When he was fifteen years old, Sam’s parents announced his mother’s new pregnancy. A little brother or sister would be arriving, and how did he feel about that? Sam was overjoyed. The prospect of a new sibling he could take on adventures and hang around the house with was one that filled him with excitement. He helped his parents decorate the spare room, went shopping on weekends for baby clothes and even managed to find his first part-time job, at the local video shop, which he absolutely loved. With his wages he opened a Post Office savings account for the new arrival, depositing one pound of his wages each week, which wasn’t much, but because Sam intended the fund to mature on his brother or sister’s seventh birthday he could present them with a cheque for the huge amount of £364 plus interest.
He needn’t have worried about it being a boy or a girl because, as it transpired, he got one of each. The twins were born one chilly December morning: Steven Paul (after his grandfathers) and Sally Jean (after her grandmothers). There was something odd at first about calling a small baby Steve but it soon became natural.
The babies were a delight. They were born at the perfect time, nearing the end of school’s Michaelmas term, affording Sam a great deal of time to spend with them over the Christmas holidays. With their arrival came a new type of warmth to the family home, which Sam enjoyed immensely – for, apart from his small group of friends, school was still proving difficult.
Around that time he was immersing himself in comic lore. His new job in the video shop gave him money to buy expensive graphic novels that he had hitherto been unable to afford. He started off with Batman cycles and discovered darker writers like Grant Morrison and Frank Miller, but it was following the discovery of the Preacher comics that he really became aware of the power graphic novels can impart. Here was a story of fallen angels and the destruction of Heaven, blended with the adventures of humans trying to make their way in the world. And it was very, very violent. Its quality was so high that, when he finished, he craved more. And that was when he discovered Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, arguably the greatest set of comics ever written, a series that encapsulated almost every conceivable human emotion and behaviour. He found it hard to believe that stories could operate at such high levels with hardly anyone seeming to know about them.
At the same time he loved watching the personalities emerge in Steve and Sally and would sit with them for hours in the evenings, giving his parents some downtime. They were a lot older than when they had Sam, nearing their forties, and bringing up twins at any age is always difficult. Because of the age gap he couldn’t help but wonder if the twins were an accident, and this led him to a much more awful thought. Maybe he was the mistake and they had the twins because the time was finally right. Had he ruined their lives?
School was better when he got to sixth form. Most of the jocks and tougher kids had left for the nearby college, leaving space for Sam to grow into. He got contacts for his eyes, and when his braces came off he became more confident, he started smiling again, and this made him happier. He talked more to girls, though mainly in the capacity of friend rather than potential lover. He fell in love with a girl named Alexi Richardson, but his feelings were desperately unrequited. He started going to the pub, where underage drinking was more or less permitted, and though he spent most of his time in a dark corner with Tango and Blotchy, he did on one drunken occasion, with the wind in his sails, kiss a girl in the alleyway where they kept the bins.
The twins learned to crawl, walk and talk. Big Steve, as Sam’s friends called him, because he had grown more quickly than Sally, was boisterous, a big character who would have overwhelmed Sally were it not for her being, like her older brother, naturally introverted. When Sam was studying for his ‘A’ Levels Sally was old enough and quiet enough to accompany him to his room, where she would sit silently flicking through books with cardboard pages.
Hormonally, acne notwithstanding, Sam was relatively unaffected by late adolescence. His love for Alexi Richardson was powerful, but not so powerful as to throw him off his schoolwork, as it did with Tango, who fell head over heels for a girl two years his junior. During those months leading up to their final exams, Tango complained of not being able to revise because his heart was too full, even though he and Eliza had not exchanged a single word. As a result of this he got a C, an E and a U in Sociology, English and Computer Science, respectively. But Sam, even through the fog of love, managed A, B, C and was accepted to read Geography at Warwick University. His life was writing itself. Soon, he would move away from everything he loved, and take a step into the big wide world.
When he got home he checked his phone. There were two missed calls and two texts from Sarah. The texts just asked where he was, nothing more. The last one was at 8:15. They weren’t angry, and the lack of anger just made Sam feel worse. He pictured her dressed up and ready to go, her coat on, checking her watch, and the terrible familiarity of regret crunched into him. Usually, after getting back from a patrol, the adrenaline buzz would keep him buoyant but this time all that lift was gone as soon as he climbed out of the costume.
Before going to bed he grabbed his spare phone, checked his voicemails, and closed his eyes in desperation at the sound of distant human voices.
He dreams of a shiny grey runway cut into a lush rainforest. A beautiful day. The sun, just past noon, draws short shadows; crisp, fluffy white clouds drift. On the ground, in the shade, the air is moist and cool. The forest breathes. He dreams a bright white plane on the runway, sleek and futuristic. He and his family climb aboard and the plane speeds down the runway and lifts over the canopy.
The forest from the sky looks like an expanse of broccoli florets. The family sit together and his sister turns to him, a spoke of sunlight turning through the cabin.
Thumbs up. This is great.
He wakes and remembers, and his sheets are drenched in sweat.
In the deep dark of night, pre-dawn still a few turns of the planet away, he fetched his wooden rod and opened the hatchway to the attic. Popping his head over the precipice, he pulled the cord and the strip lights clicked to life. Not high enough to stand, just a crawl space between the low wooden shelves bowed in the middle under the weight of all the comics, he dragged himself on his elbows past the enormous collection. He pulled off one shelf a copy of Sandman Volume I: Preludes and Nocturnes and pushed it along before him, the shelves and stories and memories of all the panels closing in around him. An embrace of stories.
He couldn’t stop picturing Sarah at home, waiting for him, and couldn’t understand why this image was making him feel so unhinged.
He made this maze, just wide enough to fit a human on his belly, when his library overspilled. After the Event he’d gathered these comics to him as a source of comfort. He’d never read them all, but it didn’t matter. Just the sheer volume of stories made him feel safe. Back in those days, when he was still in his parents’ house, he would feel the numbness start its slow saturation, and open the pages just to stare at the pictures. The narratives were of no consequence at that point; nothing mattered. On rare occasions, simply staring at the images helped.
He rounded the first corner of his comics maze, the wooden shelves just three storeys high, and came to a fork in the road. The further into the warren he went, the safer he felt. Unable to see behind him, he imagined the shelves sealing shut, feeling himself entombed by stories, sealed on the other side of reality. Life was so much easier when he hid away. Shifting right and right again, he came at last to a small opening, the centre of the labyrinth, where the space became wide enough to house a low Japanese table you could put your tea on. A travel kettle, a mini-fridge, a sugar pot, an RNLI teaspoon that had belonged to his mother, a milk jug, a cup and saucer. The only other thing on the table was a framed photograph of his family, his dad’s arm around Sam’s shoulder, his mum’s gentle smile, the twins in the front. He couldn’t remember the day it was taken. Sam lay down and turned out the lights and, tucked safely away from the world, he wrapped his arms around the Sandman comic, tried to clear away the thoughts of the girl with red hair, and hoped that Dream might come for him.