Fifty Fifty (2 page)

‘You are not having a mobile phone,’ said Dad.

‘Why not? Everyone else has had one since they started secondary school. Even the really sad people at school have got a phone.’

‘You know perfectly well why we don’t want you to have a phone yet,’ said Dad. ‘We’ve been through this before. There are no scientific studies on mobile phone use
which have fully explored the long-term effects, and the government advice is still that children should be discouraged from using mobile phones. And quite apart from that, the evidence shows they
increase your chances of being mugged and bullied.’

‘Oh yeah! Scientific studies. Government advice. I completely forgot,’ Gil said, with as much sarcasm as he could manage.

Mum had moved into the farthest corner of the kitchen, as if trying to move out of range of the argument. Gil wondered why she didn’t just leave the room.

‘Science is the best tool we have for understanding the world, Gil,’ Dad said. ‘We have to take it seriously.’

‘I hate your stupid science.’

‘That’s a bit short-sighted of you,’ said Dad. ‘Without science there would be no mobile phones, for example.’

‘If science proved your brain was in your bum you’d believe it.’

‘I’d certainly consider it,’ said Dad. ‘If the evidence was convincing.’

He was always right. Always, always, always. Evidence, logic, facts. There was never any way through it or round it or under it or over it. It was beginning to drive Gil crazy. He stared at Dad
and Dad stared back, with the kind of smile that made Gil start to rock his chair backwards and forwards, smashing the chair legs on the hard kitchen floor.

‘So if phones might give you brain cancer, how come you and Mum have both got them?’

‘We use them carefully,’ said Dad.

‘And you don’t think I would?’

‘Gil, when you are older you will understand what a responsibility it is being a parent,’ said Dad. ‘We have a duty to look after you, even if you don’t yet see that
it’s for your own good.’

‘Blah blah blah blah blah,’ Gil said. ‘You talk such a lot of
crap
. I hate you.’ He shoved his chair back quickly and stood up.

‘Gil,’ said Mum. ‘Please.’

‘Please what? It’s not me that’s the problem. It’s
him
.’

‘Get in the car,’ said Dad. ‘Now.’ He took a step forwards and Gil automatically stepped away. He wondered if Dad was going to try to pin him against the wall. He’d
never done it before, but it would really freak Mum out.

‘I can’t go to school like this,’ said Gil, bouncing on his toes in case he needed to run. ‘I haven’t even cleaned my teeth.’

‘I don’t give a damn,’ said Dad. ‘You’re coming with me.’

His hand shot out to grab Gil’s arm. Gil dodged him and ran round the table.

‘You shouldn’t be driving to work anyway,’ Gil said. ‘You’re destroying the planet.’

Dad made a noise that was probably meant to be a laugh. ‘Oh yes, I’m destroying it single-handedly, I know. Global warming is all my fault.’

It was a mistake, Gil realised, running round the table. He’d got himself trapped in a corner and the kitchen had turned into a cage. His hands ached, and looking down he saw that his
fingers had made themselves into fists, even though he didn’t remember telling them to. It was an effort to find something he could spit back at Dad.

‘Well, Dad, it’s your generation who’ve well and truly screwed it up. You’ve just behaved like a bunch of selfish gits and left the mess for us kids to clear
up.’

‘That is
enough
. You are coming with me
now
.’

‘If you come any closer,’ said Gil, ‘you’ll get this over your head.’ He grabbed his porridge bowl off the kitchen table and waved it wildly in Dad’s
direction.

‘Oh, for
God’s sake!
’ screamed Mum suddenly, dropping something with a crash into the sink. ‘Just stop it!
Stop it!
’

Dad froze in mid-step, his eyes full of astonishment, and for a moment even Gil was thrown. Mum never lost it. She never got more than mildly irritated, never screamed at anyone.

‘Rachel?’ said Dad. ‘I’m sorry – is it all getting too —’

With his last shred of energy Gil hurled the porridge bowl at Dad. He heard Mum cry out at exactly the moment that he saw Dad catch the bowl neatly, just like a frisbee, and then he ran from the
kitchen.

