Fifty Fifty (19 page)

‘Is that one of your mice?’ Gil asked finally, pointing at the picture of the embryo.

Dad was busy with something and took a while to reply.

‘It’s not a mouse at all,’ he said. ‘In fact, it’s a human being.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Well, the embryos do look virtually identical. But I happen to know this one is human, that’s all.’

Gil drained the last mouthful from the can, and then they made their way down through the building to the car park. Dad hadn’t quite got all the egg off the windscreen and it had dried
like glue. He tutted in annoyance. The security guard was still patrolling the car park with his dog, and when they drove out on to the main road, Gil saw the animal rights protesters were still
there. Dad turned the car smoothly away from them and soon they were out of sight.

At home Mum opened the door, smiling expectantly. Gil noticed the way she exchanged looks with Dad, and how Dad nodded his head as a way of indicating to Mum that he thought it had gone
well.

‘Well, you’ve had a long morning, both of you,’ Mum said. ‘You must be ready for lunch.’

‘I’ll just go and change,’ said Gil, running upstairs to his room.

He stripped quickly to his underwear, ripping away the camera equipment and tossing it carelessly into his school bag. The carpet tape had stuck too tightly to his skin and it hurt when he
pulled it off, but he didn’t care. He was utterly sick of his spying adventure. He had achieved almost nothing.

The film was so dull he might as well wipe the memory card now. There was no blood, no pain, no torture, and apart from the nude mice he hadn’t seen a single thing that really upset him.
There wasn’t even any point checking whether the camera had worked properly. Jude was going to be bitterly disappointed. It was nobody’s fault, but Gil felt as if he’d let him
down big time.

Gil’s punishments were lifted overnight without a word.

On Sunday Gil found his Nintendo and MP3 player lying on his bed, together with five pounds’ pocket money and a big bar of chocolate. Dad disappeared off to work on Monday morning before
Gil had even got up, so it was clear that he was allowed to make his own way to school once again. It meant he could go straight to Jude’s house with the buttonhole camera instead of having
to be dropped off at school first, and Gil knew he should have been delighted, but he was too full of anxiety about the way Jude was going to react to the video.

When Jude opened his front door, his face immediately broke into a huge grin.

‘Oh my God, you did it,’ he laughed. ‘You bloody did it.’

Gil followed him down the narrow entrance hall to his room. Jude whooped with delight every step of the way.

‘Oh, man,’ he said, gasping for breath as he shut the door behind them. ‘I was so worried for you. I thought about you all damn weekend. It was the longest two days of my
life.’ He stopped, and looked at Gil’s face.

‘What’s the problem?’ he asked, suddenly serious. ‘Didn’t the camera work?’

‘Yes, I think so, but . . .’

‘What?’

‘It’s just – the film’s not very interesting. I think you’re going to be really disappointed.’

‘Oh.’ Jude’s face relaxed. ‘I doubt that very much. Let’s have a look.’

Jude connected the buttonhole camera to the laptop on his desk and dragged up the armchair for Gil to sit in. Then he perched on his wobbly office chair, with a big pad of paper balanced on his
knee, and handed Gil the recorder part of the camera.

‘OK, go,’ he said. ‘You play it back for me.’

The video flickered on to the computer screen.

Gil saw a blurred flash of the car park, filmed as he’d turned away from the car, followed by a shot of Dad unlocking the back entrance to the labs. The door swung towards the camera and
there was sudden darkness. The lens readjusted inside the building in time to show the green lights blinking on the panel on the wall, and Gil could see Dad unlocking the next door, and then
opening the door beyond that with his special pendant. The film swayed and jolted as the camera moved down the corridor and up the stairs. Gil was amazed at how much movement there was. How did his
eyes ever cope with that amount of bouncing around? It made him dizzy.

Jude was chuckling. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘If that’s all they can come up with, we’re laughing.’

Gil opened his mouth to ask what he meant, but then Jude chuckled again as the camera staggered into the toilets, visited a cubicle and filmed Gil fiddling with buttons in the mirror.

