by Rhys Thomas
“I’m having a nice time,” he said.
“Me too.” She smiled. Her mouth was small, her lips thin. It was such a neat face, each feature separate from the next. Boy, it was so hot in here. The fire was stifling. He pulled off his sweater.
“Did you go to uni?” she asked.
He held up two fingers, the peace sign, as he sipped his drink to cool down. “Two years.”
“What did you do?”
“Geography.”
“Town planning?”
“Climate change, actually. Well, climatology mostly. But geomorphology, geology. Rivers. Glaciers. Reconstructing Quaternary environments.”
“So what do you think about climate change? Are we all doomed?”
“Ha. Depends if people are willing to change. You know, we’d have to drop our living standards. Are people willing to do that?”
It was a depressing thought.
“Why’d you drop out?”
He sighed. “You don’t wanna know about that.”
“Try me.”
He waved his hand. “It’s a long story.”
Here her face lost all of its tension and, in what seemed like slow motion, she said, “I’ve got time.”
He looked at her and she looked at him.
“How well can you see without your glasses?” he said, sabotaging the moment.
Sarah’s head moved, just a fraction from right to left, a tiny jerk from one space to another, and in that movement the momentum was lost.
“Hardly at all,” she said.
Part of Sam felt relief, that front part of him where everything was easier. But an older, deeper part of him felt incredibly sad and let down by what he’d just done.
“Here.”
She gave him her glasses and he lowered the lenses over his eyes. Across the table she turned into a blur of colors.
“I can’t even make out your face,” he said.
“Yup. I’m pretty blind.”
The sadness in the deeper part of him started to spread. His throat went dry.
Her eyes were smaller than they looked with the glasses on, a pale blue near the pupil strengthening to navy, almost black, at the edge of her irises. She put her glasses back on and she caught his eye and their gaze held for a second. The pub dog lumbered over to the fire and lay down on the rug.
“Let’s go and put some music on,” she said. “You can show me how to work the jukebox.”
* * *
“I had a really nice time.”
“Me too,” he said.
The air froze frost on the roads, the moon so bright you could see its craters. The idling of a taxi engine. Kiss her! yelled the audience of his life, though he knew he wouldn’t.
“Don’t forget you’re coming to that quiz with me,” she said. “No ‘falling asleep.’”
“Okay.”
Sarah smiled and stepped forward quickly and hugged him gently, only for a second, a quick thing, there and gone.
“See you later, then.”
She opened the taxi door and looked back at him. He wished he was braver, a braver person.
“Good night,” he said.
They looked into each other’s eyes and he smiled, and despite every part of him telling him to do something, he couldn’t. Time halted, just for a moment, before she climbed into the cab. The red taillights in the dark, and she was gone and he was alone.
There was a bright object beneath the moon that he knew was Venus. He pictured it traversing the surface of the sun. The transit of Venus, they called it, a black dot moving across the impossible, ferocious heat of a star inching its way toward complete death with every reaction. It was strange to think that, whatever happened, whatever anyone did in the world, everything would ultimately end up being swallowed by the sun as it bloomed outward at the end of its life.
12
THE COSTUME. HE stared at it on its hanger in the bright moonlight. He couldn’t patrol tonight because he’d been drinking, but some weird nether-sense made him long to become the Phantasm. He remembered a moment in one of his early patrols. An old lady had been struggling down the street in the dark with bags of heavy shopping. It had been his first interaction with another person while dressed in the costume, though she seemed curiously unperturbed by his appearance. He carried her bags for her, she didn’t live far, and helped her put the shopping into the cupboards of her old-fashioned kitchen.
He explained what he was trying to do, to help, and she said, “I grew up in the Second World War and I’ve never felt more afraid than I do today.”
The words had hit him like a thunderbolt. Until that point his dressing up had been about him, about dealing with the Event and its aftermath; there had been an element of selfishness in it. But suddenly, there in that poky little kitchen, with that poor woman feeling hard the danger of the modern world, all of that went out the window. In that moment the Phantasm became something more.
He closed his eyes. Wasn’t he supposed to be happy now? Hadn’t he just had a great night?
He went downstairs. The light on the oven had turned orange, so he slid a ham and pineapple deep-pan pizza in and set the timer. He’d tried lots of post-pub snacks, but this was the best. The thick crust absorbed the alcohol, the ham hit all the flavor targets and the pineapple was like a refreshing sorbet against the drunkenness. Opening the fridge and feeling the cool on his face, Sam grabbed a can of Coke and waited before opening it. He brought the ring pull to his ear to enjoy the snap and pressure-release sound. Ah. He took a big slurp and went back upstairs.
The costume called to him. Put me on. Feel safe. He stepped toward it.
The room was dark, the light coming from the landing, and in the mirror he looked like nothing more than a shadow. In the completely silent house the costume clacked and rubbed. He took the wooden reaching stick that opened the hatch into the attic and ascended the retractable ladder. He’d never been up here before in his costume, but it felt absolutely awesome.
“Just like a bat in the belfry,” he said, his voice sounding loud.
