The vista of rundown factories was beginning to resemble an old west ghost town and unwritten Ennio Moricone scores were playing within me. A bazaar of guillemots formed a writhing canopy above my head and dropped their waste like foul snow onto everything below. I rubbed it from my eyes sockets and spat it from my mouth. In the downpour, the path ahead had become obscured beyond all visibility. My only consolation was that the same was probably true for my pursuers. Controlling my ladder had become impossible and I threw my arms up in a mixture of defeat and victory. The ladder began to wobble and veer off course. I clenched my fists, preparing for the inevitable impact. Guillemot shit squeezed through my fingers accompanied by a satisfying squelch. And as my ladder collided with something big, I wasn’t the least bit surprised. I involuntarily flipped off the ladder and felt the breath evacuate my body en masse as I collided with the ground. I laid on my back, discombobulated and spent, staring at the waste as it fell from the sky. The menacing sound of ladders with their engines revving sought out my ear holes from the distance. I tried to force my limbs to move in response, but they were un-obeyed thoughts; thoughts my body couldn’t comply with had it wanted to. I bore it no ill-will. I’d put my body through a lot and now, with so many bones (most likely) broken, I couldn’t expect any more. The poor child who had been dragged along for the ride, struggled to his feet, gnawed on the tape until it broke and scurried off into the night.
I felt the intrusion of torchlight punching at my eyes, followed soon after by Fiona’s voice.
“Where on earth did you get up the gumption to run?” she asked.
I didn’t feel an answer was necessary or appropriate.
I came to in one of the factories trying to account for the time that had escaped me. I was strapped to the top of a wooden table. I couldn’t lift my head enough to see what I had been bound with, but the strange sense of contentment I felt convinced me it was probably kittens. The only line of sight I had was of the factory ceiling, which was painted with grandiose detail. I was staring at something that had most likely been painted by a cock-obsessed teenager. A tangle of crudely realised penises danced above me. Something about the dedication such a juvenile task would require made me smile. In fact, despite my dire situation, I felt enormously happy in general. I started to chortle, which attracted the attention of whoever else was in the room.
“He’s awake!”
I turned, attempting to face the direction of the voice, but found the task impossible.
“Is that you, Fiona?” I queried.
Then, staring down at me with shock and mild offense, was Arthur. “Are you suggesting I sound like a ladyfolk?” he asked. He slurped upon another teacup.
“No… not at all… I was just…”
It dawned on me that I didn’t owe any of these people an explanation. In fact, quite the contrary was true. These consummate fucks had me convinced they were my friends.
“What the hell, Arthur?” I asked.
“Whatever do you mean?”
“What do you mean, ‘what do I mean’? Why the hell are you helping her chase me down and cut me open?”
Arthur chuckled as if responding to a poorly told joke a child might tell. He sipped upon his tea. “That Fiona woman is rather persuasive, isn’t she? Quite sumptuous mammary glands too, if I may be so crude.”
“But we were fucking, friends! I let you all live with me.”
“Be that as it may, chum… it should be noted that we met Fiona before you did. Our allegiance has always been to her.”
Arthur said these words without import. What was a dry observation to him was a sickening revelation to me. I had been used more thoroughly than a Sega Master System during a sleepover.
“What did you go telling him that for?” came the voice of Belinda’s mother. “Bruce doesn’t need to know that. It’s going to make him feel horrible.”
“Why the devil should it matter now?” asked Arthur. “It’s doubtful he’ll survive the extraction of the tumours, so it’s not as though he’ll be forced to live with whatever shame this information is likely to conjure.”
“That’s beside the point,” said Belinda’s mother. “It’s just not very polite.”
It was alarmingly clear to me that I had been a patsy right from the start. I wasn’t sure how or why, but Fiona had used these people to aide the development of my tumours. She had orchestrated their introduction into my life and had carefully planned out my trajectory each step of the way.
“The cat’s out of the bag now,” I said. “Care to just fill me in?”
Both Arthur and Belinda’s mother were staring down at me. I was the patient and they were the surgeons. I wondered where Vince was. They kept swapping their gaze from me to each other, talking rapidly with their eyes, trying to come to consensus. The ferocity of their brow movements caused one of Arthur’s eyebrows to dislodge and float toward my open mouth. It landed on my dry tongue and crawled of its own volition down my throat, tickling all the way.
“Sorry about that, old chap,” said Arthur in response. “Those things haven’t sat quite right since I bought them.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I coughed. “What’s going on?”
“Look, Bruce…” said Belinda’s mother. “We didn’t want to tell you because we weren’t supposed to. We were asked to mind you. Make sure you didn’t go getting any treatment and to ensure you continued feeding those little nasties of yours. We all came together to form what’s known in the business as a ‘tumour family’.
“The business?” I asked.
“If there’s one thing you must have learned in the last few weeks it’s that there’s a lot of interest in this stuff. And where there’s interest, there’s money. Fiona has made a fortune off your tumours and she pays us rather well. The biggest threat to a perfect tumour is the host. If the host decides to get treatment, it’s always bad for the tumour. A single round of chemotherapy risks stunting the growth and if Fiona hadn’t gotten to you first, you’d probably have gone out and had it seen to. That doctor you saw… he’s with us… he fed information of your condition straight after he diagnosed you.”
“That doesn’t exactly surprise me,” I admitted. “That doctor was insane… but what about Rhonda and Vince? They were my neighbours long before Fiona came along.” I turned to Arthur, “and you’d been living in my ceiling for decades.”
Arthur chortled. “Not true, chap. I was ordered into your ceiling following your diagnoses. What I told you was what we refer to in the business as a lie. Rhonda and Vince were fortuitously your neighbours before the diagnoses. Our network is large, Bruce. We’re everywhere.”
“You’re a shit, Arthur,” I replied.
“It was our job to monitor you and keep you from interacting with loved ones,” continued Belinda’s mother. “They’re often the ones who mess it up and convince the host to get treatment. It was pretty easy with you because the only person who appears to love you is your mother and she’s bed-ridden. All we needed to do was distract you from the guilt your abandonment of her inspired.”
What I was hearing was so lacking in basic humanity that I couldn’t even attach it to reality. How could anyone live with themselves if their living harboured such personal misery? It was something I was never destined to understand.