Jack Tumor (10 page)

 

 

I went to sleep that night thinking about many things. I thought quite a lot about Jack Tumor. I'd gone past the point of being gobsmacked by the mere fact of having a dirty-minded brain tumor that chatted away to me like he was some kind of friend or brother, or even sometimes in a kind of warped-dad way. Now I was more thinking about the content, if you see what I mean, mulling over what he was saying, not just the fact that he was saying anything at all. And that led me on to thinking about Uma Upshaw. She was a stunner, and she had smiled upon me. I fixed on her for a while, but another, less glamorous face was there too: a face with a red birthmark, a face framed with strawberry blonde hair, straight as railway tracks.

And then, heading backwards and downwards, I thought about Mr. Mordred and what he was going to do to me the next day if he recognized me.

I
t was morning break. Nothing so far had gone wrong, meaning I hadn't been hauled out of registration to be sent for interrogation by Mordred. Nor had there been any incidents involving girls' sanitary stuff or being smiled at. We were by the fence that separates the Body of Christ High School from the Body of Christ Junior School. The junior school was a squat, brooding, red-brick building that looked like it had been converted from some kind of Victorian correctional institution, maybe for fallen women or men with unsightly facial hair. The kids there had somehow bypassed any kind of cute stage, and were basically miniature versions of the thugs in the high school. There'd sometimes be spitting contests between the two schools, the outcome decided more by wind direction than superior technique or catarrhal output. But this place by the fence was one of our regular morning-break hangouts. We could gather round and talk about our stuff without having to worry
too much about errant footballs or fists. We were all there, though Stan still wasn't looking me in the eye.

 

 

Smurf spoke with a faraway look in his eyes, and I knew who he was thinking about, and that made me think about her too, and yes, she seemed to be a best-of-both-worlds option. But not, as Jack suggested, one open to us.

 

STAN
:   This is definitely a thought experiment.

 

Then we were all quiet for a minute, until I thought of a knockdown argument.

 

ME
:   You're all missing the—
Ow!

I
was facedown. I was hurting. I couldn't understand why. For a few blurry seconds I thought it was to do with Jack T. To do with what was happening in my head. But then the generalized all-body pain began to focus, and it wasn't in my head, but on my back. And then I heard laughter, the cackling, spluttering glee of kids who take their joy from hurting.

As I reconstructed it afterwards, what happened was that Tierney, Johnson, and a couple of other droogs came bombing in from behind us, feet first. I took most of the impact and now I was down on the concrete with Tierney standing on my back like I was a board and he was surfing me.

And then he dropped his knee into my spine, and I twisted and writhed like he'd hit me with electrodes wired up to the grid. There was no getting up from this, no smart move, no grabbing wrists. I was helpless. I craned up to try to find my friends, but they'd been blown away by the first assault. And then I felt Tierney's breath on my cheek.

“Not so clever now, are you? What, can't speak? Beg me for mercy, or you're dead. Beg, you poof, beg.”

I'd have begged, but I couldn't find any words. I hoped that Jack T. might chip in, but he was silent too.

“Nothing? Nothing to say? Have some of that then,” and Tierney punched me twice on the side of my face. It didn't hurt that much, as I don't think he could get an angle for leverage, but it added to the humiliation, that feeling that he could do whatever he wanted to me. And then, because that probably wasn't quite humiliating enough, he spat in my ear. Then he got up.

It was good having him off my back. I turned and watched him stroll away, swaggering with his mates. There hadn't been enough time for a decent crowd to gather, but there were still a dozen people standing about, watching, in little clumps. One of them was Uma Upshaw. She had her hands on her hips, and she stepped in front of Tierney.

“That
was
brave,” she said.

Subtlety wasn't one of Uma's virtues, and the sarcasm dripped like pus from a festering boil.

“What?”

Tierney sounded perplexed. He probably thought he had been brave. There was always the chance he might have scuffed his shoes on the back of my neck.

“Sneaking up like that. Brave. You should get a medal.”

“What you talking about?”

If Tierney had left it there, with the “about” and the question mark and the closing speech marks, he might still have been able to walk away with some dignity left intact. But no, he had to say it. And the fact that he mumbled it under his breath didn't help him one little bit.

What he said was: “Bitch.”

And now there
had
been time for a crowd to gather, and collectively it drew its breath. Uma Upshaw wasn't the kind of girl you called a bitch, not in that insultingly half-arsed way. In fact, there was always the chance that if he'd hollered it out loud like a gangsta rapper he might have got away with it. But to mumble it was to commit the twin peaks of folly: it showed both a lack of respect
and
a lack of guts.

Uma's face—that thing of hard-chiseled near-beauty— became more hard and chiseled but I'd estimate about 8 percent less beautiful. It took on the look of some warrior queen, or maybe a death goddess, or even a warrior queen death goddess.

Made me quite horny really, in a way that could only truly be described as kinky. Despite the 8 percent decline in beauty.

Now, as I've said before, Tierney wasn't exactly one of the great hulking bullies, the knuckle-dragging, feel-no-pain, heavy-browed, bruising, biffing, blustering, lobotomized thugs, and we had plenty of those for the sake of comparison. No, Tierney was of the snide, manipulating variety, the evil-mastermind type, although in truth he was not especially bright, as evil masterminds, or even as ordinary kids, go. But my point is that raw physical courage wasn't quite Tierney's bag of chips. And, as I've also said, Uma Upshaw was a big girl. Not big in the compacted lard-and-muscle way like some of the other girls, but strapping and lissome, with long levers and hard cogs.