‘Nervous, huh?’ he said, grinning sideways at Gil.

The video bumped along to the laboratory room where Dad had shown Gil the mouse embryo. Gil was relieved to see that there were some better shots here and he made a real effort to stand still
and aim the camera. He watched Dad run through his speeches again, listened to his voice coming quietly out of the computer, watched the way his eyes became wide and bright as he talked about life
and DNA and bricks building themselves into houses. The voice on the video didn’t sound quite right. It was too thin. Dad’s real voice was like sweet-and-sour sauce, thick and
punchy.

A dreamy feeling came over Gil as he looked at the film he had made. It should have been exactly the same as the stuff he’d seen with his own eyes on Saturday, and yet it wasn’t.
Somehow the viewpoint had shifted slightly, but he couldn’t work out how.

‘Bloody Frankenstein,’ Jude muttered.

The camera started to follow Dad out of the embryo room, and Gil reached for the buttons on the recorder.

‘This bit’s really boring,’ he said, beginning to fast-forward. ‘It’s just shots of stairs and corridors.’

‘Whoa, whoa,’ said Jude. ‘Go back a bit. Go back to that room.’

Gil rewound, wondering what Jude was looking for. This time, instead of watching the video, he watched Jude. He was flicking between the computer screen and his pad of paper, scribbling fast.
He’d already covered several pages.

‘This is good, this is good,’ said Jude as the video neared the entrance to the animal rooms. ‘This is where the animals are kept, yeah? Pause it a second. That’s
perfect.’

‘What are you writing?’ asked Gil.

‘Eh? I’m not writing anything. I’m sketching a plan.’

‘What sort of plan?’

‘A plan of the inside of the building, of course.’

‘What for?’

Jude turned his head very slowly and looked at Gil. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘why do you think I wanted this film?’

‘Um – to find out what’s going on in the labs. To put the video on a website, maybe, if it was any good. To put pressure on people like Dad so they’d have to close the
labs down. I don’t know, really.’

Gil rambled on, wondering whether he’d missed something vital, wondering why Jude wasn’t nodding in agreement. And then, just before Jude began to speak again, Gil suddenly knew what
he was going to say. The words dropped around him like a shower of stinging fireworks.

‘We’re going in there, Gil. We’re going to liberate the animals. We’re going to show those bloody scientists that they can’t get away with this. It’s
absolutely brilliant, what you’ve done. We didn’t know much about the back entrance to the labs and now you’ve shown us everything. The security is completely pants, just a few
locks and a burglar alarm – pretty much all the internal doors are magnetic, and we can get through those easily. We weren’t completely sure where the animals were kept, either, and now
we know the route through the building, which’ll save us so much time. You’ve done a great job.’

‘But you haven’t even seen the animals yet,’ said Gil, feeling dazed.

‘I don’t need to,’ said Jude, shrugging.

‘How could you possibly get past the guards and the dogs?’

‘That’s probably the easiest part to deal with. There’ll be more of us than there are of them, and you’d be amazed how a nice bit of steak can sort out even the scariest
dog.’

‘Steak? I thought you were a vegan?’

‘Sometimes you have to make compromises, you know. For the greater good.’

‘But . . . but . . . I still don’t see how you’re going to manage the locks and the burglar alarm.’
Slow down
, Gil wanted to say.
This is going too
fast.

‘I thought maybe you’d help us with that bit,’ said Jude quietly.

‘Me?’ Gil couldn’t look at Jude. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you know where your dad keeps his work keys and things like that?’

Gil knew exactly where Dad kept his keys. They were in the box he’d found in the locked desk drawer in his study.

‘Yeah, I think so, but . . .’

Gil had to stop and swallow hard. Now he was seriously frightened, even more frightened than the time he’d found Sally sprawled on the path and thought she was dead. Jude wanted him to
steal Dad’s keys. He wanted Gil to burgle Dad’s study so that they could break into the labs. Why the hell hadn’t Gil seen this coming? All along he’d assumed that the video
was the final goal, but it had turned out to be just the first step in a much bigger plan, and now Gil could see the whole picture it scared him to death.

