Superhero

By the time we got to Jim and Eileen’s house it was all over. The Renault Espace on their block-paved driveway was crushed like a coke can. The rubber seals from the windows of the ruined car had popped out at odd angles like empty speech balloons, mute with the horror of it all. Buried in a drift of tiny cubes of glass in the flowerbed beneath one of Jim’s rose bushes I saw the Garfield with suction cups that I had given to Eileen when I finally moved out.

Dev swore. I looked at the grubby Garfield and then at the front door that was standing open. Green paint. Stained glass. Brass letterbox. Brass Number 6, shiny like it always was.

6 Rosebury Crescent – my first proper home.

And then I was at the door and charging through it, hauling myself up the single concrete step with the big white grab handle that Jim fitted last summer when Eileen started having trouble with her arthritis.

Dev was yelling at me to stop, saying it was dangerous, They could still be in there, wait for the others. And I could hear him, but I couldn’t think about the words. All I could think about was Eileen and Jim.

I first met Jim in Tower Records. He bumped into me, deliberately of course, but how was I to know at the time? I was sixteen, frightened at home, fed up at school and sick of reading problem pages that said ‘don’t feel so alone, you’re not the only one’ before watching the paper tear itself to shreds. I was reading the back of a CD – a Japanese import of ‘Check Your Head’ by the Beastie Boys – trying to compare the track list with the one I had in my head of the non-Japanese version. Sad, I know, but in my defence I’ll say again, I was sixteen and didn’t really have anywhere else to be on a Thursday afternoon apart from home or school and neither of those held a greater appeal than the second floor of Tower Records.

‘Sorry son, didn’t see you there’ said Jim after he ‘accidentally’ backed into me. I began to wonder what a slightly overweight fifty-something guy wearing beige loafers, a Pringle sweater and a duck-egg blue jacket of the kind you see for sale in the back of the Sunday supplements was doing in the Foreign Imports section of Tower Records and I guess I was giving him a pretty hard stare at that point because the next thing he said was ‘Careful son, you’ll crack my glasses!’

‘Sorry,’ I mumbled, because that made sense to me and I really didn’t want to break his glasses. It must have been a full second later before I realised exactly what he had said and then there I was staring at him again, only this time with big round eyes, and my mouth was hanging open too. For years after, Jim would still have a good laugh at how long it took for me to twig.

‘If the wind changes you’ll stick like that,’ says Jim and turns and walks off towards Easy Listening.

I must have stood there for ten seconds or more, just gawping. It’s not an unusual sight in Tower to this day, scruffy looking sixteen year olds staring into space, but I bet not many of them have the reasons I did.

‘What did you mean?’ I said, running after him, still holding that Japanese CD.

‘Your face lad. You’ll stick like that if the wind changes.’

‘No, about the glasses. What did you mean?’

And he smiled, like it was nothing.

‘You know what I meant sonny. My name’s Jim by the way.’

And there he was holding out his hand for me to shake and I’m stood there again like a Muppet. Bubble burst. Someone has seen right through me, weighed me up and moved on like I was nothing. I didn’t take his hand, not then. I was an ignorant little prick at the time. Dev would tell you nothing much has changed, but then Dev thinks he’s a comedian.

‘How did you know?’

‘I’ve always been called Jim,’ said Jim, with a surprised look on his face.

‘How did you know?’ I ask again.

He chuckled and said, ‘It’s a gift,’ and then he looked me in the eye, I mean really looked me in the eye and said, ‘you know.’

We went for a coffee. This is before the days of Starbucks mind, so actually we went for some tea, served in Styrofoam cups in a greasy spoon around the corner. All the way there, there’s a part of me just wants to throw him against the wall and scream at him until he tells me everything that’s inside his head, but I don’t, I just wait for him to say what he has to say. That was the day my life changed forever. More than that – it was the day my life began.

The wallpaper is torn off in the hallway – two neat strips about a foot wide, torn off at the same height all the way from the front door to the kitchen door. I can smell burning. I go into the living room. I don’t even think about looking round the corner first or sensing into the room – I just go. The first thing I see is the coffee table all crushed and covered with roof slates. There’s water pouring from the edge of a ragged hole in the ceiling. The hole’s about three feet wide and through it I can see into Eileen and Jim’s bedroom and there’s a hole in the ceiling of their bedroom as well and I can see through that and through the hole in the roof and into the blue sky. The slates that are still hanging around the edge of the last hole make the sky look all blocky and square, like its not real, like there’s been some cosmic error with Photoshop that’s accidentally pasted a piece of beautiful blue sky onto the underside of the roof of this suburban semi. All of the electrical equipment in the room has melted down: the black plastic case of their fourteen inch TV has oozed down the wooden front of the video cabinet that Jim made when I finally persuaded them to buy a VCR; the glass bulb of the standard lamp has dropped to the carpet in a single hot dollop that has burned a neat hole through the wool nylon blend and left a glass teardrop embedded in the underlay. I run through into the little dining room, which is empty and apparently intact and then fling open the door to the kitchen.

