As I reconstructed it afterwards, what happened was that Tierney, Johnson, and a couple of other droogs came bombing in from behind us, feet first. I took most of the impact and now I was down on the concrete with Tierney standing on my back like I was a board and he was surfing me.
And then he dropped his knee into my spine, and I twisted and writhed like he’d hit me with electrodes wired up to the grid. There was no getting up from this, no smart move, no grabbing wrists. I was helpless. I craned up to try to find my friends, but they’d been blown away by the first assault. And then I felt Tierney’s breath on my cheek.
“Not so clever now, are you? What, can’t speak? Beg me for mercy, or you’re dead. Beg, you poof, beg.”
I’d have begged, but I couldn’t find any words. I hoped that Jack T. might chip in, but he was silent too.
“Nothing? Nothing to say? Have some of that then,” and Tierney punched me twice on the side of my face. It didn’t hurt that much, as I don’t think he could get an angle for leverage, but it added to the humiliation, that feeling that he could do whatever he wanted to me. And then, because that probably wasn’t quite humiliating enough, he spat in my ear. Then he got up.
It was good having him off my back. I turned and watched him stroll away, swaggering with his mates. There hadn’t been enough time for a decent crowd to gather, but there were still a dozen people standing about, watching, in little clumps. One of them was Uma Upshaw. She had her hands on her hips, and she stepped in front of Tierney.
“That was brave,” she said.
Subtlety wasn’t one of Uma’s virtues, and the sarcasm dripped like pus from a festering boil.
“What?”
Tierney sounded perplexed. He probably thought he had been brave. There was always the chance he might have scuffed his shoes on the back of my neck.
“Sneaking up like that. Brave. You should get a medal.”
“What you talking about?”
If Tierney had left it there, with the “about” and the question mark and the closing speech marks, he might still have been able to walk away with some dignity left intact. But no, he had to say it. And the fact that he mumbled it under his breath didn’t help him one little bit.
What he said was: “Bitch.”
And now there had been time for a crowd to gather, and collectively it drew its breath. Uma Upshaw wasn’t the kind of girl you called a bitch, not in that insultingly half-arsed way. In fact, there was always the chance that if he’d hollered it out loud like a gangsta rapper he might have got away with it. But to mumble it was to commit the twin peaks of folly: it showed both a lack of respect and a lack of guts.
Uma’s face—that thing of hard-chiseled near-beauty— became more hard and chiseled but I’d estimate about 8 percent less beautiful. It took on the look of some warrior queen, or maybe a death goddess, or even a warrior queen death goddess.
Made me quite horny really, in a way that could only truly be described as kinky. Despite the 8 percent decline in beauty.
Now, as I’ve said before, Tierney wasn’t exactly one of the great hulking bullies, the knuckle-dragging, feel-no-pain, heavy-browed, bruising, biffing, blustering, lobotomized thugs, and we had plenty of those for the sake of comparison. No, Tierney was of the snide, manipulating variety, the evil-mastermind type, although in truth he was not especially bright, as evil masterminds, or even as ordinary kids, go. But my point is that raw physical courage wasn’t quite Tierney’s bag of chips. And, as I’ve also said, Uma Upshaw was a big girl. Not big in the compacted lard-and-muscle way like some of the other girls, but strapping and lissome, with long levers and hard cogs.
Levers and cogs? What am I talking about?
Anyway, Uma steps towards Tierney with her warrior-goddess head on, and she clouts him across the face so hard that he staggers sideways, and it looks like he’s actually going to take a tumble, fall right down on his evil arse. And if he had, the whole world would have been a very different place. No gang leader could survive being sent flying by a mere girl, even if she is some hybrid of Boudicca and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The fall (in both senses) of Tierney would have created a power vacuum at the top, and who knows what might happen then. A new benevolent regime bringing justice and happiness for all? Or a new tyranny, more crushing than the last? Or maybe a nothing, just a sort of happy anarchy, with each kid allowed to eat his Wagon Wheels in peace, and talk about whatever crap he wanted to talk about, and the only oppression the shared oppression of the teachers?
