Jack Tumor (5 page)

As I may previously have intimated, I hated my shoes. Mum got them from a special catalogue and they were made from knotted tree vines and carob seeds. Not really, but you get the idea. They were rubbish at keeping the wet out, but truly excellent at making me look stupid.

“I've told you, you can't get further without a power-up. You think you're wasting time stopping, that you should just plow on, but you've got to collect those energy packs or you'll never get out of that place. Power-ups are the key. You've got to be thinking ahead. Speculate to accumulate.”

Stan was a fast talker, once he got going.

“Yeah, yeah, but when you stop, they get you.”

And then they got him. I didn't even see them coming. The first I knew was that someone had Stan in a headlock.

It was Sean Johnson.

Johnson wasn't one of the evil kids. He was too thick to be evil. In fact, on his own, he was an affable, harmless character, if a bit smelly. He was led astray by the Evil Ones, who told him what to do. There was an Evil One with him now, Chris Tierney, telling him what to do.

“Hold him, Sean,” said Tierney, a bit superfluously, as that's exactly what Sean was doing. Tierney was small—not that much taller than Stan—and neat and quick. He dipped his fingers into Stan's pockets, looking for his money. This happened sometimes in our school.

Stan looked at me, his eyes wide and frightened. I felt sick, helpless. My legs wouldn't work. Tierney turned around, following Stan's line of sight.

“What you looking at?” he said matter-of-factly, as if he was asking the time.

My mouth opened, but nothing came out. Tierney waited patiently.

“Kissy, kissy, kissy, ooooooo, baby.”

Flaherty had appeared out of nowhere. He was writhing around, fondling himself, making out that Tierney and Stan were engaged in a passionate embrace.

It was very funny.

If you weren't Tierney.

Kids started to snigger. It was brilliant, but it didn't last. Flaherty, bored already, whirled away to find mischief elsewhere. But the spell had been broken and I found that I could speak.

“Why don't you leave him alone?” I managed, finally. It was about as brave as I got. It had all the impact of a butterfly landing on a machine gun.

Tierney paused, his hands still in Stan's pockets. I stared back at him, or rather at the air a meter or so above his head, and even that proved a bit too much for me and I felt my eyelid begin to twitch. I became aware of the watching kids, of the shapes around us. Tierney took his hands out of Stan's pockets and swaggered over, a narrow grin on his weaselly face.

“Leave him alone,”
he said, mimicking me, but making me sound more of a poof. He was trying to make up for the Flaherty embarrassment. Then he stopped smiling. “You gonna make me?”

“Just leave it out, will you, Tierney?”

I was trying not to sound too aggressive, trying to keep things sane. Appealing to the profound wells of love and gentleness in Tierney's soul. Trying not to run away crying like a baby.

“Or what? You'll tell your dad? Oh, wait,
you haven't got one, have you?
”

Oscar Wilde, eat your heart out.

Then Tierney pushed me firmly in the chest. I fell over. Another of the Tierney gang had knelt on all fours behind me. It turned the whole confrontation back into a comedy, with me this time as the butt. People were laughing. Some pink-flamingo girls turned sneeringly away. Amanda Something, the strawberry girl, was there again, standing as ever apart from the group. She didn't turn away, but looked at me, sprawling like a fool on the slimy ground. My humiliation swamped any anger I might have felt about what Tierney had said.

About not having a dad.

The good side to all this was that Tierney and his mob seemed content with what they'd done and started to amble away, like hyenas leaving a stain on the grass that used to be a zebra.

“
THOU WHORESON OBSCENE GREASY TALLOW-CATCH
!”

Whoooa! What the hell was that?

It wasn't in my head. I mean it
was
in my head, but it was also in my mouth. I mean I screamed this at full volume, all decibels
blazing. And it wasn't just screamed, but screamed with a kind of laughing contempt.

Tierney and his stooges turned around.

“What did you say?”

I genuinely had no idea. And I don't suppose Tierney knew what it meant any more than I did. Maybe that's what saved me. That or the fact that the playground supervisor, Mrs. Trimble, was stumping towards us on her varicosely lumpy legs, her gray hair sticking out like she'd been hooked up to the Van de Graaff generator in the physics lab.

