Fifty Fifty (10 page)

Then Gil stood and listened again. He should leave now, before Dad caught him. But the study was out of sight of the top of the stairs. If he got out as soon as he heard a sound from above he
would still be safe.

Without knowing exactly what he was looking for, Gil’s hand went to the top drawer of Dad’s desk. The drawers were locked, of course, but his hand moved again as if it had a mind of
its own.
Look,
his fingers said,
Dad’s forgotten to take the key out of the lock.
The key turned smoothly, with a little click. This was probably where Dad had put his Nintendo,
Gil thought as the top drawer slid open. Maybe he could remove it without Dad noticing.

He poked through the items in the drawer. It was mostly paper clips and scissors and envelopes and Dad’s headed notepaper and cartridges for the printer – but there was also a box
with a set of keys and a funny black pendant with a silver button on it.

Right at the back was a rusty badge that said
Scientists against the Bomb
, with a small piece of wire twisted into the safety pin. The middle drawer had piles of printed emails and other
papers. Sure enough, his Nintendo and MP3 player sat on top of the pile. Gil hovered over them for a minute and then left them where they were.

But in the bottom drawer Gil found something different. It was a photo album.

For a split second he hesitated. A photo album, in a locked drawer, in a room that he wasn’t supposed to be in. All their other photo albums were on a shelf in the front room. There were
albums full of holidays, school shows, skating galas, friends – photos that made them all look happy and normal. If this one was locked away then Gil wasn’t meant to see it, for
sure.

Put it back, right now,
said the voice in Gil’s head. He stared at the plain black cover of the album. Whatever secrets it held, he had to face up to them sometime. He let the album
fall open in his hands.

There was no blood, no dying animals, in fact nothing at all that made much sense to him. He found page after page of photos, all nearly identical, all labelled neatly. Each photo was a smudgy
picture of a cluster of blobs, like a spoonful of frogspawn. A few of the pictures were labelled with dates and names.
Thomas. Imogen. Anna. David.
Gil flicked through, mystified. The dates
seemed to be from before he was born, and the photos were going brown at the edges.

There was a tiny noise from upstairs. Gil jumped as if a balloon had suddenly popped in his ear. He slid the album back in the bottom drawer, closed it gently, turned the key and slipped out of
the study, scudding hurriedly back to the kitchen.

No one came.

Gil took the stairs two at a time and dived into the safety of his bedroom.

He waited. When nothing had happened for another ten minutes, he went downstairs to the front room with the phone number from Jude’s booklet.

He knew he had to act quickly, but he was so agitated that he stood and stared at the phone for a stupidly long time while he got up the courage to dial the number. It took him three attempts to
get it right because his fingers kept missing the numbers. And then the phone just rang and rang and rang. Gil shut his eyes and listened to the dial tone buzzing in his ear. The strange blobs from
the photos floated behind his eyelids, like the after-image you get when you’ve stared at a bright light for too long. At last there was a little click and a woman’s voice said,
‘
Hi, thanks for calling. There’s nobody here right now, so please leave your number and a message after the tone and we’ll get back to you.
’

Gil hung up immediately and tried the number again to check he hadn’t made a mistake. When he got the same answerphone he bottled out of leaving a message and put the phone down well
before the bleep began. He sat and gazed at the dead screen of the television again.

The blobs must be something to do with Dad’s research. They were probably photographs of cells, tiny fragments of the animals he experimented on in the labs. What was so important about
them to make Dad put them in a special album? Maybe he’d poked about inside them, changing their DNA, trying to create the kind of monsters Jude had accused him of making.

And why did all the blobs have names? Weird names, too. More like names of people than something you would call a mouse or a frog or even a monkey. Surely scientists didn’t bother to name
all the creatures they experimented on? Gil shivered. It was freaky enough to think of Dad creating a two-headed, four-eyed mouse and calling it ‘Imogen’. It was even worse to think he
could do that and then come home and pretend to be a normal dad by making cheese on toast.

