He did this sometimes, stood in front of his collection of Blu-rays. He found the way the boxes were all the same size and feel, all lined up neatly on the high-quality, half-height oak bookcase, very soothing. There was a knock at the front door and he came back to reality. Sam went into the hallway and found Tango holding his laptop under his arm.
‘I want you to read something,’ he said, bustling past Sam and back into the kitchen. He set up his computer on the breakfast bar. Sidling round to see, Sam watched Tango bring up the familiar old Microsoft Word XP program that he hadn’t updated since school because it would be bad luck.
‘You could have called.’
‘I’ve texted you like five times.’
Tango never emailed his writing, always insisting people read it in situ. He’d seen a DVD extra where the film director Christopher Nolan does the same thing with scripts; takes them to the actor’s house where they read them while he waits in another room before taking the script away with him.
‘I’m kinda busy tonight,’ Sam said.
‘It’s only short. You have to read it because I want to enter it into a competition and I need feedback.’
He was always so jerky in his movements, the way he jabbed the keys, the way he leaned down to peer at the screen at zero degrees, even the way his pupils darted around. He’d been like this since infancy.
‘So who was that girl?’ he said, casually, not taking his eyes off the screen.
‘What girl?’
‘From Friday.’
He pulled up the file and slid the laptop across to Sam. ‘Here you go,’ he said, not waiting for Sam’s answer.
‘Perpetual Motion,’ said Sam.
‘Yup.’
‘Good title.’
He listened to Tango’s breath of relief. He didn’t understand why Tango put so much stock in his opinions. Sam stood up and carried the laptop over to the armchair at the entrance of the conservatory.
‘I’m going to make a cup of tea,’ said Tango.
‘No.’
‘But I just want to see where you are.’
‘No. Go to the living room and wait for me there. You know the rules.’
Disappointed, Tango followed the order.
Sam set the laptop on his knee and read the first line:
The devil is a code that runs through us all.
The story was, in fact, not short at all and it took Sam the best part of an hour to read it. Like most of Tango’s stories it was exceedingly dense, about a man living inside a perpetual-motion machine he’d invented. There were long, detailed passages about drawing energy from other dimensions in the quantum world and replenishing it with the machine’s by-products, and layered treatises on the nature of immortality.
As he neared the end of the story, he noticed a movement in the conservatory window.
‘I thought I told you to wait in the living room.’
Tango’s reflection started.
‘I was just wondering how you’re getting on,’ he said, nervously.
Sam closed the laptop and turned to Tango with a sad look on his face.
‘I loved it!’ he said.
‘Great! Cup of tea?’
A small but pleasant ritual the two had established was that, before discussing whatever Tango had written, they’d make tea in a pot and bring it into the living room on a tray along with the other parts of the tea set Sam had purchased for a lot of money from Fortnum & Mason as a special treat on a day trip to London.
‘So you’re saying she just started talking to you?’
He liked watching the splash sugar cubes made when dropped into tea.
‘Yup.’
‘This is great news, Sam.’
‘Is it?’
Tango fixed him with a stare. ‘Yes. It is.’
An unspoken message passed between them. Sam leaned back in his chair with cup and saucer in his left hand. He remembered Tango as he had been as a child – tall, with trousers not reaching his ankles, big glasses, greasy hair – back when he was known by his real name, Alan.
‘We might be going out tomorrow night,’ he said.
Tango smiled. ‘I’m really happy for you,’ he said, in a rare and striking display of affection that peeled off the years and put both of them them back into that childhood friendship. Then he poured his tea. ‘OK, enough about you. Can we talk about my story now?’
So what’s the plan? x Sarah texted him the next day, on his lunch break.
Sam replied, Shall I pick you up at your place?
Within seconds she replied, Cool. What time? Xx
And he wrote, 7? x, a small kiss that made his body tingle.
Across the table in the tiny staffroom Mark flicked through his Bizarre magazine, his left hand feeling blindly for his open lunch box and the cold sausage bap squashed in the corner. Sam figured seven o’clock would be OK.
Sounds good x
And that was that. Behind the thin walls he could hear the Romanians in the small utility room, sifting through the millions of parts, one deep voice saying something loudly followed by a chorus of laughter, then silence. He sat there a moment, feeling sweat rise from his skin, and imagined a tiny green shoot growing on barren wastes.
When he got back to work after lunch, there was a state of agitation in the office, people looking through files, making calls. Mr Okamatsu sat calmly behind his desk scanning the Japanese newspaper.
Rebecca walked over to Sam, a half-run-half-walk kind of walk.
‘One of the ships has gone down in the Suez Canal.’
There was a manic fire in her eyes as she flapped a wad of faxes.
‘Gone down?’
‘Sunk.’
Sam had seen cargo ships on a business trip to Rotterdam, seen the shocking nature of their enormous size. Huge chunks of metal, skyscrapers laid sideways, drifting calmly. That one of those things might sink – even in open sea, let alone in a canal – seemed impossible.
‘They’re sending through the waybills and packing sheets,’ said Rebecca.
Others in the office were talking on phones, readjusting figures, pulling files, but it was always Rebecca who took the lead. He set to work checking his own accounts, entering the lost stock into the system to see the new forecasts and trying to calculate how much he would have to ship by air, which was very expensive. To not have stock arrive on time would be a huge dishonour to Electronica Diablique, not to mention the cataclysm of shutting down production lines all over the country.
