Jack Tumor

by Anthony McGowan

FINISHED?

  “Yeah, sorry, got a bit carried away there.”

  NO, I WON’T BE BEAMING OUT, AND I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN THAT OUR TIME IS LIMITED. IT’S WHY I KEEP TRYING TO GET YOU TO FIND SOMEONE SUITABLE TO CONTINUE THE LINE.

  “Well, maybe I have.”

  SHE DOESN’T COUNT.

  “She counts. And I’ve told you I don’t care about the line. And while we’re on the subject of continuing the line, you do realize, don’t you, that you’re not the only one trying to kill me? That psycho Tierney’s probably going to thwang me with a crossbow on Monday. Through the throat, like that dog.”

  I did a quick mime of someone getting it in the neck, adding a pretty good squelching-thud sound effect.

  NO, HE ISN’T.

  “Really?” Dripping skepticism.

  REALLY. WE’RE GOING TO TAKE THAT MOTHER DOWN.

  That made me laugh.

  “How, exactly? He may be a runt, but he’s a better fighter than me. And that’s before we even get to his gang. What am I going to do, knock him out with quadratic equations?”

  I’VE GOT A PLAN.

  “A plan? What plan?”

  LOOK, YOU THINK I’VE JUST BEEN SITTING BACK HERE WITH MY FEET UP? I’VE BEEN WORKING ON THIS. I’VE BEEN PLAYING THROUGH SOME OLD TAPES BACK HERE, AND IT TURNS OUT, IF I AM CORRECT, AND, LET’S FACE IT, I AM, THAT TIERNEY HAS A WEAKNESS, AN ACHILLES’ HEEL.

  And then Jack Tumor told me his plan, and I almost forgave him for being a bastard about Amanda and, almost, for being the brain tumor that was killing me.

  And it was then that I thought again about the bean soup. It wasn’t bad, because it didn’t taste of anything. Anything at all. Or smell of anything. And then I remembered one of the things it had said on a brain-cancer website I’d looked at with Stanislaw. It was under the heading symptoms. It said: “You can lose your sense of taste and smell.”

  Some Profound

  Reflections on Love

  and Desire

  My mum and Clytemnestra went out that night. Hideous though the pterodactyl was, I had to admit that she was good for Mum. I hadn’t seen Mum looking as cheerful and normal since . . . well, ever . It must have been hard for her to pack in the Valium, and there was no one around here who she could lean on. Maybe at another time I might have been able to help, but I had my own troubles. And I’m only a kid. Clyte was a link to her past, a link to a time when things were better, before things had gone pear-shaped. Sometimes that can be a bummer, you know, when you’re confronted with what a mess you’ve made of things, and your true crapness shines through. But other times it can be a beacon, showing you that things don’t have to be the way they are. Sometimes the light behind us illuminates the way ahead.

  THANKS FOR THAT, SOCRATES.

  So I spent the evening reading and thinking and talking to Jack. His plan was a dandy, and we ran through it a couple of times, more just to enjoy it than anything else, because it wasn’t even that difficult, you know; we weren’t talking Mission: Impossible here.

  But even after he’d gone over the plan and we’d discussed it, and I’d added a couple of elaborations, and we’d laughed about it, Jack couldn’t help but stray back to the old subject even though, this time, he tried to come across as all sweet reasonableness.

  BUT, HECK, MY FRIEND, he said, his voice as fluffy as a dandelion clock, WHY THAT AMANDA GIRL? I JUST DON’T GET IT.

  “Why?”

  Yes, actually, why? It wasn’t really such a stupid question. From the first time I’d noticed her, standing alone, looking lost and helpless, but also somehow not needing or wanting help, I’d felt strange inside. It wasn’t something as simple as just fancying her, because at first glance she was quite hard to fancy, with that birthmark and her shapeless, flapping clothes. And it couldn’t have been her personality because, as far as I was concerned, she didn’t have one back then. I didn’t know her. She was just a space. Was it that I thought she was like me? Lost and helpless, like me? A freak, like me? That sounded plausible. Birds of a feather gather no moss and all that. But I didn’t quite get the psychology, and if you want to trade clichés, then don’t opposites attract?

