The Unlikely Heroics of Sam Holloway

by Rhys Thomas

  ‘What if she wants to hang out with me?’

  Francis leaned against the door frame of his room and grinned.

  ‘Look, Sam, be real for a second. Everybody cares about you, including me. But think about other people as well, yeah?’

  Sam stood there, unable to speak.

  Francis shook his head. ‘I’ve gotta get showered,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to be so blunt but, you know, help a brother out.’

  He patted Sam on the shoulder and sidled past him to get into the corridor. He disappeared off into the bathroom, leaving Sam in the darkness, freezing cold, feeling the size of a blade of grass.

  On the last day Sam spent in his family home he stood in the empty living room, clutching the box of family heirlooms, the only thing he’d kept. Amongst them were his grandfather’s MBE for services to nursing, his grandmother’s writing box with her old pens and papers inside, a gilded key gifted to his great-grandfather for setting up a library on behalf of a nearby town’s working people after they elected him their union representative, resulting in him taking a penny of their wages for years to create a space for books and learning and advancement. His father’s England cricket cap that he’d got as a schoolboy, a crocheted flower his mother had made for him as a baby. All the family photos.

  It was dusk, and it was time to go. But he didn’t take the box to the car. Instead, he found himself in the deserted swimming pool again, the cats watching him from the overgrown bushes and unruly trees. The sky was a fire red, a dry wind whipped his face. He opened the box and removed his parents’ wedding album. He flicked through the pages, not thinking much, pausing on one image of his mum and dad standing on the steps of the church with confetti drifting. He was in the photo too. In her belly. You couldn’t see any evidence of an unborn Sam, but he was in there.

  He placed the box in the centre of the pool and took out the canister of lighter fluid, spraying it wildly and chaotically all over. He made a path of it to the far side of the pool, where he struck a match and waited, his hand protecting the flame from the wind. He closed his eyes and even from that distance felt the heat of the fire against his face as he dropped the match.

  Then he took out from his back pocket the card his little brother and sister had made – the last thing they’d given him. He opened it and read the message and remembered sitting outside Frankie & Benny’s, Steve opposite him, his head leaning to one side.

  Don’t you wish it could stay like this for ever and ever?

  Sam had turned his face away from the fire and thought, I can’t believe I’m doing this. But he did it anyway. He dropped the card, and everything burned.

  The spindly Christmas tree with a string of coloured lights stood guard in the corner of the drawing room, behind the beaten-up grand piano, next to the French windows with black night looking in. Claude, rake thin, pale as bone, wearing an ill-fitting pair of pyjamas, played slow versions of Christmas carols to the twenty-odd people gathered on the sofas and the large threadbare rug. The huge fire in the hearth burned bright, laser sparks spinning bird migration patterns up the flume.

  Francis had gone outside to make a phone call and when Sarah came in, Sam grabbed her and they found a quiet corner of the rug where the heat of the fire just about reached. A wind rattled the French windows, flames sidled, shadows bent.

  ‘Here,’ he said, pushing a glass of cider into her hands.

  ‘You’re not trying to get me drunk, are you?’

  ‘Aren’t you already drunk? I am.’

  She laughed. ‘Where’s Francis?’

  ‘Outside on the phone.’

  They took a sip of their drinks. Claude was playing ‘Winter Wonderland’.

  ‘Hey. I just wanted you to know something. Thanks for bringing me here.’

  ‘Sam, I told you yesterday—’

  ‘I know, I know. But still . . . it’s been a good Christmas. So thanks for looking out for me.’

  ‘Looking out for you?’

  ‘I just don’t want to get in your way.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?

  ‘I mean, you and Francis.’

  ‘What about me and Francis?’

  Just as she said that, he appeared at the doorway and looked around the room. He saw Sam and Sarah, but didn’t come over. Instead, he went to the piano and spoke quietly to Claude, who gave up the stool for him. He started playing a piece of music and, of course, it was amazing. As Sam listened his heart sank. He had no skills, no talents, he wasn’t even very good at being a superhero.

