Jack Tumor

by Anthony McGowan

  And then an inspiration.

  Alcopop!

  They tasted like pop, but they were made of alcohol! They were invented to get children drunk. Genius.

  I reached the bar. The man behind it looked a bit like Les Upshaw but without his twinkling, happy-go-lucky side.

  I’m being sarcastic.

  This one looked like he’d been hacked out of a quarry and towed here by truck.

  “A Campari and lemonade and a Tangerine Tosshead, please,” I said, in a gruff, lumberjack kind of voice.

  The barman stared at me. You’d have to call it a withering stare. Anyway, I withered.

  “Age?”

  I thought about confusing him by claiming to be seventy-two. Some sort of freak of nature, eternal youth, monkey-gland treatment.

  “Eighteen.”

  He carried on withering me for a while and then, greed overcoming his belief that underage children shouldn’t be served alcohol, he turned and did his thing with glasses and bottles and coolers and came back with what I’d asked for.

  “Four ninety-eight.”

  I gave him the five pounds and said loudly, “Keep the change,” because that seemed the thing to do—open-handed and grownup. Very Ernest Hemingway. And then I remembered the crisps.

  “And some crisps, please.”

  The barman breathed heavily, like it—the breathing, I mean—was something he was still getting to grips with.

  “Flavor?”

  I couldn’t think of any flavors. Not one.

  “Er, what have you got?”

  His eyes rolled slowly upwards, and for a moment I thought he was in the middle of dying, but then he said, counting off with his huge, calloused fingers like jumbo sausage rolls: “Whale-and-bacon, lemur, veal, cheese-and-cucumber, squid . . .” and I think he would probably have gone on for another half an hour or so.

  “Plain,” I said, to stop him.

  Long pause.

  “You mean ready-salted?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sea salt or rock?”

  “Erm . . . just the normal, whatever that is.”

  “What kept you?” said Uma, when I finally got back to her.

  “Crisps,” I replied, laying before her the drinks and three packets, one sea salt, one rock salt, and one whale-and-bacon (to be on the safe side).

  “Oh,” she said distantly.

  “Don’t really fancy them now.” That was annoying. Never mind, her loss, my gain. I was about to open up the whale-and-bacon when I heard a warning voice.

  NO! CAN’T EAT STRONG-FLAVORED SNACK PRODUCTS IF YOU’RE GOING TO SNOG HER. DON’T YOU KNOW ANYTHING? WHY DO YOU THINK SHE CHANGED HER MIND? SHE THOUGHT IT THROUGH WHILE YOU WERE AT THE BAR. NOTHING WORSE THAN COMING ACROSS A MASHED MORSEL OF CHEESY MUSH WHEN YOU’RE TONGUE-SURFING.

  “When I’m what?”

  “When you’re what what?” said Uma.

  “Oh, sorry. Nothing. How’s your Campari?”

  “Nice.”

  She sipped her drink and a little line of pale red moisture formed itself around her lips. And, now I was looking lipwards, I saw that whatever stuff she had put on them, lip gloss or lipstick, had bits of sparkle in it. I couldn’t decide if this was babyish or slutty. Well, my head couldn’t decide, but elsewhere decisions were being made.

  I took a gulp of my Tangerine Tosshead. There was a slight mechanical problem as my lips got sucked into the neck of the bottle and I had to pull them out with a loud smacking noise. Uma turned away courteously. The stuff was sickly sweet. Which was fine, but then the alcohol felt its way blindly through the sugar and put its claws into my gullet, and I had to swallow a mini-retch, which left me with a big burp caught half in and half out. Finally the pain was so bad I had to release it, so I held the bottle up to my lips and tried to belch discreetly back into it, which seemed like the politest of the options I had before me. I don’t know why, but the bottled burp made the drink fizz into a frenzy, and it bubbled and spilled out and down my front and onto the table.

  BRAVO, MAESTRO.

  It wasn’t one of my best performances. And then I noticed that Uma was laughing.

  “I’m sorry, Uma. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I shouldn’t have—”

  “Oh, shut up and neck your drink,” she said, her words breaking up under the pressure of her smile. “I’m having a laugh. It’s not every night you get to go out with the school weirdo, who suddenly turns out to be quite good-looking under all that hair.”