  I wish I could say it was because I saw her inner beauty, was drawn to her goodness or purity, and that the outside of people didn’t matter to me. But it did. It does. Matter, I mean. The outside.

  I think it must have been that her face, her eyes, her hair, her skin, were so beautiful (and I don’t mean pretty, because she wasn’t pretty) that it overcame the horror of the port-wine birth-mark. Birthmarks, disfigurement, they’ve always been associated with evil, been seen to be symbolic of something foul and misshapen within. But if the multitude had been able to ignore that one blemish, been able to close their minds to the clamorous b.s., then they too would have loved her. Yeah. The people who only saw the birthmark weren’t being superficial enough.

  Could that be it? Was it my lack of depth that made me love Amanda Something?

  Thinking about feelings never gets you very far. Thought isn’t the right tool for the job. Like hammering in a nail with a screwdriver.

  “Because . . .” Well, I thought about running through the love stuff with Jack, but I was tired, and I didn’t feel up to it. “. . . because she’s stacked.”

  STACKED? YOU’RE KIDDING ME? HOW DID I MISS THAT?

  I’m telling you, body of an angel. A bad one.

  BAD, HUH? BAD ANGEL. WELL . . .

  And then he sort of mumbled to himself until I went to sleep.

  A Second Journey

  to the Underworld,

  This Time with Persephone

  Rather Than Aphrodite

  I was at the bus shelter at two o’clock, an hour before we’d arranged to meet. I was wearing my new clothes again, which I hadn’t been the day before. I wasn’t early because I was nervous. I didn’t feel nervous, or at least no more than was enough to give me that pleasant tingly feeling. There was a rightness about it all, a fitting-togetherness that made the kind of shattering, nerve-jangling tension of my Uma date simply unnecessary.

  I was early to escape the pterodactyl.

  No, that’s just a lie. I was early because I wanted to be in the place where we had spent that perfect hour yesterday, the place where I was going to meet her again today. The bus shelter had become for me a sacred shrine, a place of pilgrimage. There ought to be some kind of sign. Yeah, a plaque:

  HERE SAT

  HECTOR BRUNTY

  AND

  AMANDA SOMETHING

  ON 12 APRIL

  AND NOTHING WAS EVER THE SAME AGAIN

  AFTERWARDS

  The time moved slowly and exquisitely, like a jeweled python. Each second she wasn’t there hurt, and yet it was filled with expectation, and hope and joy. It was like the opposite of waiting for the dentist. And each bus that came was the bus that might bring Amanda Something to me, and I felt an affection for them that was out of all proportion to the sort of feelings you really ought to be having for buses.

  And it wasn’t even raining.

  Because it was Sunday there weren’t many buses, only two in the hour, but then, at five past, there came the good bus, the true bus, the beautiful bus that was carrying Amanda Something to me.

  The door opened, and there she was. She was wearing a pretty dress that didn’t suit her, and her hair was pinned up, and she had makeup covering her birthmark and, all in all, she looked much worse than usual, but that made me love her more, and I’d say the increase was between 12 and 14 percent, and don’t go asking me to work it out to six decimal places, because love isn’t about mathematical precision.

  I put my hand out and she took it as she stepped down from the bus, and it felt like something from the days of lords and ladies, and I was handing her down from her carriage or her palfrey, whatever that is or was.

  The moment was ruined, but only a bit, by a large lady who squeezed past us onto the bus, tutting like a Geiger counter.

  “I thought you wouldn’t be here,�
�� Amanda Something said.

  “I didn’t have anything else on. And, you know, Sunday telly . . .” Despite the fact I said it with a smile and was looking into her eyes, which were a kind of greeny color, like pond scum but beautiful, I saw that part of her believed that a person would only ever want to see her if there was nothing else to do and nothing on the telly, and even then they probably wouldn’t really want to see her, but might out of duty or because they felt that they should as a good deed. And I tried to answer her by blasting her with a high-intensity beam, a bit like a supervillain’s doomsday device, except in place of death it dealt love. But she didn’t seem to feel it, on account either of her having some kind of protective armor plating—love Kevlar, say—or me not really being able to beam out anything except wind after one of Mum’s bean extravaganzas. I wanted to be able to say something reassuring, something that expressed what I was feeling, but I just didn’t have the words, and there was no way I was going to ask Jack to help out on this one.

