Jack Tumor

by Anthony McGowan

  MUM:

  You’ve got to relax more.

  TUMOR:

  THAT’S JUST WHAT I SAID.

  ME:

  Shut up.

  MUM:

  What did you say?

  ME:

  Nothing.

  MUM:

  You told me to shut up. (Tears in her eyes.) You know it’s the one thing we must never do. We must never shut up. We must always be able to speak. (Proper tears now. I’m feeling like a hound.)

  ME:

  I’m sorry, Mum, it wasn’t you. It was the . . . chemistry. Getting me down. Periodic table. Osmium.

  TUMOR:

  ARSIUM.

  ME:

  Shut . . . shut . . . Shuttleworth’s theory of molarity. You know, Mum, science.

  Of course, Mum would understand how science could upset you. She dried her eyes on the towel, and I got an unwelcome eyeful of Mum-tit. It hadn’t been long since Mum stopped wandering about in the nude, so I suppose I should be grateful for small whatevers, but it didn’t mean I had to enjoy it.

  TUMOR: HUBBA HUBBA.

  I didn’t know if it was an ironic hubba or a real one, but either way I didn’t like the implications. I bit my tongue, and Mum went sniffing out, carefully closing the door behind her.

  ME:

  Don’t hubba my mum, even in jest.

  TUMOR:

  HEY, SHE’S WELL HUBBABLE.

  ME:

  No way!

  TUMOR:

  WAY!

  ME:

  Don’t say “way” like that. It doesn’t suit you. You sound too old. It’s Dad-at-the-disco time. And you’re missing the point. If you hub her, and you’re me, then I’m hubbing her, and I don’t want to go there, or anywhere near there, or even in the same galaxy as there.

  TUMOR:

  AS THEY SAY, OEDIPUS SCHMOEDIPUS.

  ME:

  Don’t tell me you’ve read Freud. Why do I have to get an overeducated brain tumor?

  TUMOR:

  I’VE READ EVERYTHING YOU’VE READ. AND WHAT DO YOU EXPECT—I’M A BRAIN TUMOR, NOT SOME DIPSHIT OF A COLON CANCER, OR ONE OF THOSE FRANKLY ILLITERATE GROWTHS ON YOUR PANCREAS.

  ME:

  (Alarmed.) My pancreas?

  TUMOR:

  (Soothing.) PANCREASES IN GENERAL. BUT YOU GET THE POINT. YOU SEE, I’M UP HERE IN THE COMMAND MODULE. I’VE GOT ALL THE PANELS, ALL THE DISPLAYS, ALL THE DATA. EVERYTHING YOU’VE EVER LEARNED IS HERE, EVERYTHING YOU’VE EVER HEARD OR SEEN OR SMELLED, EVEN STUFF YOU’VE FORGOTTEN. IT’S NEVER LOST. THERE’S ALWAYS A NEURON PATHWAY SOMEWHERE WITH THE MEMORY INTACT, A MEMORY OF A MEMORY, IF YOU DIG DEEP ENOUGH. AND DIGGING’S WHAT I DO. IF I NEED SOME DATA, THEN I CAN SEND OFF A TENDRIL, REACH OUT AND TAKE IT.

  ME:

  You sound creepy. Like some kind of monster.

  TUMOR:

  MONSTER? NO, NOT ME. I HAVE A . . . COUSIN, YOU COULD SAY. TERATOMA. IT COMES FROM THE GREEK WORD FOR MONSTER. YOU DON’T WANT ONE OF THOSE. YOU REALLY DON’T WANT ONE OF THOSE. LIKE HAVING A LION LOOSE IN YOUR UNDERPANTS, BUT NOT IN A GOOD WAY. NO, I’M NOT A MONSTER. I’M YOUR FRIEND. I’M YOU. WE’RE US. AND WE’RE TIRED. LET’S HAVE A NAP. MIGHT BE OUT FOR A WHILE. NEED MY BEAUTY SLEEP. NIGHTIE NIGHT.

  ME:

  Nightie ni—Shut up! You’re my imagination. I’m already dreaming.

  Then there was a time without any talking from either of us, but just before I fell asleep, I found myself asking: “What shall I call you?”

