Jack Tumor (13 page)

“Mum, you're mad. I haven't listened to it for ten years. It's baby music.”

“I just thought . . .”

I should have been angry or at least annoyed, but I was too tired for that. I drifted towards sleep, and I saw Mum wandering off to some of the other patients, chatting with them, pouring out niceness and sympathy. And I thought about Puff the magical dragon, who lived next to the sea, and who, if I remembered correctly, frolicked in the autumnal mist in a land that, if I wasn't mistaken, was called Honah Lee.

W
AKEY WAKEY
.

There are dreams and then there are weird dreams and then there are the kind of dreams I was just in the middle of. It began with me being chased, which isn't really weird at all, it being a pretty accurate reflection of real life. The thing that was chasing me was not, surprisingly, Puff the magic dragon, but some big blobby thing like a globule of phlegm, but with spikes in it. I suppose that was probably my visualization of my brain tumor, although of course it could just have represented my fear of being chased by giant globules of phlegm.

But instead of the normal chase-dream thing where you're about to be caught by the monster and then you wake up, I fell right into the arms of Uma Upshaw. And my face was right in between those magnificent bazookas of hers, and that should have been fun, but I had the unpleasant feeling of being smothered, so maybe in real life the pillow was on my head or something
like that. And I was kind of stuck there, as if my nose was embedded in the space between her wondrous orbs, you know, like when Pinocchio is in his big-nose phase and keeps getting it stuck places.

And then it became really unpleasant, because I couldn't breathe, and I still thought that the giant booger/tumor thing was coming up behind me, and I could almost feel its hot foul breath on me, and so I sort of flapped away blindly to fend the thing off, but then something grabbed my hand, and at first I thought, right, that's it, I'm gonna get chomped, I am soooo cancer food, but then I realized that it wasn't a, like
tumory
hand, but a real one, I mean a human one, and it wasn't all slimy, but dry and warm, and it tugged me gently away, easing me out of the booby nose trap, and when I was free (
pop!
) I turned, and I had no idea who it was going to be, thinking it would probably be Mum, or maybe the Virgin Mary or someone like that, but it wasn't someone like that. And so for a second I didn't recognize her, and she was a bit hazy, a bit fluid, the way things are in dreams, but then she became clear to me, and it was her, the girl with the strawberry blonde hair and the port-wine birthmark on her face, and that's when Jack T. shouted:
WAKEY WAKEY
.

“What?” Or rather, “Whaugh?” I wasn't in a coherent state to internalize my thoughts.

A BRIGHT NEW DAY
.

“Yeah.”

DON'T SOUND SO GLUM. YOU KNOW IT'S ME WHO SHOULDN'T BE HAPPY ABOUT BEING HERE. ALL THESE PEOPLE WANT TO DO ME HARM. THEY HATE ME. BUT I STAY CHEERFUL
.

“Aren't you the plucky tumor.”

And then a huge black nurse appeared, pushing a trolley with stuff in it. She must have been two meters wide. Her uniform was stretched tightly across her front like a big blue sail in a hurricane.

“Now then, darlin',” she said in a Jamaican accent as rich as Bill Gates and as thick as Jordan, “are you feeling good?”

She was wearing big glasses which kept sliding down her face, but unlike most of the doctors and nurses she looked me right in the eye.

“Not too bad.”

She rolled closer to me, and put her hand on my forehead.

OW! GET HER OFF ME
.

Jack sounded as if he was in real pain, and I found myself flinching, although I liked the feel of the nurse's leathery hand on my head. Her face changed, her smile turning slowly, almost mechanically, into a frown.

“Things not all good either. Not in there. Me takin' your blood pressure now. Don't be lookin' worried. Don't hurt a bit.”

She was right. Having your blood pressure taken doesn't hurt a bit. Then she reached into that trolley and pulled out a plastic bag. A plastic bag containing, I could see, a syringe.

KEEP THAT THING AWAY FROM ME
.

Jack sounded on the edge of panic. I was perfectly happy about that—he was such a smug tumor that a bit of panic had to do him some good. But I'd noticed before that there were links between us, and what he felt I would feel, or at least an echo of it, a ripple, and the ripples reached me now, and I found myself flinching, and I couldn't honestly swear that I didn't do a bit of trembling too.

