Jack Tumor by Anthony McGowan

my . . . and he . . . well,
slumped
, but not in any way that I could have . . . and I thought he was playing the fool again, and I wasn’t going to be humiliated in front of . . . every intention of suspending the. . . but when it became clear that, that . . . we naturally phoned the, ah, ambulance. Immediately. And you, of course. Er, naturally. And immediately. Even more immediately.”
    â€œMum,” I said, to let her know that I was awake.
    And then I was sick.
    More than you’d have expected.
    I mean more than you’d have expected even if you’d guessed that I was going to be sick, which would have been clever of you.
    Now, whatever else you say about vomit, it’s always interesting, from the point of view of what’s in it. That is to say, from a scientific point of view. In fact, you might say that science began when people started to look at stuff like vomit and point at it and say, “Look at what’s in there! Amazing!”
    Obviously (back to
my
vomit rather than vomit
in general
) there was some of my breakfast in the mix, breakfast being muesli, a special kind my mum gets from the health-food shop,consisting mainly of some kind of fibrous material made out of sacks or something, without the dreaded nuts but with a few raisins, and they were pretty easy to spot, both in the muesli and in the vomit. And some mashed-up crisps and a brown smear of the Twix I’d had at break, bought from the school snack shop.
    It was fun buying things from the school snack shop because it was run by Mr. Churl, and he had these sausage fingers, and if you put your money down on the counter he couldn’t pick it up, but sort of chased it around like an imbecile after the last pea on his plate, and it was pleasant to generate frustration for Mr. Churl because he was a very shouty man who liked to scare the smaller children.
    And (back to the vomit) there was also, more surprisingly, some of last night’s brown rice salad, which was made from brown rice served cold, which turned it into a salad, mixed in with some real salad ingredients like spring onions and peppers, which all sounds quite nice, but you have to remember that the rice was cooked by Mum, and so emerged as a big blob of beige goo, like something you’d use to plaster a wattle-and-daub out-house. But now it was much runnier, and would never work in a wattle-and-daub context or, for that matter, pass the pencil test.
    Oh, have I mentioned the pencil test yet? We first came across it in citizenship, when the teacher told us that in South Africa during the apartheid years, one of the ways they decided if you were colored (meaning mixed race) or black (meaning black) was whether or not a pencil would stand up if thrust into your hair. Now, this was stupid, horrific, sick, etc., etc., but also quite funny, as long as you remember that you’re laughing at the idiots who came up with the test rather than the poor sods havingpencils stuck into their heads, so we adopted the pencil test for other circumstances. Like phlegm, crap, rice pudding, and, of course, vomit.
    It—the rice salad, I mean—and the other products of my activities in the field of digestion splashed over the floor and up the walls, and ran in complex river systems until they reached Mordred’s feet, and then he had to do a little dance to try to escape the flow, but there was nowhere really for him to dance to, because I’d kind of cut him off from the door, and so he got my sick on his shoes, and that would have been satisfying if it wasn’t for the fact that I felt like my head was going to explode, and I was still retching and there was sick caught in the back of my throat, which is never a nice place to have sick caught, and the whole room stank of puke, which is one of the things guaranteed to make you want to upchuck more than ever (that’s what I call ironic).
    My mum dived and got the empty