Jack Tumor (2 page)

“Been a bit tired. Get dizzy sometimes.”

“That's good, that's good,” said the doctor mysteriously. “Why don't we have a little look at you?”

There followed ten minutes of probing, none of it anally oriented. The doctor shone a light in my eyes and moved it around, asking me to follow it. He stood behind me and asked if I could hear his watch tick, first on one side, and then on the other. Then he tested my reflexes, which I thought only happened in films. All the students had a go, banging randomly around my knee area with a rubber hammer. Then I had to touch my nose with my finger, alternating left and right with my eyes closed. Then I had to walk in a straight line, again with my eyes closed.

All sounds easy, doesn't it? Except with all those people staring at me, and especially the pretty one, I didn't do that well in the nose-touching and straight-line-walking parts. There were more questions, more tests. Did I know who the prime minister was? Could I say the days of the week backwards? Did I know my arse from my elbow?

Throughout it all I could feel myself getting more and more sullen-teenagery, and that's not my normal way. I couldn't think of any clever things to say.

And then it was over.

“That's just grand, Hector,” said Doc Jones. “We'll make an appointment for a CAT scan, and sort this all out. We'll send the
appointment card. Try to fit you in early next week. Or perhaps later this week. We sometimes get cancellations. And in urgent— Well, we might be lucky. Okay?”

“Okay.”

And although I knew what a CAT scan was, I still had this quick mental image of a sort of
Star Trek
tricorder, only shaped like a cat, and Spock with his hand up its bum, passing it over my body and detecting alien life forms in there.

S
o I was out of there, none the wiser. I got a bus to school, and the driver gave me the eye, thinking I was on the skive, and I started to explain that there was something up with my head, but then I couldn't be bothered.

The trouble with all this was that I got to school just in time for morning break, which you'd think was a good thing, unless you knew what my school was like. Because it's called the Body of Christ, which is what the priest says when he puts the bread in your mouth, people who don't know it think my school must be all singing nuns and good grades, but it's not like that at all. It's full of head cases, and the worst of them hang out around the school gates, smoking and sniffing butane during break, and God help anyone who has to get past them while they're on duty. The teachers don't bother them because at least they're out of the way when they're at the gates, and they might even act as a deterrent to any casual truants thinking of making a run for it.

It's a bit like migrating wildebeest on the telly, where they go trotting across the Serengeti until they come to a river. And the river is full of big hungry crocodiles. So all the wildebeest bunch up, scared witless by the shadows in the water—you know,
I'm not going in there, no way
—until one of them goes for it, and the first one usually makes it, so a few more have a go, and they get majorly chomped, and then the rest of the herd dives in, and most of them get through because of the safety-in-numbers thing, but then any stragglers at the end get all eaten to hell as well, until all you can see is blood in the water, and a half-eaten head, and a slice of leftover hoof and a baby somewhere bleating for its mother.

So, yeah, it's a bit like that, but with less eating and more taunting, crocs being superb killing machines, but not naturals on the old repartee front. You can imagine them:
Hey, you, er, aw, what's that word for a boy wildebeest that likes other boy wildebeests more than he likes girl wildebeests? Oi! Come back, I've not finished taunting you yet. Ah, no, Ralf, I've lost another one. Any chance of sharing? C'mon, man, a hoof's all I'm askin'. Yeah, up yours too.

Small brains, you see, crocodiles. A guy came to our school once, talking about them. He had a skin and a skull. I mean, belonging to a crocodile. Of course the man had a skin and a skull too, or he'd have looked pretty stupid, not to mention dead. We all filed up to feel them. The crocodile's bits and bobs, that is. There was a tiny little hole at the back of the skull. The man said it was the brain cavity. A snug fit for your thumb. Or something else. In fact I had a little fantasy while he was talking to the class, in which I was left in charge of the thing, and I got horny and as no one was around (in the fantasy, maybe a fire
alarm or something), I gave it a quickie, but then the man and the class all came in again, and I turned around with my knob in this crocodile skull, wearing it like a Gothic codpiece.

