Who else in the JLA? Aquaman, who lived underwater. Hawkman and Hawkwoman, who had bird powers. Wonder Woman, but she was crap. I hated Wonder Woman. What were her powers? A lasso. And Green Lantern and Green Arrow. I could never tell the difference between them and never knew what they were meant to be anyway. And the Flash, who was dressed all in red and he could run like a bastard.
We used to walk right across town to the newsagent by the Dandy Cart to get American comics. Now, mind, you can buy them everywhere. You get big shops in places like Newcastle, Forbidden Planet and Timeslip, shops like that, and they sell hundreds of comics really expensively. When I was reading them all the time in the seventies, say, you’d get only a handful of them on the spinning racks in the newsagents. The dirty newsagents by the Dandy Cart. That bit of town was even rougher than where we lived, Mam said. I used to go over and buy comics at fifteen pence a time, which was more than English ones cost then. Now it’s like three quid for a bloody comic. The English ones then, even the ones that reprinted the American strips, were in black and white. The Americans were all colour, and small. They were often on yellowed paper and crumpled up. As if they’d been dampened on the boat or plane coming over, and dried on a radiator. On the spinning rack in the Dandy Cart shop they were in direct sunlight and they dried yellowy. You could never buy issues in sequence. It was pot luck. I just bought whatever was there, so I never saw a complete story. Issues began with the pick-up of a cliffhanger and ended with another nail-biting finish. You just had to make up what came before and after. The Dandy Cart stank of the cheese counter. When I think of reading comics and choosing which ones to buy, I think of rancid cheese and the glass counter, scratched by coins, over the Dandy Cart, where you’d pay and get a ten-pence mixture of sweets as well.
Sometimes I wonder, if I asked Steve, what he would say. If I said, Aren’t we like one of them team-ups of superheroes in the old comics? Isn’t that what we’re all like in this house? He would just say I was cracked. He thinks I’m cracked anyway.
I’d like to ask him, though, because he used to read those comics as well. We were at school together and we used to swap them. I got one weird comic off him once about a walking tree in a swamp that went round just killing people. It wasn’t a proper hero comic at all. I wonder if Steve remembers reading those things.
I think that we’re a bit like a super-team when we’re down the gym, especially on a good day when we’re working well, everyone’s muscles all pumped up. When I was little I used to wonder what the superheroes’ costumes were made of. Like rubber or something. But now the material’s common and we all wear it down the gym, even the old biddies and the tarts down there wear it: Lycra. In Lycra everyone’s a fucking superhero. These days it isn’t so hard. So maybe mention it to Steve one day, remind him, make him laugh.
For a moment tonight it felt like we were a super-team. A bit out of it, running out of the house over the snow. When you’re skidding about and piling after each other in the snow and you can hardly see two feet in front, then that’s a bit like flying. When we came pounding out of the house at midnight I could see us all, like in one of those full-page frames that each comic begins with, streaking into the sky with wings and masks and cloaks streaming behind us. When the superheroes flew, the artists always drew a faint trail behind them, to show how fast they were going and where they had been. Last night I saw us all leaving those trails. And the heroes gritted their teeth when flying or fighting. Their mouths were wide rectangles with the teeth bared and that’s how we all were, the seven of us, running across the estate.
What they thought they were doing, I’m fucked if I know. Suddenly we were out there and it was all going on. They had that lass, that Donna on the ground. And then there was the other woman there.
I made sure that Donna got away from them. Donna’s soft in the head. She was scared of them. I helped her get away. I did that much.
The other one, Penny’s mam. She’s been away. She came back all of a sudden. She got mixed up where she shouldn’t have.
They dragged her body out onto the playground, where she’d be found easy. I was going to stay, to make sure. Steve said no way. We’d get the blame. They dragged her over to the play park. Pulled on her fur coat. She was bleeding. A hank of fake fur came off in Steve’s hands.
I watched tonight from the upstairs window of the Forsythe house. I wanted to see them find Liz. I wanted to
