Jack Tumor (3 page)

And I also know there's something fascist in the idea of looking to these demigods for salvation, when really you should be looking inside yourself, but sometimes when you look inside yourself there's nothing there, or what there is is no good, and that's why you need the Justice League.

Yeah, well
now
you know why they call us the nerds.

“Whistle!”

The cry came a second before the searing pain. Of course I knew who and what it was.

“Whistle!”

I blew frantically. But when someone grabs hold of your nipple and squeezes it like a vise, the one thing you can't do is whistle. You blow and blow, but all that comes out is air. I tried to wrestle him off, but the little bastard was like a monkey and I couldn't get a grip.

Explanation.

This was Flaherty. Flaherty wasn't really part of our gang, wasn't really a nerd at all. What he was was a nutter, but not one of the evil ones, just a nutter plain and simple. He was a spiky-haired perpetual-motion machine, always fidgeting, spinning, jerking, chattering. Free-floating, independent, of no party but his own; the biggest pain in the arse known to mankind. His dad was a notorious local criminal, but his dad didn't live with his mum, and everyone said Flaherty was more like his uncle, who'd been a musician, but had died some squalid death in London. He hadn't, as far as you could tell, inherited any of Uncle Flaherty's musical talent, although he was pretty nifty on the old acoustic catarrh. But anyway, the reputation of the dad meant that nobody touched him, however irritating he might be, and that was handy, because he was as likely to get up the noses of the school hard cases as annoy us. What I'm saying is, he was mad but funny, sort of. And now he was on my back, squeezing my tit.

“You know how to do it,” he whispered, like a guy from ground control trying to talk down a rookie pilot with the instruments all shot to pieces and zero visibility. “Keep calm, two deep breaths, take it easy, and
whistle
.”

And it was true. That was the only way. I tried to forget the pain, forget the panic, block out the laughter of the others (they
laughed partly because they'd all been whistled too, in their time, and because Flaherty wasn't really dangerous, just a pain). I blew again, and a low, barely audible whistle came out.

It was enough. Flaherty jumped off my back.

“You little tosser,” I said, rubbing my bruised tit, but laughing. You just couldn't be mad at Flaherty. Might as well be mad at the grass for giving me hay fever.

Flaherty's tie was halfway around the side of his neck, and his shirt was out and his trousers were all over the place, but there was still something cool about him, despite looking like he'd just fallen out of a tree.

“Got a joke,” he said. “Biology joke; did it for homework.”

That was typical Flaherty—biology homework was supposed to be memorizing the carbon cycle, and instead he had made a joke.

“How do you make a hormone?”

“Don't know,” we all chorused back except Gonad, who tutted.

“Don't pay her.”

“Heard it before,” said Gonad.

Flaherty looked crestfallen for all of two seconds, and then he was away, flitting through the playground like a sprite or a spirit, or a really annoying kid who you couldn't hate even if you wanted to.

“Nutter,” said Stan, and we all concurred, smiling. And pretty soon the bell went and then it was school as usual, except for me worrying a bit about the
ARSECHEESE
and the
BUGNOB
, and a lot about whatever else was happening in my head that made Doc Jones want to look in there with his CAT scan.

W
hen I got home that afternoon I was feeling more tired than I'd ever felt before. It was as if I could sense the weight of the air on me, which is quite something given that every square centimeter of your body has a kilogram of air pressing down on it, and the only reason you don't get squashed like chewing gum on the street is that you have the same pressure pushing out from the inside, and that's why you explode if you go out in space without a spacesuit, because the pressure inside has no balancing pressure outside, so
boom!

Mum was in the kitchen doing something with mung beans or aduki beans or some other bean you've never heard of. She was wearing one of her floor-length hippie dresses made from string and rags. Her hair was down. It looked like a salt-and-pepper waterfall. I'd told her already that old ladies with long hair look like bunny-boilers, but it didn't sink in. I suppose she had some kind of mental image of how she looked which had
probably stayed the same since she was twenty, and nothing was going to shift it.

