Jack Tumor (29 page)

So, early on Wednesday morning, Amanda and I got on the first bus heading out of town. Technically, she was bunking off, but who was going to stand up in court and deny her compassionate leave in these circumstances? The plan was to get off as soon as it looked nice outside in a grass-and-trees kind of way.

I had some sandwiches in my rucksack, and Amanda had brought an angel food cake she'd baked herself, wrapped up in tin foil. I asked her why she'd baked an angel food cake as opposed to any other of the world's cakes (for a full list see www.cakesoftheworld.com), and she said that it was because it came first in the book as it began with an A. I thanked my lucky stars that no one had thought of inventing a cake with an aardvark-flavored topping.

We sat quietly on the upper deck, watching the red-brick neighborhoods give way to posher houses, which thinned until there were flat fields and out-of-town hypermarkets, and then
the road became winding and the land swelled and breathed until it felt like a good time to get off. We were on the outskirts of a village, but we turned our backs on it and walked down the road until we found a green sign that said public footpath pointing along the edge of a field that was growing nothing but brown earth. The sky was solid gray, but something about the complete uniform drabness of it suggested that it would not rain, and that was all we asked.

And talking of asking, I'd begged Jack to let us have this day together, alone. He grumbled a bit, said that he'd get bored back there, that he was entitled to a bit of fun on what just might be his last couple of days. He promised to behave himself, said that he'd learned his lesson, and that he was going to be accentuating the positive from now on. But I was adamant, and in the end he said he had to stay in and wash his hair and, anyway, the countryside was boring and so was I.

We walked until the field of earth became one of knee-high wheat, green and young, and we looked at each other (that's me and Amanda, not me and the wheat), but it wasn't quite right because the ground beneath the wheat was rough and furrowed. And then we came to a little wood about the size of a football pitch, and the path forked and one part went through the wood, and we followed it, and on the far side there was a field of soft grass and the field rose to meet the sky and the wood was at our backs, so it felt like a world that we had all to ourselves.

AND THEN WE'D WALK DOWN TO THE ORCHARD,
THROUGH BRAMBLES AND WEEDS TO THE GRASS
AND EVER SO PERFECTLY TORTURED
THE DAYS AND THE LIFETIMES WOULD PASS
.

Jack!

SORRY, SORRY, I'M JUST GOING
.

And we ate the cake first, which turned to perfumed air on my tongue, and then we laughed at the tofu sandwiches, which were actually quite nice. And after that I put my head on Amanda's lap and she stroked my hair, and we pretended that the sun was beating down, and whenever I said something funny or clever she bent and kissed my mouth, and I was reliving her kisses when the voice of Barryella came through on the intercom and told me that we were through, and that I'd done very well for staying so still for so long.

I was in a special neurological ward, so most of the other beds were surrounded by monitors going beep and trolleys with wires, which was all pretty interesting. I guessed I'd be plugged in too, after my operation. None of the other patients were much in the mood for chatting, on account of the whole massive brain injury thing that most of them had going on.

That evening everyone came: Smurf, Gonad, Stan, Amanda, Mum, Clyte. Even Sister Winifred rolled in from her usual ward to say hello and wish me luck. Smurf presented me with one of those huge embarrassing cards from school, signed by lots of people I didn't know. Everyone was cracking jokes, and even Jack got in on the act. And then the time for visitors ended and my friends left, and then Clyte, and then Amanda, and last of all Mum.

I felt Jack heavier than ever in my head.

Hey, Jack, you need to lose a couple of pounds.

WELL, KID, YOU COULD DO WITH PUTTING A FEW ON
.

Let's rest now.

YES, I'M TIRED
.

Goodnight, Jack. I love you.

The words came out of nowhere.

My father.

I'd been thinking about my father.

Young and handsome in his uniform. And dead.

I LOVE YOU, TOO
.

