The Unlikely Heroics of Sam Holloway

by Rhys Thomas

  Back at Sam’s house Blotchy took him to the bathroom and they soon realised Sam was going to have to be cut out of his tactical assault vest and mask.

  ‘This is like one of those scenes in a film,’ said Blotchy. ‘But I can assure you – we are not about to start making out.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Sam, restraining a laugh. ‘It hurts.’

  They got him out of his top.

  ‘You’re going to need to have a shower. But I’m not going to help you with that, either,’ said Blotchy. ‘You’re on your own.’

  The water was so painful his mind fogged with white, and when it came back the sight of all the blood rinsing off was shocking. So red against the white, it didn’t seem real. And there was so much of it. He thought about Sarah. This had to stop – though when he told himself this, he knew it was always going to be nothing more than an empty promise. He already wanted to get straight back out there.

  When he finally managed to get out of the shower, he wiped the condensation off the mirror and paused. A huge red graze stretched from his left temple across his cheek. It seeped globules of blood and shone in the harsh light. The white of his eye was completely red. Secretly he thought he looked quite cool, but he tried to quash that thought.

  It was an hour before he got out of the bathroom. Blotchy was dozing on a kitchen chair he’d brought from downstairs.

  ‘I made you some hot chocolate but it was going cold,’ he said, indicating two empty cups on the floor.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Sam.

  The landing was gloomy. The light from the bathroom reflected in Blotchy’s glasses as he looked up.

  ‘Don’t tell Tango about this,’ said Sam.

  ‘I won’t. But you have to.’

  Sam swallowed. His jaw ached.

  ‘We’re all friends, Sam, even if you don’t think it as much as we do. We’re all looking out for each other. Does Sarah know?’

  Sam shook his head and Blotchy tried to give him a friendly smile.

  ‘Actually,’ said Sam, ‘I think I do need to go to the hospital.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Sarah, when she saw him.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, sheepishly, getting up from his seat in the coffee house to give her a kiss.

  ‘How’s your bike?’ she said, looking him up and down.

  ‘Hardly a scratch on it.’

  She made an over-the-top sad face that made Sam feel completely pathetic, because here was this girl he was in love with, and here he was lying to her.

  ‘And what about the hedgehog?’

  Sam’s eyes fell to his coffee. ‘He was fine. Just waddled off.’ The ease with which he lied to her surprised him, and not in a good way, but rather in a way he didn’t recognise, as though there had been another level to him hiding away all this time.

  ‘Aw, you’re a hero. But seriously Sam, you’ve got to be careful. Why are boys so stupid?’

  ‘I got you a gingerbread latte,’ he said, pushing her drink across the table, grateful for how warm the place was so his bones didn’t hurt.

  ‘Thanks. What did the doctor say?’

  ‘I haven’t broken or fractured anything, so that’s good. Just a few stitches.’

  At the hospital he’d told them he’d come off the bike while swerving to avoid a hedgehog too. Although they’d said he was fine, he swore he could feel blood in the cavities of his body from where his arteries had been crushed. The good thing was, he’d managed to get a day off work and now it was Friday night. He didn’t know if Rebecca believed him when he called, but she could see the proof on Monday.

  ‘Your face is a mess,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Hey!’

  She changed the angle of her head to get a better look.

  ‘I’m meeting up with Zac in a couple of days,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Sam, a new level of anxiety pouring in immediately.

  ‘So I guess you’ll need to eat soup for a while?’

  ‘You’re changing the subject again.’

  ‘No, I’m not. There’s nothing more to say.’

  Sam finished his coffee.

  ‘Soup does sound good.’

  He watched Sarah scoop up some of the froth from the top of her coffee, something carefree and innocent in the action, unaware of his eyes on her, of the thoughts chugging through his mind, the growing guilt of how she was open towards him but not the other way round, how he could just make up a lie and have her believe it, and how he was still holding back the biggest truth of all.

  They lay in bed that night and watched the patterns the rain made on the window.

