IT IS NOVEMBER 6th, 1971. The footage is drab, so unlike the era, the shifting, turbulent crowds, the thrashing of the desperate as they choke London’s streets and their faces are a riot of the worst emotions. Anything you might care to name – horror, terror, fear, grief, anger – is stamped indelibly in the grain of the historical recording. Yet watching it, all I can think is, fuck, that’s my dad, that’s my dad and watch on in disbelief as the cavalry arrives in a psychedelic wash of lights that break like soap bubbles over the crowd.
The four of them appear in a wave, Starkey in those terrible elastic pants he had to wear, all of them in their matching blue marching band jackets, the closest thing they ever had to a uniform since they grew out their awful fucking 60s hair, a long way from the leather-jacketed young hoods they had first been. In seconds the Wolfman transforms, hirsute top half practically hanging out of his sleeves and the open top, a feral grin on his face as he leaps from the tableau before St George has even lowered his arms from the teleport that brought them from their secret base on the Isle of White.
Within a year, Ringo will be dead, but that doesn’t trouble him obviously as he powers through the crowd on all fours, people throwing themselves like the Red Sea out of his loping path. There had been a terrible mood in Britain that winter with the miners’ strikes and the government’s debt default and the renewed IRA bombings and the Manchester rail disaster and, like meat left in the sun, the public rage stayed cold and hard all winter and then boiled over once the warm weather arrived and the Beatles, along with the other loose change of British superdom found themselves at the front again, advocating violent social change as if by accident. And the Summer Rebellion was born, an inevitable expression of the twisted logic of metahumanity which, if not destroying them, would at least ruin any hope for the way things could’ve been.
In the footage you can hardly see my dad’s face for the radiant smile and those stupid little glasses he wore. I can’t see that I really look anything like him. He lifts his hand to the cheering crowd as Paul shoulders past with what seems to be a look of unrestrained menace. George already has the moustache he wears today, whenever that was the last time I saw him on the news, anyway, and he and John lift from the ground and float towards where the wall of British policemen in their Saturday morning cartoon helmets are being slaughtered.
No one seems to even remember the Spiders from Mars – Bowie’s term, if I recall. And even fewer remember what they were called until Bowie’s song came along. All anyone knew was these dark evil fuckers from outer space had been hatching inside members of Parliament for a lot longer than anyone would care to admit and it wasn’t until the Preacher, my dad, stumbled across their alien thought-waves that their conspiracy came unstuck. How much of the country’s woes at that time were down to their influence, no one could really tell. And even after the events of November 6, the people weren’t in much of a forgiving mood. The fact the ruling elite could even be vulnerable to such a threat inspired the fury of the common people, like their masters’ weakness was just a new form of an ages old betrayal.
Ironically the news crews couldn’t get close to the action. The crowds and the retreating police, hopelessly under-armed to face such threats, carrying their dead and injured like from a terrorist attack and crying and moaning and bleeding and stoppering their wounds with little more than their handkerchiefs, they all blocked the path to the burning street where the Spiders were finally routed. There is little to see of the well-upholstered members of parliament with their heads burst open directing desperate and powerful attacks. There are white balance-destroying flashes of red as McCartney unleashes his eyebeams and another bang, the crowd reacting like a single flinching organism as a car explodes, but otherwise the cameraman’s testimony blurs softly in and out as he plays at the far extremes of his focal range.
If you sit through the whole thing, eventually there’s this enormous ragged cheer and an hour later, a victorious procession as the four of them are carried on the crowd’s shoulders under the shadow of Big Ben, huge grins on their comfortably adored faces. I don’t have the patience for that sort of thing and my back is aching from sitting hunched at the computer and I switch off Youtube to spare my download limit and call up the web archive instead with the grainy Leibovitz photos from autumn 1972 – their last photo shoot as a powers team, taken for Rolling Stone.
Outside the panorama windows, the city is quiet. I call it that even when I can hear the odd car horn, a distant siren, a drunk guy retching his heart out in the alley down the side. This is as close as the city ever comes to being at peace, four o’clock in the morning and the weather turning cold and sunrise still effectively a long way off and me without a cold woman to warm my bed or a child to do the same for my heart. Instead it is just me and Wikipedia as my hand trawls over the mouse sensor and the facts flick by.
He wrote two books: one just before they went to India and one in ‘74, after the Wolfman died. And he fathered one child the world knew about. I guess I should call him my half-brother, Julian, but I can’t help wondering how many more half-brothers I have out there.
It is a while before I realise I have closed my eyes, unconsciously asleep. That’s the mixed curse of total freedom in the postmodern. In track pants and a Starbucks tee, I stumble as far as the settee and let the darkness wash over me.
