The Unlikely Heroics of Sam Holloway

by Rhys Thomas

  ‘I have spent many days on the road,’ he said. ‘I have visited all our customers.’

  Sam couldn’t see his eyes at all through the light-sensitive glasses, though he felt them keenly, coring a hole through him.

  ‘They will pay half of all fees.’

  It was hard to read Mr Okamatsu’s tone. He’d managed to save thirty thousand pounds. Surely this was good.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sam, bowing his head slightly. ‘Half of all the fees is good,’ he said, his voice quiet. It was, in fact, the amount of profit he generated for the company each month, despite what Rebecca said.

  Then Mr Okamatsu said, ‘Sam, you have failed.’

  He said it calmly and it felt as if, were Sam to look down, he would see Mr Okamatsu’s hand covered in blood, holding a knife he had just stabbed into his stomach.

  ‘I made a mistake. I really am sorry.’

  Okamatsu raised a silencing hand.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Gross misconduct. You know gross misconduct?’

  ‘I do.’

  Was he about to be fired? What about the anger management course? Did Okamatsu even have any idea about the anger management course? Five years he’d been at the company, his whole working life, and now he was about to be sold down the river for thirty thousand pounds.

  ‘But it was just one mistake,’ Sam said, meekly. He remembered times at home now, Sunday nights when he’d lain in his maze of comics, times when he was drowning in the sixth layer of thought, and how the prospect of going to work, of being around people, of being normal, was a lone beacon on the horizon.

  Mr Okamatsu removed his glasses and set them on the table, revealing how difficult this was, even for him.

  ‘Sam. People like those in there have second chances.’ He gestured towards the office where his useless colleagues worked. ‘They need chances. You are different. You are a better person, a good worker. Like me. We work hard to keep other people OK, and we ask for nothing in return.’ He turned the signet ring on his finger. ‘But you doing this, not getting the forms signed, you are not like that any more. You have stopped being one of us. We have no room for another one of them.’ And he nodded towards the office.

  Sam closed his eyes. ‘I don’t want to stop working here,’ he said, his voice catching.

  ‘You will not stop working here.’

  Sam looked up.

  ‘On one condition. This is agreed now. You will come to Japan and apologise in person to Mr Takahashi, the President of the company.’

  The words entered his head and rippled across his mind. He felt so many things, the accretion of shit from the last few days shunting into the back of him.

  ‘The flights are booked. We leave Thursday evening. You don’t come to work tomorrow and you must leave now.’

  Sam thought he could feel himself shrinking in his chair. He knew it was impossible. He couldn’t fly. Just the word made him shiver. Tears grew in his throat and he felt too stunned to speak.

  ‘You must agree, Sam,’ he heard Mr Okamatsu’s voice. ‘You must come with me to Japan. Or you can no longer work at Electronica Diablique.’

  Sarah finally replied to the text he’d sent her after work saying good luck with Zac, and how sorry he was for everything.

  Her reply simply said, Come over to my place at 7. There was still no kiss at the end but at least she hadn’t asked to meet in a public place again.

  He realised he was gripping the wheel too tight. A car overtook him out of nowhere and he almost swerved off the road. There was no way he was going to Japan. He’d simply get a new job.

  He was going to be earlier than expected and the idea that he would get to Sarah’s flat and walk in on her and Zac in bed just wouldn’t go away. When he reached her place he parked up and looked at the window that led into the strange architectural space at the front of the house, but the lights were off.

  He opened the door and listened out for voices but there were none. Climbing the stairs, he noticed an open cardboard box on the top step. When he looked inside he saw some of his clothes and DVDs and the book he was reading. He stopped. Then he looked along the corridor at the closed door that led into the living room, a heavy feeling in his gut.

  She was standing over the sink doing the dishes. The TV was off – the only sound that of splashing water. He closed the door in case she hadn’t heard him come in, but she had, and she still didn’t turn.

  ‘Sarah,’ he said.

