Jack Tumor

by Anthony McGowan

  ME:

  Stella! But she’s almost as bad as Uma.

  Stella was, in fact, one of Uma’s gang. She was long and lithe and ruthless on the netball court.

  By then we were at the front of the queue, and the prefect in charge—a heavyset boy called Vass who’d once famously put a whole pork pie in his mouth—was looking at me impatiently. I’d planned to buy Smurf a packet of crisps and also maybe a Snickers or a Twix to pay him back for snogging the love of his life, but now that seemed a bit excessive, so I just got him a Kit Kat, and he was still thanking me for this inexplicable act of generosity when the others all came around.

  Stan, of course, already knew. About Uma, that is. So now, carefully watching Smurf the whole time, I filled in the others.

  It was tough getting the tone right. I had to convey the greatness of it, snogging the most famously glamorous girl in the year, etc., etc., but without bragging, and without rubbing Smurf’s nose in it. So I capped it off with an account of the final catastrophe, dwelling on my incompetence and embarrassment. This also had the advantage of being true, and it’s always nice finding yourself on the high ground, truthwise.

  Smurf, generous-spirited waif that he was, looked genuinely delighted with the business. He seemed incapable of holding a grudge.

  OR HE HOLDS HIS GRUDGES CLOSE, UNTIL THE TIME OF EXECUTION.

  “Put it there,” he said, holding out his lank, long-fingered hand, and we shook. “It’s like you’re doing it for all of us.”

  I tried to detect a tone of melancholy or resentment in this. It was hard to tell.

  “We didn’t do it,” I said modestly, and truthfully.

  “Yeah, well, but, as far as I can see, kissing counts as it, sort of.”

  “No way,” I replied. “Kissing isn’t it. It is it. But, listen, there’s . . . something else.” I turned to Stan. “After you left on Saturday, I—”

  “I think you ought to . . .” said Gonad, doing a turn-around sign with his finger. I felt a physical jolt, as though someone had exploded a tiny bomb in my lower intestine.

  Uma or Amanda?

  I turned.

  Uma.

  And friends.

  The Fierce Ones.

  Pitiless girls.

  Including Stella Mulrooney.

  They even looked vaguely hawklike, with their sharp faces and swept-back hair. Hawklike, but not hawklike like Hawkgirl was hawklike. She was hawklike in a much nicer way, which didn’t stop her from kicking alien butt big style when that was necessary. Maybe it’s the wings. It’s hard not to love things with wings. Unless the wings are leathery, in which case the opposite is true.

  She, I mean Uma, looked magnificent—her head held high, her black hair heavy as a sea lion coiled around her shoulders, her long skirt billowing behind her.

  I thought about Tierney and the wallop she’d given him. I wasn’t going to duck, wasn’t going to cringe, wasn’t going to beg for mercy. I was going to take it, and hope I didn’t cry like a dying swan when the slap hit me.

  PALE, BEYOND PORCH AND PORTAL,

  CROWNED WITH CALM LEAVES, SHE STANDS

  WHO GATHERS ALL THINGS MORTAL

  WITH COLD IMMORTAL HANDS

  What? Had I said it? No, my friends weren’t staring at me.

  OTHER WOMEN CLOY

  THE APPETITES THEY FEED, BUT SHE MAKES HUNGRY

  WHERE MOST SHE SATISFIES.

  “Yum yum.”

  “What d’yer say, Heck?” asked Stan, but he was as engrossed as the rest of us in Uma’s stately progress, and when I replied, “I said I’m hungry, yum yum,” he just nodded.

  Uma finally stopped about two meters away. That was a good sign. Too far away for a punch. Unless she wanted a run at it. Or maybe she was going to throw something at me. A tomahawk or one of those cool ninja death-star things.

  Yet again I found myself at the center of a circle of attention. All these years of no one knowing who the hell I was, and now suddenly I was always the one in the middle of stuff happening. Why couldn’t stuff happen to someone else for a change?

  But one good thing: Amanda wasn’t there.

  “I’m sorry you’re sick.”

  “What?”

