where Josh lay on his back. Somewhat distractedly he reached out to help him up. 'Sorry, just, er, playing.'
'You nearly broke my bloody back, you fucking idiot.' Josh got up slowly and tested his limbs for damage. 'You could have killed me.'
'Yeah, sorry.'
'What the fuck's the matter with you? Just 'cause you get in one fight in Cornwall you start acting all . . . twatish . . .'
Twatish? Harvey stifled an inopportune giggle, which started in the pool of hysteria he could feel somewhere down at the bottom of his stomach. 'Sorry, Josh. Look . . .' He felt in his pockets and found a tenner. 'Look, get us both some breakfast, all right? Get yourself some pancakes and syrup, that's your favourite. And a thick shake.' But Josh was not to be mollified. He refused to go at first but then grabbed the money and without a word stalked off, slamming the shop door behind him. As soon as he'd gone Harvey went at once to the bottom drawer. There was just a chance, if he prayed really hard, if he called in all the favours he had ever done a benevolent maker, that it would turn out to have been just a drunken hallucination. That was the best plan he could think of at the moment. He knew it wasn't a good plan and that it had very little chance of success. And sure enough the Superman One was lying neatly under the moneybox. He took it out and looked hard at it for several minutes. None of his old desire was left. He felt no pleasure in it, no wish to open the packaging, no interest in its contents. It represented nothing but suffering and misery. And mystery. While drunken sleep rarely fulfils the same purpose as good sober rest, it had allowed some things to clarify. What Harvey now felt for certain as he had only vaguely guessed before was that he was being set up. Somehow, someone was trying to get at him. He felt the rising panic, the anxiety attack coming, he felt his head throbbing, his mouth felt like a sawdust floor and he could taste vomit somewhere in the background of his palate. As he held the bloodstained comic in his hands he realised something more: whoever it was was succeeding. Never in his life had he felt as got-at as he did right now. What was he to do with the evidence? He had read Edgar Allan Poe but had always considered him a fool. Hiding something in plain view was all right in novels but if he left a real Superman One on the mantelpiece Josh would wet his pants. He might perhaps have burned it, although if Josh came back to find him setting fire to priceless comics at ten-thirty in the morning that might be the end. Harvey wasn't sure that the end hadn't come anyway because when Josh did return he refused to speak and took his pancakes and syrup off to the counter where he sat making disgusting slurping sounds. Having returned the Superman One to the petty-cash drawer, Harvey went and fetched his three Big Breakfasts without complaint from the counter where they had been dumped. In truth, the silent treatment was just what he needed.
In his mind he ran over the facts. People knew that he wanted the Superman One. He had told his story many times. His old school friends knew. Josh knew. It seemed for a moment as though everyone must know. Except his parents, of course. He never told them anything. And people told other people: for a while part of Harvey's resentment about the Superman One was that it had become the most interesting thing about him. When people talked about him they would often mention it. Indeed, in his darker moments, he had imagined being referred to as 'that bore who lost the comic' or 'that weird guy who could have been rich . . . remember him?' So other people at the reunion must have known how significant his meeting with Bleeder really was. Not many people had mentioned it, of course. But that was because people were like that. They were polite or they were discreet, or most often of all in his experience, they weren't really interested enough to bother. Of course, one of those someone elses might have been rather more interested than he knew. Just because he had dreamed of the Superman One