  CALL ME? MMMMM, JACK. JACK TUMOR. THAT HAS A RING TO IT. A NICE RING.

  The Great Earth

  Spirit Who Is

  Father Of Us All

  I woke up. I’d been dreaming. The images dissolved before I could get hold of them, but I knew they weren’t nice. For five minutes I didn’t move and just stared straight up at the ceiling. It was still pockmarked with Blu-Tack adhesive. The Blu-Tack had once held lengths of white thread in its gummy grip. The white thread had been attached to the fuselage of—if I remember correctly—a Gloucester Gladiator biplane (very tricky to make with all those struts and that whole extra wing business), locked in mortal combat with a Grumman F-14 Tomcat jet fighter. My plucky biplane had been giving that Tomcat one hell of a seeing to—I suppose that looking on the Americans as the bad guys is one of the things that Mum passed on to me. But the Gladiator and the Tomcat had come down a year before when I realized that it probably wasn’t what a foxy chick would want to look at as she lay on her back and I brought her to heights of ecstasy she’d never dreamed existed.

  Yeah, well.

  I was listening, my whole body tense, like a matchstick you flex between your thumb and forefinger, feeling for the breaking point. I could hear the morning noises: the birds bitching outside; a baby crying somewhere; car doors slamming like it was a contest; Mr. Walsh in the next house having his absurdly long morning piss, the sound clear and loud as a clarinet through the paper-thin side wall we shared. But as for voices in my head, well, there weren’t any. I’d imagined it or dreamed it or imagined I’d dreamed it or dreamed I’d imagined it.

  I mean, a talking brain tumor? Pah!

  It’d be a singing wart next, or a bum-boil doing stand-up comedy.

  I dragged myself out of bed and went and made Mum a cup of rhubarb-and-nettle tea. Or maybe it was alfalfa-andhorseradish. Or dandelion-and-hemp. I should have looked on the box. Anyway, it smelled like something you’d scoop out of a tramp’s belly button.

  “Thanks, love,” she said. “What time is it?”

  “It’s in the morning.”

  Without putting the radio on it was hard to be more precise. None of our clocks told the right time, and some differed by several years, so if you went by the one in the kitchen the Spice Girls were still showing their knickers on Top of the Pops.

  I sat on the duvet next to her and drank my coffee while she sipped her licorice-and-piss infusion.

  “You remember I went to the hospital yesterday, Mum?”

  “Of course I remember, sweetie. What kind of mother do you think I am? I called the doctor afterwards. He told me all about it, and said you had an appointment next week for a scan.”

  That made me feel better. I really did think she’d just forgotten the whole thing: the headaches, the first trip to the GP, the works.

  “I’m a bit frightened, Mum.”

  She always liked it when I said things like that. And I was, a bit. Frightened, I mean.

  She put her arm around me.

  “It’ll be fine.”

  She kissed the top of my head, which ordinarily would have been out of bounds, me being at least twenty centimeters taller than her. But now it felt like the right thing to do.

  She sniffed.

  “When did you last wash your hair?”

  Now, I suppose that’s the kind of question lots of parents ask their teenage kids, with the implied suggestion that now would be a good time to do it, because you stink . It was a bit more complex than that with Mum.

  “Yesterday.”

  She looked disappointed.

  “You know it flushes out the natural oils.”

  “I don’t like the natural oils, Mum. It’s just another name for grease. People take the p— People make fun.”

  “You should be a bit less concerned by what other people think.”

  I hated it when she said that kind of thing. It wasn’t her that was having the piss ripped out of her. And that was probably why I said the stupid thing, because I wanted to get back at her, even though it meant ruining things.

  “I wish Dad was here.”

  Instantly I felt her flesh change, turning from something soft and warm to something cold and hard, as if she were being fossilized at a billion times the usual rate.

  Okay, time for a bit of family history.

  My mum was a political activist, back in the olden days when they still had them. “Activist” maybe isn’t the best word for someone who spent five years staying in one place. She joined some kind of demo outside
a nuclear-missile base back in the middle of the 1980s, and ended up staying there until the Americans decided that the Russians weren’t about to attack on account of the fact that they had nothing to attack with and probably didn’t want to attack anyway, and the base closed down.

