Fifty Fifty (20 page)

‘It was just rabbits and mice,’ said Gil defensively. ‘There weren’t any monkeys or dogs or anything.’

‘And how do you know mice feel any less pain than monkeys? Or less pain than
we
do, come to that?’

‘Uh . . .’ said Gil uneasily.

‘Did you actually see any experiments? Apart from that pathetic rubbish with the swimming mouse? Did you see what they
do
to the rabbits? Oh my God, those poor bloody creatures
cooped up in cages, never allowed their freedom, poked and prodded and riddled with diseases and then just snuffed out when people like your dad have had enough of them. It makes me sick. He
didn’t tell you how they kill most of the mice, did he? Well, I’ll tell you what they do. They hold the mouse down, stick a pencil across here —’ Jude chopped viciously at
the back of his own head ‘– and then they pull the mouse’s tail until its neck snaps. You think that’s OK, do you? You think just because you didn’t see any blood that
there’s no suffering going on?’

‘I didn’t . . . I don’t . . .’ Gil wriggled in his chair, trying to find something sensible to say. ‘I mean, those bald mice didn’t look so great. But Dad
said they don’t know they’re ill.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ Jude’s eyes were furious. It was like being told off by Dad. ‘I get it. He gave you that rubbish about consciousness, didn’t he? It’s supposed to
be only human beings who are aware of themselves. It’s only people who feel emotions, who care about each other.’ His voice was bitter.‘Well, how does he
know
? How does he
know what it feels like to be a mouse? Those scientists are always crapping on about how much of our DNA we share with other animals. So if our genes are nearly the same, how can they possibly say
that mice don’t experience any of the same
feelings
as we do?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Gil. He was too bewildered to think any more. ‘I don’t know anything about this, Jude.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Jude, softening a little. ‘I’m sorry. You’re not the enemy. I don’t mean to lay into you. You know something?’

He stopped, and Gil waited for him to go on.

‘If I was dying, and somebody told me that the life of just one of those animals would save me, I wouldn’t take it. You know that? I couldn’t live with the knowledge that my
survival had been at the expense of another living creature. Not a single one of them, let alone the hundreds they’ve got in there. We’ve got to get them out, we really have.’

Gil looked up at Jude. In the cold gloom of the little room Jude’s face hung above him, alive with emotion, his sun-coloured hair falling into his eyes. The face almost seemed to shine
with its own light, and Gil found it hard to look away. He kept his eyes fixed on Jude’s face until at last he had the sensation that he was falling upwards, as if he was being pulled into a
black hole. Once you stepped over the boundary of a black hole, there was no way back. Dad had told him about it, long ago, in the days when Gil was interested in science. The black hole’s
enormous gravity sucked you in to its centre. The problem was that you couldn’t tell where the boundary lay until you were travelling towards it at nearly the speed of light. And by then you
were doomed.

It was like that with Jude, Gil thought. He’d come too close to Jude to be able to move away now. Jude had pulled him in, and Gil was falling towards him in a great slow curve.

They played the video twice more from the very beginning up to the point where Dad dived through the plastic curtain, while Jude checked his plan carefully. He didn’t watch the footage of
the animals again. Then he deleted the film. It was one less thing to implicate Gil, he said, if things went wrong.

‘Think about everything and give me a call when you’re ready,’ Jude said as Gil got up to leave. ‘Don’t use your own phone. Borrow this.’ He opened a drawer
in his desk and pulled out an ancient mobile phone. ‘It’s got some credit on it. Try and let me know by the weekend. And if you decide to do anything at all, use these.’ He pushed
a pair of thin disposable gloves into Gil’s school bag.

It was getting on for lunchtime but Gil couldn’t face going back to school. He ate a sandwich on the bus and then went to the library, where the librarian gave him a funny look but
didn’t actually challenge him. Gil curled up in a heap of cushions in the picture-book area and waited for a computer to become free. He played pointless computer games and endless rounds of
Solitaire until his time ran out and he was kicked off the terminal. Then he went back to the safety of the cushions and read
Wibbly Pig
and
Postman Pat
books until it was just after
school finishing time and he could finally go home without anyone asking any awkward questions.