  “I said I’m sorry you’re sick. My mum talked to your mum. She said you were really sick. I’m sorry. That’s it, really. See you.”

  BOY, SHE FIGHTS DIRTY.

  And with that she turned around and walked away again. I felt sort of relieved and crushed at the same time. The watching faces dissolved back into the air, and it was just the four of us again. Or five, including Jack.

  Some seconds of silence passed, as each of us absorbed what was relevant in the exchange. Smurf focused vaguely on the retreating rump of Stella.

  “Okay,” said Gonad eventually, “just what is up with you? The fainting and spewing. And nice one, by the way, for spewing on Mordred. Cos I didn’t say, before.”

  I looked down, and then up at them.

  “I honestly don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve been having these headaches, and sometimes I feel a bit faint, and then I spew. Not just on Mordred, unless he’s around. I’ve been to the doctor and the specialist, and I had some tests last week when I was off. They’ll tell me today or tomorrow if there’s anything in there.”

  “In there?” Smurf looked anguished, almost on the edge of tears. He knew what I meant. Stan was quiet. But then Stan was always quiet.

  “It might be a brain tumor. But they hack them out no bother these days. Piece of piss.”

  I couldn’t resist it: dramatize it, and show how I could laugh in the face of death. What a hero.

  “And it might be why I’ve been acting a bit weird. So, sorry if I have been.”

  “S’all right,” they said, in unison.

  ASTAN:

  What about Tierney?

  GONAD:

  Oh yeah, he’s going to kill you.

  ME:

  I don’t think he is.

  SMURF:

  Are you going to tell the teachers?

  ME:

  Nah. Got something else in mind.

  JACK:

  THAT’S RIGHT, YOU TAKE ALL THE CREDIT.

  ME:

  I intend to.

  STAN:

  I intend to what?

  ME:

  What? Oh, ah, sort him out.

  GONAD:

  You’ve got a plan?

  ME:

  Oh yes.

  ALL:

  Tell us!

  ME:

  No. It’ll probably never come off.

  STAN:

  You’re not going to fight him, are you?

  ME:

  He doesn’t frighten me, not anymore.

  GONAD:

  Anyway, it’s time he was taught a lesson. You saw how Heck dealt with that mutant what’s-’is-name last week. Heck’s going to kick ass.

  STAN:

  It isn’t right, Heck. You know it isn’t. You can’t deal with violence by using violence. You just keep the cycle going.

  ME:

  He started it, Stan. He’s a bully.

  STAN:

  But if you beat him, it means that you are.

  ME:

  How do you make that out?

  STAN:

  A bully is someone who picks on the weak.

  ME:

  Yeah?

  STAN:

  If you beat Tierney in a fight, it means he must be weaker than you. It means you’ll have picked on someone weaker. QED.

  GONAD:

  What? You are a crazy man. That means you’d never stand up to anyone. QED my arse.

  SMURF:

  I sort of agree with Stan. Maybe not in the logic, but in the meaning behind it. Fighting isn’t the way. Especially if you’ve got a brain tumor.

  ME:

  I’m not going to fight him.

  GONAD:

  Aw!

  STAN:

  I’m glad.

  But Stan didn’t look convinced, a
nd he was right not to be. I had in mind something much worse than fighting Tierney. I was just waiting for the right time.

  And then old Mrs. Trimble rang her handbell and it was time to go in, and still there was no Amanda.

  At Lovers’ Perjuries,

  They Say,

  Jove Laughs

  After break nothing much happened. Corridors, classrooms, shuffling bodies, a yellow stink in the toilets. Until I was sitting in the physics lab, and it was hot. Equations, calculations, vectors. The numbers that map the universe. And if numbers can tell us everything there is to know about stars and atoms, about nebulae and quarks, why should they be silent about the other things that matter, our emotions, our dreams? Surely there was an equation somewhere that would give me the answer to the question of love.

  No, not singular. Multiple. The questions of love.

  Who?

  Where?

  Why?

  When will it start?

  When will it stop?

