzz, and was cut beautifully into the wall.

  ‘He remembered what happened – he lives in your village? – and he wanted me to speak to you.’

  The carpet was blurring. Jeez, will you just stop crying?

  ‘Why are you dressed like that Sam?’

  Sam knitted his fingers together. On the TV they were replaying a helicopter shot of the stricken tanker in the Suez Canal from a couple of weeks ago. Mostly submerged, its stern was still just about poking up above the water.

  ‘Are you dressed up as a superhero?’

  His throat felt hot, his eyes stung.

  ‘I’m not a psychiatrist,’ said the doctor, lowering his head and trying to look up into Sam’s eyes, ‘but people react to tragedies in a whole host of ways. Some are healthy and some are . . . less so. But look,’ he placed a sheet of paper on the coffee table, ‘this is the number of a counselling service. Did you have counselling?’

  Sam stared at the sheet of crisp white paper and shook his head. He felt so stupid, sitting there in his costume.

  ‘You should. It really helps. And it’s completely confidential of course. This service,’ the doctor tapped the paper with the end of a Montblanc pen, ‘it’s free to use. Just give them a call. You can talk on the phone or arrange a face-to-face meeting. They can help you.’

  Sam took the paper. He hated the idea of counselling, hated the idea of going to a place and just moaning to some poor soul for an hour and being a complete buzzkill.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Things like this,’ said the doctor, indicating Sam’s Ninja shirt and trousers with luminous strips stitched down the legs. ‘You’re trying to do a good thing, but the most important thing is you getting better, OK?’

  ‘So the policeman brought me here because he wanted to help me?’

  The doctor nodded.

  ‘So I can go home?’

  The doctor sat back in the comfortable chair. ‘You can go home, but you should think about what I’ve said. You should know, too, this sort of thing attracts attention. Papers, TV. Maybe you need to think about that too, what you’re trying to achieve.’

  But Sam didn’t fully know what he was trying to achieve. This really was a lovely room. They didn’t show rooms like this on cop shows. Now he knew he could go home, he’d stopped listening to the doctor, who was still talking. On the TV screen the stricken tanker had shed its shipping containers, some of which were drifting like Lego bricks across a puddle.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was still dark when they released him unceremoniously from the police station. His vest, utility belt and mask were stowed in a clear plastic bag. Using the money from his utility belt he got a taxi but only as far as the edge of his town, so the driver didn’t know where he lived. The high street was completely deserted as he walked home. He’d walked through his home town thousands of times but all the familiar things – the shop fronts, the churches, the bridge over the railway line – seemed now unfamiliar through the filter of his state of mind. He felt like a stranger. When he got back to his house he didn’t even turn the lights on. He went straight up to the attic and curled up in the centre of his comics maze, where he fell instantly asleep.

  There was a month of rain and Sam hadn’t heard from Sarah. It swept across the land and stripped the trees of what leaves they had left and then turned the ground to mud.

  As the days flicked by, the distance from Sarah did little to ease the feeling of discomfort in Sam. He returned to his old routines. In the rain he ran around the forestry on weekends and through the streets on weeknights. On Saturday nights he got takeaway and watched movies he’d seen countless times before. He cleaned for hours on end. And as he did these things, he quietly went about the business of packing away the memories that had been unleashed by Sarah. But what had once made him feel safe now made him feel lonely.

  The only thing that made him feel any better was patrolling. When he pulled on the costume, all his stress fell away. In the aftermath of the arrest he’d not donned the mask for a week but the pull was overpowering and, in the end, he’d relented. The conflict he’d been feeling between the Phantasm and Sarah dissipated. At least without her he got to keep the mask.

  In the diner on the beach the windows shuddered in the frames as powerful winds swept in off the sea. Huge waves crashed against the shore and the world was trying to get at him, but that small seaside building kept everything out. Slowly, things were getting back to normal.

  The problem was, normal didn’t feel so good any more.

  Sam landed on Trafalgar Square.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Blotchy. ‘Well, well, well. Would you like fresh towels?’

  It was very frustrating. Sam had hotels on Mayfair and Park Lane, as well as on some of the lower-value properties, but Blotchy had them on all the reds, as well as the yellows and oranges, and Sam kept landing on them. This roll of the dice meant he had to downgrade his hotels on Euston Road and Angel Islington to afford Blotchy’s bill.