In the early premonitions of my sleep, I see myself as a baby, lifted up into the arms of a strange man with a hoary beard and small round glasses that reflect my innocent curiosity and mirror his own.
THERE IS SOMETHING appropriate about the bass throb of the wind turbines as my daughter and I land like two refugees from the postmodern astride the same Newfoundland coast on which mad Viking explorers once fumbled their colonisation so badly. Like the thirty-odd unit wind farm, we are on this squall-battered peninsula for the elevation and the isolation. And like the turbines, we are far enough from civilisation that not even the most vocal civic association could object to what we propose.
Far to the north the land turns dark green with fir and spruce and I expect there are concrete barricades eventually as the crumbling Canadian highways head like a thwarted destiny to No-Man’s Land, the rusting watch-towers with their big-breasted, shaven-headed, woollen pullover’d guards forever on duty protecting the tiny principality from the patriarchal threats of the outside world. A cruel joke and a living irony in one breath. The pun on their name is a testament to what so many costumed freaks like myself discover: you can choose a dandy title (in the late 70s, the separatists declared they were Wimminsland), but the newspapers will ultimately decide whether or not it takes. Some grumpy sub-editor, or perhaps a legion of them, their ire multiplied, eyeing the gap in the headline or the cadence of some inferior cub reporter’s sentence and deciding to rewrite the course of history in a clatter of keystrokes.
Here on this pulsing scarp we are safe from any threat and small enough not to present one on the separatists’ Cuban-supplied radar. If there are blobs, they do not tell the story of a father simply trying to do the best thing by his child.
Windsong is a name the media have taken to with a fury. In her mask and vandalised leather jacket, Tessa is as much a stranger as any teenage daughter could ever be, the disaffected teenager par excellence. Yet she has a knowing wink for me and flushed cheeks that belie great expectations. We are both of us “leathered up,” as she put it, spare civvies in a Dulce & Gabana shoulder bag her mother bought as a surreptitious divorce present, a way of letting Tessa know things were only looking up with the deadweight dad out of the picture. I have mine stashed in the flat panel of the back of my jacket. The screwed-on plates of the stylised zed, now in gold, on advice from my new publicist, mist over with the cold, but I don’t feel it and Tessa tells me it’s the same for her. We are built to withstand such lesser things. We are in our environment.
“You know, when I was a child –”
“A child who knew I was Zephyr,” I say.
“Yes,” Windsong slowly exhales. “When I was a child, when I was eight or something, I went through a long patch thinking you were gonna leave us.”
“You must find this ironic.”
“Dad,” she fumes.
“Let’s practise,” I reply. “Zephyr, remember?”
“Okay.”
“Why did you think I was going to leave?” I relent and ask. “Because I was Zephyr?”
“No,” Windsong replies. “You know I said it was never a conscious thing, understanding you were Zephyr. It’s only the past few years, you know, that I was hiding from mum that I knew.”
“Just as well,” I say. “Being a kid, knowing that sort of thing? I dunno.” In my head I imagine a quick thousand-odd scenarios where my secret ID could’ve been compromised. Most of them are during the school Christmas concert.
“It’s not a good thing,” I say at last. “A kid could spent their life worrying I wouldn’t come home, some of the things I’ve done.”
Windsong bites her lip and says nothing. A light breeze stirs and I know it is my baby weather-controller testing out her powers, flexing her muscles, so to speak, now we are far away from prying eyes. My other super sense – the one attuned to my role as a parent – tells me I have stifled whatever point she was trying to make. I snap my mouth shut and contemplate for perhaps the hundredth time this morning that having a split life really is more than just a very obvious metaphor. I fear what a psychiatrist would think, observing that I could be such very different people with and without the mask. Tessa desperately needs training if she is going to persist in flying out her bedroom window at night looking to thwart bad guys. So ironic that we’re finally here, it’s Zephyr-her-dad she needs more than anything.
So I peel off the mask. The spirit gum leaves gunky pores, but no actual telltale residue. If there’s someone gunning for me with a telephoto lens then I’m about fucked, right about now, though in all likelihood its just us and the seals down on the rocks. The air is cold enough it seems to congeal in the swirls and eddies Tessa makes rise up from the damp and silent earth, brief glimpses of shapes appearing and disappearing in the mist.
“Is that you doing that?”
“Yeah,” she says, seemingly as astounded as I. “Never tried before. Hell, I don’t even think I’ve been out in the cold like this with my, you know, powers before. I just wondered if it could be done and, well, there you are.”
