Jack Tumor

by Anthony McGowan

  So, that was what this was about.

  “It’s Clyte that convinced me. Convinced me that I have to tell you. About your . . . father.”

  I sat back against the settee. My ears had gone a bit funny. Sort of echoey. And I was cold. I’ve already said that it was a bit of a nonissue in our house. Well, a big issue, really, but not one that we could talk about, beyond the, you know, Great Earth Spirit Who Is Father of Us All sort of line.

  I gulped to try to get my ears working properly. I wanted to encourage her, but I didn’t want to seem too eager. I’m not trying to come across all saintly here, but I knew that, despite being a bit of a spacer, and not really quite all there, headwise, Mum had worked hard for me, given me everything she could. And I didn’t want her to think that all the time I was wishing it wasn’t just her around, but some guy as well. The complete stranger known as my dad. Especially not now she was a bit more back on the rails, or at least nearer the rails, like when you have a road that runs next to the track and you can race the trains.

  CALM DOWN, HECTOR. EVEN I KNOW THIS IS IMPORTANT. WE’RE ABOUT TO FIND OUT WHO OUR FATHER IS. OR WAS. THE MAN WHO STARTED THE LINE WE’RE TRYING TO CARRY ON.

  Mum took some deep breaths. Her fingertips were touching her lips, like a child praying.

  “I told you about the Valium, how it happened. It wasn’t just because of world peace. The camp, we were all women. And it was wonderful, all sisters together. But sometimes, you know, it would get a bit, samey.”

  She gave me a little smile, a nice smile, where her mouth went slightly down rather than up, and I saw her as a teenager, or maybe she was twenty, at the peace camp.

  “So some of us would go to the pub in the village. Or the next village along. And that’s where I met him.”

  In a village pub. So, my father was a local yokel, a country bumpkin, a turnip head, his face red from being out all day in the sun driving his tractor.

  NAH. NO WAY. WE’RE NOT SHEEP-SHAGGER STOCK. WE’RE CITY SLICKERS, SOPHISTICATES, COSMOPOLITANS. ANYONE CAN TELL THAT.

  Hey, I could live with that. But why couldn’t Mum?

  “He wasn’t from the village. He . . . worked at the base.”

  The base.

  He worked at the base.

  “How do you mean, like a gardener or something?”

  Mum looked confused for a moment.

  “No, he was a pilot.”

  Jesus. He flew the damn things. Nuclear bombers. Jesus.

  “But how could you?” I said.

  I didn’t want to sound disapproving. I wasn’t disapproving. I was too stunned to feel anything really, and the words just came out as a way of filling up space. Still, it was all a bit like Luke finding out that Darth Vader was his dad, although that was always on the cards, especially when you learn that “Vader” is Dutch for dad (thanks for that one, Gonad).

  “I mean,” I continued, still in a fog, “everything you were there for . . . the camp . . . the women. I don’t understand.”

  Mum took some more deep breaths, getting up the nerve to go on.

  “When I first saw him, sitting there in the pub, I knew there was something special about him. He was so . . . young, and he had such kind, smiling eyes. Some of the locals were in, and they were giving us a hard time. I’ve told you before how they hated us, really hated us. The local squirearchy, the councilors, the fox-hunting types. They were worse than the Americans. They wouldn’t serve us that night at the bar. We couldn’t even get to the bar, in fact. The local men would form a kind of barrier with their backs, and move whenever we tried to get around or through them. It was nasty. It was me and Clyte and another girl, I can’t even remember her name now, but I think she was from Wolverhampton. And then he came over and bought our drinks. And it was such a shock that we accepted. He wasn’t in uniform, but you knew he was American before he spoke. There were three of them as well. All clean-cut and handsome, but he was the only one who looked . . . nice as well as handsome. So I began teasing him, and he wasn’t like the others. They were so earnest, tried to tell us that what we were doing was irresponsible, that they were protecting freedom. But he . . . he laughed, and made fun back, but there was no hate in him. He was from Iowa, and he just loved life. And he was so handsome. I already said that. Sometimes I look at you, Heck, and I can see him . . . Anyway, he said he would be in the pub again the next week, and he was. I came without the girls. And he was alone. And after that I began to see him whenever I could. He didn’t have long to go. I mean, before he left the United States Air Force. We didn’t make any promises to each other, but we both knew.

