Fifty Fifty (5 page)

‘That’s Mum’s choice, isn’t it?’ he said, swaying on two legs and looking at the kitchen floor.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Dad’s voice was icy-cold.

You’re the only one
, said Louis’ voice in his head.
That’s why they’re so protective
.

Gil dropped the chair forwards with a crash and went for it.

‘You know what the problem is with you two?’ he said. ‘You’re just so bloody over-protective. You don’t let me go into town on my own, you won’t let me visit
my granny, you say I can’t have a phone – you treat me like a baby, and it’s all because I’m an only child, isn’t it?’

‘That has nothing whatsoever to do with it,’ said Dad.

But Gil was gathering momentum, like a rock rolling down a hill. ‘It’s your fault. Why didn’t you have more children? I never asked to be an only child. If there were more kids
in this house at least you wouldn’t be ganging up on me all the time. Oh, I know. You were just too
selfish
to have more than one child. You thought it would mess up your nice tidy
lives, didn’t you? You thought —’

Mum suddenly stood up, her eyes flashing like lightning, and Gil stopped.

‘Oh, you have
no idea
. . .’ she said, so fiercely that Gil was almost scared. She was staring as if she could see a ghost hanging in the air.

‘That’s right,’ said Dad quickly, ‘he has no idea. Let’s leave it like that, Rachel. Gil, go up to your room, will you?’

Gil hesitated. He watched Mum sit down heavily in the kitchen chair and put her face back in her hands.

‘What . . .?’ he began to ask.

‘Just go,’ Dad said. ‘Now.’

Gil got up slowly and started to go upstairs. Halfway up he stopped and listened. There was no sound coming from the kitchen, not even the sound of Mum crying. Gil tried to think of something
that he could go back and say but his mind was empty, and in the end he just climbed the rest of the stairs to his room.

The room was still a mess. His homework desk stood right behind the door where he’d left it that morning. Gil squeezed past it and dropped on to the end of his bed. He ought at least to
put the desk back where it belonged and pick a few things off the floor, but then Dad would notice he’d done it and say
I see you’ve obeyed me on something
, and even the thought
of it made Gil begin to buzz with irritation. He sat for a long while gazing at the desk without moving it and wondering what the hell had just happened with Mum downstairs in the kitchen.

Oh, you have no idea . . .

No idea about what?

‘Oh crap,’ he said at last.

Somehow he’d stepped over a line that he didn’t even know was there. In all the rows they had, Gil always knew exactly how he was winding Mum and Dad up, even if he didn’t
manage to make the argument go his way. He knew which rules he was breaking, and which buttons he needed to press to trigger a reaction. But this time it was different. The look on Mum’s face
had been awful in a way that he wasn’t prepared for. He didn’t have a clue what he’d done.

Maybe they hadn’t
wanted
him to be an only child, thought Gil. Maybe they hadn’t been able to have any more kids. But if that was true, why didn’t they just tell him up
front? Why did they hide together in corners and whisper things he wasn’t meant to hear?

Mum and Dad were so wrapped up in themselves. They behaved as if life was one huge agonising problem that Gil wasn’t grown-up enough to understand. They joined forces against him, all the
time. He’d started to notice how Dad always spoke in the plural, like Queen Victoria. It was always ‘we’, and the word ‘we’ never seemed to include Gil.
We are not
going to put up with this. We are not prepared to discuss it. We are not amused, Gil. We are not amused.

Gil felt the anger begin to creep back into his guts. Dad hadn’t let him tell his side of the story, about the way the policeman had jumped on him for practically no reason. Now he would
probably never get the chance to explain himself. Nothing would change. Dad would come up with various punishments and life would wander along from day to day until he went insane with it.

Gil rolled over on to his back and looked at the window. The curtains were still open, though it was completely dark outside now. Gil thought about Jude. He imagined him lying in his hammock
under the cold March sky, guarding the tree against the chainsaws and the bulldozers, not afraid of falling, not afraid of the police, not afraid of breaking the rules. Not afraid to leave his cosy
bed and put himself on the line to fight for something he believed in.

How long was it, Gil wondered, before he turned eighteen and could go and live up a tree in a park if he wanted to? He did a quick calculation. Nearly fifteen hundred days. It was a life
sentence.

Dad produced his list of punishments first thing on Saturday morning. He’d typed the list up on the computer so there was no excuse for forgetting anything, and as Gil
skim-read the page he quickly saw there was very little that Dad had missed.

No friends home after school or at weekends. No visits to friends’ houses. No pocket money – well, that was obvious. No tuck shop money either. No ice-skating on Saturday mornings.
No swimming. No going to school or coming home independently – it seemed as if Dad planned to reorganise his entire diary so that he could drive Gil to school and pick him up again at the end
of the day. No Nintendo, no MP3 player – they were locked away immediately in one of the drawers in Dad’s study. No sweets. No crisps. No favourite treats, like bacon sandwiches when
Gil came home from school. A long list of chores to be fitted in around supper and homework. No going anywhere, even to the library round the corner, except with a parent. No television, no DVDs,
no computer and no internet access unless Gil needed something for a piece of homework he was doing, and then Dad would have to supervise it.

‘These punishments will last for two weeks,’ said Dad. ‘After that time, if you can prove to us that you are capable of behaving responsibly, you can expect to win back some of
your privileges.’

Gil stared at the list in his hands and felt as if there was something very heavy pressing down on his shoulders. It was even worse than he’d expected. He’d never had a punishment as
big as this before, and he wondered what he was being punished for. Was it because he’d nearly got arrested, or because he’d had a go at Mum and Dad for making him an only child?

‘On the other hand,’ Dad added, ‘if we find you have broken any of these conditions, or if you manage to get yourself into any more trouble . . .’