The work kept Sam’s mind off his impending date. He spent a lot of time emailing his clients, asking how much stock they had in reserve and how long they could manage without their parts. In the world of electronics manufacturing this was about as exciting as it got. He found something thrilling in writing the words, One of our ships has gone down in the Suez Canal. On the Internet it said all men aboard had been recovered safely, apart from one worker, still missing, last seen heading towards the engine room, which had flooded and caused the disaster. A life at sea comes with known risks, Sam reasoned. It is something a seaman accepts. But as he sat there with his databases and spreadsheets, the thought of that man, a humble sailor trying to save his ship, kept scratching at the window of his mind. He tried to remember how to create an Excel pivot table but found it impossible as suddenly, just like the engine room, his mind flooded and all he could think about was the act of drowning, the terror coming in the minutes leading up to death when you realise that it’s going to happen and there’s nothing you can do.
And the old storm clouds drifted in.
He hadn’t felt this way in years, this awful desperation, hovering over the edge of a panic attack. Suddenly the raging turmoil was back, as if it had never been away, setting in motion the foggy tumult of depression. Why is this happening? He sat at his desk and printed out some sheets and tried to staple them, but he couldn’t get the edges to align perfectly and he was overcome by the sudden impulse to smash the stapler through the barred window above his desk. He was sweating. That poor man, trapped down there with the water coming in, trying to save the ship. And why? Sarah’s face appeared in his mind’s eye. The containers that moved around the world and kept the man in a job so he could provide food and shelter for his family, the containers that were dispatched to production lines all over the world, millions of people standing over conveyer belts moving pieces of metal from one place to another and if they didn’t exist the man wouldn’t have been on the ship in the first place and so wouldn’t have had to try to save them and would still be alive. By this far-reaching, irrefutable logic, Sam was responsible for the man’s death. Through the complex web of modern-world connections he was directly linked to that drowning sailor trapped in the depths of a hulking cargo chip.
He remembered his breathing techniques and closed his eyes. He imagined a lovely beige carpet cut into a freshly painted skirting board, a bare room with minimalist furniture. Simple. Simplicity. Sitting down to a nice cup of coffee. And yet we go about our lives without ever thinking of the people working whole lifetimes on coffee plantations, living awful hand-to-mouth existences in the hope things will be better for their kids, but they never are, and all so that we may enjoy sugar-free gingerbread one-shot skinny decaf lattes with a sprinkling of cinnamon in lovely coffee shops who falsely proclaim ethical perfection. Or how we are able to afford enormous televisions with pixels so dense they’re too crisp for the human eye to fully decode, all thanks to Chinese workers toiling in city-sized factories under whose roofs they work, live, breed, ail and die. Our clothes stitched by slave hands, our food drawn from land so decimated by over-farming and chemicals that it will eventually lift and blow into the sea. Businesses competing hard and, instead of it being healthy, it’s become a driving down of human standards, a race to the bottom with those already there so pulverised they become the sort of men who will head down into a sinking ship instead of up. These were the tumbling thoughts in Sam’s mind. We’re just tiny organisms scuttling across the surface of a small planet, existing for a mere flicker of time, and yet we spend so much of that time in a state of struggle. There were Romanians within fifty feet of him he’d never seen and who would spend a month of their precious lives – a whole month – slotting tubes of metal through cardboard slits because a safety inspector had to make stricter and stricter regulations so he could get paid more money, the ultimate effect being tighter deadlines, things being rushed, not safer, corners cut, ships sinking, lower pay for the lower workers because people still want their motorcars to be affordable.
He feared he might start crying, and it wasn’t all because of the state of the world. The voice of reason was now telling him he hadn’t recovered from the Event at all, he had just hidden everything away and become a stupid, childish superhero instead. But if he was going to meet Sarah and make progress, why did he feel so awful? He checked the clock. Ten to five. He wasn’t staying late tonight. He packed up his things, washed his face in the Gents, and left.
On the way home he called into a florist’s and bought a large bunch of colourful flowers. He found the colours of their petals unspeakably lovely in their innocence. But they weren’t for Sarah. It was dark now and ornate Narnian lamp posts lighted the way through the graveyard. Sam couldn’t remember the last time he’d been here.
Small pellets of rain were tossed on the wind as he placed the flowers on his parents’ grave. He’d spent years as a virtual recluse, had made no new friends since the Event, had felt a rage in him so deep and powerful it surely couldn’t exist in other people. It weighed so heavily on him something vital had snapped to drive him to the person he now was, a lonely man in his mid-twenties dressing up as a superhero. He was so far from normal the idea of something normal befalling him, something like a girlfriend, was terrifying.
Staring at the grave, he felt the numbness in which he had submerged himself all those years calling to him. He could happily curl up on the gravestone and stay there for ever. But it was impossible because Sam had to go home, go home and get ready, get ready for the future. Whatever that was.
He showered, shaved, and stood in front of his clothes, which were laid neatly on the bed. He checked the time. Outside, rain clicked at the windows. Nerves. He pulled on his clothes and imagined Sarah sitting in her flat above the abandoned shop, waiting for him.
He remembered the feeling, all those months ago, when he’d stood in front of the mirror in his costume, how insane he’d felt. What would she think when she found out about the Phantasm? The possibility of burning everything crossed his mind, and yet he knew he could do no such thing. It was too much a part of him now. He’d kept it secret from the world this long; one more person wouldn’t hurt.
‘What are you doing?’ he said out loud to his reflection.
His heart raced. In front of the mirror he painted around his eyes with eyeliner and went back to the bed, where he pulled on his vest, clipped on his belt and donned the mask. In the mirror, he nodded, and pictured Sarah again, staring at her watch, expecting him any second, and how she was going to feel when he didn’t arrive. The Phantasm stared back at him from beyond the mirror and smiled. And then left the house.