  “You look . . . pretty,” I said, and her hand went up to her birthmark in that unconscious way you always draw attention to things you want to hide. “I like your dress.”

  “Thanks. I . . . I made it.”

  “Wow!”

  Oh, Christ, why did I have to say “Wow!”? Why couldn’t I have said something cool, or maybe just raised one eyebrow, and smiled seductively? And then, maybe because it sounded a bit like “wow,” and was therefore in my head, I said, “Why?,” which was probably worse than “wow.”

  “My parents don’t give me money for clothes.”

  “Who needs clothes?” I said, not at all meaning, Who needs clothes, when we are young and can take them all off and romp around completely naked before thrashing ourselves into a frenzy of frantic, exhausting, extravagant, flamboyant, gaudy, baroque, eye-boggling copulation?

  STEADY ON.

  But I think that’s what she thought I meant, because she gave a modest little smile accompanied by one of her modest little blushes.

  OKAY, GET BACK ON TRACK.

  “Do you want to go and see a film?”

  “Yes,” she said unsurely, “that would be nice.”

  Mmm. Obviously she didn’t want to go and see a film.

  “Or we could go to the new Starbucks up in town. Nice muffins.”

  She smiled encouragingly.

  No, Starbucks didn’t seem right.

  It all felt a bit Groundhog Day, you know, reliving the Uma experience. And what was it Marx said about history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? But I’d already got the farce out of the way, so that left tragedy. Or more farce. Or something else. But probably tragedy. Which is why the next thing I thought of was my weeping willow.

  “I know a nice place where we could go.”

  Amanda’s eyes suggested that she liked this vague new idea much more than the old specific ones.

  We weren’t coming from the same direction this time, so at least I didn’t have to retrace my steps, or go back into the Spleen and Marrow. But soon we were on the same narrow lane leading up to the wrought-iron arch that led into the churchyard.

  “We’re going to church?”

  “No, no. Not at all. In the graveyard. There’s a place.”

  “But why?”

  “I like it. It’s a secret. Nobody knows about it. Just you and me.”

  AND EVERY OTHER GIRL YOU’VE EVER SNOGGED.

  It was the afternoon, so there wasn’t a service on, which would have spoiled things. We stopped in front of some of the older, prettier graves. There were stone angels for the children. MARY PULLINGER, D. 2 NOV. 1902, AGED 11 YEARS. JOHN BUNYAN.D. 23 FEB. 1899, AGED 2 YEARS. We held hands in front of the sad monuments. Deeper into the churchyard we came to older graves, which must have belonged to an earlier church. Most were unreadable, the letters smoothed against the stone, or buried under moss and lichen. But some were still legible. We read the dates: 1769, 1804, 1799, 1777.

  “All these people,” said Amanda dreamily. “All of them gone forever. No one left who remembers them. No one left who’d remember even their grandchildren.”

  She traced a name with her finger, brushing away the dust and grit from the carved grooves.

  “But we’re here. We’re alive.”

  For now, I didn’t add.

  And then I took her to the willow bower, and we sat beneath the branches on the dry ground together, and I didn’t even have to try to block out the images of Uma.

  “This is beautiful,” she said. “I love the way the world is still there, but blurry. As if the whole world is a rockpool, and we’re here looking down at it.”

  ERGH. YOU TWO DESERVE EACH OTHER. SHE’LL BE TELLING YOU NEXT THAT THE STARS ARE GOD’S DAISY CHAINS.

  Even though the ground was dry I took off my jacket and spread it out. I was close to her now and I could feel the heat from her skin. I put my arm around her, and she was looking up into my eyes, all trusting, hoping, fearing. And the makeup on her birthmark had begun to flake, and I put my lips to it, and I felt her pull away, but I wouldn’t let her.

  And we spoke, our foreheads touching. She told me how lonely she had been, told me how she had once been happy, and how she had changed when she was six and another girl at her school said to her that she looked horrible, like a monster, and before that she hadn’t even thought about her birthmark, but after that she thought about nothing else. She said that in a year she would have laser treatment to make it fade, and that she had been told that it would be virtually invisible, one day. I almost said that she shouldn’t change herself, but how could I say that to someone who had lived her life, put up with everything she’d had to deal with?