  And there, looking out of the window over the damp coarse grass of the gypsy field where we had found the bleached bones of the dog, where I had touched the hard metal at the tip of the bolt, and then touched her fingers, I thought I had that equation within my grasp, and I reached for it, and the numbers and symbols danced translucent around my fingers, and I could feel them, slippery, jellied, but I could not hold them.

  HANG UP PHILOSOPHY! UNLESS PHILOSOPHY CAN MAKE A JULIET.

  Hey, Jack.

  HEY, HECK.

  Feeling a bit not-so-good again. Any chance of you easing up back there? Pull in one of your—what did you call them?— tendrils.

  I

  need

  more

  time.

  TIME. SHALL WE STOP IT? I THINK NOT. YOU KNOW THAT ONLY LIVED TIME IS PRECIOUS.

  There are so many things. To do.

  THE TIME OF LIFE IS SHORT; TO SPEND THAT SHORTNESS BASELY WERE TOO LONG.

  Base? Isn’t it you who wants me to . . .? Is it just me or has the world gone funny? You have stopped time again, haven’t you, without asking me?

  And the kids in the class, and Mr. Curlew teaching, were not moving, and there was no noise—not the droning of the teacher or the whisperings and murmurings of the class, or the sounds of chairs scraping or the buzzing of the dying fluorescent light.

  OKAY, NOT GOOD.

  Panic in his voice.

  HECK, WAKE UP.

  He’s gone too far. He knows he’s gone too far.

  I’LL SLEEP. YOU WAKE.

  And then I came back into myself and the noise of the classroom returned. I’d been in some kind of a trance. There was drool on my chin. Nobody had noticed. At least I hadn’t pissed my pants. Or fallen off my stool into a foaming fit on the floor.

  “With us again, Brunty? Try to stay awake.”

  “Sir.”

  Amanda. I’d begun to wonder if Amanda had decided not to come into school today. The horror of seeing me. The shame. Something like that.

  I went out for lunch with the gang to our usual niche, but I wasn’t hungry. Which, it turned out, was a shame.

  GONAD:

  Look at that! Heck’s got some food. I mean, food you could eat.

  SMURF:

  Looks like a real sandwich with, let’s have a look, yes, cheese and pickle.

  GONAD:

  It’ll be chopped pork next, and other similar delights.

  SMURF:

  And, look, a Wagon Wheel. Awesome. And a packet of crisps. Whale-and-bacon—my favorite!

  GONAD:

  The nation’s favorite.

  Well, the unexpectedly edible lunch should have been a pleasant surprise, but as I said, I wasn’t hungry, plus it added to the general doom and gloom. If Mum (aided, no doubt, by Clytemnestra) had thought things were so bad that I needed a real lunch rather than horseradish fritters, then, well, then things were really bad.

  The playground began to fill up as the school-lunchers filtered in. Stan said to me, “Did you hear about Flaherty?”

  “That he’s a stupid wanker?”

  Gonad and Smurf laughed.

  “No, that his dad’s been put away.”

  And I half laughed, and then stopped.

  “That’s bad luck.”

  “He’s in trouble,” said Gonad. “The only reason he hasn’t had a serious kicking is that everyone’s afraid of his dad. If it is his dad.”

  “Yeah,” we all said. Flaherty used to annoy us, but he was a major goad to the hard bastards and they hated him.

  “He can take care of himself,” I said, but without much conviction.

  I handed out my food, and when everything was gone except the crumbs brushed off for the sparrows, we got up to find somewhere else to slouch. It was then that I saw her, and the gloom of the day lifted and I instantly felt 67 percent happier. (I rounded up, of course, from 66.6 recurring.)

  And then my focus widened and I took in the scene around her. There were other girls—the hawklike handmaidens of Uma. For a moment I thought that the scene was a happy one, that the girls were enjoying some joke together. And for a while that might have been how it was. The fierce girls were smiling, and Amanda was smiling back uncertainly.

  But no.

  It was changing.

  They were laughing. Amanda was looking around. She saw me. The uncertain smile returned and she began to walk towards me.

