Julie Myerson

Home life; Pow-Wham, it's a shopping trip to Hero Heaven

Grandma has given Raphael some money to choose his fourth birthday present. His favourite shop - whose name he drops in conversations and mutters into his pillows just before sleep - is a mere 10 minutes' walk from our house.

Grimly heroic-looking, grey and maroon-painted, its slightly dusty window is an action-packed tableau of goodies and baddies, guns and battle-ships, space saucers and monsters. The goodies have cloaks and masks and muscle- bulging chests; the baddies have five o'clock shadows and sinisterly shiny, torpedo-enhanced vehicles.

Ominously, perhaps, it's an adult shop - a lurking ground for young men in nylon tracksuits and frayed loafers, the sort who paint their bedrooms black and know the names of all the old Giant Freak Insect Films, and enjoy a bristling social life on the World Wide Web.

At the front of the shop we have Thunderbirds and Stingray and Captain Scarlet merchandise (figures, postcards and badges), but the back contains many more dubious items: Japanese-made dolls with pointy breasts and glowering faces, androgynous plastic characters with whips and - um, well - thigh boots. And the adult fun doesn't come cheap: a two-and-a-half foot Batman figurine costs as much as a weekly family shop at Sainsbury's.

Nevertheless, a Batman-besotted four-year-old (escorted by responsible adult) has only to set foot on the scuffed lino to be transported to Hero Heaven. The shop is small enough to seem crammed, dimly lit enough to throb with extra-terrestrial life. The smell is Araldite and cigarettes, the mood distinctly Pow-Wham.

"Need any help?" asks the man who - cupping a tattooed hand over a mobile phone mouthpiece - leans suddenly towards us out of the greenish gloom.

"Just looking, thanks," I hold tight on to Raphael who's so rapt he's already backing into things.

"What I need - er, er, er -" the child can hardly get the words out (let alone stay upright) for excitement, "what I need, Mummy, are some baddies to fight my - my Batman figures so - so I can put on a show with heroes and - and - and -"

"We'll look at everything, don't worry," I tell him, "then you'll be able to choose. Just one thing remember, one hero."

"Yes, but if they have Spiderman, perhaps Spiderman can fight Batman baddies and -"

We move along a line of nerdishly intricate kits for Thunderbird machines, staccato Japanese hieroglyphs shrieking off them, and endless dinky tins of Humbrol paints on a wire rack and a pile of dusty 50p Disney characters. A lank-haired, fiftysomething man in pale pink sunglasses is staring up at some imported Catwoman kits on the top shelf.

Raphael sighs with pleasure as he spots The Riddler in his green suit and bowler hat. "But you've already got The Riddler," I remind him.

"But I haven't got this one."

"You have - it's exactly the same, the exact one you've got at home, look." I take the box down so he can see for himself that there's no mystery here, that this is indeed just the standard Riddler he's had on his bedside shelf for six months.

But he folds his arms, scowls. "It's a different box."

"Yours had that box, but we haven't got it any more."

"Where is it, then?"

"I don't know, it probably got thrown away."

He stamps a trainer-clad foot, "But I want a Riddler in a box!"

"Look Raph, we're here to choose something new. Grandma wants to buy you something new, not another one of what you've already got."

His lip is quivering, his face darkening. "All I want is a box."

I look around. The tattooed man is still on the phone.

"Look," I tell Raphael, "We've come here to choose a treat for you, but if you don't stop this right now, we're out of here."

He just looks at me and snarls.

"And I mean it."

He flashes nasty eyes.

"Right," I pick up my bag, "that's it."

"You OK over there?" asks the man.

I assure him we are. "What about Biker Mice?" I ask Raphael. "Would you like another Biker Mouse?"

His face lights up, "Oh yeah, I love Biker Mice. I've got Throttles and Vinnie, but -"

Quickly, I survey the dark shelves. Alien faces peer from glass-fronted cupboards and an eery, dwarf-size doll of Scott Tracy from Thunderbirds grins its clean-shaven plastic jaws at me. It's all getting a bit oppressive actually. "Do you have any Biker Mice?" I ask the man.

"Biker Mice?"

"From Mars."

He scratches his ear and sighs and looks offended, "That's fantasy." He spits it out as though it's the Number of the Beast.

"Fantasy?"

"We don't stock fantasy."

"But -" the Starship Enterprise tilts above my head, suspended from a wire, Captain Scarlet flies in from Cloudbase, "What's all this then?"

He folds his arms, "This is Sci-Fi." Isn't it obvious, his look says, where have you been?

Raphael's totally sold on the idea of more Biker Mice, so kindly agrees to accompany me to Arding & Hobbs. As we saunter down the hill, hand in hand in the brilliant spring sunshine, he asks me, "Why did the Lemon cross the road?"

"I don't know, why did the Lemon cross the road?"

"To get to the hackung hand shop!"

"Do you mean the second-hand shop?"

"Yes."

"Raphy, that's the man with one hand. The Lemon crossed the road to play squash."

"No he didn't." The frown, the don't-mess-with-me folded arms, the face darkening like an electric summer sky.

"You're right," I sigh, because with a four-year-old your pain threshold is pretty low, "he didn't."