She lifted her face from the pot of beans and smiled her dazed smile. Strands of hair fell down across her eyes and she tried to blow them away. A last few beams of late-afternoon sunshine came through the grimy kitchen window, and for a second I could imagine how she must once have looked, and I could see that her hair-blowing thing must once have been considered pretty cute by those in the market for cuteness.

“Hey, Heck!” she said.

“Hey, Mum.”

She'd obviously forgotten that I'd been to the hospital. I should have grown used to it by now, but it still got to me, sometimes, when I wasn't feeling great.

“How was school?” she asked, but I could tell even before the words were fully out that she'd drifted off again, back into the world of dreams and imagination, away from the reality of mung beans and schools and hospitals.

I went to my room. Had some homework. Atomic weights. Periodic table. Osmium. It took me ten minutes. I love the periodic table. It tells you everything about the material world, everything about what it's made from, about what combines with what, about how everything comes together. I sometimes think that if our universe was destroyed, an alien power from another dimension could reconstruct it all just from the periodic table, right down to me being here now thinking these thoughts. And the way that Mendeleyev thought it all up without knowing anything at all about the structure of the atom, just by writing down everything he knew about individual elements on cards and then arranging them in groups according to similarities. All
just mind-blowing. But not the sort of thing you could own up to thinking, at least to anyone outside my gang.

ARSIUM
.

I jumped.

The voice again.

“Okay, who, I mean what the hell is this?” I'd spoken before I realized I'd even opened my mouth.

Somehow the voice here in my room with Hawkgirl on the wall and my own duvet and pillows and stuff was much worse. It was an invasion.

There was a gap, when all I could hear was the blood pumping in my ears, and I felt like a loser for talking to myself. And then, just as I was beginning to relax:

IT'S ME
.

Well, that was even worse. The voice was definitely talking to me, answering back. It was deep, a bit theatrical, with a rasping edge to it.

I closed my eyes, trying to shut out the voice with blackness.

KNOCK KNOCK, OPEN UP. BORED IN HERE. TURN ON THE LIGHTS
.

I shook my head from side to side. Then I opened my eyes and stood up. I went and looked at myself in the mirror. I was pale and my hair was sticking straight up, but that wasn't so surprising as it was always sticking straight up unless I gelled it down, and then it would eventually ping back with a noise you could hear from across the classroom.

GOOD CHRIST, WHAT A MESS. YOU LOOK LIKE A WHORE-HOUSE BOG BRUSH
.

I'd been watching closely, and my lips definitely weren't moving. It was inside my head and it was talking to me.

“Who is ‘me'?”

That was me talking, the “me” being him. It. Whatever. My voice was frail and quavery.

AH, A . . . PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION. WHO IS ME? IS THAT A QUESTION ANYONE CAN ANSWER?

“T-try.”

Bugger it. I was adding stammering to the list of rubbish things I did.

WHY, HECTOR—IF YOU'LL PARDON MY SLIDE INTO FAMILIARITY—I AM YOU
.

I turned back to my bed and got under the duvet. It had footballs on it. And football boots. And some goals. And some animals. The animals were playing football. All in all it was a very busy duvet. I made a mental note to burn it.

YOU CAN'T HIDE FROM WHAT'S INSIDE
.

The voice was taunting, but did not sound malicious. It was the way a friend would take the piss, feeling out your weaknesses without exploiting them.

I concentrated hard and worked at controlling my breathing.

“Was it you that said ‘arsecheese'?”

Jesus, I was talking back to the voice. I was losing it. I was a crazy man.

OH, I WAS YOUNG THEN. I'D ONLY JUST DISCOVERED THE PART WHICH DEALS WITH SPEECH
.

“The part? The part of what?”

KEEP UP, BOY. HAVE A GUESS
.

I tried to think, tried to logic my way around this, or into it.

“My brain. You're in my brain.”

The voice did a sort of trumpeting fanfare by way of reply.

“You're in my brain,” I carried on, wonderingly. “You're the thing that's making me dizzy. Am I mad?”

I DON'T KNOW. ARE YOU?

“Well, I've got a voice in my head. Are you going to tell me that Satan is my master and I've got to go on a killing spree?”

