The Secret Life of Sam Holloway

by Rhys Thomas

  He charges, head down, into the squall.

  “Stop fighting!” he shouts.

  He is buried within a mass of human movement, all motion and hustle. He is struck again, on the top of his head, and again in his injured ribs, sending a snap of pain into the kernel of his mind. Someone throws their arms around him in a bear hug and the crowd murmurs the word superhero. The Phantasm releases a mighty roar and envisions pushing his arms out, creating a wave of energy that sends the fighters outward in all directions. A bomb detonating. He tenses his muscles, grits his teeth, closes his eyes and...HEAVES!

  But it has no effect on the bear hug. Close-quarter combat is not his forte and, to make matters worse, his rape alarm has been set off. It causes a momentary pause in the action. The crowd is now large and they cover their ears as the siren scream of the alarm sounds along the street.

  “What the hell is that?”

  The muscle-bound fighters are forced to cover their own ears. The noise is awful. The bear hug ceases and our hero stands. He realizes something. The fight is over. A quick nod. He is satisfied. But bobbing through the crowds now the helmets of Her Majesty’s Constabulary.

  Work done, time to disappear.

  He reaches into his utility belt, finds a smoke bomb and smashes it into the street. A hiss, a mist and the time for freedom is opportune. He turns to run but is thwarted by a lunging officer of the law, who bundles him to the blacktop. A second officer steps in and smacks a thunderbolt into our hero’s thigh with his truncheon.

  The crowd has shifted; the ones who were fighting are now part of the masses. All focus has fallen on the stricken crusader.

  “I stopped the fight,” he appeals to deaf ears.

  The police talk hurriedly into radios, he hears one of them ask his name and suddenly our hero realizes they think he is a demented gunman because of his outfit.

  “I am the Phantasm,” he grunts. “Let me go.”

  They pat him down, slap the cuffs on, put a knee in his back. He hears five awful words, Get his mask off him. A hand reaches toward the mask and fingers curl under it.

  His secret identity.

  “Please...don’t.”

  Lots of shouting, the city wheeling, why now, not now, the fingers clenching, the mask lifting...

  17

  HE THINKS OF that day, when he was younger, sitting outside on a beautiful spring day. The sky was so blue, the trees surrounding him so green.

  One of those days when the warmth comes back into the world after winter.

  The little voice had said, Don’t you wish it could stay like this forever and ever?

  * * *

  The moment Sam realized fully what was happening was around three seconds after the police bundled him to the ground. He was in handcuffs, wearing army gear, having just exploded a smoke bomb. They were rough with him, rougher than he would have expected—did they think he was a terrorist?

  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 center 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 cheers.

  “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 cleaved open like this.

  “Okay, 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, okay?”

  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 makeup 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 okay.

  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, “Okay, Sam. We’re going to arrest you for a Section 5 Public Order offense, okay?”

  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, okay?”

  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. Streetlights 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 gray-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 colorful 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 bloodred sky beyond the window. For everything he loved—this was the center.

  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 was 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 okay, 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 Live 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 cozy for a police station. Surely not every station had a room like this. The van Gogh print was of rain falling over rolling fields. The carpet was a light gray in color, a nice tight weave.

  “The officer who brought you in recognized 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. He thought of the man who’d drowned.

  “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 counseling service. Did you have counseling?”

  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 counseling, 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, okay?”

  “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.

  18

  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 hometown 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 center 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 aft
ermath 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 café 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 anymore.

  * * *

  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 personalized 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.