Did anyone ask me if I wanted this? No, they bloody well didn’t. And if they had, I’d have said to them, you can keep it mate. Not interested. I’ve got more important things in my life. They keep ringing me up, summoning me to shady destinations, telling me what I should and shouldn’t be doing. All very well, I say, but I’ve got responsibilities. Then they start banging on about my responsibility to society. Society, I say? What responsibility to society? I pay tax and National Insurance, I bring up my kids to be nice. I do the rest when I can. I’m forty-two for God’s sake. It’s not just about me. 

They don’t ever threaten me, of course. They don’t dare.

It was all very simple when it happened. There was no conspiracy, no big plan, nothing amazing. I just cut myself on a syringe that shouldn’t have been where it was. We were on holiday down in Southwold, me, Jen and the kids. It’s lovely there, what with the lighthouse and the Adnams brewery. And the beach. Anyway, it was a lovely sunny day – the Thursday, as it happens – and I really needed a wee, so I said to Jen, look, I’m off to the loo, so why don’t you stay here and I’ll come back with some ice creams. The kids were fine, so I went on my own. 

I was wearing flip flops, and I often think that if I’d have been wearing something more substantial I’d have avoided all of this. There’s a lot to be said for Birkenstock, aside from what it does for your arches. I was walking along and there was this sharp pain in my right foot, between my first two toes. I thought it was a piece of shell, but when I looked down I saw the needle stuck in there. 

It’s hard to describe how it was. I felt sort of light headed and unreal. It’s that thing where you think, this isn’t really happening. It can’t be. It’s a bit like when you have a crash in the car. Your adrenalin kicks in and takes you out of it slightly. Nobody else seemed to notice. I pulled the needle out and walked back over to Jen with it and told her what happened, and she got really upset. We both did. She told me to sit down behind the windbreak and she went back over to the spot and told the people around there what had just gone on. The space cleared pretty quickly, I can tell you. Somebody went off to tell the lifeguard, I think. I just sat there, foot bleeding, looking at my kids splashing in the sea, thinking I might have just caught something that could kill me.

At the hospital, they took blood to test. Somebody very nice sat with me and Jen and talked us through things. We were both a bit numb, so we missed a lot of it, but they gave us leaflets and telephone numbers and told us to go to the hospital in Leicester in a few months to have another test. They took the syringe away to test, too. They were lucky they got it. I was all for taking it around various pubs and finding out whose it was. When I wasn’t crying, that is. It all seemed really unfair. And it was, but not how I’d thought. And not in a bad way, like it could have been.

I got poorly. I spent three days off work, sweating and shivering and aching all over. I’d never had that before. Jen started joking about man-flu at first, but when I got a fever and started hallucinating she stopped. She looked after me. Of course, you get paranoid, don’t you? Neither of us really knew much about what could happen, but we never mentioned it to each other. And I got better, of course. And after that – well, nothing really. I just felt the same.

Apart from being able to fly. Jen noticed it first. A couple of weeks later, she started getting a bit distant from me. I thought it was down to the tests and all that, so I asked her about it and she went mad and shouted and went out to drop the kids off at school. It played on my mind all day at work, but we spoke about it in the evening. She said she woke up cold in the night because I was nicking the quilt, so she went to pull it back over to her side but then she realised that I wasn’t there next to her, I was floating a foot or two off the bed. I thought she was having me on, but she’s pretty straightforward and she said, no, you were floating a foot or two off the bed, for sure. Couldn’t you have been dreaming, I said? Could have been, she said, but then the next morning she said no, she definitely hadn’t been dreaming it because the same thing had happened again.

Well, what do you say about that? Who do you talk to? And it got worse. I’d become invisible a couple of times, too, which she said freaked her out even more. I don’t blame her. Look, I said, we’re in this together, whatever it is. Something strange is happening, but we’ve got to be strong. We were both pretty scared, but at least we had each other. We kind of got used to it, kind of ignored it as best we could.

I went for my next set of blood tests at the Infirmary, and I was met by a consultant in a very sharp suit who told me he’d be looking after me. He filled up two or three bottles with the dark red stuff and asked me how I was doing. I said fine. He said, anything – unusual? He said it like that, with a pause. How do you mean, I said? He said, how have you been? I said, I’ve had a bit of a cold. And my wife reckons I float up off the bed and turn invisible in my sleep. I hadn’t meant to say that, but it popped into my head and I thought if I told him it might make it easier to deal with. Straight after I’d said it I regretted it and thought he was going to think I’d gone bananas. But he didn’t. I see, he said. Very interesting. He was looking at me and frowning.

Anyway, that was that. My tests came back clear and we thought that was the end of it. How could it have been, though? I was starting to worry about floating away at work or just vanishing in front of somebody’s eyes. It was kind of manageable at home when I didn’t know anything about it. The kids were old enough to be sleeping through and the weather wasn’t too cold yet. But I had this funny feeling I was being watched.

It turns out I was right. Things came to a bit of a head at home when I had a bad dream and shot some kind of energy bolt through the ceiling and up out through the roof. Jen wasn’t happy about that, and it woke the kids up too. They were really upset and after we managed to get them back to sleep, with strict instructions not to go into our room if they woke up again, we went downstairs to talk it through. I got the sofabed out and Jen put the kettle on. I was going back into the kitchen to suggest that I get the tent and sleep in the garden because that would actually be safer, when I heard voices. 