  Sarah ran her fingers along the curve of Sam’s ear.

  ‘Do you still miss them a lot?’

  He sighed. ‘My family? I guess I never dealt with it properly. When I told you about them it was the first time I’d ever spoken about it, and I thought I was going insane. But if I feel like I’m missing them, it’s weird, I can sort of sense them near me? I know it’s not real, they’re not like ghosts; just the sort of stuff they taught me about being a person. Any goodness in me comes from them. My dad used to say people will let you down. All the time they’ll let you down. But you must never let them down. I try to stick to that in work and things, and it helps. Don’t get me wrong. I’m making my parents out to be saints but it wasn’t like that. They definitely weren’t perfect. God, they used to argue crazily sometimes, especially when I was younger. But all that stuff falls away over time and you just remember the best parts.’

  She swung her legs off the bed to get up. When it was like this, nothing else mattered. The thought of his mistake in work dissolved into meaninglessness. It was like Zac didn’t exist. The only thing that still tugged was the secret.

  ‘I like you,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  The wind strengthened and whipped a pocket of raindrops against the window.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ he said. ‘How come you never talk about your family?’

  She turned to face him, then leapt back on to the bed.

  ‘Tickle monster!’

  He rolled away as she grabbed at him. He hated being tickled. That’s why she loved doing it.

  ‘Tickle monster attack on scab face!’

  ‘Scab face?’

  He got his arms under her and pushed her off in a surprising display of masculinity. But she had a preternatural strength and pushed up off the mattress and with the sole of her foot kicked him in the guts, winding him.

  ‘Scab face must die!’

  He buckled over, tried to speak but couldn’t, instead holding up a just-a-second finger. She laughed and her glasses ran down the bridge of her nose. He grabbed her wrists and a muscular pain shot right up the side of his body.

  ‘Argh!’

  She laughed really hard then and flopped down on her back, pulling the sheets over her.

  ‘Why won’t you talk about your family?’ he said.

  ‘We don’t talk,’ she said, breathless. ‘It’s no biggie.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We just don’t, but I don’t care. We were never close, not like your family. I don’t think they even like each other.’

  ‘Have they split up?’

  ‘Nah. They’re just not happy together. They never were, not really. Not every family is close like yours. Some of us are just . . . different. It doesn’t matter.’

  He felt like saying how much he would kill to have his family back and how she needed to speak to them. How could she not see that?

  ‘Do you remember when you played that Elvis Costello song in the pub?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, still panting from the pain.

  ‘It’s weird. After what you did for that homeless woman in the bakery, I felt like I knew you. I watched you after you put that song on. You nodded your head a little bit and, I don’t know, I had this whole idea of who you were. And I was pretty much right, I think. And I fancied you. You had nice arms. Do you remember you were wearing that InGen tee?’
/>   ‘Yeah,’ he said, looking at her and smiling.

  ‘Oh God, he’s smiling again.’

  He smiled wider but was then hit by another shock of guilt about the superhero, and the smile faded.

  ‘When I saw you again,’ she said, ‘the shooting star night, I’d come to the pub hoping you were there. I don’t know . . . I couldn’t stop thinking about you. And I sometimes think – what if you hadn’t played that song?’

  The rain outside stopped and the water sluicing down the windowpane made shifting ribbons on the wall.

  ‘All of this from that one little moment. Isn’t that weird?’

  He was suddenly hit by the sad thought that, if they stayed together for the rest of their lives, one of them would have to die first. He watched her lying next to him, and wondered if she ever thought things like this. By that time they would have shared a large percentage of their lives together and grown into one soul. When death split that soul back into two, the one left behind would be shrivelled and dry without the other. He imagined a scene where he died first and Sarah, as an old woman, was washing up a single plate and knife and fork, and it broke his heart. He thought of her dying first and him reaching nine o’clock at night quite easily but the next few hours before bed being crushing in their loneliness, the kind of end-of-life loneliness half of all people must face. And as he thought these things and myriad other scenarios of being alone again, he considered it was maybe a blessing the way his parents died. No time to ponder or worry, they had died in their prime, before the true cruelty of life had a chance to dig in its claws.