  Blotchy took Sam’s money and folded it into the personalised money clip he always used when he played Monopoly and which was a constant source of annoyance to both Sam and Tango. Tango, who was safe on his own Bond Street, rolled the dice and passed Sam’s hotels unharmed.

  Wind pushed against the windows of Blotchy’s parents’ conservatory and tossed leaves against the glass. No matter how frustrating Blotchy’s tactics, Sam was grateful to be here, with his old friends.

  ‘I can’t believe how unlucky I am,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing to do with luck,’ said Blotchy. ‘It’s all about playing the statistics.’ He reached his big bear hand into his bag of toffee popcorn and tossed some morsels into his little mouth.

  ‘So what are your plans for the week?’ said Tango.

  ‘Nothing much,’ said Sam.

  ‘What about you, Blotch?’

  ‘My business is my own.’ He rolled the dice and glided past some of Sam’s properties on to the Electric Company, which he owned.

  ‘Any news from the dating site you signed up for?’ said Sam, trying not to sound too sarcastic. He and Tango were both surprised that Blotchy had done this. Not that he’d signed up, but that he’d told them about it.

  ‘Oh, listen to Mr Experience over there,’ said Blotchy. ‘Now he’s got a girlfriend he thinks he’s cock of the walk.’

  ‘I haven’t got a girlfriend.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re trying to hide it from us.’

  ‘I’m not trying to hide anything. I haven’t heard from her in a month.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Blotchy, stumbling. ‘Well, you’re better off without women. They’re trouble. And expensive. Especially the pretty ones.’

  ‘Blotchy is subscribing to the school of meninism,’ said Tango, leaning sideways to Sam.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Blotchy. ‘I just think feminism is going too far.’

  ‘Let’s stop talking about this before you lose whatever dignity you have left,’ said Tango.

  ‘Pretty?’ said Sam.

  Blotchy’s cheeks reddened when he realised Sam had latched on to the word, and in the air of the moment Sam felt the satisfying shift in power back to him.

  ‘I meant . . . well, she was pretty, wasn’t she?’

  ‘
She’s not dead!’

  ‘No, I know that but . . .’ His whole body went loose and he sagged. Slowly, he reached sheepishly for more popcorn.

  ‘Plenty more fish in the sea, eh?’ said Tango. He put his hand on Sam’s shoulder and said solemnly, ‘Would you like me to sign you up to Blotchy’s dating site?’

  ‘You’re OK, thanks. I’ll let Blotchy blaze that trail.’

  ‘You’re about as funny as the thing I’m about to deposit in the toilet,’ said Blotchy, standing up. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me.’

  He took his Monopoly money and put it in his pocket, then took the dice and put them in his pocket too. He then took a photo of the board.

  ‘Just in case you get any ideas’ he said. ‘I may be some time.’

  And, with that, he left the room.

  Tango waited until he heard Blotchy climbing the stairs.

  ‘You OK?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Sam felt Tango’s eyes on him as he considered this.

  ‘It just . . . kind of fizzled out.’

  There was a long pause after this. Sam ordered his money into neat piles.

  ‘She seemed nice,’ said Tango.

  Sam felt his face flush.

  ‘Did you want it to . . . fizzle out?’

  Sam cleared his throat. His Monopoly piece glinted in the light. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Probably not.’

  Tango nodded. ‘Well, you know, is there anything you can do?’

  Sam didn’t answer this.

  ‘You don’t need to take my advice,’ said Tango. ‘You know I’m useless at this sort of thing, but I’ll just say this. If there is anything you can do . . . you should just do it. Be brave.’

  Sam looked up at him when he said those two words, at his old friend, just as the flush sounded upstairs and the floorboards creaked under Blotchy’s weight.

  When he got home, there was a brown package on the doormat in the hallway. He picked it up, along with the rest of the mail, and went into the kitchen to make himself an apple and elderflower tea. He sat at the breakfast bar and hooked his finger under the perforated strip of the parcel. He loved opening that perforated strip. He looked inside and the strength fell out of him.