T
hey were coming to get me. Monsters. The faces of pigs. Forked tails. Teeth, curving like scimitars. I was running through the corridors, but my pajamas were tangling me and my feet couldn't grip on the polished floors. And finally there was no more corridor and I turned to face the monsters. They were in the shadows now, coming slowly, and their eyes glowed red, and they were going to tear me apart, they were going to put their snouts into my flesh. But that would only be the beginning, because they were going to take me away to a place where I would be theirs forever and the terror and the pain would never end. And I looked beyond them, because it should have been now that they came to help—the Justice League. Hawkgirl should have been there to spread her wings over me; the Flash should have been a blur of pure energy; Superman, my rock; Batman glowering, clever, indomitable.

But they were not there, and I was alone.

HECK, HECK. IT'S ME. WAKE UP. THEY DON'T EXIST, THEY'RE NOT HERE
.

The voice came through into the dream, and to begin with it seemed that the monsters spoke with the voice of Jack Tumor, and then I was awake in the gray hospital dawn and an old man was coughing somewhere, and there were curtains around a bed across from me, and voices murmured their concern and the patient gave a groan as though they had performed some act of terrible sacrilege upon his body.

Jack, I'm scared.

ME TOO
.

Do you know anything about . . . about what comes after?

AFTER THE OPERATION
?

After everything. After life.

DON'T THINK LIKE THAT
.

How else can I think? Tell me, what is next?

HOW COULD I KNOW
?

I thought you knew everything.

I'M SORRY, HECK, I DON'T KNOW THAT. BUT I'M AFRAID OF THE DARK. PHILOSOPHERS HAVE SAID THAT WE SHOULD NOT FEAR DEATH, BECAUSE IT IS NOT A STATE. IT IS AN ABSENCE, A NOTHING. BUT THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I'M AFRAID OF. I DON'T WANT TO BE A NOTHING. I WANT TO BE WITH YOU
.

When you speak like that . . . tell me, is it me speaking? Are we truly the same?

I DON'T KNOW. I DON'T KNOW. I DON'T FEEL WELL. THE DRUGS THEY GAVE YOU. THEY MAKE ME FEEL BAD. I CANNOT FEEL MY HANDS
.

I'm sorry. It'll be all right. It'll be fine. We'll be okay.

And I think I fell asleep again. Winifred woke me, and explained that I couldn't have any breakfast because of the operation, and all the old men of the ward knew that today was my day. An hour before my time a Chinese lady doctor gave me an injection in the arse, and after that I felt myself float slowly above the bed, and although the fear and the sadness were still in me, their grip was weak and I felt detached from them, as though they were something I was trying to remember.

And I drifted not only above the bed, but in other dimensions. I was back in the playground near my house. I was on the swings—the baby sort with a bar. Someone was pushing me. Too high. I strained to see who it was. I couldn't see. But I knew it was him, my dad. And then I was in the field with Amanda, my head in her lap, looking up into the pearl-gray sky, and she was speaking into my ear, telling me the secret thing. And then I felt a pressure on my hand and I opened my eyes to see Sister Winifred.

“It's time for you, my love.”

NOT YET, PLEASE NOT YET. ONLY A LITTLE LONGER
.

“Yes, my love, you have to go. The man is come for you.”

DON'T LET HIM TAKE ME
.

But the man was here. The porter.

LET IT NOT BE THE PORTER, THE PORTER IS DRUNK, THE PORTER IS DEATH. LECHERY, SIR, IT PROVOKES, AND UNPROVOKES; IT PROVOKES THE DESIRE, BUT IT TAKES AWAY THE PERFORMANCE
.

It's okay, Jack, we're nearly there.

