Pertaining to a Peculiarly Super Girl at a Party
I wasn’t naïve, there was no way she was a superhero. But she did wear her knickers on top of her tights. And I like that in a person.
She wasn’t there when I first arrived at the party, in fact I wasn’t sure anyone was there at all. I rang the doorbell and nothing happened so I walked back down the steps to the garden, standing back so I could see. In what little light was afforded by the streetlight the house looked like it was on miniature stilts that elevated some five feet from the garden as if the builder had been a short chap who’d decided that this bungalow didn’t deserve to suffer his fate.
Walking heavily back up the porch steps, the alcohol in my system proved enough of a distraction to cause me to stare at my feet as I walked up the steps but not enough to explain how, as I knocked on the door, the party arrived behind me.
Twenty, maybe thirty people surged through the garden as if they had been lurking like suburban ninjas in the bushes. Someone had a key, barged past me, opened the door and then I was carried by the meat-tide inside.
And the drinks came out. In force. And vague explanations of why the house was in total darkness.
Rufus (owner of the house and issuer of my verbal invitation) lunged his smile towards me and began to attempt conversation. Unfortunately for me this was the second of a proposed seven day bender for him and so as he began to explain the lack of lighting he was less clear than I would have liked. The only fact that seems clear in the slur were:
1) There was a choice between liquor and leccy
2) Liquor had won
3) Various candles were dotted around the house
4) There was a limited supply of torches
Rufus was particularly proud of that last point for reasons I couldn’t discern and whisked out five medical pen torches. The kind doctors use to look in your various orifices.
He turned one on and shone it in my eye. I squinted. He laughed and staggered forward, the torch slipping from his grip and down the front of my shirt. The cold metal of the torch touched my chest and I arched my back, instinctively moving away from it and into something that resembled the foetal position. As my head came forward, so my bum shot out and slammed into the kitchen unit behind me, the corner catching me right on the coccyx.
The pain soared up from my tailbone like a flock of birds that had been resting on a runway and were suddenly startled by a drunken pilot attempting to land a plane on them. I stood upright very, very quickly. The whole thing had lasted maybe a second or two but in that time she had walked over and was standing in front of me.
And my God she was beautiful. I mean, you believed she was a superhero even without the outfit. I smiled my best ‘I don’t stand a chance with you but by Jove I’m going to have a crack anyway’ smile and tried not to think about the cold metal of the torch that had come to rest in my boxers, vertically next to my… well, you get the idea.
And I was as cool as the metal pressing against me and I made her laugh and as I poured her a glass of my wine I began to think that something might come of this. What that was… well, let’s not get carried away. This wasn’t a fancy dress party and she had come dressed as - I wasn’t sure who she’d come dressed as but I sure as hell wasn’t going to screw it up by broaching the subject.
“That’s some amazing outfit you’ve got on there,” I broached, blindsided by my own stupidity.
Standing by the kitchen table now she leaned in and began telling me about the outfit and how she really was a superhero. Telling it softly and with a purpose. Or as softly as you could with the noise of the party:
How she could really, truly fly. How just today she’d been walking past a bank and she got a feeling, a sort of inkling that something wasn’t right so she walked up to the automatic doors but it didn’t open. It was locked so she banged hard to get the attention of the robbers inside. Told me that they turned around and she yelled, “Open up or I’m coming in!”
And I’m fascinated, I don’t know whether she’s serious or not but she’s just brilliant and I look away for a second down at my glass and I notice the torch. It’s turned on so there’s this light emanating from my crotch like I’ve got a lightsabre in my pants.
I panic. Momentarily and internally then my gaze snaps back up to meet hers and I smile and put my glass on the kitchen table and my hand into my trouser pocket.
She smiles back and leans forward again and her, long brown hair falls forward and brushes my cheek. Continuing, she tells me how she just pushed the door with the palm of her hand and it flew forward, knocking the first of the thieves over and how, just for effect she walked over the door and it tipped like a see-saw and people - the customers, the hostages, started to smile, tentatively to smile.
But I can’t concentrate on what she’s saying because all the while she’s talking I’m fumbling around in my pocket trying to get a grip on the torch, to drop it to the floor or to find the bloody off switch. I try leaning just a little closer to her so she can’t look down and see the illuminations and I try to keep my movements in my trousers as slow and precise as possible.
And then she tells me how the other two robbers came forward, shotguns pointing and she just moved like lightning - whoosh - and she was holding the two guns and they were holding plastic bank pens instead.
She takes half a step back and we both laugh when she wraps it up with, “After that it was just a case of waiting for the police to come and take them away.” I think I’m in love with this lunatic with her undercrackers over her tights. I think it for a second and then I think again about the torch and I stop my fumbling and decide just to tell her. She’ll understand, we’ll laugh and then we can get on with the business of the rest of our lives.
“Hey doll, is this guy boring you?” a tall man wearing a mask and a cape put his hand on her shoulder and she turned to him. “Come and talk to me. Somewhere - out there, someone needs our help!”
My hands quickly darted out to cover the downstairs glow but it was already too late this other man in superhero garb was obviously with her. I stared at the back of her head and felt the insides of me drain out.
She turned back, tilted her head to one side and said, “My brother. I have to go but I’ll be back. If you like?”
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees! My insides filled up so fast I felt like I someone was pouring them back in and I’d forgotten to say ‘when’.
“I’d love it,” I said with a complete lack of nonchalance.
She threw me a smile and I practically swooned as the two superheroes raced - not towards the door but the window. The tall caped man leapt forward and launched himself through, diving up and out followed moments later by my would-be supergirlfriend.
I stared at the window for a moment in disbelief. Partly that she appeared to have flown out of a window but mostly because in all the torch-related excitement I had forgotten to ask her name.
Running across the room, I skidded to a halt in front of the window and shoved my head out, opened my mouth to shout but stopped short as something caught my eye. Down in the flowerbeds some seven feet below lay a man in a cape. Face down in the soil and apparently unconscious.
“Erm,” I said and then smiled instinctively as I heard her voice. “A little help here wouldn’t go amiss.”
Whether it was fate or blind luck that had intervened, I didn’t care - she was still there. Her cape had seemingly become entangled on the old-fashioned sash window mechanism and she hung, swinging slightly and smiling sweetly. As I reached out and heaved and hauled and pulled and tried to maintain her dignity I finally mustered enough sense not to point out that if she really did have super powers she could have just flown back in. I didn’t care, this woman was just the right sort of peculiar whether she was a superhero or not.
Finally she managed to hook her legs onto the window sill and I reached down and lifted her in. With arms draped around my neck I carried her back to the kitchen without ruining it, without saying anything.
“Oh, is this yours?” she said, taking one hand from behind my neck and showing me a doctor’s pen torch.
“Oh erm,” I carefully placed her down on the floor and looked at my no-longer glowing crotch, the torch had gone. “Well… er - how the hell did you get that?”
“Lightning reflexes, I told you,” she said as she picked up her glass of wine. “Did I mention I’m a superhero?”