Jim told me that it normally begins around about the time you start to lose your first milk teeth. That made sense to me. I didn’t have many toys, but they always seemed to break very quickly – I had two amputee Action Men and this plastic spaceship with both of the wings broken off. Part of me knew right from the start, but there was another part that kidded myself that toys were badly made and things just broke sometimes. One birthday I got a swingball set from one of my distant but periodically guilty grandparents. I was out the back bashing it around on the first day, trying to see how many times I could knock the ball back and forth before I missed it. I was concentrating really hard, forty, fifty, then the pole just came in two, clattering to the ground. Dad blamed me and beat me black and blue. It was like that at my house. But that was the day I knew for sure, that was when I started to try and understand what Jim called my ‘capacity’. Years later in that cafM-CM-) I carved up little pieces of Styrofoam into neat squares while Jim chuckled, ‘You should be on TV with a talent like that son.’ He didn’t mean it – he wasn’t impressed at all – but I could tell he was worried about me and that was a new thing and it felt good.

Eileen was very particular about the kitchen. It was always tidy and spotlessly clean. It was sixties vintage, or early seventies, all pale blue greys and white Formica flecked with black and grey and white tile-effect lino on the floor that Jim was forever having to stick down where it curled up at the corners.

Now I could barely recognise it.

All of the wall units and the cabinets had been smashed, as if in one blow, and had crashed to the floor in a great heap of chipboard panels, spilling teacups and pasta twirls and saucepans. The fridge, which was the only new thing in the place, was standing just where it normally did, but the top part of it was all stoved in, like it had been dropped from a tall building. There was water spraying from the severed neck of the mixer tap, just going up into the air and falling back on itself like some sort of ornamental fountain in the middle of all the destruction.

Jim and Eileen had to be upstairs then.

As I pass back out into the hall, Dev is coming in through the front door and he’s still shouting at me, ‘Seb, don’t be fucking stupid!’ but I’m up the stairs three at a time, noticing how each of the spindles in the balustrade beneath the landing rail has a one-inch gap taken out of it. The cuts are precise. The white gloss paint reaches all the way to the bare wood. There are no chips or flakes like you’d get if they had been sliced with a mechanical saw. It’s one of Their trademarks. If you were to look at the sliced spindles under an electron microscope you could see that the cut was clean all the way down to the atomic level. A mind bogglingly precise force used as a hideously crude weapon.

I fling open the door to Jim and Eileen’s bedroom. The floorboards have been flung back from the middle of the room. Whatever made the hole was moving upwards at the time. Water is still leaking from the ruptured central heating pipes and into the living room. There is no one here. I kick in the door to the next bedroom and it’s just the way I remember it – my old room.

I lived here for five years. Jim brought me home that first day to meet Eileen. She made a meat and potato pie. Jim rang the Institute, fixed up an appointment with Angela and told me not to worry – it wasn’t like a job interview, I couldn’t fail it. Everyone there would want to help me, and maybe I could help them in return. I moved in a week later – don’t think my real dad even noticed that I’d gone.

Angela said I had to finish my GCSEs before I started at the Institute full-time. I wasn’t too happy about that, but Jim and Eileen made sure I went to school every day. I remember getting home on the first day to find that Eileen had made my bed. It’s weird, but more than any of the other things that happened at that time, that was the one that I could never get my head around.

Eileen used to fuss after me something rotten. She was always trying to feed me up, always had something baking in the oven. I don’t think I’d ever eaten anything that hadn’t come straight out of a packet before I moved in with Jim and Eileen. They didn’t even have a microwave.

In the summer, after I’d done the exams, I started going to the Institute most days. After what seemed like weeks of filling out forms and doing medical tests and those psychiatric evaluations with the ink blots and word association and all sorts of nonsense I finally found myself in a little room sitting across a table from Angela.

‘Show me what you can do,’ she said and put a house brick down on the table top between us. It took a while – I wasn’t used to performing on command as it were – but after a few minutes there was a sort of clinking noise and the brick came in two.

‘OK,’ said Angela, and that was that. I was rated with ‘borderline kinetic capacity’, though they didn’t tell me that at the time. They were worried that the borderline bit would have upset me. And it would. That was when I started to work hard for the first time in my life.

