Stevie Cross

Heroics

It’s not that I’m scared of the phone box man. I just want to avoid him, that’s all.

Usually I walk the longer way to work, through the empty backstreets with their gum-flecked pavements, the neon posters peeling from the rain. But today I’m in a hurry. I have overslept—it’s very unlike me, and I have so much to do.

Excuse me I can hear the phone box man saying up ahead, in his too-polite manner. I stay on the far side of the busy pavement, well away from him. I won’t cross the road, that would be dramatic. And I’d only have to cross back again to turn the corner.

I keep walking quickly, trying to keep my head down. It is hard not to look.

Now a woman stops. She’s wearing a leopard print coat and patent DM boots, probably on her way to an advertising agency.

I’m terribly sorry the phone box man is saying as she fumbles in her bag, people streaming by. This has never happened before.

I allow myself to look at his face. That suppliant’s frown.

I always have my portable phone with me, you see.

He is stooping, now, a butler character in some old film. And of course, my wallet.

Portable phone.

She must know, really. She has to know.

But she doesn’t look like she does. Maybe she’s never walked this way before. Maybe she’s a tourist. That seems unlikely at this time of day. Maybe she has a new job?

The first time I ever saw the phone box was my first day as an intern for Felix.

I bought into it all too, of course. His neatly cropped white hair, the leather briefcase, the three-piece pinstriped suit. The idea that people even needed to use phone boxes any more. I was probably comforted by the anachronism of it all.

It was only on the next day that I fully understood.

I was walking along, playing out that first day in the office over and over in my mind, thinking of a conversation with Felix that hadn’t gone well enough, imagining how it could be better. My friend Becca called. I needed to calm her down about something—she had just started her first teaching job then too. That’s when I noticed the phone box man there again, standing in exactly the same spot, saying exactly the same thing.

I’m terribly sorry, this has never happened before.

I wasn’t angry, of course. Nothing embarrassing like that. I didn’t mention it to Becca or anything.

I was just surprised. Not even surprised it wasn’t real, I don’t think. But more­—why couldn’t he just find another phone box? Why can’t he just move around, try another place?

If it’s all a lie, fine. But why force everyone else to see through it, day after day?

I’m thinking about that first ever time again now, and nearly past the phone box man. But I can’t help briefly glancing at him again.

This is my mistake. This is when I accidentally catch his face doing the thing I least want to see. The thing I dread the most about the phone box man. Not dread—of course, that’s too strong a word.

It’s just this thing he does when his features change.  His cringing stoop straightens, but he’s less tense somehow. Slack. He breaks his mask, comes off stage, resets before the next.

Excuse me, sorry to bother you, he starts saying again now.

And he’s back.

But there is no stage. There are no curtains. He is just standing right there doing this thing, over and over again, for everyone to see.

I find that one of my hands, which I thought were by my side, is now on my forehead, massaging my temples. I’m being silly. I must look bizarre, face scrunched up. I look away and try to find the woman in leopard print amongst the crowd of people heading towards the tube.

She is fine, no problem, off to work. Of course she is. She has been a hero, even, to a man in a tight spot. I try to channel her. She doesn’t know, and it doesn’t matter to her—to me—at all whether it’s real. It’s fine.

It’s at this point, once the phone box is fully behind me, that it hits me for the first time. A pin dropping in an amphitheatre.

It hits me that it’s all basically real anyway. The phone box man really needs that money he’s asking for. He really does actually work for it every day. He puts on his suit, he combs his hair, he comes to his phone box and he works, all day, then he goes home.

This is when things start to go very, very wrong.

I realise quickly that it is likely I’ll be sick.

I walk on, moving faster. What’s wrong with me. I am being very dramatic now. My mouth is filling with saliva. I’ve seen this man before, it’s really fine.

But now I can’t get this image out of my mind:

The phone box man in a derelict space somewhere, pale light corrugated through broken plastic, his face reflected in a dirty mirror. He is doing up the buttons on his crumpled shirt, straightening his tie, getting ready to go out to his box to work.

Now I am definitely in a walk-run. My hand is now covering one side of my face, as if I’m trying not to look at something, even though he’s already gone. It really is rude to feel so sick about someone.

It’s probably just because I haven’t had any breakfast yet. Or maybe there is something wrong with my ears? A kind of vertigo. Something to do with waking up so late, I did have a painful jaw. Now a new story plays out swiftly in my mind, with the narrative precision of a well-written tragedy. Of missed symptoms. The fatal-flaw of thinking I’d be fine, just a day earlier and she would have survived.