  ‘It’s his first Christmas without his girlfriend,’ said Sarah.

  Half his face was in shadow.

  ‘He’s very talented,’ said Sam.

  ‘He is. And he’s super hot and clever and funny.’

  Sam nodded.

  ‘But I want to be here with you.’ The suddenness of the words made his heart feel melted, and when he glanced up she glanced down. ‘I know you’re not interested in me in that way but—’

  ‘Wait. What?’

  ‘Like, you and me. And I can handle that. It’s fine. Friends is fine. But I didn’t ask Francis to come here.’

  ‘Sarah, what are you talking about?’

  This felt completely weird. The atmosphere had suddenly flipped.

  ‘I mean Francis is great, he really is, and maybe another time I—’

  ‘No, before that.’

  ‘You and me. I get it. I tried and you . . .’

  ‘Whoa. What?’

  ‘All the chances you had . . .’

  An awful realisation dawned. The colours in her irises seemed to be shifting, different shades swirling like the thickened atmosphere of some alien world, her pupils expanding black holes in the dim and flickering Christmas lights. He hadn’t even noticed that the sound of the piano had stopped. She thought he didn’t like her? An image flashed, of two hands reaching for each other in the darkness and missing.

  ‘Sam.’

  Francis loomed over him. All the dread washed right back in.

  ‘Can I have a word with Sarah?’ he said.

  Sam was frozen to the spot.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Sarah said, nodding to him. It was like in slow motion. ‘I’ll see you in a sec, OK?’

  She was sending him away. Her eyes darted across Francis’s body.

  Despite every muscle, every impulse trying to root him to the spot, to stay and fight, Sam found himself on his feet. ‘I’ll—’ his breath failed him. ‘I’ll go fetch some more drinks,’ he said. And as he walked away he could feel the presence of Francis like a pulse.

  He went into the kitchen. At the sink he poured himself a glass of water. He felt hot and disoriented so he went out to the terrace at the back of the house. It was misty and the disc of the moon was a large circle.

  ‘Samson Holloway.’

  Sam turned to find Kabe smiling at him. He swayed drunkenly in the night. Standing next to him was a girl of extreme beauty, the kind of beauty you’d throw away your life for, with thick, dirty-blonde hair parted right at her temple. She wore a pair of mirrored Aviators, her head tilted gently skywards, the lenses reflecting crisply the swirling mist.

  ‘Your zen is disturbed,’ said Kabe.

  The girl next to him slanted her head to one side and bit her lower lip.

  Kabe spoke, but this time more quietly, with a lilt in his voice. ‘Do you know about Shangri-La?’

  Sam could see through the windows into the drawing room, could see Francis lean in towards Sarah, creating a space that was cut adrift from everything else.

  ‘Shangri-La?’ he said.

  ‘A mystical paradise.’

  It felt now like they were entombed by the mist, and that the outside world had evaporated. He watched Francis’s lips move, his hands gesturing, Sarah’s eyes fixed on him.

  ‘I know of a Holy Man who went looking for it in the high mountains of Nepal, and the villagers told him Shangri-La is not a place but a knowledge. The secret of happiness.’


  Inside, they had stopped speaking now.

  ‘And they told the Holy Man he would find it at the top of the mountain next to their village. And do you know what he found when he reached the top?’

  Sam shook his head, and as he did this Sarah leaned in towards Francis and put her arms around him. He couldn’t look. He was falling apart.

  Kabe said, ‘A mirror.’

  Even through the Aviators the girl’s stare burned a hole right through him.

  ‘Everyone is looking for Shangri-La, Sam,’ said Kabe. ‘But they’re always looking the wrong way.’

  The girl stepped forward and lifted her hand. Sam felt his breath leave him as she pushed a long finger into his chest.

  ‘It’s in here,’ she said.