The teachers.
The teacher.
Oh balls.
Mr. Mordred.
In all the excitement of Tierney and the immortal death goddess Uma Upshaw, I had entirely forgotten about the balls.
And the willy.
And what I’d said. To Mr. Mordred.
He’d probably been surveying the playground from his office. I bet he had a telescope up there. Or a pair of binoculars, at the least. I could imagine him, peering down, getting himself worked up by minor acts of mischief—nose picking, greeny-spitting, insufficient reverence for the badge on the school blazer (Motto: “I think therefore I am,” universally rendered by us as: “I’m pink, therefore I’m Spam.” Coat of arms: a cross with a weird sort of eye thing in the middle, a bit like the Red Eye of Mordor, or, for that matter, the bloodshot eye of Mr. Mordred, peering down through his pervy telescope). And he’d seen me, and now he was marching across the playground, although it might be more accurate to describe his tiny, tiptoe steps as mincing more than marching. Yes, he looked like a mincing little fascist, confident only because he had the armed might of the Waffen-SS behind him. He was wearing a pair of reserve spectacles, big brown plastic jobs that carried none of the evil menace of his old pair.
“You, boy!”
Up to that point none of the crowd had noticed his approach, because they were all focused on the Upshaw-Tierney confrontation. I could see him because I was facing his way. But now, with that voice, all attention spun towards the feared deputy head.
And Tierney hadn’t fallen. His low center of gravity bailed him out, and he recovered his balance, and now even the humiliation of the slap was lost, blown away on the wind of this new drama. Still half crouching, he turned to me and spat: “I told you you was dead.”
I looked back at Mordred. He seemed momentarily distracted by the crowd. He must have seen me before Tierney’s attack and started on his way down during the action, expecting to find me still in my little huddled gang, only to emerge into what was obviously an interesting spectacle, rife with possibilities for administering punishment. But he wasn’t going to be diverted. He was definitely verted, and verted right on me.
Everything else blurred. All that existed in the world was me and Mordred. Before he reached me he stretched out his arm. It seemed to be about eight meters long and when I felt his hand on my shoulder it pierced like talons. He pulled me towards him, and his face came to meet mine. He was centimeters away. I could smell mint on his breath, but it covered something darker, something rotten. I could see his teeth, small, white, but with brown stains in the gaps. He was smiling now, the sort of smile a vampire gives when it sees the naked bosom of a sleeping girl heaving before him.
Mmm, bosoms . . . Oh, sorry!
And all this was happening which, on its own, was quite enough to make me feel a bit, well, strange, but then there was something else going on as well. He was pushing me ahead of him now, but my legs weren’t working the way they should, and I was stumbling a bit and Mordred was getting annoyed at this, and he was shouting something at me and I wanted to tell him that I was feeling funny but I couldn’t get it out, and then I felt him shaking me and half dragging me up the steps into the school, and I know this shaking was the best he could do because he was not allowed to actually hit us, and maybe even shaking was against the rules but he could always say he was just holding me so that I didn’t run away.
And now we were inside the school, on the smooth hard tiles of the
foyer, and all of a sudden it was very bright in there, and the foyer has big windows and a glass roof, but even so it was brighter than it should be, and suddenly I became aware of the pattern in the tiles, and I knew that they meant something, something important, something profound, and then a voice inside me, the voice of Jack Tumor, but far away, even though he’s inside, said HERE WE GO and then there was nothing.
A Short Chapter,
ConcErning Mainly
voMit
I had nothing to do with it. The boy just fainted.”
There was panic in the voice—the harsh, cracked sound of a man under ball-clacking stress.
I opened my eyes.
I shut them again.
I was in the sick bay with the grisly head-and-torso resuscitation dummy and the two sick buckets, but also, evidently, Mr. Mordred and, dismayingly, my mother.
“I’ve told you, he has a medical condition. The doctors don’t know what it is. He’s having a scan tomorrow. A brain scan.”
