Jack Tumor (22 page)

And then I saw something that really
was
creepy, and Amanda saw it too, because she gasped and pulled away from my side, and put her hands to her face. It was an arrow. A short arrow, the kind they use in crossbows. Thick and heavy, with a steel point. A bolt, that was the word, and it was in the neck of the little dog. Someone must have shot the poor creature and left it here to die. I stood up, but I couldn't escape from the bones and the grin and crossbow bolt and I had to fight the urge to sob, but then Amanda took my hand and pulled me away.

THE WOUNDS INVISIBLE THAT LOVE'S KEEN ARROWS MAKE
.

Shut up, please.

AS YOU LIKE IT
.

“It's really raining quite hard now,” said Amanda, and we ran to the bus shelter, still holding hands, and we sat on the seats, which were specially designed to stop you getting comfortable in case you felt like moving in. And there we chatted for a while, with the rain drumming its fingers impatiently on the asbestos roof, and we talked about the bones of the dog and the arrow in its throat and it brought us together in the way that a shared experience of something fatal can, and I nearly told her about my head stuff, but I didn't, because I thought it was too early to lay that kind of heavy crap on someone.

And there was something else I didn't tell her about. I didn't tell her about my hot date with Uma Upshaw, and you can probably guess why that was.

“Do you want to go somewhere else?” I asked after about an hour. I knew it was about an hour because I looked at my watch, but if you'd asked me to guess I would have said about ten minutes.

“I should get home, really. My mum and dad will wonder what's happened to me.”

Three buses had already gone past, slowing as the drivers saw us waiting, then accelerating away with a belch of black diesel smoke when we didn't move.

“What are they like?”

Amanda rolled her eyes.

“A pain. They both work at the university. So we haven't got a telly.”

“That's terrible. Even we have a telly, you know, just a basic one. What do you do instead?”

“We read, mostly. Sometimes my parents read plays out loud and I have to join in.”

“Man, that's awful.”

“Not so bad, really.”

“You probably play chess and bridge as well. Or sing madrigals together.”

She laughed: “We're not that weird.”

So she said, but I still guessed there was a madrigal or two in her past.

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

She shook her head. “My mum had a difficult time with me, so they decided not to have any more. What about you?”

“Nah, just me and Mum. I haven't got a dad. Not one here, I mean. Everyone's got a dad somewhere.”

Amanda didn't ask anything else about my family, but I think
we both came away with the idea that we were equally strange, in that respect.

Another bus trundled by. There were too many buses today.

“I'll get the next one.”

While we were waiting I asked her what she was doing tomorrow.

“Nothing.”

“Do you want to meet up again? Just, you know, hang out for a bit.”

“Yes, I'd like that.”

“Shall we meet here?”

She nodded again. “What time?”

“Whenever you like.”

PLEASE SAY NEVER
.

“Three o'clock. My parents like us to have lunch together.”

In the ten minutes until the next bus came, we talked about music. (She liked classical, but also some olden-days stuff like the Beatles, and she said the greatest albums were, in order,
Pet Sounds
by the Beach Boys,
Revolver
by the Beatles, and
Forever Changes
by Love. I wasn't sure if the last one was real, or some kind of code. I said that I liked the Libertines and Franz Ferdinand but, to be honest, I was winging it, and I was relieved when the bus came and saved me from having to do any explaining.) When the doors sighed open, Amanda put one foot on the step-thingy, and then turned and gave me a kiss. Not the sort of deep tonsil-tickler I'd had from Uma Upshaw, but infinitely more wonderful.

I
opened the door and knew straightaway that things weren't right. It was the laughter.

Clytemnestra.

I'd forgotten about her.

I went into the living room and there she was, lying on the sofa wearing some sort of flowing black membranous garment attached at both her wrists and her ankles. She looked like a crashed pterodactyl. Mum was in the good chair and there was a bottle of wine open between them and the spent husk of a second lying next to it. As soon as Clytemnestra saw me she flapped and writhed and finally managed to stand up.

I was transfixed by her hands, which were brown and wrinkly, but tipped by lethal red talons. Her hair was dyed Goth black, and there was a ring of black something around her eyes.

