Jack Tumor

by Anthony McGowan

  About not having a dad.

  The good side to all this was that Tierney and his mob seemed content with what they’d done and started to amble away, like hyenas leaving a stain on the grass that used to be a zebra.

  “THOU WHORESON OBSCENE GREASY TALLOW-CATCH!”

  Whoooa! What the hell was that?

  It wasn’t in my head. I mean it was in my head, but it was also in my mouth. I mean I screamed this at full volume, all decibels blazing. And it wasn’t just screamed, but screamed with a kind of laughing contempt.

  Tierney and his stooges turned around.

  “What did you say?”

  I genuinely had no idea. And I don’t suppose Tierney knew what it meant any more than I did. Maybe that’s what saved me. That or the fact that the playground supervisor, Mrs. Trimble, was stumping towards us on her varicosely lumpy legs, her gray hair sticking out like she’d been hooked up to the Van de Graaff generator in the physics lab.

  “Come on now, boys,” she said. “In you get.

  It’s after nine.” In general nobody took much notice of Mrs. Trimble, but that didn’t mean that kickings could be administered freely in her presence.

  “C’mon, Heck,” said Stan. “Let’s not miss registration.” And then, as we got going, he added, “What was that thing you said to Tierney?”

  “I don’t really know, Stan. I don’t know what happened. It just came out. It sounded olden days, like Shakespeare or something. I must have picked it up in English.”

  Mrs. Hegarty, our English teacher, was a Shakespeare nut, and she was always getting us to do read-throughs, even of plays that weren’t on the syllabus. She only really trusted us with the bit parts, and took all the main roles for herself, so she’d often end up having to kill herself or chat herself up.

  There was a bit of a pause. The sound of Stan thinking.

  “Thanks, though.”

  “I didn’t do anything. It was Flaherty really, making him look stupid.”

  “Yeah, but you tried. I hate him.”

  “Tierney?”

  “Yeah, Tierney. Johnson’s just a tool. A monkey, I mean. And Tierney’s the organ-grinder.”

  “Small organ,” I said, which didn’t really bear analyzing, but we laughed anyway.

  “Minuscule,” said Stan.

  Down and OUt

  And then we were in the classroom, and we were late, and still smiling about Tierney’s little organ, which never looks good (the smiling, I mean, not the little organ) when you enter a classroom late, and so Mrs. Conlon began to shout.

  When Mrs. Conlon was still Miss Walsh—and it was only a few months ago—she never used to shout. The shouting was all to do with Mr. Conlon. Before Mr. Conlon she had been one of the nice ones—nice and pretty. She was still pretty, in a petite blonde way, but she wasn’t nice anymore. And being shouted at by someone who you fancied added extra levels of unpleasantness, unless you happen to be a perv, which I’m not, at least not yet, because you never quite know how you’re going to turn out.

  My class was 9M. We stayed together for registration, PE, religion, citizenship, domestic science, and other stuff that didn’t need brains. Everything else was streamed, meaning the smart kids went one way, the dumb kids went another. 9M was, therefore, about 32 percent psychos, 56 percent normals, 10 percent retards, and 2 percent brainy.

  “Get out!” screamed Mrs. Conlon.

  Stan and I looked at her meekly, trying to show that we were not worth her wrath.

  “Nobody runs into my classroom. Not grinning like an idiot. What do you think this is, the Wild West?”

  It seemed a curious comparison to make, but occasionally, in her rage, Mrs. Conlon’s imagination would run away with her. She once yelled at us: “Who do you think I am, Catherine the Great?” which baffled us completely, and not even history boffin Gonad could guess at what she meant, although the next day he came back after some research and told Stan, Smurf, and me that one rumor had it that Catherine the Great perished while trying to have it off with a horse, but that that was probably just a lie put about by her enemies. I wished he hadn’t told me that, because for a while afterwards I kept imagining Mrs. Conlon . . . Well, you can imagine what I imagined.

  “No, Mrs. Conlon. But we were—” And then there was more shouting.

  And then—I don’t quite know how—I was on the floor. I suppose it was some kind of faint, but that makes me sound like a girl.