  And somehow, despite the fact that it was supposed to be an all-girl peace camp, my mum managed to come out of it holding onto a mewling, puking me, wrapped up in a home-crocheted poncho bedecked with no-nukes badges and stinking of wood smoke.

  She’s never told me who my dad was, but she did love to drone on about everything else that happened—the riots when the local council tried to evict them, the break-in at the base when they spray-painted flowers on nuclear bombers, the solidarity, the singing, the blaming men in general for all the bad stuff in the world. It was obviously the time when my mum felt she was most alive, and when she talks about it her face takes on this glow, and she looks like the stained-glass window in the school chapel, the one with Mary being told by the angel that she’s up the stick, and as far as me knowing who my dad is, the two conceptions were equally miraculous.

  So, she’s quite happy to wax lyrical about the time ten thousand peace marchers held hands around the base, but if I mention how I came to be here, it’s always the fossilization thing.

  “You haven’t got a father,” she said. “Except for the Great Earth Spirit Who Is Father of Us All.”

  “Okay, Mum,” I said, and got up and went to school.

  Hector Brunty:

  Lover and FiGhter

  I got to school thinking about nothing much. My walk had become a lot more boring since I stopped kicking stones. For maybe three years I’d played this game with myself where I’d find a stone and try to dribble it all the way to wherever I was going. Usually school. And then back again. I’m not saying that it would beat strip poker with Uma Upshaw, but it was a hell of a lot better than just mooching along, not kicking a stone. And the game had its complexities. I used to award myself points for style, say for bouncing the stone off a wall in such a way that it would roll back to me and I could take it on again without breaking stride. And for kicking it over or around obstacles. And for getting it across the road in one long curving punt. And there were bonus points for using a tricky stone, larger than the average, say, or smaller, or one with an especially irregular shape. You get the idea.

  But then a couple of months ago I was forced to realize that it was another of the things (like having model aeroplanes hanging from your ceiling) that were unlikely to appeal to girls. This lesson was administered when I kicked my stone (a piece of angular flint, difficult to control, so I began with fifty bonus points) into the aforementioned Uma Upshaw’s heel.

  Now, Uma Upshaw is nothing like the other girls in our year. For a start, she looks about nineteen years old, and I mean all over. She’s got black hair and red lips, and boy does she fill her school blouse. And even her initials, UU, look like two perfect bra-busters. I’m not quite as convinced as some of the other kids about her features—nose, eyes, ears, and stuff—which to me look undistinguished, but the overall package is undoubtedly phenomenal.

  So Uma Upshaw turned around slowly, after my stone had scuffed into the back of her shoe (black, pointy, with a forbidden high heel). I’m not sure she’d ever noticed me before, but now she was doing some noticing, sadly not the good noticing. This was bad noticing. Uma was looking at me the way a lioness looks at a warthog—like I was something ugly, but she just might eat me anyway.

  “Did you do that?” Her voice was flat, emotionless, haughty. Like some kind of death goddess, although that makes her sound a bit too Goth, and she isn’t one of those. (We have three Goths in our school and, like all their ilk, they have very thin legs and very long fingers and their acne bubbles away under their face paint, and they are gentle creatures, but they play no part in this story and I won’t mention them again.)

  “What?”

  So why was it right then that my voice, which was perfectly well broken, decided to come out like a castrated choirboy? Compared to Uma I sounded, and felt, about fifteen centimeters tall, although we’re really the same height, at least when she isn’t wearing the heels.

  “You heard.”

  Now, Uma isn’t one of the tough girls. She’s not frightening the way Susan Sutcliffe is frightening. Susan Sutcliffe fights with razor blades. Susan Sutcliffe will happily suck your eyeball out and piss in the socket.

  Uma’s scary in another way. A way that is all to do with the knowledge that she has something everyone wants, and the supplementary knowledge that you definitely don’t have anything that she wants.

  “Sorry.”

  My voice had gone even higher. I could probably use that squeak for echolocation, like a bat.

  She looked for a second like she was going to continue the discussion, but then her dignity stepped in and told her that even talking to the kind of kid who kicked stones along the street for a living and squeaked like a bat was damaging her cool. And so she turned away again without so much as a consoling up yours, and never mind a put your head between these babies and flub away.

  So that’s why I stopped with the stone-kicking, and let no man say that I am deaf to the stern tutor that we call Experience.

