Jack Tumor

by Anthony McGowan

  JACK:

  SLAP THIS JOKER DOWN.

  ME:

  Bloody hell, Smurf. I mean, what do you plan to do? You can’t ask her out, can you?

  SMURF:

  Why not? No, I can’t. Do you think I’d have a chance? Could you maybe ask one of her friends? I mean, ask them if she likes me?

  ME:

  Are you kidding? Those girls are like African hunting dogs. Is there no one else? You know, someone more . . . someone nicer? The gerbil girl? If she didn’t like you she wouldn’t have shared your test tube.

  SMURF:

  Bunsen burner.

  He filled the words “Bunsen” and “burner” with a level of anguish that the great Otto Bunsen could never have imagined would be associated with his epoch-making invention. (I know, by the way, that the Bunsen burner was really developed by Robert Bunsen, but as he was a German and Robert sounds about as German as Seamus, I think he ought to be renamed Otto. Plus Otto is a slightly funny name, and Robert isn’t funny at all.)

  But I understood what Smurf meant. It didn’t seem fair that the best we could hope for was a timid girl with nuts in her cheeks and a furry tail. And yeah, I realize it was just as bad for her, with her hopes set no higher than a big-lipped bendy boffin like Smurf, even if he would probably make the world’s greatest boyfriend in terms of being nice to you and not messing about behind your back.

  And those were the kinds of thoughts we were both still lost in when Gonad and Stan joined us. Well, with me there was one other thought, but it didn’t really belong to me. It came in the voice of Jack Tumor, and it said:

  SHE’S MINE.

  The Naked

  Lunch

  Gonad peeled back the white bread from his sandwich.

  “Mmm, chopped pork,” he said. “I’m partial to chopped pork.”

  It was what he always said. A kind of catchphrase, except not funny. Except that it had become kind of funny because he said it so much and because it wasn’t really funny.

  “What you got, Stan?”

  “Soup.”

  Stan often brought in a flask of soup. It was usually chicken noodle, but not often enough to make it funny, and sometimes he had oxtail, and sometimes it wasn’t soup at all but a surprise sausage roll.

  Smurf opened his Tupperware and wordlessly showed off a slice of quiche with a dainty little garnish of lettuce, ruffled like a lace collar. There was no spirit of triumphalism in this. Simon’s mother loved him. Perhaps too much. On the upside you could be pretty sure that Smurf’s loving mother had secreted a tasty treat—a Wagon Wheel, say, or a Cadbury’s Chocolate Roll— somewhere about his person. Today he had a Snickers, which was top of the range, but not, obviously, of interest to me.

  Stan had been right about my nut allergy. I hadn’t always had it, and I blame it on the fact that, because of Mum, nuts were about the commonest thing in my diet throughout my formative years. Nut roasts, nut cutlets; nuts fried, nuts boiled, nuts mashed. Brazil, cashew, pea, hazel, almond, macadamia, wal, you name it. Then, in Year Seven, I was eating a dry-roasted peanut when my throat started to itch, and then my eyes watered, and people started to stare at me, and Stan said that I’d gone a funny color, and I coughed up the fatal peanut, and loads of kids were around me laughing and pointing, and I had to go to the sick bay, and from then on nuts were out and I envied Simon his Snickers bar not one bit.

  They all looked towards me. My lunchbox was feared among the cognoscenti. For lunch I always had whatever we’d eaten the night before, sometimes in sandwich form (sliced lentil bake on wholewheat, anyone?), sometimes neat (e.g., cold alfalfa pizza). Of course, there was always plenty left over from last night, because it was horrible even then. Served frigid and desiccated, calcified into strange shapes, it took some swallowing.

  And then I realized that, in fact, today I had nothing. Not a beansprout, not a falafel, not a chickpea. I had completely forgotten to scrape out last night’s slop. For no good reason I found this shaming.

  “Ate it already,” I said.

  Stan looked at me strangely, his eyes growing narrow. And then I said something else. It came out in a mumbling sort of way, but with an edge that made it completely understandable.

