Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

Jonathan climbed to his knees.

‘I mean, does he do his own washing and ironing?’

‘No!’ he said, aghast. ‘That’s silly!’

‘Does he look into your eyes when he’s talking to you?’

‘No, but lasers come out of them.’

‘Ah. Sounds dangerous.’ I smiled at him. He was gawping at me now, gauging my sincerity. ‘Well, he must open doors for ladies, then. Buy them flowers on their birthday, that kind of thing.’

‘No, no, no — he’s not super like that .’ His face was alight. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you.’ He came and sat in the empty club chair beside me, laying the comic across the armrest. The front cover had a masthead that said SUPERMAN in stocky 3-D lettering. A muscly blond wrestler in a blue-and-red uniform was swinging an identical man (but for his dark hair) into a telephone pole. The caption read: A GREAT 3-PART NOVEL: THE SUPER-OUTLAW FROM KRYPTON! ‘The one with the black hair is the real Superman. The other one is just pretending.’

‘He can’t be all that super if he’s being smashed through a pole,’ I said.

‘It’s because Kull-Ex is strong, too. That’s Kull-Ex—’ He prodded the blond man’s face. ‘You think he’s Superman to begin with and that he’s turned bad, smashing up all these buildings and things, and everyone’s upset with Superman for a long time, but then he takes off his mask and you see it’s really Kull-Ex and he’s from Kandor on Superman’s home planet. And he’s trying to get revenge on Superman because Superman’s dad stole his dad’s invention. But that turns out to be a lie, anyway.’ Jonathan gulped. ‘Want me to show you the bit where he finds out it’s a lie?’

‘Of course I do. I’m hooked.’

He shifted closer. I could smell the lavender of ship-issue soap in his hair. There were dry flakes about his crown. I wondered what it might be like to comb that floppy fringe into a nice side parting, if it would make him look more like his father. Keenly, he set about unravelling the convolutions of his comic book story, conducting the flow of action from panel to panel with his finger, calling out the speech that jutted from characters’ mouths in white balloons. He did not have any trouble reading — even the longer words, like ‘confession’ or ‘solitude’, and the stranger ones, like ‘Zenium’—though I sensed he might have memorised the script in places. ‘And look, this is the bit when Supergirl goes into the Fortriss of Sollichood and tries to pull him out with tweezers! It’s silly, but I like it. I like that she can see things that are really really really small. And I think on the next page is where Superman comes up with his plan to save them. Or is it on — no wait— there it is.’ He went on breathlessly for minutes, rifling through the pages, until his father came back up the steps and we had to curtail things.

‘Managed to scrounge one off a steward in the lift,’ Victor said, flashing a silver pen at me. ‘I promised to get it back to him, but let’s just see how well it writes first, eh? This could be the pen of my dreams.’ He saw that Jonathan had been showing me the comic. ‘Oh God, sorry about him. Has he been boring you with Dr Telex and his Fortress of Whatever It Is?’

‘I believe it’s Kull-Ex,’ I said, ‘son of Zell-Ex.’

‘Right!’ the boy cried. ‘See, Daddy. I told you it was interesting.’

Victor crossed his arms. ‘Oh, thanks for nothing, Miss Conroy. I leave you alone for one minute and you start colluding with the enemy.’ He strode to the balcony and gazed into the court. ‘What’s happening down there? Any idea?’

‘I’m afraid we got a bit sidetracked.’ I leaned back in the chair. ‘And, I have to tell you, this super outlaw from Krypton is much more riveting than any squash game. Isn’t that right, Jonathan?’

‘Yup,’ said the boy, sliding the pages. ‘Loads better.’

His father spun round, looking half amused, half agitated. ‘They’re still playing. From the looks of it, Dulcie’s got the beating of her.’

‘That’s what Kull-Ex thought on the mountaintop,’ I said, ‘but it didn’t turn out too rosily in the end.’

Victor stared at me, eyes bulging behind his spectacles. ‘Wow, he’s really done a job on you. I wasn’t even gone that long.’

I reached to ruffle the boy’s hair as a show of unity, then thought better of it, patting his shoulder instead. Standing up, I said, ‘He’s impeccably behaved. A real credit to you both.’

This seemed to resonate with Victor more than I anticipated. ‘Oh — well, yes,’ he said, ‘thank you for that. I mean, we’ve always liked him.’

The crack of rubber on walls grew louder. I glanced down at the match: Amanda’s shirt was now so wet I could see the straps of her bra through it, and Dulcie’s knee was trickling blood. I was not sure how much longer the two of them would survive if they kept up this intensity of play. Their arms were shining, their faces burning red, like two old fighters in a Bernard Cale drawing.

‘To tell you the truth, I don’t really see enough of the boy these days,’ Victor went on. ‘That’s mostly what this trip is about. I thought, if work’s going to drag me to New York again, then we’ll all go this time — make a holiday of it. He’s never been further than Hunstanton before.’ His voice was quieter now but more intense. ‘Maybe that’s why he’s so fixated on the planet Krypton, I don’t know. Mandy is convinced the comics are stunting him socially.’

‘And what do you think?’ I said, peering back at the boy. He seemed content, even composed.

‘I think they definitely stimulate his imagination — no bad thing — but I worry how much they’re occluding his perspective on the world.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘I’m saying, if he fixates too much on the land of superheroes, there’s a danger that reality will always seem disappointing. That can lead to genuine behavioural problems in the long run. I’ve seen it in a lot of my patients. Not with comics, in their case, but science fiction novels, television. The research suggests we ought to be wary.’

‘You’re a doctor?’ I said.

‘Yes — a psychiatrist. Did I not mention that?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I try not to lead off with that leg, you know. Sets people against me before I’ve had a chance to lobotomise them.’ He coughed awkwardly. ‘That was a joke. An old one. Anyway—’ He sniffed and steered his eyes down to the court again. ‘You haven’t told me what you do. How’d you know an old tyrant like Dulcie?’

‘Her gallery represents me. I’m a painter.’

‘Oh, wow. Forgive me. That is exciting.’ He lifted his brow to edge up his glasses. ‘I suppose that means she works for you then, doesn’t it?’

‘That’s not quite how I’d put it. But she’s very good at what she does.’

‘No doubt she’s tenacious,’ Victor conceded. ‘What sort of pictures are we talking about here? Portraits?’

‘Now and then. I usually paint from memory. Things I’ve seen or imagined. But I’m not sure there’s much of a future in it.’

‘Why not?’

I shrugged. ‘The research suggests I ought to be wary.’

‘Ah, very good,’ he said, nodding. ‘Still, research can be flawed. There are charlatans and scoundrels in every walk of life.’

‘Yes, I suppose I’ve got to stop doubting myself and just paint. But I’ve got so many voices in my head at the moment. I thought I might be able to outrun a few of them out here.’

‘Well—’ He surveyed the limits of the viewing gallery. ‘If you can find any relief aboard this heap of metal, good luck to you. Failing that, I know a very good person in New York who you could talk to. I have his number somewhere.’