“Now, darlin', Sister Winifred's done more of these things than you've had hot dinners.”

“Well, you'd better go and get her then.”

The nurse leaned towards me, with just the tiniest hint of looming threat.

“Oh, are you having a little laugh at my expense?” Suddenly the Jamaican accent was gone and she sounded like a BBC radio announcer. “Don't you know I only talk like that to make you poor lambs feel cozy?” And then she was back in her old voice. “And you don't want one o' dem junior doctors learning on you and stabbin' and jabbin' at you like they want to chop off you arm. I been doing dis for thirty-five years and I know how to make it nice.”

And then she was swabbing my arm with alcohol and the needle was in, and it didn't hurt much, but when she pulled at the plunger and the barrel filled with my blood, so dark it seemed almost brown (that's because when they take blood they take it from a vein, not an artery, and it's been all the way round the body and given up its oxygen), well, anyone who says they'd enjoy that is some kind of freak.

I think that was when it first really hit me. Stupid, I know, after what I'd been experiencing over the past couple of weeks. But blood is such a . . . thing.

I mean it's a bit of you that should be inside you, and there it is, outside you. Slopping about. In a syringe. On its way to a lab where they test it to see if you've got
cancer of the brain
.

Blood.

A symbol for love and friendship.

A symbol for family.

A symbol for life.

A symbol for death.

It was seeing my blood in the syringe that did it. I can't remember if the tears came first or the shaking. Let's be neat and say that they came together, although if we get down to hundredths or even tenths of a second, that becomes unlikely. And I felt my face sort of collapsing in on itself, and then the nurse, I mean Winifred, was holding me, saying, “There there, there there,” like I was a toddler with a bashed knee, and she was pressing me into that enormous bosom of hers, but I can honestly say that, despite the whole uniform thing I touched on earlier, this was not what you would call an erotic moment, and nor was Winifred the kind of person you'd be having erotic thoughts about. And I could feel my shaking going into her, I mean sort of absorbing into her flesh, the trembles lessening as they penetrated her soft tissue, until they were finally lost there, somewhere in the middle of her, and I kind of imagined that there was a place there where hurt and pain got dealt with, like spent nuclear-fuel rods getting reprocessed.

After a while, and it could have been one minute or twenty, because time stood still with me clamped to that healing chest, I stopped the crying and the shaking, although I thought there might still be some little echoes and aftershocks traveling through Winifred, and maybe they're still traveling now, the way the songs of whales are supposed to carry on traveling around the world underwater for months.

But there was something I wanted to say to Winifred.

“It wasn't the needle.”

I didn't want her to think I was crying just because of the syringe.

“I know it wasn't,” she said in that voice of hers, half fierce, half melting. “I come with you down to radiography, if you like. They find that fellow in there,” she said, tapping my head with a fat finger. “They find him, then they sort him out.”

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

T
he room had nothing much in it apart from the CAT scanner, but that was enough, really. Quite an impressive piece of equipment, all things told. It looked a bit like a giant white donut, except its inner surface was sort of funnelly, you know, bigger at one end than the other.

Which makes me wonder: why is a funnel, like on a ship, called a funnel when it isn't funnel-shaped, but just a normal tube? Which is pretty well the opposite of a funnel.

Yes, and a donut doesn't usually have a table going through the middle of it.

Winifred had said I could ride down in my chair, but I walked, still wearing my pajamas and dressing gown, and carrying my clothes in a carrier bag. It was a bit embarrassing, after the hugging and crying business. The old people on the ward either looked at me with sympathy or tactfully scrutinized their bedsheets. I guess that old guys dying in hospitals don't usually take the piss.

There was a man in the room with the CAT-scan machine. He had on a white coat with about twenty pens crammed into the breast pocket. He was shy and nerdy and didn't look me in the eye, and his hair was tufty and orange and he had red blotches on his face, as if he'd just been slapped or had tried to shave himself with a bread knife.