  I said: “LOSERS.”

  “What?” Smurf was chewing. Unlike Gonad, he was a polite chewer and you hardly ever saw what was in there.

  I looked back at them, stuck again for words.

  “Nothing.”

  “You said something.”

  That was Gonad. He sounded a bit touchy.

  ME:

  I just said “loofahs.”

  GONAD:

  What’s a loofah?

  ME:

  For crapping in.

  No one laughed. I don’t know why. We laughed at stuff every day that wasn’t funny.

  SMURF:

  It’s one of those long scratchy things for washing your back. I think it’s the inside of something. My mum uses one for exfoliating.

  GONAD:

  Isn’t that what you do to trees? You know, Agent Orange and all that. The Americans in Vietnam. So the geeks had nowhere to hide.

  ME:

  Gooks. They called them gooks.

  GONAD:

  Whatever.

  SMURF:

  Yeah, but girls do it too.

  ME:

  What?

  SMURF:

  Exfoliating.

  GONAD:

  So what have girls and trees got in common? I mean, so the same thing can happen to them?

  ME:

  Well, if it’s a melon tree, they both have melons.

  STAN:

  Melons don’t grow on trees.

  GONAD:

  Course they do. All fruit grows on trees.

  SMURF:

  Strawberries don’t. Nor melons.

  GONAD:

  So where do they grow?

  STAN:

  Just sort of on the ground, kind of lying there.

  GONAD:

  Doesn’t seem very likely.

  STAN:

  I think we’re drifting off the point.

  SMURF:

  Which was?

  ME:

  What is it that girls and trees both have in common so that they can both do this “exfoliating” thing?

  STAN:

  Actually, that wasn’t the point.

  SMURF:

  What was it then?

  STAN:

  The point was why Hector called us a bunch of losers.

  And suddenly our little alcove, our refuge, our safe haven, had become a fraction colder. They were all looking at me strangely now.

  NEVER SEEN SUCH A WHEY-FACED CROWD OF MISBEGOTTEN LOSERS.

  This time it didn’t come out. This time it was all safely inside. But that didn’t mean that I was comfortable with it.

  DITCH THEM.

  I blinked, trying to concentrate on the three on the outside, closing off the one within.

  “I wasn’t talking about you. I meant Tierney and that lot. I was—what do you call it?—musing.”

  There was a little pause while the four of us all sort of mused together, but then in an entirely new tone, Gonad said, “Talk of the devil,” and I looked where he had glanced and saw Tierney and three others coming our way.

  The Raid

  One was Johnson; one was a hollow-eyed lanky kid called Murdo, who had always scared the hell out of me on the solid enough grounds that he was hellishly scary; and the other one didn’t have a name or at least not one that I knew. He was a skin-head, so pale he looked albino, and you could see the veins underneath his skin, and he had the festering scabs of a glue-sniffer around his mouth and nose.

  A good rule of thumb is: Don’t mess with glue-sniffers.

  There were sores and scabs all over his ears as well, where his attempts at home piercing had gone wrong.

  Another good rule of thumb is: Don’t mess with people who do their own body-piercing.

  Now, all this meant that th
is No-Name character should have been as scary as Murdo, but for some reason he wasn’t. He was pathetic.

  HE’S THE ONE.

  Uh?

  HE’S THE ONE.

  What?

  THE ONE TO TARGET.

  Target?

  THIS TIME.

  Time?

  ALWAYS FIND THE WEAK ONE. OH YES.

  Gonad, Stan, and Smurf were hunkering down, trying to sink into the concrete. In fact, it was more telescopic than that, because their heads had sunk into their necks and their necks into their shoulders and their shoulders into their chests and their chests into their arses and their arses into the hard surface underneath.

  This kind of thing happened about one in every six lunchtimes, or slightly over 15 percent of the time, which may not sound like much, but it was enough to take any fun out of it. They’d find us here, steal our food, slap our heads, take the piss.