  Outside, just as abruptly as it had stopped, it started raining again.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  When Sam pulled into work on Monday morning there was no sign of Mr Okamatsu’s gold Lexus, which was odd, but good. He exaggerated his limp as he went into the office and sat down.

  ‘Bloody hell, it’s the walking dead,’ said Linda from Quality.

  Sam reached under his desk and switched on his computer. The office was still quiet. It was 8:56 a.m. so hardly anybody had shown up yet, and Rebecca had a chance to talk to him.

  ‘Just so you know, Mr Okamatsu is visiting clients to sort out the air shipping,’ she said.

  Sam looked up at her. ‘Oh, OK.’

  ‘Your face looks sore.’

  ‘It’s not too bad.’

  ‘What happened?’ said Linda, poking her head over the partition.

  Sam told her about the hedgehog.

  ‘Aw, bless,’ said Linda. ‘Mind, lucky you didn’t go over it. It would have punctured your tyres!’

  Rebecca did a manic, over-the-top laugh.

  ‘Aren’t they supposed to have those tunnels to cross roads now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sam.

  He spent the morning working quietly and ignoring the quips from his colleagues about the state of his face. At lunchtime he took a drive to the marshlands, back to the fishing lake, where he ate his sandwiches while watching a tall, elderly woman casting off from a wooden jetty.

  When he got back to the office, something had changed. It was quiet. Usually, when Mr Okamatsu was away, the mood was more boisterous. Perhaps he was being paranoid but he thought they might have stopped talking when he opened the door. He put the slight shift in people’s behaviour towards him, the way they couldn’t quite meet his eyes, the spike of alarm when he addressed them from his seat, down to his air shipping error. Or the scab on his face. It was nothing more than that.

  At three o’clock he went into the warehouse to check the deliveries going out that day. It was cold and he pulled on one of the thick blue Electronica Diablique worker’s jackets with the warm collars.

  ‘You OK, Sam?’

  Mark was standing next to him with a clipboard and a smirk on his face.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  And he turned away from Sam, to check the boxes on the pallet.

  At home he warmed some bread in the oven and soup in a pan and sat at the table with his tablet, scanning the day’s Internet. He wasn’t seeing Sarah tonight – she was covering a late shift at the library – and he felt bored. After letting his dinner settle, he went upstairs and changed into his running clothes, pausing on the landing beneath the hatchway to the attic. He stared up at it for a moment, and thought about what Sarah would say if he came clean, if he just sat her down and told her everything, about the superhero, about how it made him feel, about all the things he’d done. Would she understand? If he waited for the right opportunity?

  He went outside. It was cold but he soon got used to it and let his mind empty as he ran. He took it easy but was surprised how the pain from his injuries wasn’t too awful. He didn’t go far, just a quick circuit of some of the nearby housing estates. The roads were still busy, people getting home from work, unloading groceries from their boots. One family ran from their front door into the garden, chasing an escaped puppy.

  When he got back to his street the pain from his injuries was starting to get worse and as he reached the garden he saw a figure standing in the porch, a human form in the pool of light. As he came closer he saw that it was Tango.

  ‘I’ve been trying to call you,’ he said, as Sam came up the path.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  There was a weird look on Tango’s face as he stepped forward and threw his arms around him. Sam panicked.

  ‘Al, what’s going on?’

  He had a terrible thought that Sarah was dead. In the garden, the leaves on the bushes rustled and a fluffy ginger cat turned its head in Sam’s direction. A second, smaller cat – black and white – followed and they bumped noses and went out into the street, side by side. Tango released him.

  ‘Jesus, Sam.’

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’

  Tango gauged Sam’s face.

  ‘Come on, let’s go inside.’

