Jack Tumor by Anthony McGowan

Author:Anthony McGowan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374329556
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

Clytemnestra

and Other Heroines

Mum was in the kitchen. She’d been to Sainsbury’s, and the grocery bags were on the table, but she wasn’t doing anything with them.

“Help you unpack, Mum?” I asked.

She turned slowly to face me. She looked about a hundred years older than usual.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes, that would be nice.”

“And I’ll make you some mint tea.”

“Tea. Yes.”

She hadn’t noticed my hair.

Or the stench.

As I was putting things away (and it was odd, because Mum had bought things that we never had but I’d always wanted— things like Pop-Tarts and Coco Pops and Pot Noodles; the good stuff where they actually go to the effort of jazzing them up with nice colors and chemicals to stop them going off, unlike the things that Mum usually buys, where they can’t be bothered putting any extra stuff in at all, the cheapskates), I heard a noise and I looked at Mum and saw that she was crying, which was hardly unusual, but this seemed like a different sort of crying. I gave her a hug. She just sat there and didn’t hug back with her arms, but I felt her fingers grip me and her nails dig in.

“It’s all right, Mum,” I said, although I don’t know what I was reassuring her about.

Me, I suppose.

Me and my head.

Her fingers were hurting me, so I pulled away as gently as I could, and I went and put the kettle on and got the mint tea bags from the cupboard, and while I was doing that Mum started talking.

“There are some things I need to tell you,” she said.

From the sound of it she didn’t mean a new type of organic shoe polish she’d discovered that actually made your shoes less shiny whilst simultaneously helping out with the world’s global warming problem.

HURRY HER UP, CAN’T YOU? WE’VE WORK TO DO. IMPORTANT WORK. THE WORK OF LIFE.

I ignored him, but I could feel a little surge of impatience, which was Jack doing his thing to my brain chemicals.

“Okay, Mum.”

“You know for a long time I haven’t been myself.”

I moved my head in a sort of noncommittal way, so it didn’t look like I was agreeing that she was crazy as a loon. And the truth was that she’d never been herself, as far as I was concerned. At least not if herself was someone different to the person I’d always known. Unless . . . perhaps if I thought back really hard, there might have been a time when she was, I don’t know, more together. A bit. I had a half-memory of a trip to a park, and I was sitting on a big stone lion, and she was tickling me, and whenever I laughed so much that I slipped off she caught me and put me back and began tickling me again, and I was laughing so much I thought I would wet myself, but I don’t think I did. She seemed more normal then.

But memory is deceptive, and I don’t even know if the lion was real.

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