I tell myself to stop the walk-run, just stop. I force my hand away from my face, and end up going strangely slowly instead, breathing deeply, staring up at the wall, as if I’m fascinated by the corporate graffiti on it.

I’m well past the phone box man now, but it’s as if I can still feel the heat of his eyes on my back. As if it’s contagious, like he’s trying to force some kind of connection.

I can’t look back. I can’t run properly, of course, that would look ridiculous, with everyone around. A whirring like the little street cleaning machine has started up in my ears. I have an overriding sense that everything else apart from this is about to suddenly stop. That the graffiti wall I’m clinging onto will be broken through, its pixelated façade pulverised into dusty, dirty nothingness. Into shards of light on dust. Looking into a dirty mirror. Picking up a blazer from a pile of yellowed mattresses.

It’s then that the whirring sound and the noise of the street behind it all contracts into one. A single, high-pitched drone that I rightly interpret as a signal to crouch down and put my head between my legs.

But I resist this, because I’m worried that passers-by—worst someone from the office—might see me. Instead I let myself lean up against the wall, still standing, and struggle to make out people’s faces as they walk by.

What’s wrong with Selena?

I think she’s ill.

Don’t think she’s coping well.

Something about a phone box!

Eventually, even through all this, I am unable to stop my legs from crouching down.

I need time. I just need a little bit of time. I breathe deeply, and manage to pull my shirt away from my armpits. It is definitely some kind of illness, a sickness. I feel a need to fix it, but all I can do is mutedly imagine myself in the future, looking it up on my phone.

Then suddenly, I’m not sure how I get to it, but suddenly—it’s something else.

Suddenly the potential workmates are gone. The phone box man as well. The dust and dirt and yellow-grey, thank god.

Now there’s just this green, idyllic scene.

Maybe this is—cleansing everything?

I’m thinking of a young girl, with bright pink cheeks. A nymph she would be called.

She’s running, though, and now I see there’s something wrong. Now she’s shouting too.

Now she’s burning throat and eyes all desperate.

I try closing my eyes and opening them again, hoping for the rolling hills without the running, but it doesn’t change.

From nowhere it’s as if I’m twelve again. I’m stuck in some old thought.

She’s being chased, this girl, this nymph, she’s pushing through with desperate breaths. I know that if I stay here any longer, I’ll see a god.

Apollo, there he is, laughing, following gently. He knows he’ll catch her soon—easy sport. But Daphne, now, poor thing, the nymph is Daphne. Her bones are painful, stretched and hardened into bark. She’s sprouting spring-green leaves. Turning into tree.

It must be just the chance to think of something, anything else. I don’t know where this came from, why it came on now. I think the rush of noise is going to clear from my ears.

I start to push myself up and look around. I dust the back of my jeans off, pull my coat back down. No one’s checked if I’m OK, they’ve all ignored me rushing past. That’s good.

It’s just some illness, just that breakfast thing.

It’s fine, I will be fine I think and walk on quickly now, to turn the corner far away from phone box man.

But as I do I let the scene keep playing out. Apollo trying to put his arms around the tree, Daphne mute but now protected. Her story had no place to go, but in the end she found a way.

I’m feeling fine, much better now. Whatever happens while I’m walking, no one has to know. I will be clean for the office. Clean and nothing like a newly sprouted tree. 

I

Can you make the word MUTHERFUCKERS larger by at least one point, I type.

I am pre-empting Felix’s response. I will show him the invitation design when it’s perfect. His 50th birthday party is in six weeks’ time, there is so much to organise.  I look up at him, over the monitors, leaning back on his chair as he talks into his headset about one of our artists:

Lizzie Lame-face we call her. When’s she getting on the radio playlists?

I notice as he leans further back in his swivel chair that his belt is loose, and he has one hand down his trousers. It’s nothing sexual, of course. Nothing like that. He’s more like a pre-pubescent boy really, just trying to find some comfort.

It is my job to know where Felix Knight finds his comfort. What makes him happy, what doesn’t. What will make those little red dots form on the underside of his chin and neck.  I don’t want to sound embarrassing— some fifties TV secretary, desperate for attention, but people do say that I’m good at it. In fact, I have recently been nominated in the People’s Assistant category at our upcoming industry awards. People joke about the awards of course, and they all have stupid names like that. I take the whole thing very lightly.

I do think it’s a bit strange that another assistant from my office has been nominated for the same award, in the same year though. Chloe is wonderful— everyone knows that. But it does seem a bit unnecessary that we are both nominated at the same time?

