Matthew Revert
THE TUMOURS MADE ME INTERESTING
Dedicated to my mother
PROLOGUE
I had to walk to school each morning with my older brother. He was only two years older than me, but that was enough for my presence to cause embarrassment. He was always a good thirty seconds ahead of me and would grow visibly agitated if I tried to catch up. As far as my recollection is concerned, it was always winter back then. In each childhood memory, swimming up there in my brain stew, I’m always so cold.
This morning was the same as most other mornings I can recall. I awoke in a jelly-like sweat by the abhorrent sound of my mother warbling folk songs in her bedroom. These songs had never been heard before — songs invented in the moment. Her spontaneous outbursts of musicality, as poorly sung as they were, made me so happy. My mother was sick. As the year progressed, she spent more and more of her time in bed. I had no idea what was wrong. I was under the naïve belief that it was merely a really bad flu. My experience with illness didn’t extend beyond that. I tried to help her the same way she would help me when I was sick. I made her hot water bottles, almost always scorching my hands and injuring the kitchen sink cassowaries in the process. I’d hold tissues up to her nose and force her to blow, whether there was anything to evacuate or not. I’d make her the healthiest breakfasts I knew how to make. Our cupboards didn’t really contain much of what one would term ‘healthy’ food. Once a week, dad would go shopping and buy whatever his meager income would allow from the sort of supermarkets most people had never heard of. This resulted in some unusual culinary adventures. On this particular morning, I made my mother a breakfast consisting of fried chinchilla fat and yeast. I’ll never forget the woeful smell. Smoke would waft from the battered pan, filling up the kitchen and reaching for the other rooms in the house. It was usually the smoke that woke my older brother. He’d stumble from the bedroom in his underwear, coughing and trying to hit me through the smoke — his grip on wakefulness still too tenuous to allow his fists to connect.
Every morning dad would leave the house long before we woke. I have no idea what time he got up. One morning, jolted awake by a nightmare, I swear I heard him leave for work. I remember looking at the clock and seeing a time I’d never seen before. For many years after that, whenever I saw a clock, I couldn’t help but search for that esoteric time. When my mother first got hit with her perpetual flu, my father sat me down and asked me to make breakfast for her each morning before I left for school. I remember the sense of pride this instilled in me. Previously, my father had only ever asked for my help when he needed tiny fingers to fit into something marginally bigger. This request felt like genuine responsibility. This was a responsibility I took very seriously, at the expense of everything else. I’d spend my days planning the next morning’s breakfast and then, without an iota of cooking ability, I’d fashion something vaguely edible, which my mother, in a constant battle with the rancid taste, would force down her throat. If my morning duties didn’t include wiping vomit from her chin, I’d done well.
My brother would make me wait for a minute after he left for school before I could start walking. My brother had fists like balls of asphalt and I didn’t want to be at the receiving end of them, so I obeyed. With each step toward school, my blood would lower in temperature until it was a plasma slushy forcing its way through my veins. My brother, unless in a particularly bad mood, remained in sight, steam billowing from his little body with each breath. The steam dwarfed him in size before dissipating into the freezing sky. He’d often stop and talk to people, which meant I’d have to patiently stand still until he started moving again, lest I caught up. On this morning he happened across a naked man on stilts sitting on a rubbish bin. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. All I could think about was how cold this man must be. They passed things back and forth to each other — I couldn’t make out what they were, but they glittered in the daylight. My brother put them in his pants, and very carefully resumed walking. By the time I passed the naked stilt walker, he was silent… nothing to suggest he was even still alive. I didn’t dare try and find out otherwise.
I pulled the sleeves of my jumper over my balled fists, trying my best to keep them warm. I don’t know how effective this technique was. It was usually early afternoon by the time my hands had thawed enough to de-fist. This was in spite of the school grilling the poorer students each morning before class.
There were about 10 of us who had to assemble in the school cafeteria upon arriving at school. We were the students whose family couldn’t afford a warmer method of travel to school other than walking. We were an unwilling posse of the disadvantaged. The lunch lady would meet us, filling us all with an unnamable fear. Her apron was more stain than material and as she gave us a morning hug, we’d all cop a whiff of months of rotting food. There was a large grill, big enough to fit five of us at a time. We’d lay our freezing bodies on the grill, side-by-side, and wait anxiously for the lunch lady to push us below the flame. When this was done with care, it was a beautiful feeling. The heat would penetrate our little bodies just enough to let our blood start moving again and remove the corpse-like colour our skin had attained. When, as was often the case, we were grilled poorly, our skin would burn and blisters would form. More often than not, this was the result of an ill-timed cigarette break on the lunch lady’s part. I still have red lines down my body from the school grill. They no longer cause pain. They tattoo my body with unwanted memory, impossible to forget.
On this particular morning, I was, along with the other children in my batch, over-cooked. The lunch lady squeezed cream that smelled like rotten eggs onto our burnt skin and rubbed until it was absorbed. This would cool our bodies rendering the previous attempt to imbue us with warmth useless. It was in this state that I sat in class, my hands too cold to hold my pen, and disappeared into a mental world that the basic education we were being given couldn’t penetrate. Math class was the worst. I had a teacher who opted to wear a monocle on each eye rather than standard bifocals. His eye sockets chewed down on them, causing a constant furrow on his brow. He would revel in making examples of students like me. Math has always been a source of frustration. Whenever I am faced with a math problem, the numbers start fighting in my head until there is nothing left but mathematical gore. This teacher, whose name now escapes me (he was more a concept than anything else), saw fit to jolt me from my stupor with a ruler across the back of my neck. My burns started howling, which made the other students laugh and imitate the sound. The teacher confronted me with a math problem that required the multiplication of decimals. My pupils morphed into momentary question marks and the urge to cry begged for satisfaction. Instead, I sat silent, completely unable to tackle the problem. When my inability to answer the question became obvious, I was made to stand on my desk. The other students were then requested to write math problems onto sheets of loose leaf paper, ball them up, and hurl them at me. Amidst a sea of increasingly malicious laughter, this continued until the class was over. I was made to stay back awhile so the teacher could throw a few at me himself outside the gaze of my fellow students
None of this was a rare occurrence. I wasn’t the only one treated this way. Each class had a couple of daydreamers, who couldn’t bring themselves to leave their own imaginations long enough to appear connected to the world. We were all made examples of. If anything, it just re-enforced our desire to remain within ourselves. In my mind, I was always warm and cooking mouth watering meals for my mother. In my mind, I was one meal away from the perfect combination of food that would rid my mother of her nasty flu.