  Sam fumbled for the key in his pocket and let them in. Tango went into the living room, found Sam’s tablet, tapped in some words, and held up the screen.

  At first it didn’t register. Just a bad practical joke – though that would be impossible, because nobody knew the secret. So, if not a joke, it must be real. He couldn’t quite bring himself to remove his eyes from the screen and point them at Tango. Thoughts bottle-necked, prickly heat stung his face. This is very bad, he thought. This is so, so bad. Tango was showing him the Sun’s website, naming him as the Phantasm; alongside a better-quality image of his face was a picture taken on the night of his arrest.

  ‘It’s in the actual newspaper as well.’

  The voice sounded distant, and when Sam finally looked at his old friend he was more like an idea of Tango, a hologram. Too much blood flooded his brain and he felt woozy.

  ‘Whatever this is, whatever you’ve done, you’ve got to stop it, Sam.’

  ‘People weren’t supposed to find out,’ he said, vaguely.

  He flopped on to the sofa. Already he was thinking about Sarah, about what she was going to say.

  ‘It’s not about people finding out,’ said Tango, sitting next to Sam. ‘It’s about why you did it, you know?’

  Because he wanted to do it. Because he felt like he could do it, and he should do it. Because the world needed more goodness in it. Because he was addicted. Sam covered his eyes with one arm. The humiliation was awful. From the dark, her face in moonbeams.

  ‘You could have told me. You know I’d’ve been there for you.’

  ‘There’re loads of people doing what I do.’

  ‘No. They’re not.’

  ‘Yes, they are. Look it up.’

  Tango inhaled deeply through his nose. ‘This is different.’

  ‘No it’s not.’

  He couldn’t say the precise words, couldn’t mention his family. Just like he hadn’t been able to face it head on when it happened. Sam was on his own then, and he was on his own now. Not that he cared; he didn’t need anyone.

  ‘Look. I appreciate you comin
g over, but can you go? I need to think.’

  ‘Sam—’

  ‘I’m sorry, Al, but I want to be on my own.’

  ‘It’s being on your own that led you to this.’

  Christ, he thought, it’s not that bad. I’m not hurt and I’m not hurting anyone – what’s the big deal? And the way Alan looked at him, that maudlin sympathy, as though he were a cancer patient, compounded the humiliation.

  ‘You’re not going to be able to handle this—’

  ‘How do you know what I can and can’t handle? I’ve been through worse than this, Tango, a lot worse, and I handled it.’

  ‘You obviously didn’t. You need to sort yourself out, Sam, to get to the bottom of it and fix it. I can help you.’

  ‘Like last time? Where were you then? No, Al, I don’t need your help.’ He let the words hang. ‘I just want to be left alone.’ That’s all I’ve ever wanted. ‘I dread going to the pub with you, you know that?’ He closed his eyes. ‘I dread it for days. I just want to come home and be on my own, but you never let me.’

  ‘Because I’m your friend.’

  ‘You’re not, though, are you? You say you’re there for me but you’re not. You never were, not when it mattered.’ Why was he saying this? ‘We’re only friends because we couldn’t find anyone better. All of us. You and Blotchy hang out because you don’t want to be lonely but I . . .’ His voice caught. He tapped his chest and, as the reality of what this meant seeped in, tears rose in his eyes. ‘I do.’

  ‘You can’t just be alone. What about Sarah?’

  ‘What about her? You can’t stand that I’m with her, not that it matters. She’ll be gone after this. Doesn’t matter though. I’m happier on my own.’

  ‘Sam—’

  ‘Just go.’

  ‘Sam, you don’t talk like this. And that means I’m getting through. I’m not going to give up on you.’

  ‘You really have to go.’

  Tango stood up awkwardly.

  ‘This is ridiculous.’

  It felt ridiculous as well, but his focus was set purely on ending this immediate humiliation. He had to get upstairs to the attic. He’d be safer up there.

  Tango stepped into the garden.

  ‘I’m going to go, but this isn’t the end.’