“I'll be in there,” he said, pointing at a big window with another room behind it and some equipment in there, monitors and stuff. Not quite starship standard, unless it was one of those films where they try to make the vessel look all beat-up and old-fashioned, kept running by improvisations with string. And when something goes wrong, the stardrive or whatever, they just hit it with a wrench.

Which reminds me. Submarine films. The submarine is being depth-charged. The first thing that happens, after a few explosions, is that they lose the lights, and then they come on again, but red.

Why?

I know it's supposed to be backup lighting, but why put in special red bulbs? But then the next thing is that, after a
really
close explosion, a pipe bursts and water sprays out, and then an engineer comes along with a big wrench and he hits the pipe with the wrench until it's fixed. Can that really be a good way to fix a burst pipe? Doesn't seem very likely to me.

“You put this gown on,” said Winifred, handing me what looked suspiciously like a nightie.

“Over my pajamas?” I asked hopefully.

“No, darlin', you have to be taking all your pajamas off. In the corner. I not looking. You tink I haven't seen it all before? I got two boys o' my own. One he work with computers now, the
other one useless except at making babies. So I seen everything.”

While she was talking I put on the white gown, first taking off my top, and then putting the gown on and only then taking my pajama trousers off, so even if Winifred had seen everything, she wasn't going to be seeing any more of me than she had to.

But still, it wasn't the most macho of garments, and something about the fact that it did up at the back made it seem more like a dress, because there aren't really any clothes for boys that you have to tie at the back, and I suppose there's a reason for it, maybe something to do with the olden days and ladies having servants to get them dressed, or something like that.

Then the nerdy technician got me to lie on the table thing, and he positioned me just so, and my head went into a kind of rack, which I guessed was to keep me still so the pictures didn't come out all blurry.

As he was bending over me I saw he had a name badge on his white lab coat. Barry Cunliffe. Cunliffe. It sounded like an Anglo-Saxon name for a lady's you-know-what.

“Thanks, Barry,” I said.

He looked at me, blinking.

“Oh, the coat. No. It's not mine,” he said.

But he didn't tell me what his name was, so in my head I still called him Barry.

I felt very helpless lying there in my white cotton nightie. It was cold, and I began to shiver, and then a beeper went off in Winifred's pocket and she looked at it and said, “Sorry, darlin', but I got to go,” and I said that of course she could go and I was fine, but I didn't feel fine.

Then Barry the scanman said: “Just going next door. You'll
hear me through the speaker, and there's a mic so I can hear you. Just shout if . . . Well, once we start, you have to stay still, very still, so don't, er, shout. I mean because I can hear you even if you talk quietly. But don't talk too quietly in case I, er, can't hear you. Just talk normally.”

“Like this?”

“Er?”

“Or
more
normally?”

“That's about the right level of, er, normalcy.”

And then he was gone, instantly happier to be among machines and consoles and monitors than facing a real person.

THAT COULD BE YOU, YOU KNOW
, said Jack sulkily. He
really
didn't like hospitals.

THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU WHEN YOU HANG OUT WITH NERDS. YOU BECOME ONE
.

Maybe I'm one to begin with.

IF YOU ARE, THEN I AM, BUT I'M NOT, SO YOU AREN'T. NOT DEEP DOWN. WE'LL GET YOU LOOSE, DON'T WORRY. OH HELL, WHAT'S HAPPENING
?

There was a humming noise and I started to move, or rather the table I was lying on started to move, or rather the giant donut started to move, which made it seem as if I was moving, all motion being relative, according to Einstein.

“Ah, oh, sorry. Meant to say we've begun.” So said the voice in the speaker. “That is, we've begun.”

THAT'S IT, I'M HIDING
, said Jack T.

And he did, or at least he shut up.

For the next forty minutes I lay there as the donut inched its way across my head and down as far as my shoulders. After the first ten minutes Barry remembered that he was supposed to
play music to keep me calm, and because I'd kept
Puff the Magic Dragon
very much to myself he put on a tape of Kylie Minogue, which made me want to stand up and hurl the two tons of CAT scanner through the window at him, even if she is, well, gorgeous.