Jack Tumor (9 page)

I guess that Mordred felt that his authority had been diluted, or else he'd surely have dragged me back into school where he could devise some form of torture for me, but all he said then was, “My office. Tomorrow morning.”

There was something deeply wonderful about his helplessness. Like I said, this wasn't a nice man, or a well-meaning one, or even a rough diamond.

“Sir,” I said, noncommittally.

He peered through the cracked lenses. He was probably seeing about seven of me. I, on the other hand, was seeing him with a weird clarity. I could see the dry skin on his thin lips. I could see his tiny white teeth, like the ones you see when there's a
whole fish, head and all, in the fish bit of the supermarket. I could see the dimple on top of his baldy head. It looked like someone had dropped a ball bearing on him from an upstairs window. I could see the signet ring on his little finger, and I could see two black hairs peeping out from the space between the buttons of his crisp white shirt.

“Name, boy.”

“Ness, sir.”

He changed the angle of his head, trying to see me through a bigger segment of the broken lens.

“Initials.”

“A. P., sir.”

“Remember then, my office, before registration.”

The threat was there, but it was a feeble one. The roar of a toothless lion, a eunuch's come-hither. And by now one or two of the bright sparks had got my little joke, which isn't surprising as it was as old as language itself.

Mordred had begun to walk primly back towards the school when the first voice shouted out: “Mordred wants to see A. P. Ness.”

“Another one. He can't get enough of them.”

By the time he'd spun back, the crowd had started to scatter. His mouth opened. A kind of high-pitched wail came out.
Aieeeeaillah!
Something like that. More despair than rage. Oh, it was good, it was very,
very
good.

I ran too. There were bodies around me, and my back was clapped, and my hair was ruffled, and voices said “nice one” and “genius” and other things I never expected to hear. And then I stopped and there was a little group around me, and Gonad was there, puffed and flushed and happy.

But someone else too.

It was Uma Upshaw. The love of Smurf's life.

“That was good,” she said. “Really good.”

I hadn't noticed her before in the crowd.

YOU'RE IN, OLD SON
.

“Ah, it was nothing.”

I was worried I was going to blush. Blushing would probably have been bad.

I'M WORKING HERE FOR YOU, BOY, said Jack, straining. GOT A GRIP ON THOSE FACIAL ARTERIES, HOLDING BACK THE BLOOD. TEAMWORK
.

“Something,” said Uma.

“Okay. Maybe something.”

She was smiling at me. Right at me. I thought of Smurf. I tried not to think of Smurf. I succeeded.

And then she walked away with a couple of her handmaid-ens. After a few steps she half turned, and smiled again. I went weak at the knees. Going weak at the knees is one of those clichés based on the truth—it's exactly what happens to you. But this time there was more—hell, I went weak at the
everythings
.

S
o that was all great, or I should say, really great, but with a bit of mild panic about what tomorrow might bring. And then, as I was heading home, still with Gonad and a couple of other kids from my year, I felt a hot pain as someone grabbed the hair at the back of my neck.

I thought for a second that Mordred had come to wreak his revenge, and I turned, expecting the worst, cringing and twisting with the pain.

It wasn't the worst, but it wasn't good either. Tierney was behind me. He let go of my hair.

“Funny boy,” he said. “Think you're clever?”

Bit hard answering that. So I didn't say anything.

“Fancy Uma Upshaw, don't you?”

“What's it to you?”

I knew what it was to him. Like I'd said to Smurf, he'd gone out with Uma a couple of times, before she dumped him for an
older boy who had a moped. We weren't really supposed to know all that, but nothing stays a secret for long at the Body.

“She's my bird,” he said, jutting his chin out.

Big mistake.

“No she isn't.”

Tierney looked confused, as well he might. It had been worth him attempting to state an obvious untruth as long as no one had the guts to contradict him. He'd look stupid now if he kept on lamely saying he was going out with someone when he wasn't.

So he changed tack.

“You're dead, you know.”

“He looks pretty alive to me.”

It was some big kid from Year Eleven who'd been part of the gang around the fresco. He was with a couple of his buddies. Tierney looked at them, then started to slope off. But just like Uma, he had a parting shot.

“You're dead,” he said again.

I
was one majorly confused kid that evening.

