Jack Tumor Read online

  “Hospital.”

  “What’s up with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh.”

  “What did I miss?”

  “Double math, single religion. We did quadratic equations.”

  Numbers were my thing, or one of my things. My mum didn’t approve. She’d have preferred it if I’d been good at almost anything else. She thought numbers were evil and stifled your creativity and she tried to make me learn the piano and the bassoon and write poetry.

  There was one time when she thought she’d cracked it. In our house nothing works, and one of the things that doesn’t work is the bathroom door. If you don’t slam it shut, it kind of bangs all night in a random, rhythmless way that drives me mad. I told Mum every night to make sure it was shut, but she never did, because she’s in a dream world. So I stuck a note on the door, with writing in black felt-tip. It said:

  If you go in the night for a wee or a poo,

  Close the door properly, please, when you’re through,

  Because if you don’t it’ll rattle and shake,

  And keep hypersensitive Hector awake.

  It did the trick, doorwise, which tells you something about the Power of Poetry, but I didn’t write any more of it, because my other problems were the kind that no amount of poetry could fix and there was always a chance that someone at school might find out and punch me in the head for it.

  All of the gang had a thing. Gonad’s thing was history. He knew everything that had ever happened. Not just from watching the History Channel—he’d read everything in the library. Shout out any date and he’d tell you what happened then.

  “Seven ninety-three.”

  “Easy: raid by Vikings on Lindisfarne.”

  “Seventeen fifty-nine.”

  “English defeat French at Quebec in the Seven Years War.”

  “Nineteen sixty-three.”

  “J.F.K. killed in Dallas and the Beatles’ first LP.”

  That kind of thing.

  Although he knew everything that ever happened, Gonad wasn’t, in other ways, very bright, so you often found yourself explaining things to him, like what some joke meant, or what you have to carry in a long division, or which shoe went on what foot.

  Stanislaw’s thing was chess. We called him Stan. His granddad was Polish. He was like the exact opposite of Gonad: little and dark, quick in his movements, his eyes always darting about, looking for danger. And there usually was danger, and I don’t mean from a Queen-and-Bishop pincer movement.

  Simon Murphy, usually called Smurf for obvious reasons, was best at English. He was always having to read his work out in class, which tended to get him hated above and beyond what you’d expect for a swot and a nerd. Smurf was normal in everything except for his lips, which were fleshy and protuberant, and which therefore earned him another widely used name, Rubber Lips. This hurt him a lot, for he was a sensitive soul. If you were to rank us all in order of niceness, then Smurf would be top.

  As well as our special things, we had other stuff we were all more or less equally good at. Or not good at. We knew about computers. We knew about getting our heads kicked in by the Neanderthals. We didn’t know anything about girls, and we were rubbish at sport. I suppose you could say we were a bit like the Justice League, that glittering superhero collective spawned by the wondrous DC Comics empire in the 1960s and more recently given new life in a surprisingly authentic cartoon.

  What, this bunch of hapless nerds like the Justice League? How, exactly?

  You know, the way that each has a special skill, but then they can all do other stuff as well. The Flash can run really quickly; Green Lantern has his power ring; J’onn J’onzz, aka Martian Manhunter, can dematerialize; Batman has his Batgadgets; Superman can fly; Wonder Woman has her indestructible steel bracelets and her lovely legs; and Hawkgirl her electro-hammer-bashing-thing. But then they can all fight and think and generally open a whole can of kickass as well. Except maybe the Flash, where the running-really-quickly thing just about exhausts his special powers, but that’s why everyone likes him best, because he’s a bit of a screwup.

  God, now I’ve begun on the Justice League, I see I’m not going to be able to stop. I don’t normally like kids’ stuff, but for some reason the Justice League really gets me. You see, it’s all these superheroes fighting together to save us, but there are all sorts of tensions working away beneath the surface. Batman and Superman don’t like each other; Green Lantern wants everyone to obey him, and practice and improve efficiency, but nobody else wants to, and he’s also in love with Hawkgirl, and she might love him back, and I’m not sure how I feel about it because I secretly hope that there’s a future for me and Hawkgirl (her beautiful feathery wings close around me, I take off the hawk mask and kiss her soft, superheroine lips . . .); and the Flash really fancies Wonder Woman, but she thinks he’s a lightweight, and he is, but she’s too stuck-up, which is her problem, and she actually has a soft spot for Batman. And the whole thing hovers always on the edge of tragedy and defeat, but still you know they’re there for you.