“Come on now, boys,” she said. “In you get.

It's after nine.” In general nobody took much notice of Mrs. Trimble, but that didn't mean that kickings could be administered freely in her presence.

“C'mon, Heck,” said Stan. “Let's not miss registration.” And then, as we got going, he added, “What was that thing you said to Tierney?”

“I don't really know, Stan. I don't know what happened. It just came out. It sounded olden days, like Shakespeare or something. I must have picked it up in English.”

Mrs. Hegarty, our English teacher, was a Shakespeare nut, and she was always getting us to do read-throughs, even of plays that weren't on the syllabus. She only really trusted us with the bit parts, and took all the main roles for herself, so she'd often end up having to kill herself or chat herself up.

There was a bit of a pause. The sound of Stan thinking.

“Thanks, though.”

“I didn't do anything. It was Flaherty really, making him look stupid.”

“Yeah, but you tried. I hate him.”

“Tierney?”

“Yeah, Tierney. Johnson's just a tool. A monkey, I mean. And Tierney's the organ-grinder.”

“Small organ,” I said, which didn't really bear analyzing, but we laughed anyway.

“Minuscule,” said Stan.

A
nd then we were in the classroom, and we were late, and still smiling about Tierney's little organ, which never looks good (the smiling, I mean, not the little organ) when you enter a classroom late, and so Mrs. Conlon began to shout.

When Mrs. Conlon was still Miss Walsh—and it was only a few months ago—she never used to shout. The shouting was all to do with Mr. Conlon. Before Mr. Conlon she had been one of the nice ones—nice
and
pretty. She was still pretty, in a petite blonde way, but she wasn't nice anymore. And being shouted at by someone who you fancied added extra levels of unpleasantness, unless you happen to be a perv, which I'm not, at least not yet, because you never quite know how you're going to turn out.

My class was 9M. We stayed together for registration, PE, religion, citizenship, domestic science, and other stuff that didn't need brains. Everything else was streamed, meaning the smart kids went one way, the dumb kids went another. 9M was,
therefore, about 32 percent psychos, 56 percent normals, 10 percent retards, and 2 percent brainy.

“Get out!” screamed Mrs. Conlon.

Stan and I looked at her meekly, trying to show that we were not worth her wrath.

“Nobody runs into my classroom. Not grinning like an idiot. What do you think this is, the Wild West?”

It seemed a curious comparison to make, but occasionally, in her rage, Mrs. Conlon's imagination would run away with her. She once yelled at us: “Who do you think I am, Catherine the Great?” which baffled us completely, and not even history boffin Gonad could guess at what she meant, although the next day he came back after some research and told Stan, Smurf, and me that one rumor had it that Catherine the Great perished while trying to have it off with a horse, but that that was probably just a lie put about by her enemies. I wished he hadn't told me that, because for a while afterwards I kept imagining Mrs. Conlon . . . Well, you can imagine what I imagined.

“No, Mrs. Conlon. But we were—” And then there was more shouting.

And then—I don't quite know how—I was on the floor. I suppose it was some kind of faint, but that makes me sound like a girl.

Swoon?

No, much worse. Sounds like a wuss.

Collapse
, that's it.

I collapsed.

I think I might have seen some colors, and there was a smell of something in between flowers and burning plastic. And then
I was looking up at the polystyrene tiles on the ceiling, thinking how the pockmarking of little craters in each tile must be different, so every tile was unique, and there must be billions of them in the world, like people. And then there were faces around me: the gawping faces of kids—psychotic, retarded, normal, brainy—and then, looming over them, the concerned face of Mrs. Conlon, who had thankfully stopped shouting and might have turned briefly back into nice Miss Walsh.

“Pick him up,” someone said.

“No, leave him, he might have a neck injury.”

“He fell on ‘is arse, not his neck.”
Slap.
“Ow! Sorry, miss. Bum. Ow! I mean backside.”

“Is he dead?”

“Miss, if he's dead can I have his desk?”

“He's not dead, he's in a coma.”

“His eyes are open.”

“That happens sometimes.”

“Maybe he's a zombie.”