On the way home, buoyed up by all that hero worship, I felt like I was walking on marshmallows. Okay, so maybe it wasn't hero worship. Maybe it was more just not getting kicked and spat on, but you know what I mean. And one of the weird things is that the person I wanted to talk it over with most—and I accept that “person” here may not be the conventional way to put it—was Jack, my personal tumor. The trouble is that once you start thinking about your brain tumor, then it's hard to stay buoyed up by the fickle adulation of the mob.

So that was the first up-and-down combo.

And then there was the whole death-threat thing from Tierney. That wasn't nice. I'd done a bit of acting tough lately, but acting was all it was. I wasn't tough. I was a ‘fraidy girly coward, and I didn't know how to fight, because I'd never had one, except in the slightly one-sided sense of having been punched quite a lot.

And then the smile from Uma. All mixed up with poor old Smurf's hopeless infatuation.

Up-and-down combo number two.

“Any advice, here, Jack?” I said to myself. Sort of.

 

JACK
:   
WHAT ABOUT—DEATH OR GIRLS
?

 

It was still a shock when he actually answered back like that.

 

 

 

A gap. I sensed Jack thinking. We were getting near to our road.

 

 

It seemed that was all I was getting out of Jack Tumor, for now. But I sensed that he was uneasy about this—I mean us, about what we were and how we'd end up. And he was certainly right about our fates being bound together. Until something, or someone, tore us apart.

 

Mum wasn't in when I got back. She worked in the Oxfam shop. She was a bit too dreamy for the till so they usually got her to sort out and price the smelly clothes at the back, where it was hard to see how even a space cadet like Mum could screw it up.

I sometimes used to imagine her there. Oh, old lady knickers. Faint smell of urine, mild discoloration, might only be a coffee stain, 10p. Tramp's vest. Stench of sweat, piss, blood, vomit, death, 5p.

I think she was hoping they'd let her move on to the books, which would be good as she loves books and knows lots about them, and I suppose that's something she passed on to me, because I read a lot, and not just fact stuff but novels as well, although having a crap telly helps with that. But I suppose if Mum was put on the books in the charity shop, she'd only start
reading something and end up weeping in the corner because someone died, or some man didn't love a woman enough, or Earth got assimilated by the Borg.

Well maybe
that
wouldn't worry her so much, but
I
used to lie awake at night thinking about it. Borg assimilation, I mean. I remember a couple of years ago talking about it with Gonad and Smurf and Stan. We all thought that the Borg were a major contribution to the
Star Trek
world, which had pretty well used up its store of goodwill by then. There was no denying that the Borg were both scary and cool. Stan made the useful criticism that with the Borg you have that whole problem-of-origins thing. You know, the Borg assimilate other races and thereby spread throughout the galaxy. But Stan wanted to know how the first Borg was made. Classic chicken-and-egg. But there was a general agreement that we really didn't want to be part of the Borg collective, even if they did bring a kind of peace and order to the universe, because you could see the bad effect it had had on Captain Picard, who was never quite the same man after they got him.

And then Gonad said, “I wouldn't mind being assimilated by that Borg queen,” and we all just looked at him. We were curiously troubled by this statement. You see, the Borg queen only really exists as a head and spinal column, which gets plugged into various transport and maintenance pods, usually in the form of kinky leatherette. And, while even her face is indisputably Borgesian, she still has a queasy sexiness, that vague look of being up for anything. Not that we were consciously aware of it back then.

So we all had these murky feelings which we couldn't understand, mixed up with the knowledge that somehow we were polluting
and contaminating sci-fi by so much as entertaining these thoughts. And this is before we even get onto the subject of Seven of Nine, although now she's come up I may as well give vent to my theory that Seven's undoubted hubbability is given a dark and wondrous twist by the fact of her being still part-Borg, and that is only possible because the Borg queen has already trailblazed that whole territory (I mean the territory of being a sexy lady Borg, almost certainly into the kind of stuff you'd need a credit card to access on the Internet).

And, now I think about it, the Borg queen herself, well, what is she but sex and death, Eros and Thanatos? Oh, Jack Tumor had a lot to answer for.

Anyway, so Mum wasn't in. I went and stood in front of the bathroom mirror, which I'd come to associate with Jack T., although he was just as likely to start jabbering anywhere else. He was right on it.