He started crawling toward the center. He imagined Sarah at the same moment. She was probably safely tucked up in bed. He pictured her glasses sitting on a bedside table next to a lamp, on top of a book. Would she think it was weird that at the exact same moment Sam was not in bed but dressed up as a superhero, crawling through his attic? Could Sarah in his life and the Phantasm coexist? No, she would think it was crazy. And yet here he was, after a lovely evening with her, dressed up anyway.
He didn’t even know why he’d come up here. Reaching the low table at the center, he lay down, propping himself up on one elbow as he waited for the travel kettle to boil. He picked up the picture of his family and stared at it blankly. He had looked at it so many times that it had almost totally lost its meaning. Why couldn’t he remember the day it was taken? It was warm up here with the costume on. He took the phone he’d brought from his bedroom and put it to his ear, and, suddenly exhausted at the effort of the evening, he drifted off to sleep.
* * *
There was a siren going off in his nightmare. And an overriding sense of claustrophobia. It took a while to realize that, in fact, it was not a nightmare but real life. The light from the desk lamp on the low Japanese table looked like a proto sun in an early solar system, interplanetary dust swirling before it. Sam blinked. His throat hurt. Slowly, the facts of the situation dawned on him.
“Oh wow,” he said.
There was smoke everywhere. Remembering how people caught up in 9/11 had felt the heat in the floor, he pulled off his glove and pressed his hand to the rug. It wasn’t warm. Sam coughed. He tried to figure out what was happening as he turned himself around and started crawling for the entrance. The smoke stung his eyes and the sensation of burning in his throat worsened as fear hit him. He coughed again. He couldn’t really see.
The smoke thickened near the hatchway leading to the ladder.
He went as fast as he could and got down the ladder. The top floor was thick with smoke. It was just past dawn and there was a dim gray light coming from the windows. The smoke alarms blared. He put his arm to his mouth as if it would make a filter. There was no way he could make it downstairs. He stumbled down the corridor into the spare room and pulled open the wardrobe where he kept his stuff. Thank God he’d practiced doing this in the dark. He found the oxygen mask he’d bought after the debacle with the smoke bombs in the railway station and pulled it to his mouth. The breath was deep and long. He fell back and sat against the spare bed for a second.
The pizza. The ham and pineapple deep-pan pizza was still in the oven. He grabbed his asthma pump and went down the stairs on his belly, keeping low where the air was clearest, and crawled into the kitchen. He grabbed a tea towel and pulled the oven door open, diving backward as he did so, expecting it to explode in flames, which it didn’t. Moving quickly from room to room, he opened all the windows. In the living room he looked out on the dark street. All the curtains were still shut, so he guessed his neighbors wouldn’t see the smoke. He’d give it half an hour, then close the ones at the front and leave the ones at the back open. A nagging disappointment pulled at him that he hadn’t gotten to eat the pizza and it would go to waste. Still, at least he hadn’t burned his house down.
Back in the kitchen, he approached the oven slowly. The pizza was a black circular crisp inside. There were brown burn marks all over the front of the oven. He switched everything off, pulled on his oven mitt and removed the pizza. The burned bits of pineapple and ham and strands of cheese were still discernible, like fossils. He stared at it for a moment and a sudden shock shuddered through him. He’d almost burned his house down, and yet he was normally so cautious. He took the pizza into the back garden. Beyond the back fence an orange line of dawn light cut across the sky beneath a steel cloud bank. He blinked his stinging eyes through the thick smoke. The air was freezing as he moved down the garden and suddenly realized he was outside in his costume. He reached the back fence and stood there, looking at the frozen pond. Then he faced the sky and launched the pizza like a Frisbee over the fence. It caught the air perfectly and glided elegantly into the distance, a black disc against the dawn laser light, like a flying saucer departing the atmosphere. It seemed to go on forever, the image so strange he felt it burning hard into his memory in the moment. The sound of the smoke alarms stopped.
“I need to go for a run,” he said.
* * *
Eating the streets beneath his running shoes, he let the chemicals wash away the stress of last night with Sarah. The sun made the frost on the lawns and trees a brilliant white and the road curled between winter bushes in the front gardens of the pretty little estates. Sam came at last to a children’s park, which he circled and slingshotted off, just as a rocket might use the gravity of Jupiter to catapult off into interstellar space, toward the main road.
He pictured his phone sitting on the breakfast bar, its screen illuminating with a text from Sarah. He leaned into the hill, the road passing beneath an avenue of huge chestnut trees, leaves and split shells all over the pavement crunching beneath his feet. He always thought of his family at this point in the run. Not a solid thought, a memory or image; just the idea of them. Up and up, he could feel the juices of effort secreting into his thighs, but he always kept going.
She hadn’t texted.
Even after showering, his phone was latent. He sat in the living room with the TV off. The smoke had gone, but the house smelled weird. The heating had just come on and he could hear the clicking of the boiler rattle through the walls, pipes expanding in their networks, and he was struck then by the quiet of the place. All this house with just one person moving around it.