  The cold of the night pressed against his body and he remembered what his father had once said.

  The two most important things in life are to be brave and to be good.

  His father was not spiritual, and his maxims were said half in jest, sarcastically, but now, when he thought about them, Sam realised they were almost all completely true. He looked at Kabe, and the girl, their breath turning to silver, and he went inside.

  Claude played something like snowflakes falling on a glass roof. The music now had taken on strange properties. It was no longer a purely sensory thing but, mixed with the adrenaline, a physical one as well. It brushed against Sam and put a vibration in him with its touch, a far-reaching vibration moving inwards, a conducting force setting all the atoms that made Sam into a rhythmic beat. It snaked through him, gliding and sliding, making tingling glissades up his arms and legs.

  His heart beat so hard it felt like it might break. Sarah was right there, in the hallway. Light ran across her lower lip and, behind her, the others in the room were all prone, like people sleeping in a plane that’s lost its pressure and is gliding uncontrolled to Earth. Francis was there, walking towards her from behind.

  Sam took her hand. ‘I want you to know that I think you’ve saved my life,’ he said.

  ‘Sam—’

  And then he leaned in and pressed his lips against hers. He just did it. He could sense her shock, then felt it slip away as she relaxed and pushed back into him. When they broke apart she fixed him with one of her stares.

  Behind her, Francis had stopped.

  He pulled her away, out of sight, and she kissed him again, mouths opening and joining to form a black space that was their mouths sealed tight against one another.

  ‘I have a . . .’ – he wanted to say something – ‘. . . very deep affection for you.’

  Sarah laughed and shook her head.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, and kissed him again.

  He couldn’t believe this was happening. They ran upstairs and down a long corridor to his bedroom and she kissed him again and he felt her tongue move into his mouth.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘What about Francis?’ Then he cringed for saying it.

  Sarah pulled her top off and pulled him towards her as they collapsed on the bed.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘It’s you.’

  On the ceiling a patch of damp the shape of Africa. She moved her hand down his body and took off her glasses; long lashes, white spaces. There was no thinking now. He pushed her off and removed his top and jeans, all so easy, as if this happened all the time, no thought of folding them into a neat pile as she climbed on top of him and whatever this was turned into a great surging of emotion. He ran his hands from her hips upwards and felt his perspective heighten, as though her body went on for ever and, no matter how far he moved his hands, he would never reach the end of her. She met his eyes and kissed him again as she unhooked her bra. It didn’t feel like two people but one, like they were melting into each other.

  ‘I love you,’ she said, suddenly and quietly, words like fireworks.

  This couldn’t be the real world. What he was feeling was not possible. Nothing in the real world could be this good, not for him. They quivered and shook, two hearts beating inches away from one another, two souls, and everything fell apart as he felt her chest against his and he was nothing but a moment, a breath, a flash in the dark, and it felt to Sam like this might never end, that time was mutable now. Had she really just said that? He closed his eyes and let the wave ride over him, as if infinity was something right there in front of him, something he could reach out and touch. It was an explosion of infinity, a fireball of hope, of possibility, and around it, all at once, the light from it illuminated the great expanse of what he knew, instantaneously, was the future.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The next morning came and when Sam woke she was still lying next to him, asleep on her back, her head turned sideways on the pillow, the palm of one hand sticking out above the covers, a vision of grace.

  He reached to his bedside table and toked on his asthma pump as quietly as he could so as not to wake her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

  There was a bolt of shame about his asthma. It made him feel puny. But then, just as quickly as it came, it went away.

  ‘I’ve got asthma,’ he said, taking another, deeper toke in front of her. ‘Do I look like the Diet Coke man?’

  Sarah laughed and reached her hands under the covers for him.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’ve got major hangover horn,’ she said, like it was nothing.

