Three Button Trick and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

agonizing pathos. Owen felt his eyes fill, he felt like howling.
    Ralph turned back to look at Owen and saw, with concern, the intensity of his reactions. He said, ‘Don’t get all upset, it’s only a joke. It’s got nothing to do with the devil, honest.’
    He smiled. Owen frowned and swallowed hard before attempting to reply. ‘Why is it moving? What have you done to it?’
    Marty reached towards the piece of convulsing flesh with his big butcher’s hand and picked it up. As he lifted it the flesh seemed to cling to the table. It made a noise like wet clay being ripped into two pieces, like a limpet being pulled from its rock. He turned it over. Underneath, inside, permeating the piece of meat, was a huge round cancer the size of Marty’s fist. A miracle tumour, complete, alive. The tumour was contracting and then relaxing, contracting and relaxing. Maybe it was dying. Owen stared at the tumour in open-mouthed amazement, at its orangy, yellowy completeness, its outside and its core. Marty said, ‘Sometimes the abattoir send us a carcass that shouldn’t really be for human consumption. They know that an animal is ill but they slaughter it just before it dies. They have to make a living too, I suppose.’
    With that he threw the meat and its cancerous centre into a large half-full refuse bag and began to wipe over the work surface as though nothing had happened. Owen could still make out the movements of the cancer from inside the bag. A customer came into the shop and Ralph walked over to serve her. Owen felt overwhelmed by a great sense of injustice, a feeling of enormous intensity, unlike anything he had ever experienced before. He felt as though his insides were tearing. He felt appalled. Then instinctively he grabbed at the back of his apron and yanked open its bow. He pulled it over his head and slammed it on to the counter. He said, ‘I’m going home now. I’m going home and I’m taking this with me.’
    Before anyone could respond Owen had grabbed the heavy refuse bag full of bones and gristle and off-cuts and had struggled his way out of the shop. When he had gone, Ralph turned to Marty and said, ‘He was a nice enough kid.’
    Marty shrugged.
    Owen got out of the shop and walked a short distance down the road before placing the bag on the pavement and opening it. He reached inside and felt for the cancer. When he finally touched it, it sucked on his finger like a fish or a baby. He took it out of the bag, pulled off his sweater and bundled the cancer up inside it. He carried it on the bus as though it were a sick puppy. It moved very slightly. When he got home he crept upstairs and locked himself in his room. He closed the curtains and then sat on his bed and unbundled the tumour. He placed it gently on his bedside table under the warm glow of his lamp. It was growing weaker and now moved only slowly.
    Owen wondered what he could do for it. He debated whether to pour water on it or whether to try and keep it warm. He wondered whether it might be kinder to kill it quickly, but he couldn’t work out how. He wondered if you could drown a tumour (that would be painless enough), or whether you could chop it in half. But he couldn’t be sure that tumours weren’t like the amoebas that he’d studied in biology at school that could divide and yet still survive. He couldn’t really face destroying it. Instead he decided to simply stay with it and to offer it moral support. He whispered quietly, ‘Come on, it’ll be all right. It’ll soon be over.’
    After a few hours the tumour was only moving intermittently. Its movements had grown sluggish and irregular. Owen stayed with it. He kept it company. He chatted. Eventually the tumour stopped moving altogether. Its meaty exterior was completely still. He knew that it was dead. He picked it up tenderly and cradled it in his arms as he carried it downstairs, out of the house