  And with that she did something extraordinary.

  She kissed me.

  It was a light kiss, weighing about as much as a pencil or a jam-jar lid, i.e., something in the region of two grams, which may not sound like much to you, but to me was like having a tank run over my lips, but in a good way, by which I’m trying to say that it was nice. Short, but nice. Probably less than a second in duration, but, of course, time goes funny when you have someone attached to your lips.

  WA-HAAAAAY! TOLD YOU WE WERE IN. IN LIKE FLYNN! IN LIKE FLYNN!

  I restrained myself from saying “Shut up.”

  “Let’s finish our drinks and go down to the graveyard,” said Uma.

  It was the best offer I’d had all day, for which read “in my entire life.”

  Elegy in a Citytious?

  Churchyard

  The next thing I knew we were walking down the lane to the church, and Uma had taken my arm. I don’t know if it was Jack T. on the case, or just the natural result of having the prettiest girl in the school holding on to me, and us about to enter the dark verdant world of the graveyard, but I felt dopamine drench my brain, spurting like champagne at the end of a Grand Prix.

  “Spurting”? Sorry.

  “Is this where you take all your girlfriends?”

  She was being teasing and playful, and I didn’t know if she was asking because she secretly hated the idea of me being here with other girls, or because she was actually excited by it, or if she really didn’t give a toss and she was just winding me up. Or all of those things.

  “I haven’t been here before with a—”

  STOP! GIRLS LIKE BOYS WITH A BIT OF EXPERIENCE. PLAY UP TO IT.

  “I mean lately. Not for days now. With girls. Or a girl.”

  Yes, whatever Jack said, I didn’t want her to think I was having orgies down here with packs of nudie girls.

  “Where do you usually go?”

  “Go?”

  GO TO DO IT, DUMMY!

  “Oh, God. I mean, I go down here.”

  I actually knew the old graveyard well. It was one of the better places to hang out.

  Need to give you a quick picture of our part of town: there’s the school and the social club and the Catholic church kind of at the epicenter of the neighborhood, but the whole place is in this boggy mess, with these low, soggy fields where the gypsies come to camp. But it’s only a ten-minute walk to an older part of town, where the houses are bigger, and no one has their windows boarded up and there’s less general rubbish around like old prams and cars propped on piles of bricks because their wheels have been nicked. That’s where St. Arsenius is. And I suppose you’d have to call it kind of beautiful. The church is probably only a hundred years old, but it was made to look old even then, like some Gothic cathedral in miniature. And the churchyard is like a bit of the real countryside dumped in town. There are tall trees and low trees and a spreading yew and bushes and hidden corners and lots of gravestones and some mausoleums, like small palaces where the rich lie dead and the dead lie rich.

  I used to come here when I was a kid to watch birds, but don’t tell anyone because it’s like train-spotting and making model aeroplanes, being one of the things to guarantee that nobody will ever fancy you. I never got good enough so that I could tell the little brown jobs apart—I mean, say, a willow warbler from a chiffchaff, or the drab female chaffinch from a female sparrow—but I could still tick off a good ten species while I sat on a bench or a grave. Blue tit, coal tit, great tit, male chaffinche
s with their pink breasts—hey, that’s a lot of tit action there—and magpies and jays, and blackbirds, of course, and robins coming close in that not-giving-a-cheep way of theirs, and the rooks up high, and sometimes even the dark silhouette of a tawny owl.

  For some reason the thugs hardly ever came to the graveyard, although you would have thought it was a good place to sniff glue and mug people. Maybe it was the ghosts of the place or the quietness of it that made them feel uncomfortable.

  So yeah, I knew the graveyard quite well, and I knew where I was going to take Uma Upshaw, and I suppose at some level I knew what I was going to have to do when I got there.

  “This way,” I said, and I was holding her hand.

  The terrifying Uma Upshaw had become strangely meek, and as she grew more delicate, so I became more robust. I didn’t feel fourteen anymore. I felt more like fifteen. Maybe sixteen. The dopamine, good stuff. I felt close to her. Felt able to ask her the question that was pressing me.

