Chapter Fourteen #2
I feel another surge of energy from the people around me at that prospect, and I wouldn’t be surprised if half of it comes from Kate alone.
She’s leaning forward in her chair, her chin tilted up to look at AJ with a wide smile on her face.
She looks so utterly different from the poised and purposeful nurse I see on the ward.
Here, she is happy and excited and eager.
It’s like seeing a new version of her: one with more colour and texture and character.
Which is terrifying.
I flick my eyes back onto the stage where AJ Ripley is politely smiling at Martin as he rummages through a number of other pieces of paper, his microphone unfortunately close to his hands so all the rustling is echoed over the speakers.
“So, AJ,” he says once he’s found what he’s looking for. “Thank you again for being here.” AJ nods, and their polite smile tightens. “I understand this is the first time you’ve done an event like this. Would you care to explain why that is?”
The question is so carefully composed and delivered that I suspect it didn’t come from the man sitting next to AJ Ripley at all. My suspicions are confirmed as soon as AJ starts to speak.
“My thanks to you, Martin, for having me here this evening,” they give their co-host a quick nod and then turn to face the room, “and to all of you for making your way into Central London.” They pause and I recognise something I occasionally see in my work: a person who is in complete control of not only themself but the whole room they occupy.
“The reason I’ve never done an event like this before is because I want my work to speak for itself.
Lady Phantom is a superhero unlike many others.
She isn’t about saving lives – I mean, yes, she is, very much so – but rather, she’s mostly about the dead.
She communicates with the dead. She solves their problems. She is their voice and their advocate after they have gone.
How she goes about doing that, that’s where all the fun stuff comes in, especially when her trusty sidekick the Director gets involved.
” AJ catches my eye and winks at me. They wink.
At me! “But really I wanted those who love Lady Phantom to love her for her, and to not get distracted by me: a genderqueer fat lesbian artist and writer who rarely leaves his council flat.”
Genderqueer. Fat. Lesbian. His.
So many words. So many connotations. So many feelings rise inside me, like flames, hot and scalding. But then they settle. The fire goes out. They didn’t burn me. They don’t hurt. They’re just words. And now the fire is gone, they have me smiling.
Kate nudges me again. A confirmation that I’ve won the bet. When I look at her, her wide smile suggests she’s anything but disappointed to have lost.
AJ continues to talk, his voice soft, authoritative but smooth. He has a slight West Country accent that’s comforting and yet still commanding. It’s impossible to not give him your full attention.
“I’ve been drawing female superheroes since I was a child, but Lady Phantom is a very recent creation of mine,” AJ continues.
“She was born the day my friend Julian died. He was one of the first gay men in this country to pass from AIDS, although we didn’t know what it was until much later.
At the time, he just became very unwell, very suddenly, and never fully recovered. ”
I freeze. I’m aware of every cell in my body, and how I couldn’t move a single one of them if I wanted to.
The only thing I’m aware of other than AJ’s voice is my pulse, thumping in my ears.
It takes on a new rhythm. One that says ‘Dan-ny, Dan-ny, Dan-ny’, and it’s impossible not to see him in his hospital bed in my mind’s eye.
“After he died, I wanted to talk to him, to Julian. I wanted to tell him all the things I never got a chance to while he was alive, but he became too sick too quickly and couldn’t always understand me or even wake up some days.
He was a brilliant man with a brilliant mind – he was a composer, mostly for films and TV shows – and I felt this huge void when he left because I don’t find it easy to talk to everybody, but he always held my attention, and my interest. I was so desperate to still speak with him, that I started to play around with the idea of a character having exactly that power: the ability to talk to the dead.
She wasn’t a superhero at first. Just an ordinary nerdy girl who heard voices and received messages from the afterlife.
But she appeared quite clearly to me. Purple was her colour.
Her hair was dark and long. And she was ethnically ambiguous.
“A year or so after Julian passed, I knew what it was, what killed him. It had a name. The gay plague, at first, which is awful and yet, we often do what we have to do with the awful words others give us. We made it work for us. We owned it. We used it to spread awareness and demand more research. And finally we had a proper name. AIDS. And now we know what we know.”
He takes a long, deep breath and it prompts me to do the same.
“As all this was happening, as we found out more, I wanted so desperately to tell Julian about it. To give him answers he didn’t have before.
I’d been wanting to talk to him since the day he passed, but it suddenly seemed especially urgent to give him answers when so much of his illness and passing was shock and confusion and fear.
“That’s how Lady Phantom became who she now is. That was her superpower: to receive messages from the dead and to use that power to right wrongs that only the dead could know about. And yes, she came about because I couldn’t fully accept that I had lost my friend forever.”
Pressure lands on my arm and it’s so unexpected, it makes me jump in my seat. I look down and see Kate’s hand on my wrist. I look at her, but she keeps her eyes locked on AJ, refusing to catch my gaze. I don’t know why but that somehow makes her touch even more… significant.
“So, that’s the story of how Lady Phantom came to be.
And I felt it was a story worth sharing with those who have come to enjoy her adventures, which I assume is all of you,” he pauses and looks around the crowd with a smile that warms me enough to make the muscles in my body finally relax again.
Well, most of them. I’m still keeping my forearm tight and tense because Kate’s hand is still on it, burning a hole through the material of my jacket.
“Thank you for sharing that,” Martin coughs, annoyingly into the microphone, making us all shift in our seats because it’s a loud, abrasive sound. “Now, I wonder if I could ask you a bit about the Director, and the role she plays.”
Kate’s hand squeezes my arm and now it’s me who refuses to give her my eye contact. I don’t want her to see my face head-on. I’m terrified my expression would reveal too much.
AJ chuckles, a warm, deep rumble. “Well, I have to be honest. The Director is very much a self-insert. She is who I wish I could have been. I’m a true introvert.
I thrive in my own company, but despite that I find myself benefitting from interacting with people occasionally, and indeed I found a great sense of purpose in the few short months when I was caring for Julian before he passed.
I think, if I hadn’t been creative, and if I’d had a stronger stomach, a funeral director would have been a perfect job for me.
I also didn’t fully realise what an important job it is until I found myself having to organise Julian’s funeral and nobody would take his body because he had the so-called ‘gay plague’.
The Director is also how I wish I could be when it comes to the simple fact of dying.
She has accepted it fully. She is not afraid of death.
She is pragmatic and yet still deeply sensitive about it, and so it makes sense that she would support Lady Phantom in her missions.
I also, frankly,” he looks down and gives his hands a secret smile, “like the idea of somebody who looks like me – butch, short, stocky – catching the eye of somebody who looks like Lady Phantom.”
The air evaporates around me and if it weren’t for Kate’s audible sharp inhale, I think my lungs would forget to expand.
But I do manage to take in a quick gulp of oxygen.
And just as I do, I turn and meet Kate’s gaze as her own head turns towards me.
Her eyes are wide, her smile is mischievous and her grip is tighter on my arm.
I can’t help it; I smile back. And we seem to communicate so much without a single word leaving our lips.
We got our answer. There is something between Lady Phantom and the Director.