“Not sure it has a combat application,” I grin.
She looks up and notices for the first time I have demasked. Her face contorts with caution, but she says nothing.
“You were going to tell me why you worried I would leave,” I say softly.
“Because of me.” The voice is small, the gaze turned away. Tessa removes her own mask and dabs at a sudden tear that has come from nowhere.
“You?” I give half a laugh of surprise, confusion, affection. “You? Baby, half the things I did, back in those days at least, I did because of you. I wanted my little girl to be proud. It was one of the frustrations of my life that I couldn’t share this with you. I’m glad those days are behind us.”
“Even if it means I have powers?”
“Yeah,” I shrug, surrendering to the observation.
I’m still not thrilled to see Tessa going into the wrong side of the family business. Judging by the chauffeured town car that comes and drops her off for her twice weekly visit, my wife Beth made the better call when it comes to professions. We shared an interest in the law initially – her as a student and later practitioner, and me as a guy who dresses up in gaudy outfits and beats on villains – and that wore thin over time.
Windsong replaces her mask the same way I do – it’s one of mine, after all – two fingers pressing it in place either side of her brow. The transformation into young adult is miraculously complete. Last time I glimpsed her on the NBN news I instinctively checked out her cans, her stocky childhood legs fast thinning out and hope not for any starvation diet. Although I am in good health – miraculously so, given the events of the past month – my own obsolescence is dawning on me the more I am confronted by my replacement.
“I used to think you would resent me,” Windsong says at last. The words tumble free in a rush that I recognise from my own habits, it’s a sudden confession. Her face is turned away so I can’t see if her masked eyes still water.
“Why?”
“Well you’ve got to admit it, dad,” she says and gives a throaty laugh, wiping her face with the back of her fingerless gloves. (They’re a little bit Young Madonna, but I don’t have the heart to tell her. Kids will be kids and I can recall stomping around for a year in Maxine’s high heels pretending to be Gene Simmons at one stage, though admittedly I was a lot younger than fifteen). “No one could blame you if you had masculinity issues.”
“Really?” I say, like this is a revelation to me.
“Well, take a quick check: you grew up thinking your father was a gay sperm donor and you were raised by two dykes. You knocked up your childhood sweetheart when she was, what, eighteen? And rather than be the bread-winner, because of the whole costume thing, it was mum who went on to graduate law school and bring in the income. I thought one day you would be looking after me and something would happen, some urgent call, and you just wouldn’t come back. Like I just didn’t matter.”
There’s silence for a moment, but not for long. It’s not like me to let such feelings linger.
“And did I?”
“No,” and she laughs softly, a commiseratory sound. “No, you always did.”
“Better still, babe, there were plenty of times the police scanner went off and we couldn’t get a sitter or it wasn’t your day at kindy and I just watched it on the news. I just left it, let guys like Mastodon and the Wavemaster and Aquanaut and, that other guy, the guy with the fucking horns. . . .”
“Capricorn.”
“Ha, you know your shit, don’t you?”
Windsong laughs. “Put your mask on old man. You sound like Zephyr again.”|
As I comply, I give a wry smile and watch Windsong roll her arms around like she has any idea of what a warm-up is. We flew here from Atlantic City and I clocked her top speed at just under four hundred mph. Not a dash on mine. Still not a warm-up, to my mind.
“So are you ready to get this show on the road?”
“Yep,” she nods, and starts pulling back her hair from her heart-shaped face. “Combat training 101. That’s what I want, Zephyr.”
“No, honey, that’s what you need,” I reply. “I saw you trash that jewellery store heist on CNN on Tuesday. That guy with the crowbar almost had you.”
Her face pales as she realises she’s been busted.
“You . . . saw that?”
“I sure did,” I say without much of the amusement I feel. “You’re lucky I didn’t tell your mother.”
“She’d only blame my visits with you.”
“Exactly,” I say back. “Why do you think it’s our secret?”
“Thanks, dad,” Windsong says through lowered lashes in the true tones of the abashed teenager she is. “I appreciate it.”
“You owe me,” I reply. “And payback starts here.”
She looks up. There’s fire and determination in her eyes, though unfortunately not a whiff of experience. I make a slow lunge with my hand lit up like a birthday cake and rather than defend herself, Tessa just wrinkles up that cute snub nose of hers and I think she’s about to say “Dad!” in her best irritable teenager voice. And then she’s launching backward courtesy of a significant but low voltage shock.
Windsong lands fifteen feet away and doesn’t move. The idiocy of my grin drips steadily off my face until, with concern, I hurry forward to check I haven’t hurt her too badly.
And walk straight into her attack.
