Jack Tumor by Anthony McGowan Read Free Book Online Page B

out, “Oh yeah, baby.” Well, okay, so it’s not much like that, except in the way the elephant doesn’t even know the mouse is there.
    And then I saw from Smurf’s face that I’d hit the mark.
    Â 
ME :
But she’s a bitch. And she used to go out with Tierney, you know.
SMURF :
I know. But she’s . . . she’s beautiful. And she chucked Tierney, I heard.
JACK :
SLAP THIS JOKER DOWN .
ME :
Bloody hell, Smurf. I mean, what do you plan to do? You can’t ask her out, can you?
SMURF :
Why not? No, I can’t. Do you think I’d have a chance? Could you maybe ask one of her friends? I mean, ask them if she likes me?
ME :
Are you kidding? Those girls are like African huntingdogs. Is there no one else? You know, someone more . . . someone nicer? The gerbil girl? If she didn’t like you she wouldn’t have shared your test tube.
SMURF :
Bunsen burner.
    Â 
    He filled the words “Bunsen” and “burner” with a level of anguish that the great Otto Bunsen could never have imagined would be associated with his epoch-making invention. (I know, by the way, that the Bunsen burner was really developed by Robert Bunsen, but as he was a German and Robert sounds about as German as Seamus, I think he ought to be renamed Otto. Plus Otto is a slightly funny name, and Robert isn’t funny at all.)
    But I understood what Smurf meant. It didn’t seem fair that the best we could hope for was a timid girl with nuts in her cheeks and a furry tail. And yeah, I realize it was just as bad for her, with her hopes set no higher than a big-lipped bendy boffin like Smurf, even if he would probably make the world’s greatest boyfriend in terms of being nice to you and not messing about behind your back.
    And those were the kinds of thoughts we were both still lost in when Gonad and Stan joined us. Well, with me there was one other thought, but it didn’t really belong to me. It came in the voice of Jack Tumor, and it said:
    SHE’S MINE .

The Naked
Lunch
    G onad peeled back the white bread from his sandwich.
    â€œMmm, chopped pork,” he said. “I’m partial to chopped pork.”
    It was what he always said. A kind of catchphrase, except not funny. Except that it had become kind of funny because he said it so much and because it wasn’t really funny.
    â€œWhat you got, Stan?”
    â€œSoup.”
    Stan often brought in a flask of soup. It was usually chicken noodle, but not often enough to make it funny, and sometimes he had oxtail, and sometimes it wasn’t soup at all but a surprise sausage roll.
    Smurf opened his Tupperware and wordlessly showed off a slice of quiche with a dainty little garnish of lettuce, ruffled like a lace collar. There was no spirit of triumphalism in this. Simon’s mother loved him. Perhaps too much. On the upside you could be pretty sure that Smurf’s loving mother had secreted a tastytreat—a Wagon Wheel, say, or a Cadbury’s Chocolate Roll— somewhere about his person. Today he had a Snickers, which was top of the range, but not, obviously, of interest to me.
    Stan had been right about my nut allergy. I hadn’t always had it, and I blame it on the fact that, because of Mum, nuts were about the commonest thing in my diet throughout my formative years. Nut roasts, nut cutlets; nuts fried, nuts boiled, nuts mashed. Brazil, cashew, pea, hazel, almond, macadamia, wal, you name it. Then, in Year Seven, I was eating a dry-roasted peanut when my throat started to itch, and then my eyes watered, and people started to stare at me, and Stan said that I’d gone a funny color, and I coughed up the fatal peanut, and loads of kids were around me laughing and pointing, and I had to go to the sick bay, and from then on nuts were out and I envied Simon his Snickers bar not one bit.
    They all looked towards me.
My
lunchbox was feared among the cognoscenti. For lunch I always had whatever we’d