He left the threat hanging in the air.

‘We’ again,
Gil thought, even though Mum wasn’t there to be included. She hadn’t even got up yet.

Gil got a bowl of cornflakes from the kitchen and took it up to his room. He was still in his pyjamas, but it was pointless getting dressed if he wasn’t going skating. While he sat and ate
the cornflakes he read Dad’s list of punishments again, until it occurred to him that this was a bit like going up a level in a computer game. You always ended the previous level on a real
high because you’d got unbelievably good at whatever it was you needed to do to beat the enemy. And then you were faced with a new scenario that needed a totally different set of skills, and
for a while you were out of your depth. Dad had just pushed the game up to a new level of difficulty, and it looked seriously daunting.

But as Gil read and re-read Dad’s list, slowly his mind cleared and settled. Some of the punishments were things he didn’t care about anyway. He only ever went to Louis’ house
these days, and he could do without Louis for two weeks, no problem, especially if Louis was going to insist on hanging around with Ben. Skating was something he did with Louis too, but recently it
had begun to feel less and less of a challenge. There were always too many people at the rink to try anything really adventurous. Gil thought he could probably manage without pocket money; he
wasn’t allowed to go into town to spend it in any case. It wouldn’t kill him to give up his MP3 player for a couple of weeks, and he was bored with most of his Nintendo games, so that
wasn’t a great loss either when it came down to it.

OK,
thought Gil. What if he just made a conscious decision not to care about any of the other punishments? So Dad was going to be waiting for him at the school gates every day – so
what? The morons in his year could say what they liked. No sweets, no crisps, no television – well, he wasn’t addicted to them, was he? It would be good discipline to prove that he
could do without them. Gil’s mind drifted away again to Jude in his tree. Jude was probably living on bread and water. He wouldn’t waste time longing for a packet of prawn cocktail
crisps or wondering what was happening in
EastEnders
. He had more important things to do.

Gil traced over the pattern on his duvet cover while he considered his strategy. There must be something he could do to piss Dad off without actually breaking any of his rules. Something that
would make a tiny crack in the solid wall that Mum and Dad put up in front of him. Right now Gil couldn’t think of anything, but he knew when he did it would be like finding the secret power
that makes your enemy crumble into a pile of dust. And meanwhile he would make a really good job of doing exactly what Dad wanted so that when he finally found the thing that was going to drive Dad
crazy, Dad would be completely unprepared.

‘Don’t forget to look for your school bag,’ said Dad as they drove off for school on Monday morning.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Gil said, and then pulled himself up short. ‘I mean yes, sure.’ He was going to have to make an effort, otherwise he’d blow it before they got as far
as the school gates. He rubbed his ear. It was hard, sitting this close to Dad without any possibility of escape. At home he could at least find an excuse to leave the room if Dad started to bug
him, but he couldn’t exactly throw himself from the car if Dad went off on one of those ‘you-have-to-believe-that-we-are-acting-in-your-best-interests’ speeches. Fortunately Dad
seemed to feel in control, and he just talked about last week’s maths homework and how early the cherry blossom was again this year. Gil didn’t get the urge to put his fingers in his
ears once. He felt pretty pleased with himself, especially as he’d managed to blag another three pounds off Mum for lunch without having to confess to losing his wallet.

‘See you later, then,’ said Dad as Gil climbed out of the car. ‘Have a good day.’

Gil spotted Louis immediately, standing by the school gates. Even from a distance Gil could read all kinds of things in his face – relief, worry, curiosity. Louis was hopping from foot to
foot as if he couldn’t wait to ask what had been going on.

‘Hi,’ Gil said, as if it was just a normal Monday. ‘Good weekend?’

‘Yes. No. Gil, what happened to you on Friday? Your mum phoned and she sounded terrible. And then I never heard anything. You weren’t at skating, and I phoned you on Sunday morning
but your dad just said you weren’t available.’

‘I didn’t know you’d phoned. Dad didn’t tell me.’

But would he have bothered to phone back, Gil wondered, even if Dad had given him permission? He hadn’t really thought about Louis at all over the weekend. Louis had become just another
item on Dad’s list, one of the many things he was no longer allowed.

‘So . . .?’ said Louis eagerly, making a hurry up gesture with his hand.

‘So what?’

‘What happened on Friday?’

‘Oh, that,’ Gil said. ‘I went into town, I did some stuff, I was about to come home and then . . .’

He waited a split second before finishing, to create the maximum impact.

‘ . . . the police nearly arrested me, just for dropping a plastic bottle.’

Louis’ eyebrows shot up in horror. ‘The
police
? You’re joking!’

‘It wasn’t a big deal.’ Gil grinned, enjoying Louis’ reaction, until he remembered the smell in the police car, the smell of other people’s bodies, and he had to
swallow quickly to stop himself feeling sick.

‘What do you mean, it wasn’t a big deal?’ Louis peered at him closely. ‘I’d have been cacking it.’

‘Yeah, that’s because you’re such a wuss. Anyway, I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, so they couldn’t arrest me. They took me home in a police car, though, just
to try and scare me.’

Louis stopped in the playground with his mouth open.

‘You can guess what Dad said,’ Gil went on.

‘I
told
you it was a bad idea, didn’t I?’ said Louis.

‘Oh, wow, what a surprise. I so didn’t expect you to say that. And by the way, thanks a lot for dumping me in it when my mum phoned to see if I was at your house. That was
really
helpful.’

‘What was I supposed to tell her? You told me you didn’t care what I said,’ Louis fired back at once. ‘You know I’m rubbish at lying. You should have given me
something to say if you wanted me to cover for you. Anyway, as soon as the police brought you home it would have been pretty obvious I wasn’t telling the truth. Then I’d have got a load
of grief for lying, wouldn’t I?’