The police want to take some details so they
shepherd Richard into a restaurant across the street. Meanwhile, paramedics,
police and press work through dusty survivors, all against a backdrop of a hole
in a wall where the Sauchiehall Street branch of the Clydesdale Bank used to
be.
A
sweaty, overweight PC sits at Richard's table and consults a clipboard.
"Your name, sir?"
“Richard
Spalding."
"How
are you?"
A simple
question but he can only be sure of one thing. "Alive."
The
policeman contemplates this and swaps clipboard for notepad. "Why don't
you start at the beginning?"
Richard
explains how he was in the bank to get change bags. A lunchtime queue made him
consider coming back another day but Debbie, his girlfriend, had been going
mental about his towers of change that clutter the flat so he stayed put. He'd
moved forward a few places when four men with balaclavas and automatic rifles
burst in. Everyone did as they were told and lay on the floor with their hands
on their heads. Two robbers blocked the exit while the other two did whatever
it is bank robbers do on the other side of the counter. At some point an alarm
went off and then the police arrived. The robbers were panicking and then the
entire front wall of the bank collapsed. That was when the shooting started.
That was when people got hurt.
"And
this wall caving in," the policeman says, "that was Ultraman
arriving?"
"That's
right."
"Caused
a bit of damage, I suppose?"
Richard
cocks his head towards what's left of the bank. The PC scribbles in his pad.
"Please,
sir. Continue."
"So
at that point, all the customers were still on the ground. Some were bleeding
from the flying bricks and glass. The robbers didn't seem to care where they
fired but mostly they were shooting at Ultraman. Of course, he just did that
thing where he stands in his yellow suit, hands on his hips, laughing that
laugh of his. You know the one. The incredulous one."
The
policeman smiles. “Indeed I do, sir.”
“So then
Ultraman used his plasma bubble to hold the robbers in place, said something
smart about freezing their accounts and then finished them off with one of his
gamma shocks.”
“Textbook
takedown. Absolute textbook. Anything else, sir?"
What
Richard chooses not to mention is that during the violence he kept his eyes
clamped shut and prayed. When the noise settled and he opened them again, a
dotted line of bullets stretched to a point less than a foot away from his
face, suspended by the gravitational pull of the same plasma bubble that held a
snarling, firing armed robber.
“The
end,” Richard says.
#
She's on all fours and bored so while the thrusts
nudge her towards the head of the bed, Debbie's attention wanders to a voice in
the living room. She knows it's not Richard. Richard's at work. Because she's
bored, she starts picking out the odd word until she realises she's listening
to the afternoon news. She hears the
words "Clydesdale Bank". Her curiosity bristles into a shiver and she
quickly replays the argument she had with Richard before he left this morning,
the one about the change.
The
words "Sauchiehall Street" and "Ultraman" upgrade the
shiver into a chill and she remembers Richard's promise. It's a promise he's
given countless times and always broken, but what if today was the day he was
finally good to his word?
He's
panting behind her -- the guy she meets at the deli on Tuesdays -- and it urges
her to pretend to be an interested participant. When she moans in reply, it
doesn't come out right but he must read it that he's hitting the right spot and
finds another gear.
"Armed
robbery," she picks up next. Something else. Then, "Office workers on
their lunch."
Pebbles
tumble in her gut. A rock forms in her throat. She tells herself he'll have
forgotten, like he always forgets. He'll claim he had a meeting and he'll go
tomorrow instead. But he plays five-a-side with the boys on Wednesday
lunchtimes. It'll have to be Thursday,. Although, wait a minute -- doesn't the
bank close early on a Thursday? In-house training or something? It'll keep to
Friday. Or next week. There's no rush.
And in
the meantime, the problem that's masking the other problems stares her in the
face. With her cheek on the pillow, she watches a towers of coins on his
bedside table, a metallic termite nest, rocking with the thrusts that knock the
headboard onto the bedroom wall.
"Initial
reports suggest," is what she hears beneath the noisy ecstasy crashing
into her. She clenches her eyes, focuses on the living room, on the TV, on the
man with the fancy suit, garish tie and fake tan who always seems a little
cockeyed. She pictures him so clearly, sees his lips form the words and
suddenly everything else is background. It's only on a very subtle level that
she hears the deli guy explode and a key scratch at the front door and the
tower of coins clatter to the floor because all of that is buried below the
booming words from the newsreader as he tells her no members of the public were
seriously injured.
#
As soon as Ultraman's yellow streak flashes across
the sky and a sonic boom shakes the clouds, the office drones abandon their
workstations to press themselves against the window where they watch in awe.
Libby
sneaks back to her desk, the one beside Richard's, and checks the Scotland
section of the BBC News site, keen to be the one to feed the others with the
next packet of data. Minutes pass before a breaking story appears. Ultraman
foils armed robbery in Glasgow bank, the ticker says. When she shouts this
across the office, the others coo and jostle for a better view.
It's a
pleasant change to see people excited, Libby thinks. Since she overheard Mr
Sunderland chat with his fellow directors about unfulfilled backorders and
letting some people go, and since she related this to a few select colleagues,
the office has been on eggshells, waiting on redundancy notices to work through
the internal mail. So it's nice, she thinks, that people can put that to the
back of their minds.
The BBC
site refreshes with an image to accompany the ticker. It takes her a while to
recognise Sauchiehall Street amongst the rubble and then she spots the
Clydesdale Bank logo lying at an odd angle in the road. She can't make out
faces but there are lots of open-necked shirts and loose ties -- office types
-- pictured emerging from a building that's lost a wall.
She knew
Richard was going to a bank at lunchtime. She even knew why. He's what Libby
calls a collector. He keeps a stack of empty plastic coffee cups, a six foot
string of paperclips, a clutch of pens without their tops, all across his desk.
Unopened Christmas cards from last year -- cards he couldn't be bothered to
return -- lean against his base unit. The idea that he's incapable of putting
his change in a piggy bank isn't an alien notion.
The more
she looks at the image, the more convinced she becomes that she sees him. She
flicks onto the company intranet page and checks the directory for his mobile
number. Typically, he's been too lazy to fill out that field. She considers
asking one of his football buddies but that would give the game away and she
wants the scoop.
Would
anyone care if she took a look in his drawers? And if they did, doesn't she
have best intentions in the vicinity of her heart? After all, she might find a
wallet with some contact details. Or something else to gossip about.
The
drawers slide open with a dull toast of glass clinking together. Buried beneath
scrap paper, she finds another collection; three empty vodka bottles, a soon to
be empty fourth. Her mouth drops in a gasp just as she gets a sense of someone
standing over her. When she sees strip lights reflected in the shine of
expensive shoes and recognises the luxurious fabric in the trousers, she knows
she won't be looking up at Richard. She wonders what Mr Sunderland is going to
say about all this.
#
For Ultraman, there is black and white. The city
is grey enough without him adding any unnecessary complications in between.
Life is best when it’s kept simple. Consequences and chains are for other
people. When he leaves the bank and takes to the skies, he recalls the mantra
that reminds him to put on that yellow suit and do the job the city needs him
to do, each and every day: The little guy stands tall. The good guy always
wins.
Gavin Broom used to live and write in Stirling,
Scotland. He now lives and writes in Michigan, USA. His poetry and
fiction has appeared over fifty times online and in print. He edits
fiction for The Waterhouse Review.
