A real-life superhero came to the aid of over a hundred vulnerable people on Thursday night, community workers report.
The incident took place late on Duke Street, where volunteers run a soup kitchen and food bank for the city’s homeless. Nicholas Bush, 47, one of the volunteers said, ‘It was just a normal night when all of a sudden we saw this dark figure running towards us, dressed in fancy dress. We all thought it was a drunk guy on a stag party until he threw a big bag of sandwiches and pasties at us.’
The sandwiches are thought to have originated from popular baking chain Greggs, who were unavailable for comment.
Sharon Claymore, 54, another volunteer, commended the masked vigilante. ‘In all my years I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t know about the costume but the sandwiches were much needed and appreciated.’
This is not the first time people have taken to the streets of Britain dressed as masked crusaders . . .
He skipped this part.
A police spokesperson said, ‘No law has been broken, no crime committed, so if somebody wants to help people, even dressed as a superhero, it’s up to them, though we wouldn’t recommend it. Vigilantism itself is a crime and so if this man has any notions of crime fighting we suggest he leaves it to the experts. The law remains the law.’
Sitting at his breakfast table the next morning with a warm croissant and cup of coffee, Sam scrolled through the Google results. The story was posted on his local paper’s website under the headline Superhero Loose On City Streets, and the story had been syndicated on a few other sites, as well as being shared on Facebook and Twitter, where it had gained the hashtag #RealLifeSuperhero.
Stunned, Sam reached for his breakfast marmalade and spread it on the croissant. He didn’t know what he expected, hadn’t even considered the possibility of his alter ego being reported in the press. That others might be interested in his dressing up was, in retrospect, completely obvious now. He took a bite of his croissant.
He needed to be more careful, lurk in the shadows, cut the number of days he patrolled. What would Sarah think of all this? Oh. That thought didn’t feel nice. Yesterday, being the Phantasm was one thing. Suddenly today, it was another.
‘You’re a sensitive boy,’ his mother had once told him, and she was right. He sensed the feelings of others keenly, and frequently put himself second if it meant making somebody else feel good. His friends labelled this a weakness (and sometimes pious) – and maybe it was – but Sam couldn’t help himself. He took pleasure in seeing others happy – that’s what made him happy – but being in a new relationship (not that he assumed a relationship was a foregone conclusion but it was surely a possibility) meant losing out on the safe and comfortable life he had built around himself, over which he exercised so much control. He took another bite of his croissant.
All the odd routines, like the way he took time to appreciate the lovely carpet in the boot of his car, would be gone, or at least diminished, because showing Sarah how he liked to stare into the boot for minutes at a time, at the clean, empty space, might distance himself from her. He liked his routines, they brought him tremendous calm. To lose them would be to lose a large part of who he was, and erode the dam built between him and the raging chaos that swirled at the edges of his mind.
But if he was so scared and worried at the prospect of his life changing, why did he get butterflies whenever he remembered Sarah’s face in the moonlight? And as each successive memory arrived, he sensed the distant collapse of rocks somewhere in the kingdom.
Sometimes Sam would just gravitate to the place where he grew up. He sat in his parked car opposite his parents’ old house and felt the enveloping warmth of being there. He knew this street so well, had cycled up and down it so many times he knew every crack on the pavement, every lip of every kerb. It still felt like home. He looked at the house, at the bedroom windows behind which they’d all slept, the front door he’d posed before on his first day of school, for a photograph.
Pushing the car door open, the cold air hitting his face, Sam walked down the street. It was so quiet, just as it had always been. Put up in the seventies – pebble-dashed walls, stone cladding beneath the ground-floor windows – it now housed mostly retirees who had never moved. Memories hatched in that quick way where they merge to form a feeling, an essence of his life then, how it had been.
When he reached the end of the street he turned left into the alleyway, which led to a small gravel track near the river, a little path between two tall fences, away from the estate and on to the horse paddocks and then across the river bridge to the woods. Halfway along the steel bridge Sam stopped to watch the water move beneath him.
The Phantasm had to endure. He would just be more careful. He’d pulled on the mask to help people, and even if only by a tiny amount, he knew he had made the world a better place with some of the things he’d done.
