Jack Tumor (20 page)

BUT DO YOU REMEMBER THE POSTCARD HE SENT YOU? THE ONE WITH THE PYRAMIDS IN THE BACKGROUND, AND THE BIG SIGN SAYING “CAMEL RIDE TO THE TOMB”
?

“Yeah, but—”

WELL, THAT'S WHAT WE'RE ALL ON. YOU, ME, EVERYONE. A LURCHING, COMIC, ABSURD CAMEL RIDE TO THE TOMB. AND WE HAVE TO MAKE THE MOST OF IT
.

“Here we go again. What did you call it before? Thanatos and Eros. Bollocks and bullcrap.”

HECTOR, PLEASE, THIS IS TOO IMPORTANT. THE RIDE TO THE TOMB ONLY MATTERS IF YOUR LINE ENDS. GENETIC DEATH IS THE ONLY DEATH. WE HAVE WITHIN US THE CAPACITY FOR IMMORTALITY. THERE ARE GENES WITHIN YOU THAT ARE A HUNDRED MILLION YEARS OLD. LOOK FORWARDS ANOTHER HUNDRED MILLION. YOU CAN BE THERE TOO. WE BOTH CAN. YOU DON'T MATTER. WHAT MATTERS IS THE CODE YOU CARRY
.

“But I don't care about the code. I'm more than the code. I don't care if bits of me are alive in a billion years inside somebody else. I want them alive inside me—now.”

BUT YOUR GENES
. . .

“I don't give a damn about my genes. My genes might have made me, but I'm more than they are. I've escaped from
them. And if my genes made you as well, then I hate them.”

Okay, so I was losing it a bit. It had been a tough day.

LOOK, I'M SORRY, I'M REALLY SORRY
. And now even the urgency had gone from Jack's voice, leaving only sadness in its wake, and so we were one, in our sadness at least.

I DIDN'T MEAN TO . . . COME ON, CHEER UP. WE'LL HAVE ANOTHER GO WITH UMA—NOTHING'S AS BAD AS IT SEEMS
.

But I was lost to such platitudes. I was lying here in this ancient quiet space, a space I'd always seen as a refuge, but now it was like a prison, and it might as well have been another of the graves looming and crowding around us.

“Why me?” It was the obvious question. Why you? Why us?

YOU MEAN WHY HAVE YOU GOT A BRAIN TUMOR
?

“Did I do something wrong? Am I being punished?”

THAT'S NOT THE WAY TO LOOK AT IT. NO ONE GETS HANDED OUT TUMORS BECAUSE THEY'VE DONE SOMETHING BAD OR STUPID
.

“Smokers?”

OKAY, I'LL GIVE YOU SMOKERS. BUT YOU DIDN'T DO ANYTHING TO DESERVE ME
.

“So why did you come?”

A BIT OF GENETICS. A SMIDGE OF ENVIRONMENT. A ROLL OF THE OLD DICE. THAT LADY LUCK CAN BE A SOUR-FACED OLD HAG
.

“I wish I could go back or stop time or something. I don't want . . . I don't want to . . .” I was beyond tears, past the point where crying could do anything for me.

WE CAN DO THAT
.

“Do what?” I might have sniffed a bit.

STOP TIME. FOR A WHILE
.

“How?”

I was intrigued, but also skeptical. And there was something sloppy about saying you'd stop time “for a while,” because, well, “a while” is a period of time, and if you've stopped time, then how can you have a period of time? But that only occurred to me later, and I never did bring it up with Jack.

WE'LL DO IT TOGETHER. PUT OUT YOUR ARMS
.

I was lying on my back, looking up into the darkening skies through the narrow gaps between the leaves and branches. I could see the first of the stars coming through the willow. I shrugged and put out my arms to the side like a crucified Jesus. I felt like an idiot. Not even a happy idiot. A depressed idiot.

“Now what?”

STRETCH OUT YOUR FINGERS
.

I did.

CLOSE YOUR EYES. CAN YOU FEEL IT? WE'RE MOVING. WE'RE SPINNING THROUGH SPACE: YOU, ME, THE EARTH. YOU KNOW HOW FAST
?

Of course I knew. “Six thousand, six hundred and ninety kilometers an hour.”

AND MOVING AROUND THE SUN. HOW FAST
?