I presumed it was the neighbours, but it was a man and a woman in smart casual gear. They had given Jen a manila folder and were talking to her. When I came into the kitchen they all stopped and looked at me. Jen put her hand over her mouth. I asked what was going on and who were they? They said I should go with them, but I said I didn’t want to. Jen came over to me and gently placed her hand on my arm. She didn’t need to say anything. I held her and she held me.

They took me in a new car to Stoughton airport. From there they put me in a helicopter and we flew back east to a small island off the coast of Norfolk. They were military. I was told to sign the Official Secrets Act. I said I wasn’t keen, and the bloke looked at me like he was waiting to see what I’d do, then he smiled and said we could do that later. They were all really nice to me. They said they wanted to test me in my sleep and they took me to a laboratory and connected all these wires to my head and chest and arms. I didn’t mind, I’d seen stuff like that on the telly or in films. The bed was comfortable, even if the windows into the next room were a bit off-putting. 

The next morning when I woke up, I felt better than I had in weeks. It was like all my worries had gone. Interestingly, so were the wires and the researchers. Everything was quiet. I looked around the room, got up and found my clothes. Once I was dressed I tried the door, but it was locked. 

No-one came when I shouted. I didn’t know what to do. It could be another test, I thought. I looked around for a phone or something, but there wasn’t anything. I waited a bit, then I tried the door again. Well, I had visions of having been locked up, of being trapped. It got me really stressed. I could feel my heart pounding. Suddenly something snapped. It was like the last few months just bubbled up inside me and this anger came over me. Something went bang inside. Then there was a real bang outside. The real one was much louder. Things went blank.

When I came to, I realised I was hovering cruciform twenty feet above the ground with smoking rubble below me. My body was invisible, but blue smoke clung and wrapped around me, outlining my shape. I was naked, which was a bit embarrassing. There was a small crowd of people coming out of the other buildings and they looked really scared. 

I realised that I had to make some quick decisions. This was partly going to be about image. A couple of soldiers arrived below. One man spoke to the soldiers. They raised their guns and aimed at me. I’m not having that, I thought, and reached out a hand. I made a twisting motion in the air and the guns were wrenched out of their hands and crushed. Now that, I thought, is mint. The man who had spoken to the soldiers was smiling. Everyone else seemed to be either screaming or running or both.

I came down eventually, and we got things sorted out. The people who were in the crowd all worked on the island, so they weren’t going to say anything. And I spent the next few weeks trying out my new powers with their help. It seems I was pretty much a natural. I soon learned to control what I was doing. I could fly really fast, become invisible at will, use telekinesis or fire a burst of energy that was powerful to knock out whatever they put in front of me. On top of all that, there was the blue smoke thing that happened when I did more than one of them at once, so that was what they ended up calling me. Blue Smoke. The problem with it, and I knew Jen wouldn’t be too keen either, was the fact it vaporised my clothes. No matter how I did it, that always happened. They said they had material that could stand extreme pressure, re-entry to the atmosphere or zero degrees Kelvin. None of it was any use in preventing what I thought must be the slightly disturbing sight of a naked, middle-aged bloke hanging in mid-air.

The real problem, though, came when I’d had enough of messing about. I said I wanted to go home now. It was one morning when I was talking to General Jones. He was the bloke who’d told the soldiers to shoot at me. He was very keen that I understood he wasn’t telling them to shoot me, just to shoot at me. I said I’d had a lovely time and the people were really nice, but I wanted to go home now. I’d spoken to Jen and the kids on the phone a lot, although obviously I couldn’t tell them everything, but I was missing them and I wanted to get back to normal life.

He looked a bit shocked. Normal life, he said? What do you mean? I said, exactly that. But what about your powers, he said? What about them, I said? And that’s when he started telling me about using my powers for the good of society. It took a few seconds for that to sink in. Look, I said, this isn’t the comics. What do you expect me to do, get a shortwave radio or a big red telephone in the living room? I’ve got a life mate, and I’m very happy with it thanks. I’m not some single younger bloke with time on his hands and an over-developed sense of my own self-worth. I’ve got kids and a happy marriage. I’ll do what I can when I choose to, but I’ve got priorities, and I’m not having some government department telling me to go here or there and sort out their mess, no questions asked. 

I was feeling quite fired up, and looking back, I can see why he was looking a bit scared. O-of course, he said. W-whatever you want. Thank you, I said, I’m going back to my room to pack. And I did.

It was smashing getting home. Jen and the kids were there with cake, and the kids had made a card saying ‘Glad your beter Daddy’, which was nice. Of course, it seems I won’t get better as such. That’s taken some getting used to for both of us. And it’s not like I don’t ever do anything to help people, I just have to try and keep it quiet. One public Blue Smoke moment and I’ll never be able to show my face down the pub again. 

The government keep pestering me. So do the army and the police. It’s a right pain, I can tell you. I go to the meetings when I can – it’s a mixture of dark multi-storey car parks, benches next to boating lakes and boring offices – and they always come out with the same thing, but I’m not having it. They only go so far, because they know it’s no use trying anything on me. Like I said, I’m too powerful. You’ll just have to trust me, I say, and if you go anywhere near my family I’ll have you. Well, you do what you can, don’t you? I still pay my tax. Later today, we’re off to the zoo. Should be nice.