At the store’s other end, his dad and Mr Salter were still gabbing in their tangle of Egyptian smoke, and Mr Salter said so then the kid goes Lady if I put a penny in the slot and press the button will the bells ring, and his dad said yeah, yeah, that’s a good one I gotta remember that and tell the other fellers on the line. Outside a truck backfired and faintly, down the street, someone’s transistor radio was playing that one tune that Worsley liked, with how the floor fell out of this old guy’s car when he put the clutch down, which, if Worsley understood the song correctly, had been caused by magic. Though, without a word for the gratification that he was deliberately delaying, he inched slowly to the right and didn’t let his eyes fall on the treasure lode until he stood there right in front of it, could almost feel its toybox colours shining through his shirt and jeans.

  American made comic books how they were obviously meant to be. They looked just right, and with that came the implication that the other companies were slightly wrong, or that they’d failed to meet the mark. While it was true American put out a lot of things that Worsley wasn’t interested in – for instance, Conquerors of Mystery, Our Unshaven Army, Henny Youngman and their turgid Perry Mason, where the poorly drawn attorney looked like a failed cake with angry and accusing eyes – none of this mattered when they also brought about the flimsy miracles that now filled the boy’s fixed, dilated gaze.

  King Bee. World’s Best Adventure. Exploit Comics. Thunderman …

  Maybe two kids in Worsley’s class would know who Blinky was, but everyone, even his mom, had heard of Thunderman. Thunderman had his own TV show, but he wasn’t quite the same on that and couldn’t do as much stuff, being just an ordinary actor guy and not the real Thunderman.

  The real Thunderman was there in front of Worsley, and was there at several stages of his super-life at once, all inches from a five-year-old face that was underlit with wonder. Here was Thunderman in his own comic, where exposure to arch-adversary Felix Firestone’s Random Ray seemed to have left the gold-and-purple costumed hero sporting the magnificent head of a Bengal tiger. Here was Thunderman when he was just a fair-haired kid of maybe twelve or so, imperilled by the similarly youthful Arcturan delinquent Anti-Matter Lad on the front page of Thunderboy, while simultaneously being sentenced by a jury of his fiftieth-century buddies, the Tomorrow Friends, there on the front of Exploit Comics. Here was Thunderman with King Bee and young pal Buzz in World’s Best Adventure, matched against a tag team of their enemies the Droll and, once more, Felix Firestone. Sucking up more cola through the barber’s-pole infinite spiral of his straw, Worsley considered Firestone’s lack of confidence in his own criminal endeavours: during the purported genius’s many six-page-long escapes from jail, he didn’t even bother changing out of his grey prison uniform, as if he’d given up and knew there wasn’t any point.

  The man of storms, as his publishers sometimes called him, also featured in Exciting Comics (grinning while he arm-wrestled the Greek god Atlas); Thunderman’s Chum Teddy Baxter (rescuing the junior news photographer from what the caption called ‘The Planet of Doomed Baxters’); and Thunderman’s Girlfriend Peggy Parks (staring appalled at the persistently endangered redhead’s latest crazy transformation, with her lower body now that of a gigantic constrictor as ‘The Python Peggy Parks’). Worsley was unsure in what sense the sneaky and suspicious radio reporter could be said to be Thunderman’s ‘girlfriend’, when all that he did was catch her when she fell out of a window every other issue. But you’d never see him take her to a movie, or a dance, or put his hand under her skirt like Worsley had seen sometimes-uncle Paul doing with Worsley’s mom last month, when it was Independence Day.

  Away in Egypt down at the store’s other end, his dad and Mr Salter were both talking in gruff voices like they understood things. Salter said he’s gonna lose on TV he looks like a bum, we’re gonna get that Boston toothpaste ad, and Worsley’s dad said sure looks like it anyway, that’s who my Jean is voting for I gotta feeling, and then Salter yeah, so anyway Joe how’s that going, and then Dad it’s pretty bad, and Salter ah she’ll come around, and Dad no, no she won’t. The two of them were wrapped around by floating yellowed gauze now, mummified in smoke.