  I said I got to school not thinking about much, but that was an effort. I knew that if I relaxed I was going to be thinking about the thing in my head. The voice. And the thing that owned the voice.

  “ ‘Sup, Heck?”

  It was Stanislaw. I’d got through the gates without incident. The sentinels there were doing more of the staring-at-the-painting-on-the-social-club-wall thing, but this time I didn’t stare with them.

  “Oh, hi, Stan. Nothing much. Still stuck in the same place. Gets frustrating.”

  We began to walk across the red-clay playing field, heading towards the school buildings. A drizzle was falling, although it was so fine it seemed to hang about in the air, floating up as much as it fell down. But some at least had reached ground level and turned the red-clay pitch into meat paste. I could feel it gently sucking at the soles of my shoes.

  As I may previously have intimated, I hated my shoes. Mum got them from a special catalogue and they were made from knotted tree vines and carob seeds. Not really, but you get the idea. They were rubbish at keeping the wet out, but truly excellent at making me look stupid.

  “I’ve told you, you can’t get further without a power-up. You think you’re wasting time stopping, that you should just plow on, but you’ve got to collect those energy packs or you’ll never get out of that place. Power-ups are the key. You’ve got to be thinking ahead. Speculate to accumulate.”

  Stan was a fast talker, once he got going.

  “Yeah, yeah, but when you stop, they get you.”

  And then they got him. I didn’t even see them coming. The first I knew was that someone had Stan in a headlock.

  It was Sean Johnson.

  Johnson wasn’t one of the evil kids. He was too thick to be evil. In fact, on his own, he was an affable, harmless character, if a bit smelly. He was led astray by the Evil Ones, who told him what to do. There was an Evil One with him now, Chris Tierney, telling him what to do.

  “Hold him, Sean,” said Tierney, a bit superfluously, as that’s exactly what Sean was doing. Tierney was small—not that much taller than Stan—and neat and quick. He dipped his fingers into Stan’s pockets, looking for his money. This happened sometimes in our school.

  Stan looked at me, his eyes wide and frightened. I felt sick, helpless. My legs wouldn’t work. Tierney turned around, following Stan’s line of sight.

  “What you looking at?” he said matter-of-factly, as if he was asking the time.

  My mouth opened, but nothing came out. Tierney waited patiently.

  “Kissy, kissy, kissy, ooooooo, baby.”

  Flaherty had appeared out of nowhere. He was writhing around, fondling himself, making out that Tierney and Stan were engaged in a passionate embrace.

  It wa
s very funny.

  If you weren’t Tierney.

  Kids started to snigger. It was brilliant, but it didn’t last. Flaherty, bored already, whirled away to find mischief elsewhere. But the spell had been broken and I found that I could speak.

  “Why don’t you leave him alone?” I managed, finally. It was about as brave as I got. It had all the impact of a butterfly landing on a machine gun.

  Tierney paused, his hands still in Stan’s pockets. I stared back at him, or rather at the air a meter or so above his head, and even that proved a bit too much for me and I felt my eyelid begin to twitch. I became aware of the watching kids, of the shapes around us. Tierney took his hands out of Stan’s pockets and swaggered over, a narrow grin on his weaselly face.

  “Leave him alone,” he said, mimicking me, but making me sound more of a poof. He was trying to make up for the Flaherty embarrassment. Then he stopped smiling. “You gonna make me?”

  “Just leave it out, will you, Tierney?”

  I was trying not to sound too aggressive, trying to keep things sane. Appealing to the profound wells of love and gentleness in Tierney’s soul. Trying not to run away crying like a baby.

  “Or what? You’ll tell your dad? Oh, wait, you haven’t got one, have you? ”

  Oscar Wilde, eat your heart out.

  Then Tierney pushed me firmly in the chest. I fell over. Another of the Tierney gang had knelt on all fours behind me. It turned the whole confrontation back into a comedy, with me this time as the butt. People were laughing. Some pink-flamingo girls turned sneeringly away. Amanda Something, the strawberry girl, was there again, standing as ever apart from the group. She didn’t turn away, but looked at me, sprawling like a fool on the slimy ground. My humiliation swamped any anger I might have felt about what Tierney had said.