  And I also know there’s something fascist in the idea of looking to these demigods for salvation, when really you should be looking inside yourself, but sometimes when you look inside yourself there’s nothing there, or what there is is no good, and that’s why you need the Justice League.

  Yeah, well now you know why they call us the nerds.

  “Whistle!”

  The cry came a second before the searing pain. Of course I knew who and what it was.

  “Whistle!”

  I blew frantically. But when someone grabs hold of your nipple and squeezes it like a vise, the one thing you can’t do is whistle. You blow and blow, but all that comes out is air. I tried to wrestle him off, but the little bastard was like a monkey and I couldn’t get a grip.

  Explanation.

  This was Flaherty. Flaherty wasn’t really part of our gang, wasn’t really a nerd at all. What he was was a nutter, but not one of the evil ones, just a nutter plain and simple. He was a spiky-haired perpetual-motion machine, always fidgeting, spinning, jerking, chattering. Free-floating, independent, of no party but his own; the biggest pain in the arse known to mankind. His dad was a notorious local criminal, but his dad didn’t live with his mum, and everyone said Flaherty was more like his uncle, who’d been a musician, but had died some squalid death in London. He hadn’t, as far as you could tell, inherited any of Uncle Flaherty’s musical talent, although he was pretty nifty on the old acoustic catarrh. But anyway, the reputation of the dad meant that nobody touched him, however irritating he might be, and that was handy, because he was as likely to get up the noses of the school hard cases as annoy us. What I’m saying is, he was mad but funny, sort of. And now he was on my back, squeezing my tit.

  “You know how to do it,” he whispered, like a guy from ground control trying to talk down a rookie pilot with the instruments all shot to pieces and zero visibility. “Keep calm, two deep breaths, take it easy, and whistle.”

  And it was true. That was the only way. I tried to forget the pain, forget the panic, block out the laughter of the others (they laughed partly because they’d all been whistled too, in their time, and because Flaherty wasn’t really dangerous, just a pain). I blew again, and a low, barely audible whistle came out.

  It was enough. Flaherty jumped off my back.

  “You little tosser,” I said, rubbing my bruised tit, but laughing. You just couldn’t be mad at Flaherty. Might as well be mad at the grass for giving me hay fever.

  Flaherty’s tie was halfway around the side of his neck, and his shirt was out and his trousers were all over the place, but there was still something cool about him, despite looking like he’d just fallen out of a tree.

  “Got a joke,” he said. “Biology joke; did it for homework.”

  That was typical Flaherty—biology homework was supposed to be memorizing the carbon cycle, and instead he had made a joke.

  “How do you make a hor
mone?”

  “Don’t know,” we all chorused back except Gonad, who tutted.

  “Don’t pay her.”

  “Heard it before,” said Gonad.

  Flaherty looked crestfallen for all of two seconds, and then he was away, flitting through the playground like a sprite or a spirit, or a really annoying kid who you couldn’t hate even if you wanted to.

  “Nutter,” said Stan, and we all concurred, smiling. And pretty soon the bell went and then it was school as usual, except for me worrying a bit about the ARSECHEESE and the BUGNOB, and a lot about whatever else was happening in my head that made Doc Jones want to look in there with his CAT scan.

  The kick

  Inside

  When I got home that afternoon I was feeling more tired than I’d ever felt before. It was as if I could sense the weight of the air on me, which is quite something given that every square centimeter of your body has a kilogram of air pressing down on it, and the only reason you don’t get squashed like chewing gum on the street is that you have the same pressure pushing out from the inside, and that’s why you explode if you go out in space without a spacesuit, because the pressure inside has no balancing pressure outside, so boom!

  Mum was in the kitchen doing something with mung beans or aduki beans or some other bean you’ve never heard of. She was wearing one of her floor-length hippie dresses made from string and rags. Her hair was down. It looked like a salt-and-pepper waterfall. I’d told her already that old ladies with long hair look like bunny-boilers, but it didn’t sink in. I suppose she had some kind of mental image of how she looked which had probably stayed the same since she was twenty, and nothing was going to shift it.