  Mouth momentarily filled with brown foam, Worsley regarded the remaining titles from American, the ones without Thunderman in. These were King Bee, who also starred in Manhunt Comics alongside a so-so character called Rocket Ranger, then an uninviting Moon Queen where they’d got her bound by her own silver whip to a grotesquely carven alien totem pole, and finally a book called Comic Clarion Presents in little letters on a scroll, with under that the Streak, a character – in a white costume and red boots with wings – that Worsley hadn’t seen before. He drained his Coke down to the obscene noises at the bottom of the bottle, felt deliciously conflicted over which comics to spend his hot and sticky money on.

  They were all so enticing, with their covers lit-up windows on to worlds of blazing satisfaction. All the pictures and the colours printed so much better on the shiny cover paper than they did on the insides, so that each one became a longed-for jewel, with skies of beautifully graded cyan, capes like banners, ochre Kansas dust. He loved the arcane cover furniture, the little disc up at the top left where it said American and Thunderman, the large serrated stamp at the top right that meant the issue was approved of by the Comics Code Authority, the glorious logos hurtling with speed lines or in chiselled platinum on brooding violet cumulus. They had a glaze, a lustre that was metaphysical.

  He finally picked Thunderman, King Bee, Exciting, Exploit, Manhunt, Thunderboy, and thought he’d take a chance on Comic Clarion and the Streak because he liked the colour scheme, the white and red, like Japanese flags and Coke bottle caps. He solemnly transported his selection and the empty bottle with its sucked-flat straw across to Mr Salter at the counter, where he used up his leftover pennies on the five-cent box of second-hand old comics, not too creased or tattered, that was there beside the register. He chose a battered copy of Alarming Adult Reverie, one of Goliath’s faintly sinister and bafflingly titled fantasy anthologies for children, where the cover-featured creature, Voom the Inexplicable, appeared to be made out of orange pine cones which made Worsley think he could most likely handle it. He stood on tiptoe so that he could pass his comics, his spent soda bottle and his seventy-five cents to Mr Salter, who called Worsley champ as he was ringing up the sale. The afternoon was humming like a dynamo.

  His dad and Mr Salter had by this time stubbed out Egypt in a big glass Johnnie Walker’s ashtray that was right there on the countertop. Its boozy late Victorian fop now strode through a volcanic fog of powdered ash with smudges on his monocle, and when you thought about it, Johnnie Walker was a sort of cartoon hero too, one every bit as famed and popular as Thunderman.

  Then Worsley’s dad, well I suppose we oughtta hit the road, then Mr Salter, take it easy Joe I’ll see ya around, then Worsley and his dad walked the few blocks back to his mom’s place without saying much. Ray Porlock, his son knew already, never had and wouldn’t ever get to live a colourful, heroic life where he was always smiling, saving worlds and winking at the readers. His dad didn’t have the right chin, the right attitude, or the right house inside a hollow mountain in the desert. There weren’t any readers. None of this was his dad’s fault, though Worsley couldn’t help but feel that if Ray had just tried a little harder, then his parents might still be together and things would have been OK again. They walked home side by side with neither of them looking forward to arriving. Somewhere up above, a kind of rocket like a spiky iron bowling ball was shooting round and round the Earth that had a Russian dog inside it and was called a Spotnik. Over the tall buildings and the clouds and birds and aeroplanes, the Russian dog was maybe looking down right now on Worsley and his dad, and thinking that America was too sad to drop bombs on.

  His mom met them on the doorstep and said did you have a nice time to his dad, but so you knew she meant she hadn’t had a nice time and it was his dad’s fault. Mom didn’t invite his dad inside, but she made Worsley say goodbye and go indoors to take his coat off while the two of them had a hushed, angry talk out in the street. He heard his mom ask if his dad had taken Worsley to a bar, and heard his dad ask why his mom had to be such a bitch, but he was concentrating on King Bee #200, where there on the cover someone called Enigma Man challenged King Bee and Buzz in their own secret hideaway, the Hive. He seemed to know their true identities and everything. Guess who I am King Bee or I’ll reveal your real name to the world. I just don’t want him finding out that you’re a lousy drunk. Great Lincoln’s ghost who is Enigma Man and how does he know everything about us. Jesus Christ Jean you’re a piece of work who’s Paul who’s Bob you’ve got a fucking nerve. How can the droning duo save their secrets find out in The Puzzling Mystery of Enigma Man. You goddamned alcoholic failure go to hell just go to hell Ray. Approved by the Comics Code Authority. And slam.