He spent the next seven hours cleaning the smoke stains, and as he inhaled the various antibacterial sprays and bleaches he felt the cleansing properties of the chemicals disinfect his soul so that it could start afresh.
* * *
Sometimes Sam would think back to a happy day in his past. At the end of the Easter holidays in his second year of university, the day before the journey back to campus, they went for lunch in the nearby Frankie & Benny’s. It was one of those spring days where warmth comes back for the first time, blue skies with cartoon white clouds.
Sam loved his relationship with the twins at that time. His absence while at university, and the age gap, meant that when they saw him the delight on their four-year-old faces was multiplied. They lavished him with attention and looked for approval all the time. That Easter holiday had been amazing. Steve had started telling rudimentary jokes (“What’s my favorite food? Snot.”) while Sally, like her father and older brother, had become fascinated with dinosaurs.
“Watch this,” Sam’s dad had whispered to him the first night Sam got back from uni, before turning to Sally. “Sal? Want to do the alphabet for your brother?”
She looked up from the TV, stood up, walked the three feet to the sofa and sat down again.
“A,” said Sam’s dad.
“Apatosaurus!”
“Whoa,” said Sam.
“Yup.” His dad nodded. “Listen. B.”
“Brachiosaurus!”
Then she went all the way through to Zigongosaurus without hesitation.
“Sally, that’s amazing,” he said, stunned. Staring at her looking up at him, he’d tried to imagine what impact this little person was going to have on the world.
In Frankie & Benny’s the twins were given balloons and the family ordered their food. There was an outside seating area to the rear of the building, fenced in by wooden boxes with vivid green conifers growing out of them. Steve and Sally persuaded Sam to join them. They found a table and the twins climbed up into the seats and sat down in what, to Sam, seemed a very civilized manner.
“Well, isn’t this a lovely day,” said Sally.
“It is,” Sam agreed.
Across the table Steve tilted his head. His fine brown hair, parted messily to the side, was getting long.
“Don’t you wish it could stay like this forever and ever?” he said.
Sam looked at Steve when he said this. This moment would replay itself countless times over the coming years.
“I do,” he said, quietly.
After Frankie & Benny’s they took ice creams to the park and sat on the grass together.
“Can I have the present?” said Steve to his mother.
She looked down on the top of his head and tidied his hair.
“It’s in the bag.”
Steve went to the bag on his knees and fetched a sheet of paper, and turned to Sam with an expectant smile on his face.
“Here,” he said, holding out a hand-drawn card. On the front was a picture of two small people and a big one in the middle. Sally, Steve and Sam. The figures were drawn in the way kids draw people, with a circle for a face, and the arms and legs coming directly out of the face instead of a body. The three heads were the same size; the thing that made Sam bigger was a pair of extraordinarily long legs that terminated in a pair of circular shoes. The three of them were holding hands at the end of long spaghetti arms. Scratchings of colored pencil were scribbled randomly across the page. Inside was a handwritten note, the writing slanting diagonally downward from left to right, but the words were clear.
To Sam, Have a nice time in uni. We will miss you. Sally, Steve xxx
He sat on the grass and felt the warmth of the sun move into his bones. He imagined them sitting at the kitchen table, steadily writing the card with his mum, their faces pictures of pure concentration.
“Thanks, you two,” he said.
Sally just shrugged. “No problem.”
The sun on the white card hurt his eyes. This was the most precious gift he’d ever received.
He caught the
eight o’clock train back to uni and they waved him off on the platform. As the train pulled away, he adjusted himself in his seat and was conflicted by how much he was looking forward to getting back to his new life and how much he missed being at home. Wasn’t there a term for that? Seagulls wheeled against the pink sunset. He saw the ghost of his reflection in the window and started to look forward to the end of the summer holidays when his family would get back from South America and he’d be able to spend more time with them. He remembered the term now. Feeling two things that should be mutually exclusive. He mouthed the words under his breath. Cognitive dissonance.
* * *
“Okay. Now, you’re sure you know what you’re doing?”
Blotchy mimicked moving the gearstick into first and flicking the indicator switch. He made a hoop with his mouth and expelled a short blast of air. Nerves made his skin particularly blotchy today.
“I think so,” he said.
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
Blotchy looked like a giant at the wheel of the little car. Sam had put him on the insurance as a favor, because Blotchy’s mother had refused to take him out for driving practice anymore. The engine revved loudly on the deserted industrial estate.
“Hold on a sec,” said Sam, calmly, above the noise, already realizing this was a bad idea.
Blotchy took his foot off the pedal and looked at Sam with fear in his eyes.
“Okay, what did you do wrong?”
Silence.
“You forgot to put the car into gear, didn’t you?”
“Right. Yeah.”
“How many lessons have you had again?” came Tango’s voice from the back seat.
“You said you wouldn’t talk!” Blotchy’s voice betrayed his hysteria.
“Calm down,” said Sam. “Let’s start again. Now, you know the route? You’re going to pull out, turn left, go round the roundabout at the end and then pull over on the side of the road.”