He took the stairs two at a time, slamming the bedroom door behind him, and immediately started to build the barricade the way he had before. He dragged his homework desk across the door and put
the chair on top of the desk, weighing it down with as many heavy objects as he could put his hands on. And then he lay on the bed and waited. Next time I’ll throw the kettle, he thought. Or
one of Mum’s teapots with the tea still in it. He won’t be able to catch that. He tried to laugh but it made his lungs hurt.

Dad took a while to come. In the end, though, Gil heard Dad’s footsteps plod up the stairs and stop outside his door. The handle rattled.

‘Come out of there, Gil.’

‘You can’t make me. You can’t force me to do anything.’

‘Oh? Really?’

There was a thump on the door and Gil saw it move. He could almost feel Dad’s whole weight pressed against it. The desk tilted slightly, and the chair slipped a centimetre.

‘So you’re going to break the door down, are you, Dad?’ Gil said. ‘That’s very mature of you.’

The door relaxed again. There was silence for a while, and Gil gazed through the bedroom window, thinking about the fire drill that Dad made him practise from time to time.
Unlock the middle
window. The key’s above the curtain rail. Step out on to the conservatory roof – the joists, Gil, the wooden beams, not the glass, or you’ll go straight through. Edge across to
the wall, crawl down backwards, hang at full stretch off the end of the wall, drop into the back garden. Safe.
The fire drill had seemed like a huge adventure when he was little, and now it
felt like just another of Dad’s pointless rules. But it might come in useful as an escape route if Dad decided to lay siege to his bedroom.

‘Gil, listen. You’re not an adult yet. We have to do what we think is right.’

‘I don’t care,’ shouted Gil. ‘I’m not listening.’

‘Look, I’m sorry if I made you angry. But you must believe that the things we do are in your best interests.’

‘I
don’t
believe it. I don’t believe anything you say.’

‘Gil, I’ve got to go to work now.’

‘Why don’t you just sod off to work, then? Your precious, wonderful work. It’s so
important
, Dad, isn’t it?’

‘Is this how you speak to your teachers? Honestly, Gil, I don’t understand what’s got into you recently.’

YOU have, you loser
, thought Gil, but he didn’t say it aloud.

‘You can’t go on like this,’ Dad said through the door. ‘For your mother’s sake, please try to sort yourself out.’

That meant Mum was upset, but Gil made himself not think about it, in the same way that he was making himself not think about the way she’d screamed at him and Dad.

‘Have a good day at school, Gil.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Gil. ‘Whatever.’

There was silence, and then Dad’s footsteps went away down the stairs, and Gil heard him talking quietly to Mum below. After a while the front door clicked shut and the car engine
started.

All at once Gil felt exhausted. The wave that had carried him this far had smashed itself to pieces and he looked at the day that lay ahead of him with something like desperation.
Have a good
day at school?
What kind of crap was that? Every day was a clone of the day before. Each day was exactly the same, from the moment he got up until the moment he went to bed. Identical clothes,
identical meals, identical arguments.

Nothing ever changed, nothing moved on, nothing was sorted out. You could fiddle around with a few of the details – swap the porridge for cornflakes, or wear a new pair of trainers –
but it made no real difference. Everywhere he turned Dad was there, blocking his way, breathing down his neck. He was stuck in an endless loop.

He had to find a way out, before he completely lost his mind.

Twenty minutes later, mainly because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, Gil dragged the desk away from his door and started to go downstairs. Halfway down he
decided to go back to his room and fill his wallet with the remains of his pocket money. After all, it might be worth being prepared.

Mum was sitting at the kitchen table with a half-finished cup of tea. She looked up when Gil came in, and Gil wondered if she might have been crying, but she managed to make her voice sound
almost normal.

‘That was all a bit unnecessary, wasn’t it? It’s a good job that bowl didn’t smash.’

‘Yeah. Sorry,’ Gil said. He couldn’t think of a way to make his apology any bigger. Mum seemed to have recovered. Maybe she hadn’t screamed quite as badly as he’d
imagined. And anyway, it was all Dad’s fault.