‘Hello, darling,’ said Mum at the front door. ‘Good day at school?’

‘Actually, I feel crap,’ said Gil.

He slid into bed with relief while Mum fussed around him with thermometers and cool drinks and painkillers, and let the world outside his bedroom disappear for a while.

The next few days passed in a haze. Gil was aware of his body keeping everything going, like a plane on automatic pilot. His body got out of bed and dressed itself and ate breakfast and managed
to produce a few words for Mum and Dad and walked itself to school and found its way to registration. His body waded through lesson after lesson and solved problems and answered questions and
handed in homework. But Gil himself wasn’t there. He sat quietly to one side and struggled with the weight of the thing that Jude wanted him to do.

What was the right thing to do? When you were little, right and wrong were easy. Share your toys. Don’t snatch. Don’t hit people, or bite them. Say ‘please’ and
‘thank you’ in the right places. But he wasn’t little any more, and all at once Gil found himself in a place where nothing was so clear-cut. No one was going to tell him what to
do – or rather, Jude and Dad were both telling him what to do, and they were both claiming to be right. How could they both be right? Obviously it was wrong to steal Dad’s keys, but was
it still wrong to steal Dad’s keys if it helped to prevent the suffering of innocent animals? Maybe some crimes were allowed, if they prevented bigger crimes. Even Dad had been prepared to
break the law because he thought that nuclear weapons were wrong. But were Dad’s mice suffering? And if they were helping to find cures for diseases, did that make the suffering
acceptable?

Gil felt as if he was tumbling through the space between the stars with nothing to stop him falling. He sat in his room for hours at a time, staring, unable to do anything. He woke up often in
the middle of the night, imagining he could hear noises from Dad’s study, and wondering at what point Jude would decide to take matters into his own hands.

‘Gil, we’d like to go out for the day on Saturday,’ Dad said over supper on Thursday.

‘OK,’ said Gil, not really listening.‘Where are we going?’

‘Actually, I meant just your mother and me. I want to take her out for lunch. Would you mind very much?’

‘Oh. No, I don’t mind at all.’

‘I guess you’ll be going ice-skating with Louis on Saturday morning, won’t you?’

‘Yeah, of course,’ Gil said automatically. ‘I haven’t been for ages.’

‘Do you think you could go home with him afterwards, so you don’t have to be here on your own? We’d be back late afternoon.’

‘Yeah, I’m sure I could. I’ll sort it out with Louis at school tomorrow.’

Maybe there was no need to make a decision, Gil told himself. He would just drift along until he bumped into something that would make the decision for him. But of course he wouldn’t talk
to Louis. Even if he’d wanted to it would be difficult. They hadn’t spoken all week. Gil caught sight of Louis occasionally, eyeing him from the other side of the classroom or the
canteen. Sometimes he was on his own, sometimes he was with Ben, but he always looked away again as soon as his glance touched Gil’s.

Gil allowed Mum and Dad to drive him to the ice rink on Saturday morning. Before they left the house Gil opened his bedroom window a fraction, hoping it wouldn’t be noticed. When they got
to the rink Dad escorted him in, paid the entrance fee, gave Gil enough change to buy a drink and a snack and took him through the door that led to the ice.

‘Have a great time,’ he said. ‘We’ll be back at about four.’ Dad waved cheerily to someone on the ice below and gave the thumbs-up. Gil knew without looking that it
must be Louis. As Dad disappeared back out to the car, Gil stood at the top of the stairs with his skates slung over his shoulder and scanned the ice. There was Louis, standing as still as an ice
sculpture in the middle of the rink while dozens of other skaters whirled around him. Louis’ eyes were huge, staring up as if Gil had just emerged from the land of the living dead. Gil stared
back, judging the time it would take for Mum and Dad to drive out of sight of the ice rink. When he thought he’d waited long enough, he turned round and walked out of the door.

Gil walked slowly home with the skates bumping at his back.