  “I don’t care about it,” I whispered in her ear. “I think you’re beautiful, and I don’t care about it.”

  The skin of the birthmark wasn’t like the rest of her skin. Its texture was a little rougher and it felt warmer to my lips.

  And then I looked at her eyes again, and they had become liquid, and I kissed the tears as they spilled, and drank the salt tears, mixed with the makeup from her face. And then I wiped away the tears and the makeup with my sleeve, and I felt through her hair to the nape of her neck, and I pulled her closer to me and we kissed, and after we’d kissed I told her that I could stop time and she, wonderingly, asked me how, and I said watch, and as we lay together, face-to-face, I stilled the spinning world and stopped time, and there were only the two of us together.

  And that’s all I can tell you, because the rest is private.

  ABBa ABBa

  I opened the kitchen door, not knowing what to expect. I’d heard the distressing tones of “Dancing Queen” as I came down the road, but it wasn’t until I reached our house that I realized that here was the epicenter. It was enough to bring me down to earth, which was probably a good thing as I was as high as a weather balloon, and we’re not talking solvent abuse here, but, well, you know.

  The kitchen was clear. I moved cautiously towards the door to the living room, my presence covered by the racket. I opened it.

  The sight before me was truly shocking.

  The bottles of wine, the gatefold sleeve of Abba’s Arrival by the side of our ancient music center. Mum and Clytemnestra were in the middle of the room. They had hairbrushes in their hands. Hairbrushes they were using not for their noble, God-given purpose of making your hair look less stupid but as dummy microphones. They (Mum and Clyte, not the microphones) were wearing some ancient nightdresses of my mum’s: long floaty nylon items that hadn’t been worn in decades. They were dancing and miming, throwing the kind of shapes you see on reruns of olden-days Top of the Pops.

  Yes, they were Agnetha and Frida.

  Frida, I mean Clytemnestra, was the first to spot me. You’d expect embarrassment, a hurried hiding of microphones, the covering up of pink nylon nighties with cushions or rugs.

  Instead: “Hey, Heck, come join us. You can be Benny. Or Björn. Doesn’t really matter.”

&n
bsp; Benny or Björn? The original rock and the hard place.

  I don’t know if it was because I was still on cloud nine after my afternoon with Amanda, or if it was some special power that Clytemnestra had but, and God forgive me for it, I joined them, playing air keyboards (which made me Benny, I think) to not only “Dancing Queen,” but also, and yes, you are right to quake in your boots as I call the roster of shame, “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” “That’s Me,” and “Money, Money, Money,” not to mention the other album tracks in between.

  By the end, I’ll admit that I was laughing with them. This may have been helped by the fact that Clyte poured me a glass of red wine, which I drank with one hand whilst continuing the air piano with the other. When it was over we all flopped down on the sofa.

  “You seem in a very nice mood,” said Mum when she’d got her breath back. “What you been up to?”

  “Just hanging out. The usual.”

  She looked at me as if she knew that something more than that had been going on. It was amazing how she’d changed. In the old days, meaning just a week ago, she wouldn’t have noticed if I’d been abducted by aliens and given the full anal-probe treatment and came back twenty years later but not a day older with the anal probe still sticking out of me.

  Then Clytemnestra said, “You two settle down for your talk and I’ll go and make supper. Something special today.” And then she swept out into the kitchen.

  “Talk?” I said, when the door was safely closed.

  Mum was suddenly very serious, after the silliness of the Abba concert. I hadn’t sat together with her like this on the settee for a long time. Years, maybe. When I was a little boy, seven or eight, say, she sometimes used to let me stay up late with her to watch a film or a documentary about animals. But that was a long time ago.

  “Abba,” she said. “It means ‘father’ in Aramaic. Did you know that?”

  I did know it, or at least I’d heard it before, and it was lodged back there, somewhere behind Jack Tumor. Abba abba sabba labectori . Something like that. I’ve only heard it spoken. Father forgive them, they know not what they do . Jesus on the cross.