  Sometimes they’d almost act as if we were just messing about together, having a laugh. But then it would turn, just as you found yourself smiling at some dumb thing Johnson had said, or at one of Tierney’s sly put-downs. And then you’d get stamped on. And that made it worse, because they’d managed to suck you in, so you felt dirty as well as sore (and hungry).

  I don’t know why, but this time I didn’t join my friends in shrinking into the concrete. Something to do with what was happening inside my head, I expect. I wasn’t looking at Tierney, but at the No-Name scab boy. I felt kind of funny. Kind of tingly.

  No, should try harder than that.

  What I felt was a faint pinpricking across my shoulders, as if sharp claws were delicately running over my skin, and there was a tension at the base of my skull, and a humming in my ears like the sound you hear from power lines, and a smell like bitter almonds, not unlike the smell I’d got before I fainted, I mean passed out. These were all new sensations to me and I think that overall I’d have to say that they were pleasant, that they were exciting.

  “Hey, it’s bummers’ corner,” said Tierney.

  “Give us a sandwich,” said Johnson, wading in, all elbows and ammonia.

  “And I’ll have that,” said Murdo, taking a Wagon Wheel from Gonad.

  Smurf had dropped his Snickers bar in the middle of us. Instead of taking it, Tierney pushed through and stamped on it, grinding the chocolate, caramel, nougat, and nuts into the concrete.

  And then the one without a name leaned across me, stretching out his hand to reach for Stan’s thermos of soup.

  NOW, said Jack, and I don’t know if he was saying it to me or to himself. I didn’t have any control over what came next. I grabbed No-Name’s wrist with my right hand and stood up, twisting his arm as I rose. With my left hand I took the thermos from Stan’s unresisting fingers. I wrenched No-Name’s arm behind his back, and then I forced him down onto his knees, right in the middle of the half-circle formed by our group.

  I couldn’t see Johnson, Tierney, or Murdo, but somehow I knew that they were too stunned to do anything, for now at least. Stunned, I mean, because this sort of thing never happened. Not even nearly. The No-Name kid was sort of mumbling and murmuring, coming out with the half-formed cries of anguish that I’d got used to hearing from us lot.

  I still didn’t have any control over what was going on, but something in me was liking this, even if in another part of my brain I knew I was going to pay for it when the rest of Tierney’s mob got over their surprise. But now I was pushing No-Name’s head forwards, and I was pouring the hot chicken-noodle soup down the back of his neck. I could see the black ring of grime around the inside of his collar, and I got a smell of sweat and piss before it was drowned out by the soup smell.

  And now No-Name was crying and squirming, but he couldn’t squirm too much because I had his arm twisted behind his back. The soup was hot but not scalding, so I knew I wasn’t going to burn him badly or do any serious damage, but anyway, like I said, it wasn’t up to me. Stopping, I mean.

  And then I looked at the faces of my friends. Gonad was blank, with his mouth open. Smurf looked frightened, as if he was next, as if I was going to go and twist his arm behind his back and then pour soup down his neck.

  But Stan.

  Stan looked at me like I was something he’d found stuck to his shoe.

  And then I heard a sound from behind me, and I thought I was going to get it from the others, but when I looked around at them, I saw that Tierney had this kind of smirk on his face, and he was giggling, and then the others joined in with the giggling, which soon turned into full-on laughter, and then suddenly Tierney’s face went hard again and you could see the line of his jaw emerging out from the smooth skin, and I thought, right, now this really is it, because that was a pattern we all knew, the laughter turning hard, I mean. And Tierney moved to one side and pulled back his leg and let fly with a kick, but it wasn’t aimed at me, or any of us, but at No-Name, and he took it in the guts, and that made me let go of his arm, and he sank down to the cold concrete and looked at me, and the look wasn’t what I expected, some sort of mixture of hate and fear, but it was a look of betrayal, as though I’d failed in some duty that I owed him. And then Tierney kicked him again in the guts and he rolled into a ball. Then Tierney said, “C’mon,” and walked away, and Johnson and Murdo followed him.