  Swoon?

  No, much worse. Sounds like a wuss.

  Collapse, that’s it.

  I collapsed.

  I think I might have seen some colors, and there was a smell of something in between flowers and burning plastic. And then I was looking up at the polystyrene tiles on the ceiling, thinking how the pockmarking of little craters in each tile must be different, so every tile was unique, and there must be billions of them in the world, like people. And then there were faces around me: the gawping faces of kids—psychotic, retarded, normal, brainy—and then, looming over them, the concerned face of Mrs. Conlon, who had thankfully stopped shouting and might have turned briefly back into nice Miss Walsh.

  “Pick him up,” someone said.

  “No, leave him, he might have a neck injury.”

  “He fell on ‘is arse, not his neck.” Slap. “Ow! Sorry, miss. Bum. Ow! I mean backside.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Miss, if he’s dead can I have his desk?”

  “He’s not dead, he’s in a coma.”

  “His eyes are open.”

  “That happens sometimes.”

  “Maybe he’s a zombie.”

  “I think he’s a poof.” Slap. “Ow!”

  I stood up, disappointing those who favored death or coma, although the zombie supporters remained hopeful.

  “Are you okay, Hector?” Mrs. Conlon still wasn’t shouting.

  “Yeah. Must have slipped or something.”

  I was embarrassed and felt a blush coming on, unstoppable as stampeding bison. Blushing is one of my things. I really wish it wasn’t because it makes you look stupid and weak.

  “Do you want to go to the sick bay?”

  The sick bay was a small room next to the office. It’s where the bandages were kept. And a tube of Savlon antiseptic. And a bucket. For the vomit. It often smelled of vomit (the room, not just the bucket), which is why it was called the sick bay. Actually, there were two buckets, both vomit-oriented. As well as the bucket for actually spewing into, there was also the sand bucket, used post-spew to strew the spew with sand, although why puke must be covered with sand prior to cleaning is one of those arcane mysteries like why the dinosaurs died out, or what happened at Area 51, or just what is going on down the front of Uma Upshaw’s blouse.

  There was also (in the sick bay, not down Uma’s blouse) a slightly grisly head-and-torso dummy used for practicing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in citizenship classes. It was a lady one, perhaps pretty once, but a decade of heavy use had seen her fall into a decline, and her hair was all matted and greasy, and the paint was flaking off her and one of her eyes had come out and was on the floor next to her, waiting for a visit from the grisly-head-and-torso-resuscitation-dummy doctor.

  (That, by the way, is a good use of the hyphen. If I’d said the “grisly head-and-torso-resuscitation-dummy doctor,” i.e., leaving out the hyphen after “grisly,” then it would mean that the doctor was grisly, and not the head-and-torso resuscitation dummy. I suppose that the doctor might also be grisly, in which case I should have said the “grisly grisly-head-and-torsoresuscitation-dummy doctor.” And I’ve just thought that if that doctor himself got sick, then he’d go and see the “grisly grisly-head-and-torso-resuscitation-dummy-doctor doctor.” And if that doctor was, in turn, grisly, then—)

  Where was I?

  “No, miss.”

  I really didn’t want to go to the sick bay. You’d have to be mad to go to the sick bay. You’d have to be sick to—

  On the way to double chemistry, Stan asked m
e if I was feeling all right. He looked concerned. Okay, so he always looked concerned about something, but that something wasn’t usually me. I thought about telling him about my head troubles, Doc Jones, the works, but for some reason I couldn’t. It wasn’t even the sort of embarrassment that might stop you talking about your undescended testicles or pubic lice. It was a deeper reluctance, and it was dark and shrouded. And it had gotten itself mixed up with annoyance. So I went on the attack.

  “Shut up, will you, Stan? You’re the one who’s allergic to the world. I mean, is there anything, and I mean literally anything, in the universe that doesn’t make you sneeze, or make your eyes water, or bring you out in welts?”

  It wasn’t supposed to be unkind, but I think it probably came out that way. In any case Stan wasn’t the sort to engage in repartee. He was more the sort who’d go off and hate himself in a corner, so I shouldn’t have taken that path with him.