‘It’s a big ask, I know,’ Jude said very gently. Gil tried to hide his face. He felt sure Jude could see exactly how he felt. ‘Maybe it’s too much. You’ve
already put yourself on the line to get the video.’

‘No, no. It’s fine. Really.’

‘I’ll totally understand if you tell me you’ve got cold feet. We’ll find another way to do it, don’t worry.’

‘I haven’t got cold feet. I just didn’t realise what you wanted me to do, that’s all.’

Oh for God’s sake, get a grip,
Gil told himself furiously. He was supposed to be a hero. He desperately didn’t want Jude to start thinking he was a little scaredy-cat kid.

‘You know, if you tell me where the keys are we can come and get them ourselves,’ said Jude.

‘You mean – break in? Break into my house?’

‘Uh-huh. It wouldn’t be a problem, honestly. In fact, I’d make an educated guess and say your dad probably keeps everything in his study, doesn’t he? Which is on the
ground floor, isn’t it, with a small window facing the front garden?’

‘You know my
house
? You know where I
live
?’ Gil’s words came out in an embarrassing squawk and Jude gave a smile that lit up half his face while his eyes remained
cold and serious.

‘Yeah, we’ve had a few plans for your house. None of them have come off yet, though.’

Plans for your house.
The words lifted Gil up and swept him along in a flood of pure terror.
Plans. For your house
. Very clearly, he heard a voice speaking in his head. It was Dad,
the time they’d come back from town on the bus.
Let’s hope the house doesn’t get fire-bombed. He’s dangerous.
And now Jude was telling Gil he’d been there,
outside Dad’s study, examining the layout, making plans. Maybe he’d been in Gil’s back garden under the apple tree where the mice were buried. Maybe Gil had even looked out at
Jude from his bedroom window without realising there was anyone there at all. It was like feeling hands grasp your shoulders when you thought you were all alone.

But Dad can’t be right
,
Gil thought, struggling to control his panic. There was no way Jude could be that dangerous. He was a friend, wasn’t he? Jude was testing him, that was
all. It wasn’t such a big deal. He just had to face up to the test and show Jude that he could pass it.

‘OK, I’ll get you the —’ Gil tried to say the word ‘keys’, but it wouldn’t come out. He tried again, and thought it was going to make him throw up.

Jude nodded understandingly. ‘Sure?’ he said.

‘Yup.’

‘We won’t need to keep them,’ said Jude. ‘We’ll just need to borrow them for a while so we can copy them, if that makes you feel any better.’

‘Yeah. It’s fine.’

‘You know, the animals would thank you for it,’ said Jude. ‘If they had a voice.’ He nodded at the computer screen, where Dad was still frozen in time with his head
through the curtain. ‘Play.’

Gil played the rest of the video.

Jude watched in total silence and with a face as still as stone. It was impossible to read what he might be thinking. Gil gave up trying and instead looked again at the animals on the film
– the rabbits in their cages, the mice in their boxes. He looked again at Dad. Dad the monster. Dad the torturer. Dad patiently coaxing the mouse out of its hiding place. Dad rubbing the
mouse’s head with a finger, the way he stroked Mum’s hair sometimes.

Who
was
Dad? wondered Gil. What was he?

The camera back-tracked through the animal rooms, through the washroom, round the corners to Dad’s office. It glanced up at the sign that said
Dr Matthew Walker
. And then it
stopped. The computer screen went grey.

‘That’s it?’ said Jude. He took a deep, shaky breath and rubbed his face with both hands as if he was washing himself. ‘Oh, God, it makes me so bloody angry,’ he
whispered. ‘I don’t know how you coped with it.’

‘It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,’ Gil said, surprised at how upset Jude seemed to be. Then he wished he’d kept his mouth shut, because Jude blazed with
anger.

‘Not bad? You call that
not bad
?’