The old men frailly waved their liver-spotted hands, and the nurses gathered to wish me luck. Tiny ones from the Philippines,
big ones from Jamaica and the Ivory Coast. They'd come so far for me. And then it was a lift with the drunken porter and then a new part of the hospital, a part I'd never been to. And then the operating theater, and if I'd had my wits about me I'd have checked out the stuff they had in there, the gear and the gadgets. I saw that I was wearing a green gown but I couldn't remember when I'd put it on. The same Chinese lady doctor was there again, but now with a plastic bag on her head and a white mask across her face. Anesthetist, yes, that's what she was. Other doctors were there, the ones who would do the cutting. Grave, gray men. The lady doctor was talking to me, but it was hard to hear her over Jack. He was whimpering, jabbering, making no sense, and I wished that I could comfort him.

I looked down and saw that there was a thing in the back of my hand. A tube thing with a valve.

“Can you count for me, backwards from a hundred?”

Math.

Good at math.

I could tell her all the prime numbers, walk with them into infinity. She put a syringe into the tube in my hand. This was how they did it.

“One hundred.”

The room was darker. And in the shadows I saw shapes.

“Ninety-nine.”

Not the pig men. The shapes of my friends. And then larger shapes, sleek with power. And I knew that at last they'd come to help me: the Justice League.

“Ninety-eight.”

I saw the Flash, glimmering like starlight.

“Ninety-seven.”

I saw Hawkgirl, saw the spread of her velvet-soft wings. Saw more figures arriving—superheroes I didn't even recognize, from every corner of the known galaxies and beyond, all coming to help me . . .

“Ninety-six.”

And that was my last number, and the darkness drew down like a blind and all I could hear was Jack. Green fields, green fields. He babbled of green fields.

And it was then that the thought came to me that life is the process by which you discover all the things you can't do. And at the end you finally discover the last thing you can't do: live forever.

O
h, come on! Of course I didn't die. I mean, how could I? How could I be telling you this story? What, like,
telling it all from heaven or hell
? Yeah, like
that's
gonna happen.

No, you don't get rid of me that easily.

A year has gone by, and I'm still here. The cancer is in remission, which is good news, but they don't like to talk about a cure, so I don't know how long I've got. But then who does?

Mum's still Mum, in the sense of stewing mung beans, but she's off the Valium, and I think that's forever. She's got a boyfriend, a junior doctor called, I kid you not, Noddy, who she met in the hospital. He's half her age, and I don't really approve, but you have to let people make their own mistakes. At least they never do it while I'm in the house, because that would make me quite literally barf my lentils.

School's a better place to be, but I don't think that's got much to do with Tierney's humiliation. I've a feeling that my year was just coming up to the stage when rational discourse
takes the place of kicking the crap out of each other. In other words, bullying was going out of style. Things are probably just as bad for the younger kids, but they'll get through.

My gang is still a gang, but I'd be a liar if I said that things were the same as ever. There's something special about the friendships you have before things get complicated and messed by girls and by that other thing, life.

Gonad got a girlfriend first of all: a tiny shy thing who spoke in an unintelligible dialect of squeaks and whistles. And then Smurf fell in love with another one of Uma Upshaw's fierce handmaidens who, of course, mocked and scorned him. He wrote her love poems, and she tore them up in front of him. They'll probably get married one day. Stan isn't there yet, but he's always moved at his own pace. As a joke I told him that he could have Amanda if I died, and that managed to offend everyone involved.

Amanda. Yeah, still together. She's begun to have treatment on her birthmark. She says it hurts like hell. Already the mark has faded. I tell myself it isn't a symbol for anything.

And Jack?

Well, sometimes I think I hear a voice, whispering, murmuring. Nothing as distinct as an
ARSECHEESE
or a
BUGNOB
, and it could just be the wind in the leaves or the sound of traffic in the streets or maybe even the music of the spheres, nothing more than that.

Yeah, that's it, the music of the spheres.

I would like to acknowledge the inspiration provided by two outstanding works of reference: Iona and Peter Opie's
The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren
, and Jonathan Blyth's
The Law of the Playground
.

Thanks also to Shannon Park and Wesley Adams for their editorial élan, to Stephanie Cabot for her support, and to Rebecca Campbell for everything else.