“Hector, Hector,” she said in a moaning, sighing way, like a dead thing, coming towards me with her wings outstretched,
her talons twitching. “Come embrace me, my poor, good, beautiful boy.”

Every instinct told me to run, to hide.

“Hi,” I said. “Hello, Mum.”

The second bit was over Clytemnestra's shoulder as she hugged me. I expected at any moment to feel her talons sink in to extract my life force.

“Your mother and I have been having a long talk.” Clytemnestra now had me firmly gripped at arm's length. She was looking deep into my eyes, like a hypnotist. I felt myself growing weaker by the second. Soon I'd be a zombie, willing to fulfill her every wish. I had to fight loose, had to escape. “And now so are we.”

It was useless. Resistance was futile. The end was near.

“I've made some soup,” said Mum. “Moroccan bean.”

The next hour was pretty grim. Clytemnestra asked me all sorts of questions about how I was and how I felt and all that kind of stuff, never letting her eyes drift from my face for even a second. After the questions (my answers—”I'm all right,” “I feel okay,” “No, not sad at all, really, can't complain, you know how it is”—obviously weren't the ones she wanted, but I wasn't going to go sharing my feelings with any old vampire) came a load of talk about how hard it had been on Christabel, and how we must all stick together. Mum and she carried on drinking the wine, and I had some soup, which wasn't bad, actually, in a Moroccan beany kind of way, and, let me tell you now, there are worse ways than that when it comes to my mum's cooking, and, for that matter, beans in general.

It was only later that I realized why, in fact, it wasn't bad.

Finally I managed to escape up to my room. This was no
time for the enlightened, progressive world of
Watchmen
, or even the aestheticized utopianism of the Justice League. No, this situation needed the near-fascist vigilante. It had to be
The Dark Knight Returns
. Batman has been in retirement for ten years. A gang called the Mutants has taken over Gotham City. The police are corrupt, the streets are meaner than a polecat with a toothache, and the old, familiar villains are more psychotic than ever. So out comes the cape. But Batman is out not just to right wrongs: he's here to reassert his dominance, to show the world that he is still a player. It's brutal stuff, especially when Batman takes on the leader of the Mutants, and his job isn't so much to defeat as to humiliate him. It ends with a death, a funeral, a heartbeat.

Once I'd got that out of my system, I started to think about Amanda. And about Uma.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. AND WE ALL KNOW WHO THE BEAST IS
.

She isn't a beast.

NO, NOT A BEAST. I'LL TELL YOU WHAT SHE IS. YOU'VE JUST BEEN READING ABOUT THEM. SHE'S A MUTANT
.

“Shut up!” I'd been trying to internalize all my conversations with Jack since the moment of humiliation with Uma, but now my anger took over.

I CAN'T, I WON'T SHUT UP. THIS IS TOO IMPORTANT. SHE'S A FREAK. WE CAN'T HAVE HER. WE MUST TRY AGAIN WITH UMA. SHE'S THE ONE
.

“She isn't the one.”

I GIVE UP
.

“Good.”

YOUR FUNERAL
.

“I know it is.”

Silence.

SORRY, I DIDN'T MEAN . . . IT CAME OUT WRONG
.

“And you seem to forget about the fact that
my
funeral means
your
funeral as well. Unless you know something I don't, and you're planning to beam out or something, you know, just before we crash. I can see it now. The shuttle's heading into a black hole, or maybe a star about to go supernova, and we see the sweat on the pilot's forehead, and someone screams ‘Pull her up, Steve,' because, well, the hero's always called Steve, unless it's a made-up science-fiction kind of name like Svoron 17, and then we cut back to an outside shot of the shuttle, now just a black spot against the orange of the star, and next there's a massive explosion, or maybe it's just a little blip against the background, because sometimes that can look pretty cool in a bleak, how-small-a-thing-is-man way, and we think he's a goner, and you get some reaction shots of the team back on the mother ship, and one of them's probably Steve's girlfriend, who's half-Mulvanian, and they have four breasts, but as she is only half-Mulvanian, she has three, but anyway then when they're all despairing (the crew, not the breasts, because not even Mulvanians have sentient breasts; for those you have to go to the warrior maidens of Kroyttzer VII), they pick up the
bleep bleep bleep
of the distress signal, and it's all okay because he got out in the escape pod at the last second.”

