But I’m gone! I’m running! See me go!
Across the park, down Faulkner Road, across the Burn. If you looked you’d hardly see me. I’m just a blur, a pulse of light.
There’s a pub here. I think of having another drink. More courage, and maybe I need it. The pub is the Robin Hood. Its sign is a painting of Kevin Costner as Robin Hood in that crappy film. Like on the cover of the video, he’s firing a burning arrow right at you. It’s a good likeness of Kevin Costner, that.
I run round the back of the pub and I realise I don’t want another drink. I know what I want. To prove something.
When they made superhero TV series they always had a warning on at the end. They said, “Spiderman — or whoever it was — has special powers and that’s why he can climb up walls and that. Don’t try it at home.” And of course I always did. Who was going to take notice of a warning like that? It made you want to do it all the more. But I could never bloody do it. I couldn’t climb up walls. I couldn’t even run straight.
That’s why tonight I get the smart idea of climbing up the tallest side of the Robin Hood. Off go my shoes! Off with my socks! Look at my feet! I press my fingertips and my two bare feet against the brick. If someone caught me up this dark alley now it would look like I’m having a slash. But it would stop looking like that with the first step I take upwards. I brace elbows and knees and then...then...I hurry to the rooftop, to the eaves.
At the top I unfasten and unscrew and liberate their satellite dish. As proof I have been there. I imagine, as I scoot back down the sheer wall, that I can hear the groan of disappointment from inside the Robin Hood as the TV reception fucks up. They’d be watching the football.
And I’m away, with the satellite dish tucked under me arm. It’s the dish that calls the superhero members of the Justice League of America up to their satellite which orbits the earth. That’s what I reckon. And I can run!
SIXTEEN
The atmosphere was no better. It had got so that Judith dreaded going to work. And she was a good worker, she was never one for not enjoying her job. Shop work had always suited her because you saw people, but just recently the corner shop had stopped being a nice place to work. This was the business of the boss’s son and his interfering ways, his ideas for upgrading the shop. “It’s a tatty little shop on an estate!” Judith shouted at him. “What does it need upgrading for? We’ve got everything that everyone wants!”
The boss’s albino son looked at her. “Everything needs upgrading.” He was doing a business degree at the University of Sunderland and in his holidays his dad let him practise on the family business. All the threatened changes preyed on Judith’s nerves so that she could hardly sleep at night. It had been her agitation that made her daughter waylay the boss’s son one night after shutting up shop, and slap him one in the face. She wasn’t usually like that. She had meant to give him a reasonable talking to, one business-studies person to another, but the boy was obtuse. She had made his nose bleed. “Our Joanne,” Judith giggled when she was told. “I didn’t bring you up like that! Did he know who you were?”
It turned out Joanne had said this was from her mother: smack. Judith was horrified. “Whey, now they’ll sack me for sure!”
“That would be unfair dismissal,” said her daughter implacably. “And besides, do you think that cocky little short-arse will want to tell his father he was clocked one by a lass?”
“I suppose not.”
“Well then,” said her daughter. “Your job’s safe.”
And she was right. Not a word was said. But the atmosphere in the place had turned awful. The boss’s son treated her like dirt in front of customers. He wouldn’t let her play the tapes she wanted over the speakers — she loved the Pan Pipes, she thought they were relaxing. He insisted they had a station with lots of contemporary, dancey pop music. Judith came home each night with her head throbbing.
“My feet and my head are throbbing!” she’d cry, throwing herself in a chair. “I hate that shop!”
It was a shame. That shop had once been such fun. It had seemed like her own private shop. It was funny how things went downhill, how times changed. How you were never aware of your own peak.
She walked to work, ten minutes or so, with a heavy heart. First thing in the morning it was dark and the ground was silver. They said they could still have snow this year.
For the first hour of each morning the shop was hers again. The boss’s son wouldn’t be in till eight at the earliest. Judith was there for the early crowd wanting fags and milk and papers. Often she saw Fran when she was returning home from her cleaning job at Fujitsu. For that first, very early hour, it could seem that things were just the same. But then, when it became a more ordinary time of day, when the charm of earliness wore off, that brat would arrive to start shouting his mouth off.
This morning Judith unlocked the shutters and the whole series of locks that kept the corner shop safe. The lights on the deli counter and the fridges were left on all night, so the first thing she saw in the gloom each morning was, beyond the dark shelves and aisles, their lemon glow.
There
