Fifty Fifty (9 page)

Gil lay on his bed for a long time, twisting Jude’s booklet in his fingers. There was a picture of the sad ginger-brown monkey on the booklet’s cover, and Gil could
hardly bear to look at it.

His head was filled with a mess that was like the smashed plate and meat and gravy that had covered the kitchen floor. Suddenly he was terrified that Mum was ill. It had been coming for a while
– little hints here and there that she wasn’t quite the person she had been before, the way she hung about the house and seemed to rely on Dad so much – things that irritated Gil
more than anything. But now she had fallen apart so badly that he couldn’t ignore it any longer. There was something really wrong with Mum. If he did anything to upset her it might make her
worse.

And of course that was the perfect way for Dad to keep him in line.
Don’t argue, Gil, it’ll upset your mother. For your mother’s sake, please try to sort yourself out. Blah
blah blah blah blah.
It’s Dad’s fault, thought Gil furiously. It’s all Dad’s fault. But his anger fizzled out as quickly as it had started. There was too much to be
scared about, all the things that Gil was now certain Dad didn’t tell the truth about, the things that he and Mum deliberately kept hidden from him. Without warning, Gil found himself staring
right at the terrible thing he’d discovered the previous day.

Dad experimented on animals.

Dad experimented on animals, and
he had never told Gil
.

The shock of it made the inside of Gil’s head clang like a gigantic bell.

After a while Gil sat up and smoothed out Jude’s booklet. He had to read it. He needed to know exactly what Jude was accusing Dad of. But the booklet was so hard to get through that he
nearly gave up.

It told Gil about people who squirted toilet cleaner in rabbits’ eyes to see if it made them go blind. People who shaved the fur off guinea pigs and then dripped bleach on their skin to
see how badly it burnt them. Researchers who fed monkeys cocaine and cannabis to make them into drug addicts, who infected monkeys with AIDS and then tried to find ways to cure them. People who
made dogs eat lipstick to see if they got cancer. Scientists who fiddled with the genes in embryos and made mice with two heads, or with half their head missing altogether, or with no legs, or with
too many legs. People who grew eyes on creatures where eyes were never meant to grow. Scientists who put electrodes deep into chimpanzees’ brains and then ran electricity through them to see
how the chimps twitched.

People like Dad.

Some of these procedures, the booklet said, were now banned. Animal rights movements had fought long and hard to achieve this. As a result, no UK experiments were permitted on chimpanzees or
gorillas any more. The use of animals in the testing of cosmetics and household chemicals had been reduced.

But it had not stopped. Millions of animal experiments were carried out every year in Britain alone, and millions more in the rest of Europe and in the USA. Millions of animals that could not
speak for themselves, that needed people to stand up and speak out for them.

The pictures were awful. When Gil closed the booklet he felt sick and upset. He didn’t want to feel like this, he thought angrily. He wanted to be able to make
Dad
feel sick and
upset, while he stayed in control just like Jude had.

Jude was right. It was torture. Dad took part in the torture of animals.

The thought was too big to fit inside his head properly. The rollercoaster feeling swept over him again and for a while the ground and the sky switched places. Gil lay back on the bed with his
eyes closed, trying to picture Jude the way he had looked on the television news. He very badly wanted to see Jude again. He needed Jude to appear out of nowhere to rescue him, crashing through the
ceiling on a rope dangled out of a helicopter.

There was a knock on the door and Dad came in before Gil could say anything.

‘I’m making tea,’ he said. ‘What would you like?’

‘Uh – maybe just a cheese sandwich.’

‘You had that for lunch,’ said Dad.

Gil looked up at Dad as he stood in the doorway, with the W-shaped crease between his eyebrows, and black hair flopping over his face. He looked so ordinary, and he was talking about ordinary
things. Could the people who did the things in Jude’s booklet really seem so normal? It was hard to make sense of it. The idea came into Gil’s head that Dad might be like one of those
Doctor Who
monsters that look exactly the same as human beings, until the moment when their skin splits open and the alien inside bursts out and starts to devour people.

‘OK then, pasta,’ Gil said.

‘Are you OK?’ said Dad.

‘Yeah,’ said Gil. ‘Fine.’

Dad nodded, and then he frowned. He’d seen the booklet.

‘Have you read this?’ he said, picking it up and leafing through it quickly.

‘Mmmm.’

Dad hesitated. ‘It’s not . . .’ he started. ‘It’s not the way they make it sound, Gil. This is deliberately written to shock people. It’s propaganda. There is
another side to it, you know.’

‘Oh,’ Gil said. ‘Really.’

‘For one thing, they’ve lumped everything in together. I can see that at once. They don’t make any distinction at all between different kinds of animal testing.’

Was there a difference? Gil didn’t see how.

‘Maybe we can talk about it sometime,’ said Dad, after a short silence.

No, you mean
Maybe I’ll give you a lecture on why you should see things exactly the way I do,
Gil thought, but instead he said, ‘Why did you never tell me you did experiments
on animals?’

‘Well . . .’

Dad looked at the floor and didn’t answer for a while. He flicked a corner of Jude’s booklet.

‘Safety, partly. Some of my colleagues have had their property attacked. Car tyres let down, brakes damaged, fireworks through the letterbox, even occasional death threats. When
you’re in that situation, the fewer people who know what you do the better. And it’s a difficult subject, I acknowledge that. I was going to tell you when I thought you were old enough
to cope with it.’