  “You’re just as bad.”

  “It’s only nuts, with me. You’re everything. I mean, kiwi fruit? Who ever heard of being allergic to kiwi fruit?”

  “So?”

  “And latex.”

  “Uh.”

  “And pollen. All pollen.”

  Stan shrugged. “You’ve got that too, remember.”

  “And wheat, and milk, and . . .” But by then I was talking to his back and feeling like a sod. At least I hadn’t mentioned his twitches and tics.

  He had two main sorts. The first sort involved closing one eye, while the same side of the face made a kind of fluttering movement. It was a bit like a wink performed by a ham actor in a Restoration comedy with wigs and frock coats and ornamental snuffboxes—our class went to see a performance of some play, The Fondling Fop or something, by Sir Humbert Halfninney (1643–1701) at the theater in town, so I know all about this. The second sort of tic involved at least one additional eye in a sequence of rapid blinking, his face otherwise immobile.

  I’m honestly not trying to be mean about Stan, who I love like a brother. I just want to give you the whole picture, and if you miss out on the blinking and winking (oh, and the compulsive knee shaking) then you’re not seeing him like he is, in the round.

  Anyway, he went and sat on one side of Gonad, and I sat on the other, and, given Phil’s bulk, that was a long way apart.

  We were doing colloids. I had a soft spot for colloids. A colloid is a mixture of two different things: a mixture, but not—and this is the important bit—a compound. There’s no chemical reaction between the two, nor any physical bonding. Just two or more things rubbing along together. For instance, a gel is a liquid suspended in a solid, an emulsion is a liquid in a liquid, smoke is a solid suspended in a gas, fog is a liquid suspended in a gas, and foam is a gas suspended in a liquid.

  I could go on.

  I told you I liked colloids.

  Mr. Brightman taught chemistry, and he was one of the teachers who mysteriously seemed not to hate us. He told us jokes and tried to make chemistry interesting with stories about what stuff explodes and what gases are the most poisonous, and how much of them it would take to kill, say, a million people, or an elephant. He was very tall, yet drove a tiny Ford Fiasco, I mean Fiesta, which was also quite funny, and which tended to earn him not insults but rather points for a good visual gag. Seeing him climb in and out of the little car was like watching a giraffe trying to have sex with a tortoise.

  As I was getting my books and pens out, Gonad said, “Heard you fainted.”

  “Didn’t faint.”

  “He did,” said Stan from somewhere beyond Phil.

  A girl called Sarah Wrigglesworth said, “Yes, he did. He fainted, and he drooled.”

  She wasn’t talking to anyone in particular, just adding her bit to the general humiliation. I didn’t remember drooling. Drool-ing’s one of the things I’d most like not to do in life, and it’s not even one of those things, like cannibalism or sheep-shagging, you could imagine getting into in certain extreme circumstances. It’s just a complete no thanks, and I don’t care how many parallel universes there happen to be.

  But then Mr. Brightman came to my rescue, and it was colloids for the next hour and twenty minutes.

  Smurf in Love

  We’d all given up on school lunches. It wasn’t just the stuff they gave you—the eyeball-and-scrotum burgers, the sardines, the mashed turnips—it was more what might happen to it before it got into you; the things done to it while your back was turned, or even in your plain sight. As a bare minimum your water would be spat in and you’d find chewing gum or fag butts in your rice pudding. (Okay, so that provided a mild improvement in flavor, but still, not a good thing to have happen.)

  So it was packed lunches for me and Stan (chess maestro) and Gonad (small ears) and Smurf (big lips), eaten in the same place every day—a kind of crinkle in the outside wall of the school library, out of the way of the wind, and, as it was partially hidden by a ragged line of dying rosebushes, easily missed by passing psychos.

  To begin with, today, there was just me and Smurf. Like I said before, Smurf had “nice” written all over him. He usually joined in the piss-taking and banter when we were all together, but when it was just the two of us he became more serious. And the thing he was most serious about was girls.