  “None of the women knew what was going on. Except for Clyte, and even she didn’t know everything. And then one evening he came to see me at the camp. In my tent. It was silly. We shouldn’t have. But it was . . . exciting. He tried to sneak away afterwards, but someone saw him. There was an argument. Men weren’t allowed. They thought he was there to cause trouble. They were near the road. He was in the middle of a group. A car was coming. A four-wheel-drive thing. A Range Rover, I think. The driver was a woman from the council, one of the ones who hated us for being unfeminine. She’d done this before. Driving past us too quickly, too close, her horn blaring, laughing, trying to make us jump out of the way. We were used to her. But he didn’t know about that, and he was talking to the women and they were shouting at him, calling him a fascist, and when the Range Rover came, all the women knew to move out of the way. It was raining, I remember. He was wet. He was enjoying the argument, I think, enjoying being the reasonable one. He hadn’t even been to college. He was going to go after he left the air force. And all the women moved out of the way and the Range Rover hit him. The woman, the woman who was driving, Olga Something she was called, said she didn’t feel it, and she drove on, but there was a dent in the side of the car, and those cars don’t dent easily. Built like tanks. Not that she was ever charged with anything. She said it was our fault. And the women just stood there, looking at him.

  “I didn’t understand what had happened for a moment. And then I realized it was all wrong, the way they were standing, and I ran to him, and he was on the ground. His legs were all bent, and at first I thought it was just a broken leg, something like that. I knelt beside him and held him, and I thought he was going to open his beautiful blue eyes. His face was fine—nothing, not a mark, except for the mud—but then I felt the blood on my legs, seeping in, and the back of his head wasn’t really there anymore. Just a pulp, like rice pudding. And I knew that he was dead.”

  My mother’s face was cold and still and blank.

  “What was his name?”

  “His name? His name was Hector.”

  And that was too much for me. I folded up into my mother, and she wrapped herself around me, and that’s how we stayed.

  In the middle of the night I woke up and remembered about my mule. We might not have had a computer but I had earned my spurs, all right, on Gonad’s PlayStation. You need a mule in Dungeon Siege to carry your inventory. That’s weapons, armor, health vials, and magic spells. Without the mule, you can’t carry as much stuff. But the mule can be a bit of a pain. He follows along behind, and can be a liability in a fight. I was deep in a warren of caves and caverns and passages. There were Krug waiting in ambush around every corner. Krug, and worse than Krug. I had picked up a pretty competent team of warriors. I had a sexy archer girl called Ulura, and a big oxlike character called Tog, plus a dwarf and, naturally, an elf. I wanted to explore an area with the team and then come back for the mule. But I lost my way in the caverns and accidentally went up a level. I couldn’t find a way back. I could go on, but not back. I was in the light, but my mule was lost to me. The worst thing was that I could change screens and see my mule waiting patiently in that dark place, laden with my stores. It would wander backwards and forwards, never losing faith, never giving up hope that I would return for it.

  I lay for a long time with the night breathing about me. I revisited those caverns alone, with
out Ulura or Tog or the others, and I searched for my mule. I was sure that I could find him again, lead him into the light. There had to be a key or a switch or a lever. But I couldn’t find it. And I felt Jack big and heavy in my head.

  When I woke up in the morning, I was lying on the floor in a pool of my own vomit. Jack was ready with a comment.

  BEATS THE HELL OUT OF LYING IN A POOL OF SOMEONE ELSE’S.

  Another seizure.

  I cleaned up the mess, showered, and put on my school clothes.

  Mixed Feelings

  Mixed.

  Definitely mixed.

  My feelings about going to school that day.