  In the silence of the morning she rolled over and on to him and arched her back, and the frame of the bed creaked with their weight. As she rode him he looked at her face. Her eyes were closed and he was hit by the impression that she wasn’t really there in the room with him, like she’d withdrawn to some other place beyond the veil, where nobody could touch her, a separate space of her own personal ecstasy. She leaned forward and kissed him deeply, grinding hard with her hips, both still a little drunk, and when it was over they lay on their backs, panting for the longest time, until at last she curled up next to him.

  They lay there for a second, Sam deep in thought about how great this was, how all of a sudden they were in bed together having sex when only yesterday he felt so awful. Outside the window birds cawed. He felt her pressing closer to him and an image appeared in his mind of a white sheet hanging from a line, being blown dry by a spring breeze.

  After Christmas Day they were supposed to be going home. Instead, they’d stayed for ten days. They’d taken long walks through the estate, past an old dilapidated chapel tucked away in a wooded hollow with a witch hazel sapling poking through a window, and had talked about so many things. As the days passed the number of people at Arcadia dwindled but it only made things more intimate. They found a path made of upturned champagne bottles, which the old owner of the house had made in its heyday, and it had glimmered ethereally in the twilight gloaming. They’d slept together every night, which was in some ways confusing to Sam, who couldn’t understand how someone could want him that way to that degree, but he wasn’t about to complain.

  The day after they got back, Sarah took him to see a band called Frightened Rabbit. They went to a pub and drank cloudy cider in a dark corner until their minds were foggy and he couldn’t stop thinking how awesome this was, how new and exciting, and how being out of his comfort zone wasn’t even a thing now. They ran across the busy street, hand in hand, to the venue; dark night sky and bright headlights, rain spitting sideways.

  He’d never been to this kind of cramped, sweaty, grimy, ramshackle place. Metal girder columns with huge rivets blocked the view of the stage from the bar, and the mezzanine looked on the verge of collapse. He’d never seen a band like Frightened Rabbit either; amazing in an earthy, aggressive, lovely way, the singer laying himself bare, covered in sweat after a couple of songs.

  Sam stood at Sarah’s shoulder and at the end of each song, when the room erupted, she’d turn back to him and smile, and he was so happy it felt like his bones might liquefy. She called him sappy but he didn’t care. At the front people bounced up and down, and the way so
many of them knew all the words to songs he’d never even heard made him think he was being welcomed into a secret world.

  His T-shirt was slick with sweat, like he was melting into the room. He put his arms around her waist and it felt like an OK thing to do. All borders had come crashing down. Sam watched the back of Sarah’s neck and the side of her face. Her hair tied back, sweat glistening behind her ear, the wet skin catching the orange light from the lighting rig above the stage. He could just see her eyelashes when she blinked.

  He was almost completely happy. Almost. Because now the thought of the superhero had been sparking flashes of dread across his chest. He couldn’t tell her about it. When they’d been at the Christmas fayre she’d said it was messed up and over the past week, between the long stretches of happiness, that conversation had played and replayed in his head. He wished the Phantasm could enter early retirement, but that’s what was producing the flashes of dread. The call of the costume was way too strong to overcome.

  The Phantasm #010

  Amongst the Tombs

  The graveyard. Witching hour. Full moon. In the old times they said the veil between this world and the next thins in these places. Realities shift, and things that go bump in the night are close. But that was in the old times . . . wasn’t it?

  The hero is a man of reason, he worships at the altar of science. And yet at his feet is the Orange Chocolate KitKat he’d climbed over the gate to enjoy in solitude. Even heroes need time to think. But he is not alone. He dropped the chocolate bar as soon as the groaning started out among the tombstones. The stirrings of fear were immediate. The old legends suddenly don’t seem so stupid now. Yes, this dark protector can defeat men of flesh and bone, but what of something other?

  His first instinct is to run, but then, what kind of a hero would he be? Would Bruce Wayne run? Of course not. In the moonlight and low mist, the headstones look like the skyline of a city abandoned for a hundred years, great monoliths tilting this way and that with the erosion of centuries. Soil mechanics 101.