  She lifted her face from the pot of beans and smiled her dazed smile. Strands of hair fell down across her eyes and she tried to blow them away. A last few beams of late-afternoon sunshine came through the grimy kitchen window, and for a second I could imagine how she must once have looked, and I could see that her hair-blowing thing must once have been considered pretty cute by those in the market for cuteness.

  “Hey, Heck!” she said.

  “Hey, Mum.”

  She’d obviously forgotten that I’d been to the hospital. I should have grown used to it by now, but it still got to me, sometimes, when I wasn’t feeling great.

  “How was school?” she asked, but I could tell even before the words were fully out that she’d drifted off again, back into the world of dreams and imagination, away from the reality of mung beans and schools and hospitals.

  I went to my room. Had some homework. Atomic weights. Periodic table. Osmium. It took me ten minutes. I love the periodic table. It tells you everything about the material world, everything about what it’s made from, about what combines with what, about how everything comes together. I sometimes think that if our universe was destroyed, an alien power from another dimension could reconstruct it all just from the periodic table, right down to me being here now thinking these thoughts. And the way that Mendeleyev thought it all up without knowing anything at all about the structure of the atom, just by writing down everything he knew about individual elements on cards and then arranging them in groups according to similarities. All just mind-blowing. But not the sort of thing you could own up to thinking, at least to anyone outside my gang.

  ARSIUM.

  I jumped.

  The voice again.

  “Okay, who, I mean what the hell is this?” I’d spoken before I realized I’d even opened my mouth.

  Somehow the voice here in my room with Hawkgirl on the wall and my own duvet and pillows and stuff was much worse. It was an invasion.

  There was a gap, when all I could hear was the blood pumping in my ears, and I felt like a loser for talking to myself. And then, just as I was beginning to relax:

  IT’S ME.

  Well, that was even worse. The voice was definitely talking to me, answering back. It was deep, a bit theatrical, with a rasping edge to it.

  I closed my eyes, trying to shut out the voice with blackness.

  KNOCK KNOCK, OPEN UP. BORED IN HERE. TURN ON THE LIGHTS.

  I shook my head from side to side. Then I opened my eyes and stood up. I went and looked at myself in the mirror. I was pale and my hair was sticking straight up, but that wasn’t so surprising as it was always sticking straight up unless I gelled it down, and then it would eventually ping back with a noise you could hear from across the classroom.

  GOOD CHRIST, WHAT A MESS. YOU LOOK LIKE A WHORE-HOUSE BOG BRUSH.

  I’d been watching closely, and my lips definitely weren’t moving. It was inside my head and it was talking to me.

  “Who is ‘me’?”

  That was me talking, the “me” being him. It. Whatever. My voice was frail and quavery.

  AH, A . . . PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION. WHO IS ME? IS THAT A QUESTION ANYONE CAN ANSWER?

  “T-try.”

  Bugger it. I was adding stammering to the list of rubbish things I did.

  WHY, HECTOR—IF YOU’LL PARDON MY SLIDE INTO FAMILIARITY—I AM YOU.

  I turned back to my bed and got under the duvet. It had footballs on it. And football boots. And some goals. And some animals. The animals were playing football. All in all it was a very busy duvet. I made a mental note to burn it.

  YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM WHAT’S INSIDE.

  The voice was taunting, but did not sound malicious. It was the way a friend would take the piss, feeling out your weaknesses without exploiting them.

  I concentrated hard and worked at controlling my breathing.

  “Was it you that said ‘arsecheese’?”

  Jesus, I was talking back to the voice. I was losing it. I was a crazy man.

  OH, I WAS YOUNG THEN. I’D ONLY JUST DISCOVERED THE PART WHICH DEALS WITH SPEECH.

  “The part? The part of what?”

  KEEP UP, BOY. HAVE A GUESS.

  I tried to think, tried to logic my way around this, or into it.

  “My brain. You’re in my brain.”

  The voice did a sort of trumpeting fanfare by way of reply.

  “You’re in my brain,” I carried on, wonderingly. “You’re the thing that’s making me dizzy. Am I mad?”

  I DON’T KNOW. ARE YOU?

  “Well, I’ve got a voice in my head. Are you going to tell me that Satan is my master and I’ve got to go on a killing spree?”