  ‘I left your things on the stairs.’

  ‘Yeah. I saw those.’

  ‘Because we’re not going out any more.’

  She placed a cup calmly on the draining board, still pointedly not looking at him. He didn’t know what to do so he just stood there.

  ‘You can leave your key on the table.’ The silence between sentences had its own mass. ‘You never did get that key cut for me, did you?’ she said. ‘You never did quite trust me.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Now she did turn around, leaning with her back against the counter.

  ‘I said to you. Yesterday. To tell me if there was anything else.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You’ve been spying on me.’

  ‘I’ve been what?’

  She shook her head and the calmness dropped for a split second before she regained it. ‘You were looking on my Facebook. I know, Sam. Do you know how fucking embarrassed I am? Having to sit there with him laughing at me liking some shitty photo from fucking years ago, and me having to pretend that I knew what he was talking about, and then having to pretend it was true because even that was less embarrassing than telling him my psycho boyfriend – who, by the way, dresses up as a superhero – was snooping on my Facebook. I came here for a fresh start, to have a healthy life and try to be a good person. God, I should have stayed single. I knew I didn’t want a boyfriend. I was happy before, the happiest I’d been in a long time.’

  ‘Please don’t say this.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ she snapped. Her glasses caught the light coming through the window and a sick feeling sludged in his stomach.

  ‘I like being on my own. I don’t need a boyfriend to be happy. I used to be a right whore, you know that? You know how many people I’ve slept with?’

  ‘Stop,’ he said.

  ‘Over twenty.’

  She set her jaw tight and stared at him for a reaction.

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘I just want you to know that you’re not special. You think we have something special but we don’t.’ He could see how she almost started crying at this, but she composed herself. ‘I was getting so much better before I met you and now my head’s fucked again.’

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  She turned to him then, with a look of disbelief on her face. For some stupid reason he thought those words might find a critical point in her armour and cleave it open but instead she just said, ‘Did you really just say that?’ She closed her eyes and said quietly, ‘I can’t handle this. I’ve never dreamed of you, you know that? Not once. You’ve never been in my dreams. Don’t you think that says something?’

  ‘I don’t know what I was doing,’ he said. ‘There’s no excuse.’

  ‘It’s too late, Sam. I thought you were this . . . amazing person.’

  Glimpses of their few months together zoetroped in his mind.

  ‘Please stop.’

  ‘Oh God, Sam, don’t be such a pussy.’

  ‘I fucked up, OK?’ It came out louder than he meant but he wasn’t breathing right. ‘This is all new to me, you’re right. And I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing. Do you have any idea what it’s like being me? How hard it is for me to even get out of bed in the morning? To put on clothes every day and go to work?’ He didn’t know why but he was angry with her, with the way she was speaking to him. ‘It’s agony. But you’re right. I can’t handle this, either.’ He tried to calm his breathing because his voice was comin
g out so shakily.

  ‘Well boo fucking hoo,’ she said.

  ‘I’m just agreeing with you.’

  He took out his keys and unhooked Sarah’s. ‘Here.’ He put it down on the table.

  ‘And just so you know, seeing as all your experiences come from films, this isn’t the point in the movie where we argue and get back together later, OK?’

  That really hurt. ‘I don’t see my life as a movie,’ he said. ‘I just want to go back to how it was before – because, like you say, I’m not ready. This,’ he pointed down at the floor, and his mouth hung open for a second, ‘is killing me.’

  She stared at him and he couldn’t read her reaction.

  ‘Well maybe you should have thought about all this before you lied.’

  ‘It’s not that easy, though, is it? You don’t know what it’s like being me.’

  ‘Oh please.’

  ‘You deny your family’s existence, and there’s me who lost mine. You have a choice, but that was taken away from me. I don’t have that choice. You have no idea how lucky you are. How do you think it makes me feel to see the way you are with your family, and you won’t even tell me why. I have to live with what happened to me every day. I lived, they died.’

  Sarah stared at him.