  As well as the usual bad things about Mondays (the arse-kicking, the nipple-squeezing, the triple math in room G2 where the windows didn’t open and your brains boiled like offal in a pan, just the very fact of being at school and a full week of it ahead of you), I now had a whole new thing to dread: the public enjoyment of my sexual humiliation, not to mention the general appreciation of the fact that I was now known to be the kind of person who

  talks

  to

  his

  brain

  tumor.

  And maybe worst of all, the whole betrayal-of-Smurf thing, which combined so many bad things: me feeling like a jerk, me actually being a jerk, and then me being treated like a jerk by the few friends I had. Of course, all that was assuming that Uma would blab and, well, who could blame her if she did? I mean, you’d need to be pretty special, in the keeping-of-secrets line, not to spread a story as juicy as that. And it wasn’t as if she owed me anything. I, or rather Jack, had felt her up, and then felt her down again. After she had said to stop. Not good. Not good at all.

  HOW WAS I TO KNOW? SOMEONE TOLD ME EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY.

  Welcome back. Where’ve you been hiding?

  NOWHERE SPECIAL. JUST KEEPING MY OWN COUNSEL FOR A WHILE. AND DON’T FORGET, WE NEED TO STOP OFF FOR OUR MUNITIONS.

  I haven’t forgotten.

  The good bit of the mixed feeling (the diamond in the ash? the walnut in the whip? the carrot in the sick?) had everything to do with Amanda, and I kept switching to her channel whenever the other material was getting me down.

  The trouble was that the two things couldn’t be kept separate. Nice Amanda thoughts were contaminated by bad Uma thoughts, because when the Uma bomb exploded, shrapnel was going to land everywhere.

  Despite having to stop off on the way, I got in early. The ginormous willy still hadn’t been cleaned off, a fact which I found comforting, even if it was fading, sinking slowly back into the wall. It had become a kind of totem for me, and as long as those elegant lines were there, however faintly, hope remained.

  Because it was early there were no monstrous sentinels on the gate, and the only person I knew in the playground was Flaherty, who came scampering up.

  “Hey, Mr. Lover-Man. Saw you, saw you.”

  My heart sank.

  “Saw me where?”

  “In the street.”

  “Big deal.”

  “Not alone.”

  “Some of us have got mates.”

  “Not a boy friend.”

  He’d seen me with . . . which one? Uma or Amanda? God, but it was hard being a stud. (I’m being ironic.)

  “Did you then?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Did you snog her?”

  “Snog who?”

  “Fanny Smith.”

  Mrs. Smith was a tiny ancient sewing teacher, called “Fanny” because it was widely accepted that she didn’t have one. (Flaherty was being sarcastic, which is much less cool than being ironic.)

  “I can honestly say that I’ve never snogged Fanny Smith. Have you?”

  “Yeah. She tastes of dog meat. She must eat it, and it gets stuck in her dentures. So you did then?”

  “You’ve lost me, Flaherty. I wish I could do the same for you. Please go away.”

  “Hey, Gonad, Hector Brunty snogged Uma Upshaw. Probably had her too, dirty monkey.”

  Well, at least that answered the “who” question. For now.

  I turned around. Gonad had just arrived, his bag over his shoulder, his small ears all a-flicker. His mouth fell open at the news.

  “Snogged . . . I thought you were sick?”

  Big groan. From me. There was no way I was going to be able to control this.

  “Look, it’s a long story. Nothing happened. I just went down to get some chips, and she was there, working, and she had to go out, and we were walking in the same direction and . . .”

  It wasn’t sounding convincing, even to me.

  “I saw them, I saw them,” said Flaherty, doing one of his stupid little jigs. “They weren’t just walking in the same direction. They were on a love cruise. Heading for the cemetery. And we all know what happens there.”

  “THE GRAVE’S A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE, BUT NONE I THINK DO THERE EMBRACE.”

  “You what?” said Gonad, looking puzzled. Flaherty had stopped his jigging as well. I must have spoken the words. Bloody Jack T.

  “Love poetry, that’s what that was,” said Flaherty, the irritating little jerk. “He’s got it bad if it’s come to love poetry. He’ll be gazing at flowers and sighing next. Aaahh, nature.”

