“Look at your tumour, Bruce.” She held the rancid thing just below my nostrils. “I mean really look at it. It’s perfectly spherical. It’s the size of a tennis ball. It feels like silk.” She ran her tongue over the surface. “It tastes like truffle. I don’t think you understand how rare a cancerous growth of this quality is.”
This bitch was fucking mad. Watching her tongue travel about the surface of my tumour made me want to puke, even if a small, detestable part of me felt aroused by it. Did she honestly want me to feel proud of that filthy, life-draining thing? “Forgive me for not feeling the same way about my tumour as you do,” I said snidely.
She laughed patronisingly, actually making me feel stupid for not seeing things from her point of view. The waitress came back and placed a bowler hat with two dead sparrows contorted inside. She handed me a metal straw and told me to enjoy. Fucking trendy cafes! “What the hell’s this?” I asked myself rhetorically.
“If you didn’t want it, why did you order it?”
“Can we just forget about that for a second?” I seethed. “Look, as far as I’m concerned, you dragged me down here under false pretenses. I’m sure the way you obtained my tumour wasn’t exactly legal.”
“Why are you so angry?” she had the gall to ask.
“Fuck you! You and I both know that the only reason I’m here with you right now is because I thought you could offer me an avenue of treatment. I have a sick mother who relies on me to look after her. I promised her I’d visit you and see what could be done. Is there anything that can be done?”
She fell silent for a moment, placing the tumour back in her handbag. “There’s always something that can be done.”
“Like what?”
“Well, you can have an operation in a futile attempt to remove the tumours and any cancerous tissue around the area. After that, you can blast yourself with chemotherapy in an effort to kill the beast that already owns the better part of you. The chemo will further weaken your already ravaged body, but hey, throughout it all you’ll have a false sense of hope that you can share with your mother. Of course the death will only hit her harder, but at least you will have experienced that fleeting false hope. By all means, Bruce… travel down this redundant path. It’s of no concern to me.”
Her words were too real to ignore. I was stunned into meek silence. My tear ducts vomited down my face. I hunched forward, rocking slightly and starting to sob. I knocked the sparrow hat from the table and heard the contents slide across the floor. My sobbing graduating into wailing. “IT’S ALL OVER!” I yelled, again and again. If I thought my impending death was vivid before, I had just been schooled. Every part of me mourned itself. I was dying. My mother was going to be left alone. There was nothing I could do. There’s this little thing I’ve always done — I’m sure I’m not the only one. I’ve always made it a point to expect and accept the worst. What I learned at this moment, as Fiona stared dominantly at my trembling body, sly smile still unwavering on her face, was that the version of ‘worst’ I’d created was a lie. It had always been a lie. At a deeper level, I always knew my doom-laden predictions would never come to pass. Life is, more often than not a mild disappointment. It’s rarely the catastrophic disappointment we convince ourselves we’re going to accept with cynical stoicism. When the storm really hits, we cower and hide. I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t ready to die.
“Please, Bruce. Try and calm yourself down,” said Fiona, with all the sympathy of a statue. ‘It’s really not as bad as you think.”
My head was buried in my hands, gushing tears like an open wound gushes blood. “I don’t want to die,” I snivelled through bubbles of snot. It was here, in the pit of my misery that I felt Fiona’s foot brush my inner thigh. As if on cue, my snot bubbles retreated back into my nostrils and my tears dried up, leaving stinging eyes in their wake. My cock sprang back to life, panting like an excited dog. She ran her foot in delirious circles that drew me away from everything.
“Has anybody ever told you that you’re a very handsome man, Bruce?”
I slowly began to raise my head, catching her horrifying, seductive stare. No. I’d never once been told I was handsome, cute, attractive, hot or any other variation. Once a woman at the button market told me I might look decent if I got a haircut and separated my unibrow. But here was an attractive woman, crazy as she may be, who was looking me in the eye and telling me something I’d always dreamed somebody of her calibre would tell me. With everything that had happened, I knew it wasn’t real. I knew it was a fugazi, but it intoxicated me. There’s nothing wrong with choosing to believe the occasional lie.
For the next hour I sat across from Fiona, her foot slowly working my inner thigh into a stupour. Precum drenched my underwear to such an extent that it blotted my jeans. I let her tell me how special I was. I even let her convince me to hold my tumour. I watched her run her tongue over its surface and I forced myself not to gag. I accepted her fascination. As long as her foot stayed on my thigh, I’d accept anything. I agreed to meet her again, this time at her home. She insinuated the possibility of sex. Her foot moved closer to my crotch whenever mention of her home occurred. I was her slave. She could have told me to bite into my tumour like an apple and I’d have obeyed, oblivious to the cannibalistic nature. If I was going to die, at least I might get to fuck first. But really… it was more than that. Yeah… I would have like to have sex with this woman, but I’d like to have sex with most women. This was more about someone wanting to have sex with me. A part of me was ashamed to respond to such a basic level of seduction, but I had never knowingly been the subject of seduction. The thought that Fiona might actually be willing to let me do this to her gave me a sense of validation. It made me feel important.
8.
I invited Arthur to join me for dinner. I had to coax him out of the ceiling like a cat from under a bed, eventually dragging him out by one wrinkled leg. If anyone needed company, it was him. He needed to eat something that wasn’t a carpet sample, and truth be told, I needed someone to talk to. The residual effect of my meeting with Fiona, although bizarre, had me thinking I was a bit special. My tumour was pretty fucking round after all. I wanted to say these things to Arthur but he was too busy squinting at the bright lounge room light and swatting invisible insects he believed were on his clothes.
“You’ve really hermitised yourself up there, haven’t you?” I said, pointing my fork toward the roof.
He poked at the spaghetti bolognaise on his plate, clearly unsure what to make of food so overtly edible. “I’ve never viewed myself as a hermit,” he said. “Yes, I’ve grown somewhat accustomed to my life in your ceiling, but I am rarely alone. I would always hear you plodding about down here. Pottering away and watching your television. Some nights I’d listen as you sobbed wretchedly into your pillow. Although you were unaware of my existence, I’ve always felt that I’ve known you.”
To think of Arthur up there, listening to me crying at night was an embarrassment I couldn’t process. A man who sobs into his pillow is rarely in want of an audience. I tried to shake it off. He was here before me after all. “Why didn’t you ever think to introduce yourself?” I asked earnestly.
“Let me ask you this, Bruce. Let’s say I had ventured into your quarters — how would you have felt knowing you had an ‘interloper’?
Rather than answer his question, I reached into my pocket and withdrew a cigarette. I placed it between my lips and sucked at it, enjoying the faint taste of unburned tobacco.