  BYE-BYE.

  Now this all got a bit embarrassing. No-Name was on the ground, and I think he was crying, but without any sound coming out. I didn’t know where to look, or what to do with my face. Whenever one of us took a spanking, there were established policies in place. You didn’t make a big fuss about it, because that made them feel worse.

  It was Stan who put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and said, “Are you okay, Neil?”

  So that was his name. There seemed to be no end to the stuff Stan knew. Not that Neil appreciated Stan’s concern. He gave a violent shrug, made some kind of animal noise, and got up and scuttled away, like a wounded beast escaping into the under-growth.

  “Have you been going to judo lessons or something?” asked Smurf.

  There was a kind of admiration in his voice, but it was mixed up with something else.

  “No. But when I saw his arm stretching out like that, it just seemed like the thing to do.”

  “You didn’t have to pour my soup down his back.” That was Stan, of course.

  “Screw it, Stan, I was trying to help. If I hadn’t grabbed him he’d have had your soup, and probably spat it out in your face. Look,” I continued, taking a handful of change out of my blazer pocket, “here’s some cash. Go and buy something at the snack shop.”

  “I don’t care about the soup,” he said, and all of his twitches were up and running together. “There’s something different . . . Something’s got into you.”

  The other two were looking at us, not knowing what to think. Hell, I didn’t know what to think. But I did know I was annoyed at Stan, and I still had a sort of afterglow from that pleasant tingle, and a layer of something else—the feeling you get when you hurt someone, and they haven’t hurt you—and I’m sorry to say that it wasn’t at all a bad feeling, although I knew it should have been.

  And then some other kids came over—the other nerds and half-nerds and quarter-nerds with whom we sometimes spoke, kids who had their own sandwich nooks and niches around the playground—and there was much back-slapping, and “Well done, Brunty,” and that sort of thing, and Gonad and Smurf got caught up with that, because I’d become a bit of a hero and everyone wants to be on the side of the hero. But I kept looking at Stan, who wasn’t getting involved at all, and the last I saw of him was his back as he went off to the lunchtime chess club, and his back spoke louder than all the slaps and smiles and compliments of the kids around me.

  An Act

  of Gallantry

  The second period that afternoon was physics. There were four science labs on the third floor, two for chemistry and two for physics, and you sat on high stools at benches, and there were Bunsen burners on the benches, but that was
about it for equipment. With chemistry we sometimes got to make stuff, mixing up chemicals in test tubes, but physics was all chalk and talk, not that I minded, because I was good at it, and I could take it all in and I liked the equations.

  Physics was taught by Mr. Curlew, who was neither nice nor nasty, giving the impression that all he wanted was to get through each day with as little damage as possible. He wasn’t a bad teacher, but he’d given up hope, probably back sometime in the seventies. I only ever once saw him animated, and that was when he was showing us some mercury he kept in a vial in his pocket. He poured it out into his leathery old palm and then let it run from one hand to the other like a living thing. Suddenly his face, usually a motionless collection of folds and flaps, caught the flame of life from the darting, flowing mercury, and his yellow eyes filled with delight. But then the mercury was put away, and with it the light in his eyes, and out came the chalk.

  So anyway, the two physics labs are at the end of the corridor, and I was lining up outside one ready to go in when things started to happen. The kids began to file out of the other room, with the usual bustle, and then Mr. McHale began to shout.

  Mr. McHale was one of the popular teachers. He was a fierce-looking red-faced Scotsman who wore a very odd safari suit every day to school and was sometimes known to smell of drink in the afternoons, but unlike Curlew, he hadn’t lost his will to live, and so he still fought to get knowledge into us, and was exasperated when he failed and genuinely exultant when he succeeded. But all this was at a price, hence the smelling of drink and the occasional fits of madness.

  Like now.

  BANG!

  We all jumped. The door to McHale’s room had been slammed shut with a noise like a detonating shell. The kids who’d just come out spun around, and those of us waiting to go in all leaped into the air.