“I think he's a poof.”
Slap.
“Ow!”

I stood up, disappointing those who favored death or coma, although the zombie supporters remained hopeful.

“Are you okay, Hector?” Mrs. Conlon still wasn't shouting.

“Yeah. Must have slipped or something.”

I was embarrassed and felt a blush coming on, unstoppable as stampeding bison. Blushing is one of my things. I really wish it wasn't because it makes you look stupid and weak.

“Do you want to go to the sick bay?”

The sick bay was a small room next to the office. It's where the bandages were kept. And a tube of Savlon antiseptic. And a bucket. For the vomit. It often smelled of vomit (the room, not
just the bucket), which is why it was called the sick bay. Actually, there were two buckets, both vomit-oriented. As well as the bucket for actually spewing into, there was also the sand bucket, used post-spew to strew the spew with sand, although why puke must be covered with sand prior to cleaning is one of those arcane mysteries like why the dinosaurs died out, or what happened at Area 51, or just what is going on down the front of Uma Upshaw's blouse.

There was also (in the sick bay, not down Uma's blouse) a slightly grisly head-and-torso dummy used for practicing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in citizenship classes. It was a lady one, perhaps pretty once, but a decade of heavy use had seen her fall into a decline, and her hair was all matted and greasy, and the paint was flaking off her and one of her eyes had come out and was on the floor next to her, waiting for a visit from the grisly-head-and-torso-resuscitation-dummy doctor.

(That, by the way, is a good use of the hyphen. If I'd said the “grisly head-and-torso-resuscitation-dummy doctor,” i.e., leaving out the hyphen after “grisly,” then it would mean that the doctor was grisly, and not the head-and-torso resuscitation dummy. I suppose that the doctor might also be grisly, in which case I should have said the “grisly grisly-head-and-torsoresuscitation-dummy doctor.” And I've just thought that if that doctor himself got sick, then he'd go and see the “grisly grisly-head-and-torso-resuscitation-dummy-doctor doctor.” And if that doctor was, in turn, grisly, then—)

Where was I?

“No, miss.”

I really didn't want to go to the sick bay. You'd have to be mad to go to the sick bay. You'd have to be sick to—

On the way to double chemistry, Stan asked me if I was feeling all right. He looked concerned. Okay, so he always looked concerned about something, but that something wasn't usually me. I thought about telling him about my head troubles, Doc Jones, the works, but for some reason I couldn't. It wasn't even the sort of embarrassment that might stop you talking about your undescended testicles or pubic lice. It was a deeper reluctance, and it was dark and shrouded. And it had gotten itself mixed up with annoyance. So I went on the attack.

“Shut up, will you, Stan? You're the one who's allergic to the world. I mean, is there anything, and I mean literally
anything
, in the universe that doesn't make you sneeze, or make your eyes water, or bring you out in welts?”

It wasn't supposed to be unkind, but I think it probably came out that way. In any case Stan wasn't the sort to engage in repartee. He was more the sort who'd go off and hate himself in a corner, so I shouldn't have taken that path with him.

“You're just as bad.”

“It's only nuts, with me. You're everything. I mean, kiwi fruit? Who ever heard of being allergic to kiwi fruit?”

“So?”

“And latex.”

“Uh.”

“And pollen. All pollen.”

Stan shrugged. “You've got that too, remember.”

“And wheat, and milk, and . . .” But by then I was talking to his back and feeling like a sod. At least I hadn't mentioned his twitches and tics.

He had two main sorts. The first sort involved closing one eye, while the same side of the face made a kind of fluttering
movement. It was a bit like a wink performed by a ham actor in a Restoration comedy with wigs and frock coats and ornamental snuffboxes—our class went to see a performance of some play,
The Fondling Fop
or something, by Sir Humbert Halfninney (1643–1701) at the theater in town, so I know all about this. The second sort of tic involved at least one additional eye in a sequence of rapid blinking, his face otherwise immobile.

I'm honestly not trying to be mean about Stan, who I love like a brother. I just want to give you the whole picture, and if you miss out on the blinking and winking (oh, and the compulsive knee shaking) then you're not seeing him like he is, in the round.