He crossed the river and came to the woods, turning left, heading north, wintry branches hanging still in the dead air, the sky pearlescent beyond. The air was still and so cold it carried sound easily – the caw of crows, the rush of the river. Tree roots snaked from the hard ground, fallen autumn leaves drifted against ridges of jutting rock. He’d been here hundreds of times as a kid but it never lost its magic.
He checked his phone, but nothing from Sarah. There was a text from Tango, though. What are you doing tomorrow night? Sam ignored it. He thought of Sarah. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Shafts of sunlight gave the water of a tributary stream a strange white translucence, a fairy-tale effect, and then he came to a ridge, and continued over it into a small valley where he had once spent a dark winter night reading comic books by torchlight. Up the far slope a tricky clamber away stood the old tree with its overhanging roots, the cleft in the rock where the tree had split the cave open.
He didn’t think he would ever come back again but here he was, scrambling up the slope, her face repeating in his mind, making him feel in turns alive and afraid, the thump of his heart at once pleasant and unpleasant. After all those years, through everything, he was back at the one place he used to come to feel safe.
Hand over fist he clambered towards the tree, breathless, leaves and rocks sliding out from under him. It was harder than he remembered, and his ribs ached, but at last he got a hold of the cliff face and sidled along under the tree roots to the cave, his Batcave, the place of ultimate safety. He thought it might open him up, give him a kind of perspective, tell him what to do, but it did none of these things. Whatever spiritual link had existed between him and this place was absent now. He looked down into the small leaf-strewn basin, at the tree trunks growing at strange angles, the black remains of a bonfire, a grey squirrel scuttling along a branch. Suddenly, he felt like crying. Turning into the cave, he found the hidden alcove at the back and reached inside, hoping to find something he’d missed last time he was here – a magnifying glass, a pencil, a comic, some message from the past – but there was nothing there save dusty rock.
It was such a familiar voice, yet so long since he’d heard it.
‘Sam?’
‘Oh,’ he said.
The woman in the doorway of the house, not his parents’ but the one next door, looked so much older now. Her face had thinned and crumpled, she was ever so slightly hunched, her hair less full. But there she was. Guilt, built over time, welled up inside him. Seeing her now, he realised the scale of his betrayal.
‘God look at you.’
When he was growing up, Sam would go to Moira’s house to play with the dog and eat biscuits before his parents got home from work. Being part of the old gentry, she would take him for day trips to local farms, hidden pockets of the country you wouldn’t even know existed, or the country houses and huge manors on the brink of bankruptcy as the old ways died. He’d go and watch detective dramas on her huge television; would, on occasion, be taken to the cinema to watch a film she wanted to see (widowed and childless, with her family miles away, she wanted a companion and Sam was fine with that – he liked her). Moira had been a huge part of his childhood, and he hadn’t seen her in years.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I was just passing, thought I’d come see the old place.’
‘I hope you were going to knock my door.’
‘I was in a bit of a rush,’ he blurted.
‘You should come and see me, dear.’
She was a thin woman, but tall; even with the hunch she looked down on him as he went to the edge of her garden.
‘I know. I’m just, you know, so busy.’
‘Don’t give me that.’
Her brazen manner was only a shell for her kindness. Sam tapped the end of his key with his little finger.
‘I’m sorry. It’s just . . .’
‘I know. Come in, the kettle’s on.’
He wanted to go in. More than anything he wanted to go in. She’d have the log fire burning in there, that special kind of heat. He could listen to her stories about her nieces and nephews – and, possibly, their kids now – what meals she had planned for the week ahead, her TV schedule. He wondered if the portrait of her old racehorse, Thunder, was still on the wall, the holiday knick-knacks still cramming every inch of every shelf.
‘I really do have to go,’ he said.
She stood with one hand on her front door, using it as a support, and there was the sudden sense of the crushing effects of time.
‘I’ll come back, I promise, but I have to go. I have to . . . go.’
She stared at him. Her eyes bored a hole through his skin, loosing so many memories, and in that moment he could tell she could see past his clothes and skin and organs, past even the years he’d put between the Event and now, right into the black scribble of his heart.