The phone rang very suddenly and loudly next to his elbow. Gil grabbed it, convinced that Jude must be on the end of the line somehow, even though there was no logical reason why he would be,
and sent the phone crashing to the floor.

‘Hello?’ Gil said, scooping up the phone. ‘Are you still there?’

‘You nearly blew my bloody ear off,’ said a familiar voice. ‘What are you trying to do, smash the phone up?’

It was Louis.

‘Oh,’ Gil said. ‘It’s you.’ He made no effort to hide his disappointment.

‘Look, I want to say sorry about last week, that’s all.’

Gil couldn’t be bothered to think of a reply.

‘Gil?’

‘Yeah, I’m still here,’ Gil said in a bored voice.

‘So is that OK, then? Can we just go back to normal?’

Back to normal.
Where was ‘normal’, exactly? Normal was ages ago, before Gil had discovered Dad’s horrible secret, before he’d met Jude, before he’d broken
Dad’s rules and gone into town and nearly got arrested. Normal was before he’d read Jude’s booklet, before his head had filled up with pictures of suffering animals, before Mum
had screamed so terribly about so little that he knew there must be something seriously wrong. It was like looking through binoculars the wrong way round. Everything normal was very small and far
away and Gil knew he couldn’t go back there even if he tried.

‘OK,’ Gil said. ‘If you want.’ He didn’t care much one way or the other. Louis probably only wanted to make up so he could get Gil to help him with maths and
science.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then,’ said Louis.

Gil put the phone down. He had plans for tomorrow, or at least he wanted to have plans for tomorrow. He sat in the dark in the front room waiting for inspiration. By the time Dad found him
sitting there and sent him to bed, Gil knew that he had to do
something
tomorrow, but he still hadn’t worked out what the something was.

Before he went to bed, Gil was allowed into Mum and Dad’s room to say goodnight to Mum. He almost didn’t want to see her in case it really was his fault that she’d got so
hysterical at lunchtime and the sight of him set her off again. But she was sitting propped up in bed with a book, and looked up brightly as Gil came in.

‘Night night, darling,’ she said, as if nothing at all had happened.

‘Come on, then,’ said Dad, before Gil could decide if he wanted to ask Mum how she was. ‘Bed.’

When Dad had gone, Gil packed his school bag as if he was preparing for an expedition. He spent twenty minutes digging about in drawers and cupboards, looking for things that might be useful,
but since he wasn’t sure what he was preparing for it was difficult to decide exactly what he needed. A torch? A penknife? String? A compass? A city street map? In the end Gil threw
everything into his bag, together with the animal rights office phone number and his wallet. He could only hope that on Monday he would wake up with a clear idea of what he was supposed to do.

When Monday morning arrived it was so grey and foggy that Gil couldn’t even see the apple tree from his bedroom window, though it was only a few metres away. Mum
didn’t appear at breakfast, and it felt wrong. Dad moved silently and efficiently round the kitchen making porridge and toast and coffee, hardly speaking, and Gil tried to attract as little
attention as possible, like a mouse hiding from the hawk circling above him.

‘How’s Mum?’ Gil asked as they left the house.

‘Still asleep,’ Dad said. That was it.

The car crawled to school through the thick fog. Gil watched the fog lights of oncoming cars as they appeared in pairs and disappeared again in the gloom. Dad dropped him at the school gates and
was gone again at once. The distance from the gates to the school building seemed to have doubled, and shapes loomed up in unfamiliar places. Gil didn’t like it much. But at least it meant
Louis didn’t manage to find him until they’d both got into the classroom.

Louis was chattering excitedly before he was even close enough for Gil to hear him properly.

‘Man, that was weird,’ he said. ‘I waited for you at the gate but I couldn’t see a thing. Then I got completely lost coming across the playground and ended up in the
sixth-form block. Do you reckon this is what it’s like to be almost blind?’