  “Uma,” I said, “why did you agree to come out with me? I mean, you’ve never acted interested in me much. I mean before the other day, outside school.”

  “Why did I come? Because you asked me. Lots of boys are afraid of me. Or too shy to ask. But you did. And I had noticed you before. I thought you sometimes said funny things. And you’ve got a cute smile. And you couldn’t be worse than that little creep . . . you know who.”

  I didn’t want to think about Tierney. But the rest of that was good to hear. This didn’t feel like my life anymore, I mean my usual boring life. It felt like the life I wanted, a life where things happened.

  I found the place I was looking for. It was a weeping willow at the edge of the graveyard. The ground beneath the drooping branches was always dry, and soft with the fallen leaves. It was a place where I came long ago on summer evenings to read comics and imagine myself a hero, and even before that I’d come here to play Spades with Smurf and Phil, and we’d lie there and talk about nothing, and one of us would have brought a bottle of soda, and we’d have burping contests, or see if we could piss as far as the wall from within the shelter of the willow branches.

  Once an old man parted the curtain and put his head through, and he sort of looked at us for a while and then he went away, half smiling, and I suppose he was the vicar.

  Smurf. It was always his pack of cards we played with. His image began to form in my head, mournful, accusing. But then I felt Jack smother him before he had the chance to mess things up with Uma, and he disappeared with a faint pop, taking my guilt with him.

  I held back the softly falling branches for Uma.

  “I’m not going in there,” she said, poking her head through.

  “It’s really nice,” I said. “It’s my favorite place in the world.

  The ground’s dry.”

  That was all it took. She went into the space beneath the boughs.

  “This is okay, actually,” she said, bumping herself down.

  ACTION STATIONS. CODE YELLOW.

  I sat down beside her. Three packets of crisps crunched in my pockets.

  NICE MOVE.

  We still hadn’t had anything resembling a conversation. I thought now might be as good a time as any to start.

  “Which is your favorite Star Wars film?”

  NOOOOOOOOOO!

  “My what?”

  “Er, favorite Star Wars film. I think mine’s The Empire Strikes Back.”

  JEEZ.

  “I haven’t got one. I saw the last one, what was it called? Anyway, it was crap.”

  “Yeah, a fiasco. But at least it didn’t have Jar Jar Binks in it.”

  “Hector—”

  “You can call me Heck.”

  “Heck—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Shut up and give me a kiss.”

  CODE RED. I REPEAT, CODE RED.

  The moment had come, the moment I had been dreading. I moved closer to her, and put my hand on her shoulder. She folded herself into me and I kissed her. I was leaning on my left arm and I then made the mistake of moving it before I’d readjusted my balance, and we fell back together, and my lips and teeth ground into her. She pushed me off.

  “Ow! That really hurt.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Am I bleeding?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I touched her lips with my finger and then looked at it. There was a little spot of blood on it.

  LICK IT.

  I put my finger to my mouth and kissed off the spot of blood. Then Uma’s eyes went kind of bleary, and she half rose to meet me, and I stooped to her and we were kissing again and I could taste the salty blood.

  LISTEN, HECK, YOU TAKE CARE OF THE FACE, AND I’LL LOOK AFTER THE REST, OKAY?

  I wasn’t listening to Jack by then. The kissing felt so nice, so warm. It was like finding something you didn’t realize you had lost. But there was something else too. The feeling that perhaps this wasn’t really the thing I’d lost, just something that looked like it, that the fit wasn’t quite right.

  And then I realized what my hands were doing.

  Or rather undoing.

  Her blouse.

  It was Jack.

  “No,” said Uma.

  “Sorry.”

  “You can stay outside, or forget it.”

  I tried to wrench my hand out, but Jack resisted. Uma helped, pulling at my wrist. And then my hand was touching her breasts through her top, and she let out a little sort of half-moan, half-groan, and Jack did some more things with my hand.

  There was an added complication here, in that a Saturn V rocket seemed to be trying to break out of the gravitational pull of my trousers. I don’t know how it got there. The damn thing appeared to have nothing to do with the rest of me. Probably Jack in the pilot’s seat. There was no way I could get Houston to abort the mission. The best I could do was to try to keep it in orbit, avoiding a splashdown.

