Issue #1 Winter 2002
Cancer Boy
by Richard Marshall
Lom has this repeated dream episode.
Lom, he's had this same skit for ages and it's disturbing him in a low-level, non-obvious way, and it's terribly afflicting and passionate, a way-OTT theme in him that he thinks of as incredibly multivalenced and touchingly ponderous.
And when he wakes out of this dream he is always confused and wants to know how he's ever going to be healed.
And then there's his Cancer Ma.
So his ma is getting really ill and her skin is sort of ashy yellow, like lemon scale. It's all over her but especially on her face, except round her eyes, where the skin kind of hangs slack a bit, and is darker there like a bruise or an untuned TV signal. Someone must paint it. How else explain the non-monochrome effect?
So Lom has to creep around the place on his tiptoes like in classical retro ballet, wearing just socks on his feet, which he finds comfortable and allows him to move surveillance-free. Then downstairs, right under her room, he makes sure to keep his voice down to a whisper so that she won't be disturbed by his evasive, soliloquized babble. Disturbances always upset her. He hates the half-crazed scenes they provoke after.
Lately, she can't even move out of her bed, which is disturbing him more than the rampages because he's not used to her just lying there. He likes it better when she's sometimes hanging around the upstairs landing's oblong free-space, policing it a bit.
Yet apart from the colour change, she is still not that different. To look at, at least. She's a little thinner maybe and she keeps the sheets up to her chest, even her neck sometimes. But from what he can see there isn't that much of a change. And if he keeps the light low -- which he can do because the room has one of those illumination dimmer switches giving personalized ambient finger-tip control -- then he can avoid the change of colour through manipulating the mood glow to below the colour threshold and he feels this is good. But because she doesn't move around anymore, he is always having to do things for her and this interferes with what he likes to do down below. But it can't be helped. 'It can't be helped,' he thinks.
But when Mirez comes round, Lom has to insist that she, too, take off her sneakers and tiptoe around, which in the end he finds exciting because it stretches her out when she walks. There's a feeling that this is a sexual thing to do, which is in the back of his head all the time from then on like a warmth. But Mirez is wide-faced and small and has a shaggy purple top on and tight jeans and just looks really fresh-faced and reveals what Lom would say to himself is a healthy outlook -- and he takes that to mean all the way through, like, a healthy outlook on the inside too. From the outside through to the inside. Which becomes interesting to him but only in a half-caught way, like he never really intends to get to the bottom of the thought.
Lom at this time is always living on the outside of his thoughts.
Mirez is a bit stupid according to Lom because she has conversations like this with him. Mirez: 'So your mum's at work then? I thought you said she was ill?' Lom: 'Some illnesses they just come and go, yea? So that's what happened. It went. So she's out. We're all on our own.' So her stupidity is of a very specific kind, which might go under a more generous heading such as,'Duh, Easy.' Because, of course, the mum is lying perfectly still upstairs, turning yellow.
And Mirez never asks about anything further but Lom notices how she looks when he says that 'We're all on our own' stuff, which he likes to do in a deep, creepy sort-of drawl so that (i) she knows that he is only joking but also (ii) she knows that he knows what the situation is and that she could be in trouble. Which, in a sense that Mirez never knows, she sure is. Because Lom isn't being straight with her at all. And what with all the walking around and the warm sexual feeling in the back of his head, it stacks up to what might be pretty uncomfortable for her if she realizes. But Lom makes sure she doesn't.
They watch a couple of videos - 'Jurassic Park' - and they love the bit where the lawyer gets it from T-Rex, of course. But the whole slow build-up thing Lom really likes and sees it as the essential-genius aspect of Spielberg's whole oevre and he expounds at length and Mirez likes this about him, his expansive critiques such as, e.g., this, on Spielberg.
But after 'Jurassic Park' they watch 'High Plains Drifter' which Mirez doesn't like as much, but Lom loves to say, at the end, 'You see, all that and he wasn't really there at all, and so perhaps neither were they,' as the Eastwood character slopes off into the mountains. But here's something about Lom, like, he never bothers to research the mountains, for instance. He never can be bothered to find that sort of stuff out. If the information falls into his lap, say, well, then he'll use it, but he isn't ass-busting for any of this. This saves him from being too over-geeked, which would undoubtedly have put Mirez off of coming round.
They get to just about three in the afternoon and they're lying on cushions and assorted stuff like that, and he lies his head so that at one point it touches her knee and she shifts, but not away, but just so that she has her knee bending closer to his mouth. So this, Lom feels, is of a piece with his warm thought and the tip-toe thing. And he looks up at her, because she's on the couch and he's on the carpet and he says to her, with his face all slack and gawpy, 'You want to just lie there and let me do stuff?' and she finds that this is her power because, although she considers herself overweight, she has a way of getting people to do things for her without moving a muscle, which she calculates will be her passport to the future and a good one at that. If she doesn't lose it. So long as that.
So she lets her eyes kind of shine and dazzle and lets him tongue her and then afterwards watches his flushed dizzy face trying to pull itself together as if it's been washed apart, in all directions, whilst she feels wet inside her own knickers, but with his saliva more than anything. And it's all friendly and she goes back to the last few reels of the video wondering how to exploit this, her power, and when she'll need to make a decision.
Because Lom really doesn't matter. Doesn't count. Which makes her feel for him, a little sad and a little, you
know, generous.
Lom looks back at her face, which is flat and flushed, and he thinks that in a few years time her eyes will seem too small, packed in to all that flesh even though they're bright and brown and can flash when she's excited, which he finds sexy. But he reckons on only a few years and then the zap of them will burn out. He imagines her like a big balloon of light with a power source which is slowly trickling to fade-out, switch-down and finally ZZZT!
So he sees the way everything about her body shivers slightly, wobbles, which now is a pure delight -- he reckons she's at least maybe 150 pounds already and yet only five feet tall at the most -- and he can't help thinking it's a last vibration, some buzz ending, mean and remorseless. So he feels she is doomed which is what, he reckons, is just so typical.
And they both get hold of ma's fags, but Lom, conscious of the way the smells creep up to her (and she always -- he considers this as part of the ma's mysteriousness -- she always knows), he rolls away and opens a couple of the walnut-ledged windows and glances out over the overgrown lawn, which is now just clumpy grass and then the beach over the other side of road and wall, and she exhales, sighing, the crooked blue smoke dismal and shadowy and refining the scene into burnt-out, ghostly umber, melting and feely. Goose pimples come up on him and spread and then they flush away like an electrical field of brit.
Mirez is stroking her legs. She's rolled up the jeans so that her swarthy calves chub out like roasts and he smiles because of the gorgeous thump of her solidity compared to his own, which is broken up, smashed around and distinctly wrecked. His body that is. Just a matter of pieces hanging on grey clothes-hanger wire, in a twisted rumour of right order.
'You'd never guess,' he says in a drowsy voice which feels as if there was going to be so much more, it has queenly promise. Mirez doesn't bother to look over but mumbles into her fist and her strutted fingers between which the fag is hanging like a coaxed ermine digit. 'Say what?' she says. Lom just has nothing more to say to her. 'Whatever. You'd never guess anything ,' he answers slyly, his mind buttoning up like a long trench coat and then, tucked up, he stays stum. On the horizon there is a grey trail of whirled-up cumulus, like mushy snow and nothing really.
©2002 Richard Marshall
Richard Marshall is the London editor of 3AM Magazine. His stories and poems have been published in Critical Quarterly, and "Cancer Boy" is an excerpt from his novel of the same name.