Gil shrugged.

‘God, I’d hate to be blind,’ Louis rattled on. ‘That fog is so bright it hurts your eyes. It’s given me a headache already. Hey, do you think there’s such a
thing as fog blindness? You can get snow-blind, can’t you? I remember, you told me about it, when we used to play that brilliant game you came up with, about being Arctic explorers, and we
hid in the freezer, and —’

‘Yeah,’ Gil said. ‘I remember.’

‘That was cool.’

‘No it wasn’t. It was a stupid kids’ game.’

‘I thought you wanted to be an explorer.’

‘Well I don’t, OK?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s boring, like everything else.’

‘Oh. Well, anyway, do you think they’d let me off PE if I said I was suffering from fog blindness?’

It was a whole week since Gil had spoken to Louis, and Louis was already driving him crazy. It had taken less than five minutes.

‘Louis, you’re talking crap,’ Gil said.

‘Oh.’ Louis stopped, but only for a second. ‘So, are you still grounded? You weren’t at ice-skating again.’

‘Yeah . . .’

‘So you can’t come over to my house, then?’

‘No.’

‘What’s the problem?’ Louis was looking at Gil with a frown.

‘Nothing.’

‘You look . . .’ Louis shook his head. ‘You just look like you’re not really
here
.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ groaned Gil. ‘Give me a break.’ But there was a little pinging noise in his head that told him Louis was right. He felt as though he was
hundreds of miles away, marooned on a floating island in the middle of a vast sea, waiting for something to break the surface.

‘Did your dad say —’ began Louis, but broke off as Mr Montague sprang into the room.

By the time Mr Montague had got halfway through the register, an idea had arrived in Gil’s head out of nowhere. He waited until his name was called, right at the end.

‘Gil Walker?’

‘Here, sir. Um – excuse me, sir . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve got to go to the dentist this morning. I’ve got a note somewhere from my dad.’

Gil pretended to look in his school bag while he waited for Mr Montague to become restless, which as usual took all of five seconds.

‘OK, Gil, just take your note down to the school office,’ said Mr Montague briskly. ‘They’ll let you go.’

‘What a pain,’ said Louis, tracking Gil out of the classroom. ‘I’d rather do PE than go to the dentist. Is your dad picking you up? Are you missing the whole of maths?
God, if you’re not back for science I’m in trouble. How long are you going to be?’

Gil managed to shake Louis off on the way to maths and locked himself in a toilet cubicle to forge a note from Dad. He wasted several sheets of paper trying out different styles of handwriting
before deciding it would be safer just to print the letter as neatly as possible, but when he got to
Yours sincerely
he stopped. He couldn’t for the life of him remember what
Dad’s signature looked like. In the end, he did a big swirling tornado of scribble and wrote
Dr Matthew Walker
in brackets underneath it.

At the office the secretary fiddled with her glasses as she studied the note.

‘Your appointment’s at ten,’ she read, not looking at Gil. ‘That’s over an hour away.’

‘Yes,’ Gil said. ‘I know.’ Idiot, he thought. Why hadn’t he put nine-thirty?

She slid the glasses to the end of her nose and peered at Gil through the security window.

‘Where’s your dentist?’ she demanded.

‘Brogan’s Hill.’

‘And how are you getting there?’

‘Um – walking.’

‘Even at snail’s pace that’ll only take you twenty minutes,’ she said, disapprovingly.

‘But it’s foggy. I’m worried about getting lost. And . . . and . . . I really
hate
the dentist. If I don’t go now I’ll bottle out completely. And my dad will
be furious. Please.’

Gil could hear real desperation creeping into his voice. If he couldn’t blag his way out of the school building he couldn’t put the next part of the plan into action, and now the
plan was filling his head he badly wanted to get on with it.

‘All right,’ said the secretary, relenting.

The door clicked open and Gil was out into the safety of the fog.