  “I’m off to registration,” I said, stumped for anything better. “I’ve got to give in my sick note for last week.”

  Flaherty followed me in his flitting, scampering, dancing, mosquito way, and Gonad trudged along as well, looking vaguely annoyed. Snogging girls like Uma Upshaw wasn’t playing by the rules. It was cheating. It was unnatural.

  It was entirely without historical precedent.

  Shouty Mrs. Conlon, who used to be nice Miss Walsh, decided to mix and match by becoming nice Mrs. Conlon, for the morning at least. She asked if I was okay and how I felt, and that sort of thing, and she asked if Mr. Mordred had really slipped and fallen arse-first into the pool of puke (she used different words), and you could see her trying not to laugh when I told her that he had, and the kids who were there all laughed because nothing was stopping them, certainly not nice Mrs. Conlon.

  But that was about as good as it got that day.

  She who Gathers

  All Things Mortal

  I made it through the morning lessons. There was little alternative. Unless I stopped time again. But I felt that my time-stopping powers were weak today. I did entertain a fantasy about a sniper on one of the local tower blocks. He was, obviously, going for a head shot, but he failed to account for the curvature of the earth, the slight breeze, and the gravitational effect of the moon, and so the bullet only grazed my ear. But it was enough for another glamorous hospital run, plus an interview on the BBC.

  And after that I became the prime minister’s special adviser on teenage assassination attempts.

  Oh, and a recording deal with EMI.

  It was a fantasy, remember. Be grateful I left it there.

  Morning break. Recently whittled down from twenty to fif-teen minutes for the purposes of advancing the three great causes of numeracy and literasy. Not very popular, in general, but joy to us nerds as it meant five fewer minutes of intimidation and battery.

  Up until break it had been nose-to-the-grindstone (assassination fantasies excepted), and there hadn’t been a chance to talk. Smurf was acting normal, his usual half-smile and slightly dazed expression fully in place as his bendy body swayed gently in the breeze. So he obviously hadn’t heard. That was something. As soon as we were outside I took my chance and got hold of him and dragged him to the snack-shop queue.

  It was hard to get out the things I had to say, and I had to blink and swallow and wiggle my ears a bit before I got going.

  ME:

  There’s something I have to tell you, about thingy. Ummm, Uma.

  JACK:

  NEVER APOLOGIZE, NEVER EXPLAIN.

  SMURF:

  You didn’t tell anyone, did you?

  ME:

  No, but I . . . But it’s just that . . .<
br />
  SMURF:

  Because I feel a bit of an idiot.

  JACK:

  THAT’S BECAUSE YOU ARE AN IDIOT.

  ME:

  No, it’s me that’s an idiot . . . What? Why? No, look, I’ve got to tell you. I went to see her.

  SMURF:

  You didn’t say something to her, did you? Jesus, Heck, I wish you . . .

  ME:

  No, I didn’t tell her about you. It wasn’t supposed to . . .

  SMURF:

  Because I was wrong.

  ME:

  Wrong? What do you mean? Wrong about what?

  SMURF:

  About fancying Uma Upshaw.

  ME:

  How can you be wrong about fancying someone? Either you do or you don’t.

  SMURF:

  There’s no logic to it, Heck. I did, for a while, and then I sort of didn’t.

  ME:

  You mean you just went off her?

  JACK:

  HEARTLESS BASTARD.

  ME:

  Heartless bast—I mean, that’s a bit, er, fickle.

  SMURF:

  Well, it’s more that I sort of fancy somebody else now. You know, instead. Hey, don’t look at me like that. It’s something that happens. It doesn’t make me a monster of depravity. And stop laughing.

  ME:

  Sorry, I can’t help it. And I know you’re not a monster of depravity. I’m just relieved is all.

  SMURF:

  Relieved, why?

  ME:

  Well, just relieved. And who is it, anyway?

  SMURF:

  You swear you won’t tell?

  ME:

  For Christ’s sake, Smurf . . . Have I ever let you down?

  SMURF:

  Well, er, okay. It’s Stella Mulrooney.