  WHY SHOULD I DO THAT?

  The voice sounded wounded. I mean, playing at being wounded.

  “It’s what voices in your head usually say.”

  I’M NOT THAT KIND OF VOICE. BY THE WAY, IS SATAN YOUR MASTER? IT WOULD PUT A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT SLANT ON THINGS.

  “Not unless he’s disguised as Mr. Truelove.”

  HUMOR! GOOD. I’D HATE TO END UP IN A BORE. TAKE ME BACK TO THE MIRROR, WILL YOU? I WANT TO HAVE A PROPER LOOK AT US.

  “No.”

  I COULD MAKE YOU.

  “Bollocks.”

  DON’T TEMPT ME. IT’S EARLY DAYS YET, AND I MIGHT MAKE A MESS OF THINGS. BUT I’D GET YOU THERE.

  “Horsepiss.”

  IF YOU INSIST.

  And then I felt a weird thing. I mean, well, everything had been weird today, but we were now on a new level of weirdness, warp-factor-twelve weirdness. My arm started to slide out from under the duvet. I wasn’t doing it. It was just moving. All by itself. No, not by itself. Just not helped by me. It wasn’t my arm anymore, it belonged to someone else. I grabbed it with my other hand and pulled it back. There was a moment of resistance, and then I was in charge again.

  OKAY, OKAY, said the voice, sounding a little out of breath, SO I NEED A BIT MORE PRACTICE BEFORE I TRY THE OLD MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY ROUTINE. BUT I CAN MAKE LIFE TRICKY FOR YOU, IF I WANT. I’M TALKING HERE ABOUT MAKING YOU STEP IN DOGCRAP OR FALL DOWN IN FRONT OF GIRLS. OR BOYS, IF THAT WOULD WORK BETTER. LET’S HAVE A LITTLE LOOK DOWN THERE. MMMM . . . NO, NO, IT SEEMS GIRLS WILL DO THE TRICK.

  “What? Down where? Where are you looking?”

  OH, JUST THE OLD BRAIN STEM. SEAT OF
THE ANIMAL INSTINCTS. DESIRE, RAGE, HUNGER. COME ON, TO THE MIRROR.

  “I’ll go if you stop playing games and tell me what you are.”

  The voice sighed. I WASN’T PLAYING GAMES WHEN I SAID THAT I’M YOU.

  “But you can’t be me: I’m me, and you’re . . . something else.”

  LET ME CLARIFY. I’M MADE FROM YOU.

  “Made from me?”

  FROM YOUR CELLS.

  “My cells?”

  YOUR BRAIN CELLS.

  “My brain cells?”

  YEAH, STOP WITH THE REPEATING.

  “Sorry. But this is a bit hard to take in.”

  KEEP GOING, YOU’LL GET THERE.

  “So you’re a thing in my brain made from my brain cells. How did you get there?”

  WELL, I GREW, NATURALLY.

  And then I got it. So, I was slow on the uptake, but it had been a tough day and besides,

  I had a freaking brain tumor!

  No, let’s be a bit more precise:

  I had a freaking talking freaking brain tumor!

  HEY, EASY BOY. GOT A MAJOR ADRENALINE RUSH THERE, said the tumor, as I now had to think of it. DON’T GET ME WRONG, I LOVE IT, ADRENALINE, AND WE’RE GOING TO MAKE SURE WE GET PLENTY MORE OF IT WHILE I’M AROUND, BUT NOW ISN’T THE TIME. WE’RE REFLECTING HERE. WE WANT REPOSE AND TRANQUILITY. WHAT ABOUT A BIT OF A CHANT, LIKE MUM? AFTER ME NOW, MMRAANGNUAANGNOOOOOOOOOOR.

  I’d been numb, but now something of the horror of it all was getting through. Thoughts rushed into my head like the cold frothing sea pouring into the hole in the Titanic.

  Cancerdeathpainscalpelbloodwastingskullcancerdeathpain bloodcancerdeath.

  “Shut up! Shut the hell up!”

  Then the door opened. Mum stood there, draped in towels, dripping from the bath. My head was ringing and reeling, and I guess I looked pretty white.

  MUM:

  Hector, what is it?

  ME:

  Nothing.

  MUM:

  But I heard you shouting.

  ME:

  It was chemistry homework.