And then some crying. Not from Mr. Mordred, yet.
“Mrs. Brunty . . .”
“Ms.,” she managed to sob.
“Ms. Brunty, I . . . Hector, yesterday, made comments. Said things of a nature . . . of a . . . of a sexual nature. About me. In front of . . . there were several . . . of an intimate nature. Not acceptable in any way, shape, or . . .”
It was good hearing Mordred flustered. I’d have enjoyed it more in other circumstances.
“Well, what did he say?”
“He, er, ah, suggested his name, when I asked him . . . he said he was called . . . it was of a sexual, ah, nature . As I said.”
It sounded pretty feeble.
“And what exactly did you do to him?”
Mum was getting angry now, which got rid of the tears, for the time being.
“Nothing . . . I was simply asking him to come up to my . . . and he . . . well, slumped, but not in any way that I could have . . . and I thought he was playing the fool again, and I wasn’t going to be humiliated in front of . . . every intention of suspending the. . . but when it became clear that, that . . . we naturally phoned the, ah, ambulance. Immediately. And you, of course. Er, naturally. And immediately. Even more immediately.”
“Mum,” I said, to let her know that I was awake.
And then I was sick.
More than you’d have expected.
I mean more than you’d have expected even if you’d guessed that I was going to be sick, which would have been clever of you.
Now, whatever else you say about vomit, it’s always interesting, from the point of view of what’s in it. That is to say, from a scientific point of view. In fact, you might say that science began when people started to look at stuff like vomit and point at it and say, “Look at what’s in there! Amazing!”
Obviously (back to my vomit rather than vomit in general) there was some of my breakfast in the mix, breakfast being muesli, a special kind my mum gets from the health-food shop, consisting mainly of some kind of fibrous material made out of sacks or something, without the dreaded nuts but with a few raisins, and they were pretty easy to spot, both in the muesli and in the vomit. And some mashed-up crisps and a brown smear of the Twix I’d had at break, bought from the school snack shop.
It was fun buying things from the school snack shop because it was run by Mr. Churl, and he had these sausage fingers, and if you put your money down on the counter he couldn’t pick it up, but sort of chased it around like an imbecile after the last pea on his plate, and it was pleasant to generate frustration for Mr. Churl because he was a very shouty man who liked to scare the smaller children.
And (back to the vomit) there was also, more surprisingly, some of last night’s brown rice salad, which was made from brown rice served cold, which turned it into a salad, mixed in with some real salad ingredients like spring onions and peppers, which all sounds quite nice, but you have to remember that the rice was cooked by Mum, and so emerged as a big blob of beige goo, like something you’d use to plaster a wattle-and-daub out-house. But now it was much runnier, and would never work in a wattle-and-daub context or, for that matter, pass the pencil test.
Oh, have I mentioned the pencil test yet? We first came across it in citizenship, when the teacher told us that in South Africa during the apartheid years, one of the ways they decided if you were colored (meaning mixed race) or black (meaning black) was whether or not a pencil would stand up if thrust into your hair. Now, this was stupid, horrific, sick, etc., etc., but also quite funny, as long as you remember that you’re laughing at the idiots who came up with the test rather than the poor sods having pencils stuck into their heads, so we adopted the pencil test for other circumstances. Like phlegm, crap, rice pudding, and, of course, vomit.
It—the rice salad, I mean—and the other products of my activities in the field of digestion splashed over the floor and up the walls, and ran in complex river systems until they reached Mordred’s feet, and then he had to do a little dance to try to escape the flow, but there was nowhere really for him to dance to, because I’d kind of cut him off from the door, and so he got my sick on his shoes, and that would have been satisfying if it wasn’t for the fact that I felt like my head was going to explode, and I was still retching and there was sick caught in the back of my throat, which is never a nice place to have sick caught, and the whole room stank of puke, which is one of the things guaranteed to make you want to upchuck more than ever (that’s what I call ironic).