  He made his mouth into an O and exhaled.

  ‘I get it now, and I do love you,’ he said. ‘But it’s not enough, is it?’

  A car rushed past outside. Why was he doing this? The coward, the Sam who wanted a simple life, smiled from some deep, dark place inside. He swallowed and said, unable to stop himself now, ‘Just because I love you, it doesn’t mean I can’t be happier without you.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  He couldn’t remember the drive home. He peered into the living room, at the stillness and neatness, and a strange sensation of nausea crept up on him. The light was harsh and the house cold. He went through to the kitchen and leaned on the counter. Taking a glass from the cupboard, he poured himself some water and gulped it down.

  ‘I miss you,’ he said to the vision of his parents in his mind, fully aware of how crazy and stupid this was.

  The out-of-control feeling was back. He regulated his breath and closed his eyes and counted to ten. Then he threw the glass as hard as he could against the wall. At the breakfast bar he untucked one of the tall stools and took it into the living room. He calmly turned it on its side, legs facing the wall, and smashed it through the screen of the TV with such force the glass spat back into his face.

  He remembered seeing a documentary about people living close to Chernobyl and how, on the night it happened, they sensed what felt like tiny bits of sand being fired against their skin when, in fact, it was gamma radiation.

  Sam stepped back into the middle of the living room and examined the stool, two-thirds suspended in mid-air, the other third through the screen and out the back. He didn’t feel any better. Making his way back to the kitchen, he unlocked the side door into the garage and took from one of the metal racks a stack of folded-up cardboard boxes and the tape gun.

  Ascending the ladder to the attic, he switched on the lights. He had grown to hate this place. He filled box after box without stopping, without hesitating, for three hours straight. Inside himself there was a staccato cascading. Before taping up the final box he noticed an eight-page preview comic of Y: The Last Man. In the hallway he took it out and flicked through it. In the same box he found a reprint of The Death of Superman. There were all the Akira books. There were lots of Suicide Squad comics, Hellboy, Neonomicon, We3, From Hell, 100 Bullets. He loved these comics so much. They had done so much for him.

  He taped up the final box and when he loaded it into his car he looked at all the boxes, filling the inside to the brim, but even so it didn’t seem like much. His eyes and throat stung with hidden dust, and he opened the car window on his way.

  When considering his chosen superpower he used to think if things were getting too hard he could blink and everyone in his field of vision would disappear. He would love that so much – to be alone, to go back to, if not a happy life, a life he could bear.

  He felt perfectly calm as he arrived at the tip. He pulled up at the paper recycling area and started unloading the boxes, untaping them, tossing the contents over, quick as he could, throwing them jerkily, as if they were covered in disease.

  He suddenly remembered exactly how good the first volume of Y: The Last Man was. What an awesome premise for a story: the death of every creature with a Y chromosome, apart from one man and his pet monkey. He’d read it in springtime, season-change weather, the sun higher in the sky. Now his breathing faltered again and the rain, falling in sheets, was freezing. His T-shirt provided little protection from it. He started opening the remaining boxes but couldn’t remember which one it was in. It was dark and he was in the shadow of one of the huge metal containers. Pulling the tape back, he felt a certain degree of panic. He’d just keep that one. But he couldn’t find it. He upended a box, then another, then another, the comics spilling all over the concrete. He kicked them aside but to no avail. What if he’d already thrown it over the top and into the container? He looked up. The container was red and blistered with rust.

  ‘Just forget it,’ he said aloud.

  He tried to stay calm but his lip was shaking and he put his hands to his head and grabbed two clumps of hair and started pulling as hard as he could. His eyes were pinched so tight they hurt. He threw away the few strands that had come out of his scalp and from the corner of his eye caught them drifting up and away towards the orange light. He went down on his knees to find the comic, but it wasn’t there, and then started punching the sides of his head, fighting back the tears, determined not to be pathetic and cry. He could feel the last vestiges of sanity slipping into the distance as he ran at the container, brought his fist up and smashed his knuckles into the side as hard as he could. He felt the bones crunch and the pain shoot up his arm. He lay down in the soaking mud for a second. It was dark and late and nobody was around so he stayed there.