Jim and Eileen redecorated my room not long after I moved out – there were too many little rips in the wallpaper where I’d used blue tack to put up my posters and the wardrobe had more or less fallen to bits – but the walls are still the same colour now and the view out of the window is just as it was. Nothing’s out of place here, everything is perfect and untouched, or it seems so until I notice a few wisps of roof insulation and some specks of plaster dust sitting next to a neat hole in the floor that’s a bit less than an inch across. It’s perfectly round and there’s a matching hole in the ceiling. Something angry starts to take shape at the heart of my confusion. Who do They think They are using stuff like that here in Jim and Eileen’s house? It must be only about eight seconds since I was looking at that Garfield in the flowerbed, but I can actually feel myself aging as the seconds tick. I turn away and head for the bathroom and hear Dev coming up the stairs after me, screaming something about the balustrade, begging me to get out of there.

After I began at the institute full time, I sometimes helped Jim on his talent scouting expeditions. The first time was when he found Dev.

Dev was eighteen before Jim noticed him sitting outside the British Museum one morning. We spent nearly a fortnight tailing him to his flat and back to the museum and in and out of all those bookies.

‘If he can see through time, then how come he doesn’t know we’re following him?’ I asked one day after we lost him somewhere on the Circle Line. Jim had a good laugh at that one and tried to explain Dev’s capacity to me. Frankly, I was more interested in his mobile phone. They were still pretty new in those days and Dev’s was really small. I thought Dev was pretty cool. He was two years older than me, dressed in sharp looking suits and had a fair bit of cash on account of his unusual good luck on the horses. When Jim finally ‘bumped’ into him in a bookies and tried to give him a sure thing tip on the 3.30 at Newmarket I felt like a chapter of my life had closed, like I really belonged somewhere for the first time in my life.

The panels in the bathroom door are broken, as if they have been punched out from the inside. I yank the door open and some of it comes away in my hand and the rest falls to the floor, exposing the full horror of the destruction. It looks like everything has been smashed and then burned and then smashed again,

There’s a tangle of branches in the bath and a strange sort of greasy film on the tiles and then I look and I see that something has actually melted parts of the pink plastic of the bath and that some of the branches have gone through it and some of them have been bonded into it and then I see that they are not branches but bones and I know that they are Eileen’s bones and Jim’s bones, blackened and burned and melted together with the pink plastic of the bath and the yellow duck that Eileen had kept since she was a child and the non-slip patches that Jim stuck on after the time he slipped and knocked his hip.

I can feel Dev trying to pull me up, to take me out of there and that’s when I realise that I’m kneeling on the floor with the black water from the broken radiator and the water from the shattered toilet soaking into the knees of my trousers. I can feel bits of broken tile and broken sink and broken toilet pressing into my kneecaps, but the pain doesn’t come. It’s blocked because my head is full of something that’s like anger, but it’s flowing through me with a force that I can’t control and I feel like I’m drowning.

I can’t get my breath.

I’m staring at the floor watching the soot and the grease swirling in the water, trying to focus, and Dev’s pulling at me, trying to get me out of there, and then the floorboards start to pop, showering bits of chipboard and spraying water and I watch as a fault line zigzags up the floor of the bathroom until it reaches the wall and then plaster shears off and its only when the first breeze block bursts like a balloon and the air is suddenly filled with grey black dust that I realise its me doing it and I can’t stop. That’s when Dev knocks me out.

I wake up in the passenger seat of Dev’s Z3. It’s night. The world outside is sodium darkness as we flash past a sign that says Taunton, which means we’re somewhere on the M5. Dev is driving fast and speaking into his hands free kit at the same time. He sounds tired and angry. After a moment I decide that he’s talking to Angela but he’s not talking about what we saw at Jim and Eileen’s. I must have been out for a while.

Something has changed. They have never been quite as inelegant as this before. Maybe They’re bored, bringing an end to that apparent balance we’ve had since before I was born.

And why Jim? It doesn’t make any sense. Maybe They have a newly discovered sense of irony. The thing was that Jim never had any capacities. His so-called gift was just that he understood people, especially people like us – could tell what we were all about, just by bumping into us in a record store. Eileen didn’t have anything at all, except that she loved him.

That day in the cafe Jim told me that I could be a superhero. I believed him then, but now I don’t. Now I know what it really means. There’s guys I know that have capacities you wouldn’t believe, but would still run a mile rather than face up to a single one of Them.

Jim and Eileen stood up to be counted with nothing at all, except each other – they were braver than any of us.

I watch the white lines of the motorway flashing beneath us through half-closed eyes. I can’t talk to Dev yet – can’t think about what happens next.

All I can think about is that Jim and Eileen died today, and they were the only real superheroes we ever had.