  When she came back into the room, she didn’t say a word about what had just happened, nor did Worsley’s dad get mentioned for the whole remainder of that Saturday. Which actually was a relief and certainly a whole lot better than the usual well what did he say about me, or the did he slur his words when he was talking did he smell of beer. As the late dark of August slumped on to Wisconsin, Worsley and his mom sat on the couch together and watched Gunsmoke while they ate two Swanson’s TV dinners, with electric blue light crayoning their faces. After, they had lemon Jell-O and a can of plump mandarin orange segments that the label said came from Japan. Worsley liked Gunsmoke, and if it had only had more costumes, robots, masks and special powers, it would have been terrific. As it was, he liked how Marshal Dillon spent the better part of every episode reflecting on what was the decent thing to do. He also felt a great surge of affection for Miss Kitty that he thought perhaps was love, but didn’t really know what this entailed, or what he and Miss Kitty might do if they were to meet up one day, except maybe she’d adopt him.

  What decided it for Worsley and made Saturday his best day after all was what came afterwards, when he got sent upstairs to bed but was allowed to have his table lamp on and read for a while so long as he was quiet. When the long day was shut away behind his bedroom door, with all its adults and its other people, when he was here by himself then the whole world was Worsley.

  He arranged the seven comics – seven and a half if you counted Alarming Adult Reverie – face up like giant fortune-telling cards upon his cosy maroon coverlet, then ordered them by inverse preference so he could read his worst one first and work up to his best one last. First up, it hardly needed saying, was Alarming Adult Reverie, an inch-long tear in its peculiar cover with the spindly, nervous-looking title lettering and an unsettlingly downbeat colour palette, stony greys and sombre navy in the background, reds and oranges that were more firelight than lollipop. Surprisingly, the stories on the inside, four of them plus a one-page text feature that he didn’t bother reading, were all good and nowhere near as scary as their crumpled, threatening-vagrant cover made them seem. The story about Voom the Inexplicable, as an example, turned out to concern a guy who’s always lying, saying he’s related to the President and so on, so that no one likes him. Then he’s caught by Voom the Inexplicable, who wants to invade Earth and asks this liar guy to tell him what defences Earth has got. The guy says we’ve got vanishing rays, moon-exploder missiles, skeleton gas and atomic daggers, so Voom says in that case he’ll leave Earth alone, and everyone goes back to thinking that this guy’s a lying jerk, and they don’t know he’s saved the world from Voom. To Worsley, this was more grown-up and realistic than another Felix Firestone jailbreak, though he couldn’t have said why, exactly.

  Next most worst was Comic Clarion Presents wherein, despite the austere ambulance appeal of that white-and-red suit, the Streak was kind of disappointing. Though the story was believable, with this mechanic guy who gets stuck in a cyclotron so light-speed particles colliding make him just as fast as them, the art was stiff and boring. The Streak looked so rigid when he ran that you’d think he was paralysed, and hardly capable of making it out to his mailbox for the morning paper, let alone nineteen times round the world in half a minute. Then came Manhunt Comics, where in the front story, King Bee’s master-foe the Droll gives people special poison so that if they smile they die, then tells them jokes, but then the Rocket Ranger story at the back was something about earthquake-guns.

  Exciting Comics next, then King Bee, where Enigma Man turned out to be King Bee and Buzz’s trusted janitor Carruthers with his mind warped by a science-drink, then Thunderboy, then Thunderman, which usually he left until last as his favourite. This time, however, that much-coveted position went to Exploit Comics, which not only promised Thunderboy but also an appearance by his future best pals, the Tomorrow Friends. These, to Worsley’s knowledge, had shown up just once before, some months ago, apparently to great reader response, when he’d concluded that the idea of a secret club of super-kids come from whatever century was just about the best thing ever.