‘You’re going to be terribly late, you know,’ she went on.

‘Yeah, I know. Can I have three pounds for lunch?’ Gil held the wallet behind his back.

‘I thought you said you had money? I gave you ten pounds yesterday, didn’t I?’

‘I had to give some of that to Louis,’ said Gil. ‘I owed him. From last week.’

It wasn’t a very convincing bluff, but Mum got up obediently and Gil almost felt guilty. It was getting easier and easier to blag money off Mum. She hardly bothered to put up a fight these
days.

‘Actually, make it five,’ he said. ‘I need some for tuck shop too.’

‘Honestly, you cost me a fortune,’ said Mum, but she handed it over anyway.

‘Bye, then,’ Gil said, picking up his bag and slipping the wallet into it.

‘Don’t you need a coat?’

‘No. See you later.’

‘Bye, darling,’ said Mum.

Gil walked away out of the front gate, knowing that Mum would watch him from the half-open door until he was out of sight. He resisted the temptation to turn at the last moment to wave to her.
Instead he watched his feet as they walked him along the pavement in the direction of school, the direction they took him every single morning. But today didn’t feel quite like one of his
identical days, and Gil wondered why. Then he realised it was because he was really late. He couldn’t remember being this late for school before, and it felt weird. The streets were nearly
empty, and when Gil stepped into the playground there was an echo he’d never heard before. The noise of a thousand kids was shut up inside the school walls. He walked towards reception,
feeling nervous.

Don’t be stupid, he told himself. And then, with his hand on the door, he thought, Crap. What am I doing here?

Suddenly it was blindingly obvious. He needn’t have come to school at all today. He could have skived off, gone somewhere else, done something exciting and dangerous. That would really
have been like sticking two fingers up at Dad. But Gil had never deliberately skipped school before, and the idea hadn’t occurred to him until now, when it was too late and he could see the
secretary frowning at him through the glass door. Oh, well, another time
,
thought Gil, pushing the door open.

‘Name?’ said the secretary.

‘Gilbert Walker. 9Q2.’

‘Why are you late?’

Gil made his face droop sadly. ‘I had a really, really bad row with my dad. Sorry.’

The secretary’s face softened a bit. ‘Oh. OK. You’re not one of our regulars, anyway. Don’t make a habit of it. You should catch the end of registration.’ She
pressed a button below the desk and the entrance door buzzed to let him through.

As Gil opened the door of his classroom, the noise burst around him like a small bomb. Mr Montague wasn’t there. At the front was a woman Gil had never seen before, obviously a supply
teacher. She was trying to keep order and failing badly. As Gil slipped quietly into the room the whole class turned towards him, pointed and howled with laughter. Gil stopped and stared, more
irritated than embarrassed. What the hell was going on?

‘There she is, Miss,’ shouted Ben from a desk at the back of the class. Gil’s lip curled. Ben, the moron who made all the other morons in the year look relatively normal. And
Louis was sitting next to him. Fantastic.

The teacher was looking at Gil with a puzzled face.

‘You are . . .’ she said.

‘Gil Walker.’

‘Gil?’

‘Yep, Gil, as in the things fish use to breathe with. It’s short for Gilbert.’

‘Oh dear, I’m terribly sorry. I thought it was
Jill
. I was expecting a girl.’

The class exploded with laughter again. Gil rolled his eyes and waited for them all to get over it. Even Louis seemed to be in hysterics, although if he was under Ben’s spell that
wasn’t surprising.

‘Simmer down, simmer down,’ called the teacher just as the bell rang and everyone stood up and made for the door in a thunderous, giggling mass.

‘That was sick, man,’ said Ben loudly as he and Louis came towards Gil. ‘Hey, Jill! Shake what your mamma gave you, girl!’ He poked Gil savagely as he went past and began
to cackle again like a demented chicken. Louis was still laughing, but when he saw Gil’s face he made a brief effort to compose himself.