  As a gang we didn’t talk much about girls—I mean, real girls as opposed to, for example, Hawkgirl. It wasn’t that we didn’t think about them, but just that, well, too much was at stake. You couldn’t say that you fancied so-and-so, because it was pathetic, given that we were all no-hopers, and our chance of being fancied back was as close to zero as you can get without actually dipping into the negative numbers. A few of the other boys in the year—the cool, the bold, the persevering—had girlfriends, but that wasn’t for us, and we coped with that fact in our own different ways. Stan clammed up. Gonad lusted graphically. I joked. But I think the one who suffered the most was Smurf, partly because he was such a romantic, which meant that he was usually in some kind of love with a girl (I mean the whole girl, too, and not just some bit of her like, for example, her breasts) and partly because of all of us, he was the one most subjected to ridicule, on account of the lips. It was a tragic combination.

  And right now I could tell that not everything was well in the gentle heart of Simon Murphy. He was slumped in the corner, staring at his feet. Smurf was a very bendy person, and sometimes looked like he had no bones at all.

  ME:

  Whassup, Smurf?

  SMURF:

  (He looks up, his big brown eyes full of love-misery. He shakes his head.) Nothing. Nah, nothing.

  ME:

  Who is it this time?

  SMURF:

  No one.

  ME:

  Come on. It’s either some girl, or you’ve just heard that an asteroid is going to vaporize us in ten minutes.

  SMURF:

  (Pause. Then another pause.) Yeah, well. I was just thinking. So who do you think is the most . . . the one with the best . . . the . . . I mean, who do you fancy?

  ME:

  You mean, Hawkgirl or Buffy?

  SMURF:

  You know I don’t mean that. I mean, just in general. In our year.

  ME:

  Look, Smurf, just tell me who you’re talking about.

  SMURF:

  (Mumbling.) It’s mad. I haven’t got a chance.

  JACK:

  HE’S RIGHT THERE, WHOEVER IT IS. UNLESS IT’S MONGA FROM PLANET UGLY.

  ME:

  Shhhh—I mean, do you want me to guess? Is it that little rodenty thing in chemistry? The one who asked you if she could share your test tube? I’m sure she stores food in cheek pouches, like a gerbil.

  SMURF:

  No, it’s not her. And it was my burner, not my test tube.

  ME:

  Aha! So you admit it’s someone in particular, and not someone in general?

  SMURF:

  (Noncommittal shrug.)

  JACK:

  IT’S PROBABLY AN INTERNET PORN ST
AR. I BET HE’S GETTING THROUGH TEN PACKS OF COMPUTER-SCREEN WIPES A NIGHT.

  ME:

  Dawn Elkington, then? She’s not bad. You know. For a girl. I suppose it depends on where you stand on the issue of plantar warts.

  SMURF:

  How do you know she’s got plantar warts?

  ME:

  Keeps her socks on for gymnastics.

  SMURF:

  Oh yeah. Good deduction. No, not her. But not ‘cause of the warts. I wouldn’t let warts stand in the way. Not on their own. I’m not that superficial.

  ME:

  Moira Pennington?

  SMURF:

  No, not her either. Look, do you swear you won’t tell the others?

  ME:

  Of course I won’t.

  SMURF:

  Oh, Jesus, I can’t even say it. Have another guess.

  ME:

  I’m getting bored now. Okay, Uma Upshaw, then.

  I said it without thinking, not supposing for a second that Smurf would be mad enough to fancy someone like her. It was like the story of the mouse who lusts after a she-elephant. One day, when the elephant is having a drink in the river, the mouse sees his chance and leaps on her back and starts to, er, make passionate love to her. At that moment a crocodile grabs hold of the elephant’s trunk, and the elephant starts thrashing around and trumpeting, and the mouse thinks that she’s having a big elephanty orgasm and he squeaks out, “Oh yeah, baby.” Well, okay, so it’s not much like that, except in the way the elephant doesn’t even know the mouse is there.

  And then I saw from Smurf’s face that I’d hit the mark.

  ME:

  But she’s a bitch. And she used to go out with Tierney, you know.

  SMURF:

  I know. But she’s . . . she’s beautiful. And she chucked Tierney, I heard.