Jack Tumor (6 page)

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.

W
e'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.

 

 

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.

 

 

He filled the words “Bunsen” and “burner” with a level of anguish that the great Otto Bunsen could never have imagined would be associated with his epoch-making invention. (I know, by the way, that the Bunsen burner was really developed by Robert Bunsen, but as he was a German and Robert sounds about as German as Seamus, I think he ought to be renamed Otto. Plus Otto is a slightly funny name, and Robert isn't funny at all.)

But I understood what Smurf meant. It didn't seem fair that the best we could hope for was a timid girl with nuts in her cheeks and a furry tail. And yeah, I realize it was just as bad for her, with her hopes set no higher than a big-lipped bendy boffin like Smurf, even if he would probably make the world's greatest boyfriend in terms of being nice to you and not messing about behind your back.

And those were the kinds of thoughts we were both still lost in when Gonad and Stan joined us. Well, with me there was one other thought, but it didn't really belong to me. It came in the voice of Jack Tumor, and it said:

SHE'S MINE
.

G
onad peeled back the white bread from his sandwich.

“Mmm, chopped pork,” he said. “I'm partial to chopped pork.”

It was what he always said. A kind of catchphrase, except not funny. Except that it had become kind of funny because he said it so much and because it wasn't really funny.

“What you got, Stan?”

“Soup.”

Stan often brought in a flask of soup. It was usually chicken noodle, but not often enough to make it funny, and sometimes he had oxtail, and sometimes it wasn't soup at all but a surprise sausage roll.

Smurf opened his Tupperware and wordlessly showed off a slice of quiche with a dainty little garnish of lettuce, ruffled like a lace collar. There was no spirit of triumphalism in this. Simon's mother loved him. Perhaps too much. On the upside you could be pretty sure that Smurf's loving mother had secreted a tasty
treat—a Wagon Wheel, say, or a Cadbury's Chocolate Roll— somewhere about his person. Today he had a Snickers, which was top of the range, but not, obviously, of interest to me.

Stan had been right about my nut allergy. I hadn't always had it, and I blame it on the fact that, because of Mum, nuts were about the commonest thing in my diet throughout my formative years. Nut roasts, nut cutlets; nuts fried, nuts boiled, nuts mashed. Brazil, cashew, pea, hazel, almond, macadamia, wal, you name it. Then, in Year Seven, I was eating a dry-roasted peanut when my throat started to itch, and then my eyes watered, and people started to stare at me, and Stan said that I'd gone a funny color, and I coughed up the fatal peanut, and loads of kids were around me laughing and pointing, and I had to go to the sick bay, and from then on nuts were out and I envied Simon his Snickers bar not one bit.

They all looked towards me.
My
lunchbox was feared among the cognoscenti. For lunch I always had whatever we'd eaten the night before, sometimes in sandwich form (sliced lentil bake on wholewheat, anyone?), sometimes neat (e.g., cold alfalfa pizza). Of course, there was always plenty left over from last night, because it was horrible even then. Served frigid and desiccated, calcified into strange shapes, it took some swallowing.

And then I realized that, in fact, today I had nothing. Not a beansprout, not a falafel, not a chickpea. I had completely forgotten to scrape out last night's slop. For no good reason I found this shaming.

“Ate it already,” I said.

Stan looked at me strangely, his eyes growing narrow. And then I said something else. It came out in a mumbling sort of way, but with an edge that made it completely understandable.

I said: “
LOSERS
.”

“What?” Smurf was chewing. Unlike Gonad, he was a polite chewer and you hardly ever saw what was in there.

I looked back at them, stuck again for words.

“Nothing.”

“You said something.”

That was Gonad. He sounded a bit touchy.

 

 

No one laughed. I don't know why. We laughed at stuff every day that wasn't funny.