FINISHED
?

“Yeah, sorry, got a bit carried away there.”

NO, I WON'T BE BEAMING OUT, AND I HAVEN'T FORGOTTEN
THAT OUR TIME IS LIMITED. IT'S WHY I KEEP TRYING TO GET YOU TO FIND SOMEONE SUITABLE TO CONTINUE THE LINE
.

“Well, maybe I have.”

SHE DOESN'T COUNT
.

“She counts. And I've told you I don't care about the line. And while we're on the subject of continuing the line, you do realize, don't you, that you're not the only one trying to kill me? That psycho Tierney's probably going to thwang me with a crossbow on Monday. Through the throat, like that dog.”

I did a quick mime of someone getting it in the neck, adding a pretty good squelching-thud sound effect.

NO, HE ISN'T
.

“Really?” Dripping skepticism.

REALLY. WE'RE GOING TO TAKE THAT MOTHER DOWN
.

That made me laugh.

“How, exactly? He may be a runt, but he's a better fighter than me. And that's before we even get to his gang. What am I going to do, knock him out with quadratic equations?”

I'VE GOT A PLAN
.

“A plan? What plan?”

LOOK, YOU THINK I'VE JUST BEEN SITTING BACK HERE WITH MY FEET UP? I'VE BEEN WORKING ON THIS. I'VE BEEN PLAYING THROUGH SOME OLD TAPES BACK HERE, AND IT TURNS OUT, IF I AM CORRECT, AND, LET'S FACE IT, I AM, THAT TIERNEY HAS A WEAKNESS, AN ACHILLES' HEEL
.

And then Jack Tumor told me his plan, and I almost forgave him for being a bastard about Amanda and, almost, for being the brain tumor that was killing me.

And it was then that I thought again about the bean soup. It
wasn't bad, because it didn't taste of anything. Anything at all. Or smell of anything. And then I remembered one of the things it had said on a brain-cancer website I'd looked at with Stanislaw. It was under the heading symptoms. It said: “You can lose your sense of taste and smell.”

M
y mum and Clytemnestra went out that night. Hideous though the pterodactyl was, I had to admit that she was good for Mum. I hadn't seen Mum looking as cheerful and normal since . . . well,
ever
. It must have been hard for her to pack in the Valium, and there was no one around here who she could lean on. Maybe at another time I might have been able to help, but I had my own troubles. And I'm only a kid. Clyte was a link to her past, a link to a time when things were better, before things had gone pear-shaped. Sometimes that can be a bummer, you know, when you're confronted with what a mess you've made of things, and your true crapness shines through. But other times it can be a beacon, showing you that things don't have to be the way they are. Sometimes the light behind us illuminates the way ahead.

THANKS FOR THAT, SOCRATES
.

So I spent the evening reading and thinking and talking to Jack. His plan was a dandy, and we ran through it a couple of
times, more just to enjoy it than anything else, because it wasn't even that difficult, you know; we weren't talking
Mission: Impossible
here.

But even after he'd gone over the plan and we'd discussed it, and I'd added a couple of elaborations, and we'd laughed about it, Jack couldn't help but stray back to the old subject even though, this time, he tried to come across as all sweet reasonableness.

BUT, HECK, MY FRIEND
, he said, his voice as fluffy as a dandelion clock,
WHY THAT AMANDA GIRL? I JUST DON'T GET IT
.

“Why?”

Yes, actually, why? It wasn't really such a stupid question. From the first time I'd noticed her, standing alone, looking lost and helpless, but also somehow not needing or wanting help, I'd felt strange inside. It wasn't something as simple as just fancying her, because at first glance she was quite hard to fancy, with that birthmark and her shapeless, flapping clothes. And it couldn't have been her personality because, as far as I was concerned, she didn't have one back then. I didn't know her. She was just a space. Was it that I thought she was like me? Lost and helpless, like me? A freak, like me? That sounded plausible. Birds of a feather gather no moss and all that. But I didn't quite get the psychology, and if you want to trade clichés, then don't opposites attract?