WHY SHOULD I DO THAT?

The voice sounded wounded. I mean, playing at being wounded.

“It's what voices in your head usually say.”

I'M NOT THAT KIND OF VOICE. BY THE WAY, IS SATAN YOUR MASTER? IT WOULD PUT A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT SLANT ON THINGS
.

“Not unless he's disguised as Mr. Truelove.”

HUMOR! GOOD. I'D HATE TO END UP IN A BORE. TAKE ME BACK TO THE MIRROR, WILL YOU? I WANT TO HAVE A PROPER LOOK AT US
.

“No.”

I COULD MAKE YOU
.

“Bollocks.”

DON'T TEMPT ME. IT'S EARLY DAYS YET, AND I MIGHT MAKE A MESS OF THINGS. BUT I'D GET YOU THERE
.

“Horsepiss.”

IF YOU INSIST
.

And then I felt a weird thing. I mean, well, everything had been weird today, but we were now on a new level of weirdness, warp-factor-twelve weirdness. My arm started to slide out from under the duvet. I wasn't doing it. It was just moving. All by itself. No, not by itself. Just not helped by me. It wasn't my arm anymore, it belonged to someone else. I grabbed it with my
other hand and pulled it back. There was a moment of resistance, and then I was in charge again.

OKAY, OKAY
, said the voice, sounding a little out of breath,
SO I NEED A BIT MORE PRACTICE BEFORE I TRY THE OLD
MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY
ROUTINE. BUT I CAN MAKE LIFE TRICKY FOR YOU, IF I WANT. I'M TALKING HERE ABOUT MAKING YOU STEP IN DOGCRAP OR FALL DOWN IN FRONT OF GIRLS. OR BOYS, IF THAT WOULD WORK BETTER. LET'S HAVE A LITTLE LOOK DOWN THERE. MMMM . . . NO, NO, IT SEEMS GIRLS WILL DO THE TRICK
.

“What? Down where? Where are you looking?”

OH, JUST THE OLD BRAIN STEM. SEAT OF THE ANIMAL INSTINCTS. DESIRE, RAGE, HUNGER. COME ON, TO THE MIRROR
.

“I'll go if you stop playing games and tell me what you are.”

The voice sighed.
I WASN'T PLAYING GAMES WHEN I SAID THAT I'M YOU
.

“But you can't be me: I'm me, and you're . . . something else.”

LET ME CLARIFY. I'M MADE FROM YOU
.

“Made from me?”

FROM YOUR CELLS
.

“My cells?”

YOUR BRAIN CELLS
.

“My brain cells?”

YEAH, STOP WITH THE REPEATING
.

“Sorry. But this is a bit hard to take in.”

KEEP GOING, YOU'LL GET THERE
.

“So you're a thing in my brain made from my brain cells. How did you get there?”

WELL, I GREW, NATURALLY
.

And then I got it. So, I was slow on the uptake, but it had been a tough day and besides,

I had a freaking brain tumor!

No, let's be a bit more precise:

I had a freaking talking freaking brain tumor!

HEY, EASY BOY. GOT A MAJOR ADRENALINE RUSH THERE
, said the tumor, as I now had to think of it.
DON'T GET ME WRONG, I LOVE IT, ADRENALINE, AND WE'RE GOING TO MAKE SURE WE GET PLENTY MORE OF IT WHILE I'M AROUND, BUT NOW ISN'T THE TIME. WE'RE REFLECTING HERE. WE WANT REPOSE AND TRANQUILITY. WHAT ABOUT A BIT OF A CHANT, LIKE MUM? AFTER ME NOW, MMRAANGNUAANGNOOOOOOOOOOR
.

I'd been numb, but now something of the horror of it all was getting through. Thoughts rushed into my head like the cold frothing sea pouring into the hole in the
Titanic
.

Cancerdeathpainscalpelbloodwastingskullcancerdeathpain bloodcancerdeath
.

“Shut up! Shut the hell up!”

Then the door opened. Mum stood there, draped in towels, dripping from the bath. My head was ringing and reeling, and I guess I looked pretty white.