My mum dived and got the empty sick bucket and held it under my chin, but that was completely closing the stable door after the horse had vomited. I took over the holding, and Mum turned back to Mordred and said: “Perhaps now you can see that my son is seriously ill.”
And the tears were rolling again, although of course that could have been something to do with the stink.
Mordred was trying to look concerned about me, but it was plain that he was much more concerned about the puke on his gray slip-on shoes, and he made a little leap, like a ballet dancer, to get over the main flow, but that was a disaster, a serious error of judgment, because he landed with his heel in one of the tributaries and the heel shot from under him and he ended up flop-103
ping back flat on his arse in the sick. Oh yes indeedy, about as much in the sick as he could have been if he’d set out with the deliberate intention of having a good old wallow in it.
Then the school secretary, Miss Bush, who had blue hair and brown teeth and wore her glasses on a chain around her wattled neck, opened the door and sort of shooed in two men in green overalls who looked like Kwik Fit auto mechanics, but who I knew were really paramedics. One of them had a mustache and the other one didn’t, although he might as well have had one for all the difference it made.
They took in the situation: me, Mum, Mordred sitting in sick, and for a second I thought they were going to run for it, despite the fire-and-vomit-repelling suits and their belts adorned with high-tech weaponry. But then they got their courage back, and the next thing I knew I was being wheeled away, dimly aware of the eyes of the school upon me.
CasUalty
So I went back to the hospital, this time with a bit more style and drama about the whole business, riding in the back of the ambulance like a genuine emergency. The paramedics turned out to be pretty funny, in a slightly forced, double-acty kind of way.
Sample joke: Paramedic A (the one without the mustache) is sitting beside me (I’m still lying down at this stage, although I feel okay, maybe about 82 percent normal) and he has a clipboard. He looks for a pen, then takes out something from his top pocket and sort of goes through a little mime of writing with it before he looks at it in disgust. Paramedic B (mustachioed) says, “What’s that?” and Paramedic A replies, “My rectal thermometer.” And then together they say, “Oh no! Some arsehole’s got my pen,” and then they laugh at their own routine, and I smile as well, because it’s obviously the sort of thing they do all the time.
But Mum isn’t really listening
, and just carries on looking like it’s her with the brain tumor.
Yes, Mum rode in the ambulance too, which put the dampers on things, in the way that being punched in the head and collapsing in the foyer and the fountains of spew never really had. She insisted on holding my hand.
I suppose if I was being honest I’d have to admit that I didn’t mind, really, this once.
The ambulance dumped us at the casualty ward, and the men said goodbye like we were old friends, but I guess they forgot about us the second we were somebody else’s business.
There was a brief conference with some hospital people of indeterminate function, and I was moved from a trolley to a wheelchair, but not one of the cool ones—a brown spazzy job with little wheels. Then there was a wait to get seen by the bighaired receptionist, and then another wait to see the nurse who finds out if you’re about to keel over or not (pretty, in a uniformed kind of way, which, all kinkiness aside, is one of the best ways, and I’m really sorry if that’s offensive to nurses and police-women), and then another wait, the real wait, before you get to see the doctor. Mum went and told the big-haired woman on reception about my scan, and she went on in a boring way about how they had to tell Dr. Jones that I was here.
The waiting room was about the most depressing spot in the universe, the kind of place they stick you in after you die and before they let you into hell. It was full of people with dirty bandages and crying kids, and it was hard to know if it was the kids who were sick or their mothers, who were all tired and gray and greasy-haired, and you could see them itching for a fag. The mothers, I mean, but maybe the kids as well, who were probably passively smoking about forty a day.
No one here looked at all healthy to me.
After about an hour I got wheeled through a doorway and into a cubicle, with Mum still holding on to my hand like she thought I was going to make a break for freedom. After another ten minutes Dr. Jones appeared, along with a couple of other doctors—unless they were impostors disguised as doctors, which happens more often than you’d think, according to the papers, at least, but probably not in this case.
Jack Tumor Page 8