  WALK AWAY.

  No!

  THERE’S NOTHING IN THIS FOR YOU. LOOK AROUND. PEOPLE ARE WATCHING AGAIN.

  I don’t care.

  YOU SHOULD.

  Amanda was searching my face as she came, trying to find an answering smile there. But I was busy with Jack, trying to shut him up, trying to make him go away.

  He wouldn’t go away.

  FOUL.

  No.

  MISSHAPEN.

  No.

  POXED.

  No.

  And Amanda was here now, talking to me, but I couldn’t hear.

  SHE IS AS UGLY AS A WARTHOG’S SCROTUM. SHE IS DISEASED.

  “Shut up!”

  SHE IS A MUTANT.

  “Piss off. Piss off. Piss off.”

  SHE IS POLLUTION, CONTAGION, DEATH FOR US.

  “Shut up and piss off!” I was screaming. I knew I was screaming.

  LOOK AT HER. SHE’S—

  Finally, despairingly, I cried out, “Go away and leave me alone, please.”

  And the girls who had been laughing stopped laughing, and I don’t know if what remained in their eyes was satiation or disgust, and the crowd of people around Amanda—around me— parted and she ran through, covering her face with her hands and, as in a kind of echo, as a replay, I heard what she had been saying.

  “Tell me it isn’t true, tell me you didn’t see her, tell me you didn’t go there with her, tell me you didn’t take her to the place where we were together, tell me you didn’t.”

  And what she had heard in return, as she stood imploring and desperate before the crowd of tormentors, was “shut up,” “piss off,” “go away,” and “leave me alone, please.” And, for all I knew, “pollution,” “contagion,” “diseased,” and “mutant.”

  And I looked at the faces in the crowd, and I could not see my friends, but I did see Tierney and his followers, and he was grinning like a skull, and they were nodding and their eyes met mine, and they knew me.

  Tierney, Johnson, Murdo, No-Name, Brunty.

  The new gang.

  Things Can Only

  Get Better

  The horror of it. And I was rescued by, of all people, Mordred. Of course, I didn’t know he was coming to rescue me to begin with—I just saw him scampering on his little feet towards me across the playground.

  “Brunty . . . ah, er, Hector. Your mother has telephoned”— his voice here broke and quavered a bit, strongly suggesting he was scared of Mum—”and, er, she would like you to go, as it were, home.”

  “Now, sir?”

  “Yes, now. Of course, now. Straightaw
ay. Immediately. In a word, now.”

  Mordred left, his hand making meaningless gesticulations, as if he were mentally rehearsing a speech to a Nazi rally.

  “I’ll come with you if you like.”

  Stan was there again.

  “It’s okay, Stan. I’m good. I’m good.”

  “It’ll get me out of religion. Father McGuire’s coming in, and you know the smell of whiskey makes me feel sick.”

  Father McGuire was one of the two priests serving the parish and the school. McGuire was ancient and scrofulous, and he didn’t like the kids at all. He regaled us with what would happen to us in hell, which involved a lot of burning, and a grab bag of inconveniences ranging from impalement (bad) to being forced to read the works of J. K. Rowling over and over again for all eternity (v. bad). McGuire obviously looked back fondly on the good old days when he could strap boys for failing to look suitably religious, but now he had to make do with coming up close and shouting into your face with his brown teeth all over you and the spray flying out and with it a sulfurous stench, and most of us thought that the strap would have been better.

  The other priest was Father Conway, who liked to be called Jim, which may well have been his name. He was young and nice and never shouted at us or threatened us with hell if we “interfered with ourselves” (a favorite topic of Father McGuire). Because he was nice, he was generally thought to be gay, although I never heard a report of any actual interference or even inappropriate ogling. His religion classes took the form of meditations on some moral problem, such as why it might be nice to be nice to each other, and how it was not nice not being nice to each other, and he rarely mentioned God at all except in a very backgroundy kind of way, along with the suggestion that he might well be nice.

  But McGuire was a good enough reason to get out of school. So we went and got our schoolbags and coats and set off back to my house.