  First, stringing things out, he read the letters page, Exploit Enquiries, where some know-all kid in Iowa called Mervyn Clarke the Third was asking how come Thunderboy didn’t go back in time and stop the alien war that destroyed Thunderland from happening. Worsley thought this was stupid, but in their reply, the editors said that it was a great idea, and that it could be one of their ‘Unlikely’ stories. These were stories that you didn’t count as having really happened, because in them Thunderman did something real unlikely like, say, getting married, having kids, or dying. Worsley still thought Mervyn Clarke the Third and his idea were stupid.

  Then he read the story in the back which, being Exploit, was most usually about Red Fox, who was a blatant copy of King Bee, with his boy partner Cub, his secret hideout called the Fox’s Den, his Foxcar, and about a millionth of King Bee’s appeal. This issue’s offering did nothing to reverse the trend, and in fact introduced a manservant called Carrington.

  And finally, the summit peak of Worsley’s day, he read the Thunderboy adventure at the front, which surpassed all his expectations. Much to his relief, he soon discovered that the trial scene on the cover was only a test to see if Thunderboy was worthy to be a Tomorrow Friend, including the balloon where they said they were sentencing the barely teenaged hero to a hundred years’ space-labour. The Tomorrow Friends, in their original appearance, had been four kids from a special school for super-children that existed in 4959 AD who’d formed a sort of super-gang or scout troop. The four founding members, Dust Damsel, Expanding Lad, Clock Kid and Sonic Girl, had seemingly picked up a fifth, Paradox Boy, between appearances, and now, with Thunderboy’s surprise admission, there were six of them, all being friends in their dome-dwelling and jet-shoed tomorrow.

  Worsley couldn’t get enough of the Tomorrow Friends. For one thing, they were from the future, so they hadn’t not existed yet and might one day be really real. He started to work out a plan, in which he’d write a letter to Expanding Lad or Clock Kid, telling them to come and pick him up at his mom’s address in September, 1959. He’d have the letter put in a time capsule with a sign on that said Do Not Open for Three Thousand Years, and then sit back and wait for Clock Kid’s flying hourglass to pop out of nowhere and collect him. If he got made a Tomorrow Friend, it would be like he had all these big brothers and big sisters that were the best family in the solar system, and they’d live together in a turquoise dome, and his name would be Thinking Boy because he thought so much.

  He finished reading, then got out of bed and placed the seven-and-a-half new comics on the modest stack accumulating there beside the chest of drawers up in the corner. He had nearly twenty now. He climbed back underneath the covers, dutifully switching off the bedside lamp, and snuggled down into the silence and the black. After what seemed like a long time, he heard his mom talking to someone downstairs, on the phone it sounded like. Then, after that, he heard her and he didn’t know if she was crying or else laughing at something somebody said on the TV.

  And later, Worsley wasn’t sure how long, he realised he’d done something really dumb and was now certain to be in a heap of trouble: though he couldn’t recall all the details, he’d apparently got out of bed and walked the two or three blocks down to Salter’s in the middle of the night, still dressed in his pyjamas. He was looking for the copy of World’s Best Adventure that he wished he’d picked instead of Comic Clarion Presents. Salter’s was open, but the lights were out and there was nobody around except for Mrs Salter, standing there behind the counter, staring at him and not saying anything. He realised she must work the night shift, which was why he’d never seen her in the day, and also that she was his mom’s friend Mrs Stevens, and that Mrs Stevens was therefore a bigamist. Worsley looked for the copy of World’s Best Adventure but it wasn’t there, and all that he could find, alone save Mrs Salter-Stevens in the creepy moonlight, was a comic where the logo said Thunderman Gone. On the front cover, Thunderman was drunk and had a Johnnie Walker bottle in one hand, or maybe Johnnie Walker was there too and trying to help Thunderman stand up, it wasn’t really clear. Stood on a doorstep over to the right was Peggy Parks, pointing at Thunderman and looking angry. Peggy Parks had got no clothes on, so that you could see her chest and where she’d got her little pee-pee hanging down, like he assumed that everyone had. Thunderman was saying This is quits and Peggy’s speech balloon said You’re too late for anything, which didn’t quite make sense although he thought he could see what she meant. Worsley looked at the cover and knew that his life was spoiled. He also knew, all of a sudden, that the figure there across the darkened counter wasn’t Mrs Salter, wasn’t Mrs Stevens after all, and it was awful. It was awful.