  At least I seemed to have got the hang of the kissing. I basically did what she did, only more so.

  “No!”

  Oh God. I looked down at my hand. It was lost somewhere under her skirt. I tried to pull it out, but Jack wouldn’t let me.

  YES! WE’VE GOT TO DO THIS.

  “No, we don’t,” I said, out loud.

  “Don’t what?” said Uma, still wrestling with my hand.

  MUST.

  “Shut up.”

  “Don’t tell me to shut up.”

  Uma had finally managed to remove my hand from her skirt.

  “Not you, I mean—”

  “You really are a psycho.” She stood up, pulling down her ruffled skirt. “I’m off. I can’t believe I came here with you. I didn’t think you were like this . . . like all the others. After what you can get.”

  “Wait, I wasn’t—”

  “What were you doing then? I told you to stop it and you kept on, and it was nice before that.”

  I gave up.

  “I’m really sorry, it wasn’t meant to be like this.”

  “Too right.” And she was out of there.

  “I’ll walk you home,” I called to her.

  “Piss off.”

  The Music

  of the Spheres

  I slumped back down.

  “Nice work, Jack.”

  ME? IT WAS YOU WHO MESSED IT UP. THAT WAS OUR BEST CHANCE. OUR LAST BEST CHANCE.

  Jack sounded like a spoiled toddler surveying his ice cream lying cone-up in the mud.

  “Best chance for what?”

  YOU KNOW WHAT.

  “I don’t know what you mean. Don’t know what you want. Don’t know what you are. And I didn’t even like her that much. Not as much as Smurf, anyway.”

  SHE WAS PERFECT.

  “But”—I hesitated here because, well, it’s embarrassing— “I . . . I didn’t, I don’t love her.”

  LOVE HER! WHAT CENTURY ARE WE IN HERE? STUPID WANKER.

  “I don’t want to hear this now, Jack. I don’t feel too good. I have a brain tumor,
remember.”

  And I did suddenly feel pretty low. There was a weight on my forehead, pressing me down. I was trying not to think about the horror of what I’d just been through with Uma. And sure, she was magnificent, but I really didn’t love her. Or even fancy her that much. You can sometimes accept that someone is perfect, physically, but nothing happens: no bells, no music, no twang. Okay, maybe a bit of a twang, what with the Saturn V rocket. I’m fourteen, remember, and all kinds of things can make you go twang. But all I’d done with Uma was humiliate myself. And worse, because I tried to force her to do things she didn’t want to do.

  Oh God. I was as bad as Tierney and his droogs.

  What had Uma called me? A psycho—yes, exactly what we called them.

  It was like the bit at the end of Animal Farm, when the horse, or whichever animal it is, looks through the farmhouse window from the pigs to the humans and back again and he can’t tell which is the pig and which the human.

  WE CAN’T MESS ABOUT. WE MIGHT NOT HAVE ENOUGH TIME.

  Jack was sounding different now. The petulance had gone, replaced by an awkward, jarring urgency.

  “Time . . . what do you—?”

  But I knew what he meant, and now I had something else to feel crap about. Jack meant that I was going to die, and die soon. He meant that I was going to stop being a thing made of soft, warm, breathing, living stuff, and become a thing made of cold, dead stuff, and I’d never see my friends again, or be able to help my mum when she got older, and nor would I ever have sex with another of those soft, breathing, warm, living things.

  I HAVEN’T GOT FOREVER. REMEMBER WHEN SMURF WENT ON THAT LAST-MINUTE BARGAIN TRIP TO EGYPT?

  “Yeah, some bargain. He said he hardly ever climbed off the bog. Said he had to stuff tissues in his undies to make a sort of nappy.”

  BUT DO YOU REMEMBER THE POSTCARD HE SENT YOU? THE ONE WITH THE PYRAMIDS IN THE BACKGROUND, AND THE BIG SIGN SAYING “CAMEL RIDE TO THE TOMB”?

  “Yeah, but—”

  WELL, THAT’S WHAT WE’RE ALL ON. YOU, ME, EVERYONE. A LURCHING, COMIC, ABSURD CAMEL RIDE TO THE TOMB. AND WE HAVE TO MAKE THE MOST OF IT.