“Thirty kilometers a second.”

AND THE SOLAR SYSTEM, AND THE GALAXY. ALL SPINNING, FLYING THROUGH SPACE, EXPLODING AWAY FROM THE BEGINNING OF THINGS. AND TIME WAS BORN THEN TOO, BACK AT THE BEGINNING, AND IT'S FLYING AND SPINNING WITH US. FEEL FOR IT, FEEL THE AIR, FEEL THE TIME, FEEL IT THICKENING IN YOUR HANDS
.

And you know what? Mental as it sounds, I did think that I could feel the stuff of time thick in my hands; a liquid like mercury,
cool and heavy. I felt as though I could have formed it into a ball, and eaten it like an apple.

NOW HOLD ON TO THE EARTH. DIG THOSE FINGERS IN, BOY. GRIP IT. HOLD IT TIGHT. YOU'VE GOT IT. GIVE IT EVERYTHING NOW, EVERYTHING YOU'VE GOT. THIS ISN'T EASY, THIS IS THE HARDEST THING THERE'S EVER BEEN. THIS IS WORK FOR SUPERHEROES. YES! IT'S SLOWING
.

And as I gripped the earth I thought that I could feel it grinding, feel the spin of it slow, and it was like when Superman slows a train speeding towards the broken rails and the steep drop, his heels driven back and throwing up sparks, but stop it he always would. But my train was the earth, and the universe, and time, and I stopped it, I really did.

IT'S STOPPING
.

“No.”

YES. IT'S STOPPED. THAT'S MY BOY
.

I opened my eyes and everything was still. There was no breeze to move the willow leaves, and the stars were silent and unmoving, and there was no traffic noise from the road, and I knew it was because the cars had all stopped, the drivers' mouths frozen midway into mobile calls, and the birds were suspended in the evening sky, and Uma Upshaw was a mannequin out there somewhere, her brave bold stride caught like a photograph. And all the clocks of the world had stopped, and the breath of every living thing, and the beating of every heart.

“Has it really stopped?”

DON'T YOU FEEL IT? FEEL THE STILLNESS OF EVERYTHING
?

“I can't move.”

BUT OF COURSE NOT, YOU'RE HOLDING IT ALL STILL. IF YOU MOVE, THE SPELL IS BROKEN
.

“Can we stay like this forever?”

DO YOU WANT TO
?

“I don't want to have a brain tumor. I don't want to die.”

WE ALL HAVE TO DIE
.

“I don't want to die yet.”

WE CAN STAY THIS WAY FOR AS LONG AS YOU LIKE. CALM, SERENE, UNMOVING. WE ARE LIKE GODS, BEYOND THE TOUCH OF PAIN. BUT ALSO JOY. BUT ALSO LIFE
.

It was beautiful lying there with the world dead around me, and me immortal. But I also saw that everything I cared about was in that world I'd stopped and which was lost to me, beyond my reach. And I knew what Jack was doing, what he was saying. You can't step out of the stream of life and yet be part of life, and more than that, that somehow we must acknowledge the truth of our death to understand the truth of our life. The only way to stop death was to stop life.

Well, then it struck me as wise and profound, but now I think it's just lying hippie b.s.

I could hear a sound. I couldn't call it beautiful, but it was . . . perfect: a long, slow, simple sound, like the sound of a finger circling a wineglass. Except a million of them, and heard from far away.

“What is it?”

THE MUSIC
?

“Yes, the music.”

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
.

The music of the spheres.

“It's nice. Can I sleep now?”

And I felt that I could sleep forever here in this willow bower, and I didn't mind so much that life was elsewhere, and that sleep is a little death.

I'M NOT SURE IT'S SUCH A GOOD IDEA. NO, HECK, WAKE UP, NOW ISN'T THE TIME. OH, LOOK WHO'S HERE
.

And I looked and I saw at the edge of my vision a face pale against the leaves, and then I sort of snapped out of my trance, and the music of the spheres turned out to be an ice-cream van playing music, and when I turned and focused I saw that it was Uma, and she was staring at me like I was a major freak. She might have been there for a while. She might have heard me talking to Jack. Talking about having cancer and dying.

Yeah, big turn-on.