It was about two miles. No plans, Gil told himself. No plans. But a plan began to seep into his head without permission. His bedroom window would still be open, unless Dad had checked and shut
it before they’d gone out. So he’d be able to scale the conservatory roof and climb in the window. It must be possible – after all, he’d practised it the other way round as
part of Dad’s fire drill. And once he was in the house . . .

Gil’s mind slid away from the thought, as if it was too slippery to keep hold of. It would be nice to have the house to himself for a change, that was all. Gil began to count footsteps,
trying to empty his head. One, two, three, four . . . how many till he got home?

It took nearly four thousand steps, but Gil still felt he was there far too quickly.

It was hard to tell if his bedroom window was open or not. Gil thought he could see the tiniest crack, but he couldn’t be sure. He stood looking up at the window for ages, listening to the
quiet noises of the gardens around him – leaves rustling in the bushes, birds cheeping, the occasional plop of a big fish diving in the pond next door. Well, if the window
was
open it
was fate, Gil thought at last. He wasn’t really making a choice. He was just following a thread.

He dumped his ice-skates on the lawn and pulled the garden table across to the fence so that he could scramble up on to the wall at the edge of the conservatory roof. Then he inched his way
across the wooden beams between the glass until he could reach his bedroom window. He tugged at the crack with his fingernails. The window was stiff, or perhaps it really was shut, Gil thought, his
heart sinking. Trust Dad. He was obsessed with security. But suddenly the window swung open and Gil hauled himself head first through it, falling awkwardly on to the floor of his bedroom.

For a moment he lay there, and then he sat up carefully.
Don’t think about it, just do it.
He’d need the gloves. Jude had told him to wear gloves so he wouldn’t leave
any fingerprints. Gil reached over for his school bag and dug about till he found them. They were made of thin clear plastic, not like the rubber ones Dad had made him wear in the labs. The plastic
was both crackly and slimy and as Gil pulled the gloves over his fingers he felt as if he was preparing for some disgusting medical procedure.

It’s bound to be locked, Gil thought, creeping down the stairs. But the study door wasn’t locked. The handle was cold through his thin gloves, and the door felt even heavier than the
last time he’d pushed it open. Well, the drawer will be locked, anyway
,
Gil decided as he stepped towards Dad’s desk. It was, and this time the key was nowhere to be seen. Gil
hesitated. Was it fair to look for it? Did that still count as fate, or was he making a decision? Maybe if he just lifted a few things here and there he could give himself permission to give up.
He’d go and phone Jude and tell him he hadn’t managed to do it and then . . .

Gil picked up the holiday photo that always sat on Dad’s desk. Immediately a small key slid out from somewhere at the back of the frame and tinkled on to the desk. Gil stared at it. He
really hadn’t searched very hard. So that must mean the key wanted to be found. And that meant the desk had to be opened.

The top drawer slid open. There was the box, the one that held Dad’s keys and the magnetic door release pendant. Gil took the whole box. He left the key in the drawer for now, and stumbled
to the kitchen to make the phone call on the battered phone that Jude had given him. He had a completely irrational fear that if he made the call from Dad’s study Dad would somehow be able to
hear it.

‘Jude here,’ said the voice on the other end of the phone, sharp and crisp as a cooking apple.

‘It’s Gil,’ said Gil huskily. ‘I’ve got what you want.’

There was a cry so loud it hurt his eardrum. ‘Woo-hoo! You star, Gil! I knew you’d pull it off!’

Somehow the praise didn’t make Gil feel any better this time.

Jude launched into the plan so quickly that Gil knew he’d had it all thought out way in advance. It would be better if Gil wasn’t seen at Jude’s house, and it was definitely
too risky for Jude to come to Gil’s. Instead they would meet at the local library. Gil would bring Dad’s key box hidden in his bag and sit in the kids’ section. He’d put the
bag down nearby, but not too near. Then Jude would come in and sit down too, and after a while he would pick up Gil’s bag and walk out with it. They wouldn’t say anything at all to each
other. Gil would go home and wait for Jude to phone to say his friend had copied the keys, and then they’d repeat the process to get the bag back to Gil.