Henry Tumour - Exclusive Alternative Ending
Henry Tumour author Anthony McGowan reveals his exclusive alternative ending to the hit story...
Epilogue
Oh, come on! Of course I didn’t die. I mean, how could I? How could I be telling you this story? What, like, telling it all from heaven or hell?
Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.
No, you don’t get rid of me that easily.
A year has gone by, and I’m still here. The cancer is in remission, which is good news, but they don’t like to talk about a cure, so I don’t know how long I‘ve got. But then who does?
Mum’s still mum, in the sense of stewing mung beans, but she’s off the Valium, and I think that’s forever. She’s got a boyfriend, a junior doctor called, I shit you not, Noddy, who she met in the hospital. He’s half her age, and I don’t really approve, but you have to let people make their own mistakes. At least they never do it while I’m in the house, cos that would make me quite literally barf my lentils.
School’s a better place to be, but I don’t think that’s got much to do with Tierney’s humiliation. I’ve a feeling that my year was just coming up to the stage when rational discourse takes the place of kicking the shit out of each other. In other words bullying was going out of style. Things are probably just as bad for the younger kids, but they’ll get through.
My gang is still a gang, but I’d be a liar if I said that things were the same as ever. There’s something special about the friendships you have before things get complicated and messed by girls and by that other thing, life.
Gonad got a girlfriend first of all: a tiny shy thing who spoke in an unintelligible dialect of squeaks and whistles. And then Smurf fell in love with one of Uma Upshaw’s fierce handmaidens who, of course, mocked and scorned him. He wrote her love poems, and she tore them up in front of him. They’ll probably get married one day. Stan isn’t there yet, but he’s always moved at his own pace. As a joke I told him that he could have Amanda if I died, and that managed to offend everyone involved.
Amanda. Yeah, still together. She’s begun to have treatment on her birthmark.
She says it hurts like hell. Already the mark has faded. I tell myself it isn’t a symbol for anything.
And Henry?
Well, sometimes I think I hear a voice, whispering, murmuring. Nothing as distinct as an ‘arsecheese’ or a ‘bugnob’, and it could just be the wind in the leaves or the sound of traffic in the streets or maybe even the music of the spheres, nothing more than that.
Yeah, that’s it, the music of the spheres.
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