I tried to say something, but my mouth felt all gummy. Then Uma stooped and picked up the little sequinned bag she must have left behind, and was gone in a shimmer of leaves and starlight and sequins.

I
got home at about nine. There was a note from Mum saying she'd gone to bed early, and that there was some lentil bake in the oven. I left it there and went to my room, where I ate the three packets of crisps, although by now they'd become a sort of savory powder. Jack had clocked off, exhausted no doubt from stopping time, and I was on my own, even in front of the mirror.

The one good thing about the evening's fiasco was that it was Friday, so there was no school tomorrow. That gave me a couple of days' respite from whatever grief Uma decided to inflict although, of course, I had all the fun of imagining it in advance. And then I remembered with a groan that Clytemnestra was coming. It never rains but it pours a bucket of cold dung over your head.

So I read to take my mind off things. I began with
Crime and Punishment
, which I'd been reading for the past two years, but I wasn't in the mood for heaviness, and the Russian names were all spinning around in my head, so I put it down after a couple
of pages. I then went to the opposite extreme, and tried a
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
novelization that Gonad had given me, but it was piss-poor. So I turned to some old friends; I skimmed through my favorite bits from Frank Miller's
The Dark Knight Returns
, but that was hardly going to cheer me up, and nor was Alan Moore's
Watchmen
. No, it had to be the Justice League, and that night I fell asleep nestling in the down-soft wings of Hawkgirl, watched over and protected by my friends the Flash, Martian Manhunter, and Green Lantern.

Bit of a shock the next morning. Mum actually came in with a cup of tea for me. Almost as freaky as having a talking brain tumor or stopping time or going out on a date with Uma Upshaw. And yes, it was ordinary tea, none of your aardvark-spittle-and-lime-bark. She looked old and tired, but also better in some way I couldn't quite put my finger on.

“How you feeling, Heck?”

“Me? Oh, not too bad. You know, considering.”

“One of your friends called last night.”

“Which one?”

“The little one.”

“You could tell he was little over the phone?”

“Silly! I've met him before. Recognized his voice.”

“Stan.”

“Yes, Stan. He said he had some homework for you. He said you'd want it, which seemed a bit odd to me, but I said he should come over today and have lunch.”

“Okay, thanks, Mum.”

Poor Stan. Still though, I was glad that he'd called. We didn't meet up at the weekends that often anymore, not the whole gang of us. Stan's family had moved away from the neighborhood,
and Smurf had never lived that close, and Gonad was always doing other things at the weekends. I think he may have had special weekend friends, and he didn't like to mix and match. I didn't know if it was because they were the embarrassing lot, or we were.

“I said that I thought you'd gone to see him last night, but obviously you hadn't.”

“Yeah, well, I was just, er . . .” But nothing else came out, except a blush, and then Mum started to smile, and I think that she had an idea what was going on, although she couldn't have, not the whole thing.

“When's Clytemnestra getting here?” I said finally, trying to change the subject.

“Not until the evening. I'll leave you to your tea now. See you for breakfast later. Or I can bring it up, if you like?”

Things really had changed.

 

Stan came around in the middle of the morning.

OH NO, NOT THAT SCHMUCK
.

Hello, Jack, welcome back.

“What happened to your head?” he (Stan) asked, in that quiet voice of his, pointing at my hair. “Looks like you got dive-bombed by some kind of bird of prey, and it got stuck on your head.”

 

 

And from then on it was all okay, and the stuff from earlier in the week, the little misunderstandings, the awkwardness, was all gone. He'd brought some math and physics, and we finished it together in half an hour in my room, and then we mooched about for a bit and he told me some things that happened at school, and then I told him about my hot date with Uma Upshaw. Luckily I didn't have to mention about the Smurf side of things as he'd sworn me to secrecy. So if I told Stan about betraying Smurf I'd have to tell him that Smurf fancied Uma, and that would have meant betraying Smurf. Which is ironic. I think. Or maybe just circular.

It was usually hard to work out what was going on inside Stanislaw's head, but not now. It was as if he was miming “astonishment” as part of a course explaining earth emotions to visiting extraterrestrials.

“You went to see her at the chippie? Just like that? And she went out with you? And you went to the pub? And then you went to the churchyard? And then you snogged her? And then you tried to grope her and she dumped you?”

With each item in the list his voice went up an octave.