I look past Felix’s scruffy blond hair and over to her desk. No surprise, she isn’t in yet.

In my mind, the People’s Assistant comes in early, every day. The People’s Assistant finishes all the paperwork, and finds time to plan a huge, sprawling, never-ending birthday party on the side. I am taking it lightly. I look back to my screens and press send. It is as if these columns never really leave my mind. Tetris blocks of black and white, arrows shooting from the sky that rain down thick and fast. I delete and file and click out quick replies.

I have wasted time on the way in. It was nothing, all that—no one saw it. But I need to get back on top of things. The People’s Assistant does not let things get out of hand.

Yeah, Selena can get you that, I hear Felix say into the little microphone on his cheek.

I look up immediately, eyebrows raised, ready. But Felix scowls and waves his hand as if my face is unforgivable.

I lower my head back down quickly behind my screens, and glance again at my list.

I type out a message to the owner of Felix’s favourite taxidermy shop, Stuff and Nonsense. Last week I finally managed to convince the man there to help us decorate the venue for his birthday party. I had to go there in person and make a solemn promise, handing over a hefty cash deposit and my risk assessment plan, to show how the menagerie would be protected.

The man there looked like someone from the series Lovejoy. I used to watch repeats sometimes when I was young, by myself at home. Sometimes I would get lost in things like that. Only occasionally. In other worlds, infantile stories in my head, wizened old antique dealers in sheepskin coats, gods chasing nymphs, mortals stealing fire, just random stuff like that. Sometimes I’d have to use the voice of someone on the news, or even the talking clock, to get me out of it.

Usually I was busy, helping around the house, doing homework kept me in my real mind. All I needed to do really was to walk through into the fresh-smelling laundry room, fill the drum, slam the door, click through the symbols on the small white dial and press the start button, that would bring me back.

Even though this man has a Lovejoy-look about him, he is much less reassuring. I think of how his grey chin quivered as he stroked a stuffed iguana in his shop: They need to be handled gently. He agreed to everything, finally, for Felix’s birthday, while I was standing there, and I gave him the documents and money. But he definitely couldn’t give me the surety I needed. People like that you think you’ve finally got it all in order, they’re on the right track. But if you leave them just a little too long, they will be off elsewhere, in some other story.

He’s living in a fantasy world, this man. I click the arrow send.

Sel will do all that, I hear Felix say again. But this time I know better than to lift my head. I keep moving information into spreadsheets, making sure that nothing will be lost.

I think back now to the interview I had with Felix for this job. I see myself behind the glass table of the meeting room in my mind, holding his roster of bands in my hand. He laughs at my degree. What Classics? Classic songs? Classic jokes? Reebok classics—I’ve got all the Classics!

I laugh. Ha, those are the best Classics! I say.

He makes it clear he is not looking for anyone with big aspirations. I tuck my legs further under the table, and explain to him in a sincere voice that I really do find my satisfaction in the details.

I consider for a moment, now, how I could be so much more convincing having worked for Felix properly for two years. And soon I’m on my acceptance speech—I won’t really be given time to give one, not properly. But if I am, I will explain how it’s the set times, load times, technical riders, capacities—the fine print of an artist’s working visa. These are what I’m motivated by, these are the things that make me tick.

Some people might think that these things are, well—boring. That’s what someone like the taxidermist would say. Someone living in a fantasy world.

I shake my head and push his greying chin out of my mind.

They do look a tiny bit dry, on the page, the details.

But they are everything—of course they are.

They are everything because—suddenly I can’t think of what to say? I’m standing on the podium, in the big round venue, and I can’t think of anything to say. What did I even actually say to Felix initially in that first interview? I can no longer remember. My mind, for a moment, is completely blank.

They are everything because they are just the seeds, that’s it.

Seeds that must be tended, planted right. Eventually they’ll blossom, bursting out as real-life people, in a field or club. Someone on the phone I’m by the flag, the red flag!! Girls in toilet queues offering lip balm, a man who chews his face off at the front, hugging the speaker. Denim jackets weaving through the crowd, dripping ice-cold pints on someone’s velvet boots—

Selena, Felix is saying now, Seleena.

I realise he has been waving his hands, standing over me, a voodoo shaman.

I have been lost, carried away with myself. I apologise.

I thought women were the multi-taskers! Felix says, looking around, arms out wide. But there is no audience there to receive him.

Where is everyone? he asks, disappointed.

It’s only 8.15, I say, pointing to the clock. The People’s Assistant always knows the time.

But Felix has already sat back down, is bashing some numbers out on his phone—it must have been rhetorical.