  At last he sat up, and threw what was left of his beloved comics over the lip of the container. In the last box he came to the first book of Sandman, the book that had pulled him back into the world that day in his neighbour’s deserted garden. He tilted it towards the light and turned to the last story, about Death. How many nights had he gone to sleep with this book lying next to him? He watched it flutter upwards, a broken butterfly, and time seemed to slow with the image of the book coming open, the leaves flapping, the backlight of orange halogen. Then it was gone and the rain picked up.

  Shivering in the car, he sat for a moment, soaked through. His chest was tight and it felt as if fingers were at his throat. The unnatural, prickly sweating and light-headedness. And then the feeling of impending death. His mind fell back, years crumbling as his memory accessed the coping mechanisms for panic attacks. He imagined a forest glade, bright sunlight, the cool shade under the eaves of the trees at the fringe.

  But the Andromeda Galaxy was on a collision course with our own Milky Way, comets from the time the universe started hurtled across space in never-ending streams, the sun was going to burn out. Eventually the whole universe will tear itself apart.

  He thought of the magical pond on the mountainside. And his mum and dad. What were people going to do when they recognised him on the street as the weirdo who dressed up as a superhero? What was he going to do now that he was a freak in the only place he felt safe – his hometown? What was he going to do without Sarah?

  In the night he read every road sign under his breath twice, and blinked with a little nod as he passed every lamp post.

  He pulled up outside the community centre, where his friends were camping out for a Call of Duty video game night, and ran to the front door, pushing through it with his shoulder. In the hallway blue light glowed through the square of reinforced glass set into the double doors. Inside, banks of screens stood on a fold-out table, computerised images of war, with steel frames
draped with black netting and plastic vines like camouflage around the centre of the room. There was a table of supplies: chocolate bars and kettles and milk and bottles of Coke. In the centre of it all men in sleeping bags lay on their fronts on top of camping mats, ratcheted up on their elbows, their gaming controls held up before them. Sam sidled round, found Blotchy and stood in front of him.

  ‘Hey!’

  Botchy tried to crane his neck to see around Sam’s form.

  ‘Congratulations, you got what you wanted,’ said Sam, leaning over him.

  ‘You’re not covering us,’ someone shouted.

  Blotchy’s glasses caught the reflection of the screens and the rest of his face was in near darkness, but Sam felt his eyes behind the lenses.

  ‘Don’t ever speak to me again. You hated it that I was going to be happy, and now I’m not and I just came here to say I don’t need you. I never needed you, and never speak to me again.’

  Sam gave a final nod from his head down to the centre of his chest, and then he made for the door.

  The night outside was even colder now. He started shaking uncontrollably. He couldn’t remember ever being this angry. Something had snapped.

  ‘Sam,’ a voice called from behind.

  Tango. Sam reached the car and got in, slamming the door.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  Tango’s voice was muffled through the glass. The anger growing and growing, Sam screeched back up the ramp that led to the road. There was a flash of light and the sounding of a deep horn, the screeching of brakes and tyres squealing as a lorry swerved across to the other side of the road. Sam put his foot down, his back end fish-tailing, his heart beating so hard it shook his bones, and tore off.

  He imagined the scene, Blotchy laughing to himself, emailing the newspaper, telling them about Sam and his superhero alter ego. He accelerated up the streets, blowing dead leaves into vortices as he cut through the night.

  He picked up the photo on the passenger seat, of his family, and glimpsed at it whenever he passed under a street light. They’d want you to be happy, people had said to him when it happened, but he couldn’t be happy. That path was not open to Sam. He wished it would come to him, the memory of the day, like a hidden door sliding open, but he knew it never would. The day the picture was taken was lost in the synapses, data corrupted. The past was gone for ever.