Okay, so I'm back from the Serengeti, and I've shaken off the crocodile underpants, and I'm praying that I'm too insignificant to attract the attention of the sentries, or maybe that they've got themselves a really good vintage paint stripper to inhale. (
Well, Cecil, I detect citrus tones, undercurrents of leaf mold, juniper, and MELT-YOUR-HEAD HYDROCHLORIC ACID
.)

So I walked around the social club next to the school, my insides beyond the jelly stage, and I see straightaway that something a bit weird's going on. There's normally about ten of the morons slouching about, tangled up like they've just been puked out by a clothes drier, but now they're all staring in the same direction, their mouths hanging open. At first I thought they were looking at me, and that made me begin to initiate the countdown to crapping my pants, but then I realized that it wasn't me but the wall of the social club they were staring at.

Now, this wall was the main outlet for the creative urges not just for our budding artists, but for all the local vandals, and it was regularly daubed with lame graffiti and crude drawings, generally of genitalia. Sometimes inadvertent poetry would result. There was a brutal PE teacher called Truelove, and the two-meter-high letters spelling
TRUELOVE IS A WANKER
achieved a pleasing kind of bittersweet resonance.

Every couple of months the school or the council or someone would paint over the graffiti, but that just left a clean and tempting canvas, and a day later the same stuff would be back again, with maybe the obscenity ratcheted up a notch. So they'd finally covered it up with some kind of special coating that, in
theory at least, you couldn't paint on, and the wall had been blank for a couple of months.

I turned and looked at it. At first I couldn't see anything. Then I began to make out the faint outline of a sinuous form emerging from the pale gray coating. It really did seem as though the
thing
, whatever it was, was somehow working its way through to the surface. And it certainly wasn't any of the usual stuff: you could see that right away. Even though I couldn't tell what it was, I could see the elegance of the form, the beauty of the line. It looked like a real work of art, like something in a gallery or a book.

BUGNOB
.

“Huh?”

There it was again. The voice. This time I stopped myself from looking around. This time I knew it didn't come from outside.

I didn't like it.

But at least it snapped me out of the strange trance thing I was falling into, looking at the whatever-it-was emerging from the wall. I quickly slipped past the guard of honor, who were all still staring like zombies.

I
walked along the red-clay pitch. There were a couple of soccer matches going on, but none of my mates were playing. No surprise there. As I suggested earlier, they weren't exactly natural athletes on the whole.

Scattered here and there were clumps of girls in microskirts, pink legs whipped by the cold wind. They reminded me of flamingos, and anyone who thinks flamingos are pretty just hasn't looked at them, frankly, with their upside-downy heads and mad eyes. It must be a pink thing, I mean why people think they're pretty. But there's nothing so great about pink. Lots of pink things are ugly—you only have to find a porn mag on the back of the bus to realize
that
.

There was one girl standing on her own, not part of a group, but even more flamingoish than the others. She was tall and gangly and she had long, straight, strawberry blonde hair. She also had a port-wine birthmark in the shape of Africa on her face, and it was hard not to stare at it, especially if she put on makeup
to try to hide it, which she sometimes did and sometimes didn't—the worst of all worlds, if you ask me. Her name was Amanda Something. For a second our eyes met, and I thought that she might have smiled, and I looked behind me, thinking there was someone there, and when I looked back, Amanda Something was looking down, and for no good reason I felt like a heel.

I found my gang hunkered down by the fence. All three of them.

“Where you bin?” asked Phil Tester. We called him Gonad, because gonad means testicle, and Tester is like the first part of that, and Phil rhymes with the last part and, all in all, that's enough, we reckoned. Gonad was a gentle-giant type with short fair hair and ears that looked like they belonged on some other, much smaller creature, a vole or something.

“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.