‘And when would that have been, exactly?’

‘Gil, I didn’t want you to be upset or frightened.’

‘It’s pretty frightening to suddenly find out that my dad’s a . . .’

‘A what?’

Torturer.
Gil opened his mouth but he couldn’t say it. Dad looked serious and a bit impatient, the way he always looked during this kind of discussion. But behind him Gil could see
the shadow of another Dad, a man in a white coat with a knife in his hand, grinning like a madman.

‘Gil, listen. I am a respected scientist who makes tiny genetic changes in mice in order to try and bring about massive improvements in the health of thousands of people. I do not hurt
animals for fun. I don’t believe in fox hunting. I don’t approve of factory farming. I don’t support the use of animals in testing cosmetics and chemicals. I certainly don’t
agree with using animals to test weapons of any sort. But what we’re doing in our labs – it’s different, Gil. It’s critically important research.’

‘Oh,’ said Gil. ‘Right.’
Argue back, you moron,
he told himself, but Dad was off again before he could put a sentence together.

‘And even if I didn’t disagree so profoundly with their views,’ Dad went on, waving Jude’s booklet, ‘I really wouldn’t want you getting mixed up in this
animal rights stuff. It’s too confrontational. Believe me, I’ve seen enough demonstrations outside my building in the last few years to know how violent and nasty it gets. It’s
not something that a boy of your age should be involved in.’

‘Dad, you haven’t got a clue. Like sitting in your office and watching demonstrations through the window makes you an expert, does it?’

Dad looked at Gil with a strange expression on his face, as if he was listening to music from very far away.

‘I know a lot more than you think,’ he said. ‘From experience as well as observation.’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘In fact, I met your mother on a demonstration. We were both members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and we took part in a mass attempt to break into a military base where nuclear
weapons were held. It got pretty unpleasant. We were arrested for criminal damage and trespass and ended up sharing the back of a police van.’

Gil stared at Dad. He didn’t look as if he was joking.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Gil said.

‘We had to go to court for it. We both got fined – well, so did a lot of people. Then some of them, including your mother, refused to pay the fine and went to prison.’

‘Prison? Mum?’

That was even harder to imagine than the idea of Dad on a demo. Mum, who drifted about the house and screamed with terror when she broke a plate – how could she ever have been tough enough
to survive prison?

‘For about a fortnight, yes.’

‘And what about you?’ said Gil.

‘I paid the fine at the last minute,’ said Dad. ‘I had an interview for a very important research post. If I’d gone to prison I might have missed my chance
altogether.’

‘So you let Mum go on her own?’

‘Gil, we hardly knew each other then. Anyway, we wouldn’t have been together. There are separate prisons for men and women. I did visit her, though.’

Dad gazed through the bedroom window and Gil saw the faraway look come over his face again.

‘If you’ve been arrested yourself,’ Gil said, ‘how come you gave me such a hard time when I came home in a police car?’

Dad immediately snapped back into the room. ‘That was completely different,’ he said sharply. ‘I was arrested for something I believed in passionately. We were trying to
prevent crimes against humanity. You were picked up by the police for littering in a public park.’

Gil bit the tip of his tongue so hard that it hurt. ‘Why aren’t you still out there, then, demonstrating, or breaking into nuclear bases, or whatever it was you did, if you thought
it was so important?’

‘Things changed,’ said Dad. ‘I grew up. I discovered that not everything is as straightforward as it seems when you’re young. You will too, some day.’

He walked out of the room, still holding Jude’s booklet.

So this was what growing up was about, was it? thought Gil fiercely. You started out with principles. You had things you really believed in, things you would fight for and shout about. And then,
slowly, they started to fade. They shrivelled up and became unimportant. And eventually you turned into people like your parents – people who couldn’t be bothered to stand up for
anything any more, people who had terrible secrets that they hid from you for years, people who told you to do one thing and then did the opposite themselves.

At that instant, Gil decided it was never going to happen to him. He was going to join Jude and stand shoulder to shoulder with him until they achieved something huge. It was a waste of time
waiting for the world to change. Gil would change the world with his own hands.

But just finding Jude, Gil knew, might be a task in itself. When Gil had met him he’d been living in a tree, and now even the tree didn’t exist any more. How did
you track down someone like that?

After tea, Dad went up to see Mum again. Gil didn’t feel like asking if he could come too. Instead he sat in the front room looking at the silent television set and wandered around in his
thoughts.

He had no phone number for Jude, no idea where he lived or worked, not even a surname. Maybe, though, there would be a contact number for the local animal rights group on the back of
Jude’s booklet. That would be something. Gil jumped up, and then flopped down again. It was pointless looking in his bedroom. Dad had walked off with the booklet. He could have put it
anywhere. But at least Gil had a bit of time to poke about while Dad was safely shut away upstairs with Mum. He got up again and began quietly to move around the house.

The booklet didn’t seem to be in the front room or the kitchen. Gil peered in the bin. Right at the bottom was the carrier bag full of broken plate that Dad had cleared up. Gil lifted it
carefully, but there was nothing underneath. So unless Dad had taken the booklet upstairs, it was probably in Dad’s study. Gil stopped for a moment. Dad’s study was completely off
limits. Now that Gil was beginning to get an idea of what Dad did at work, it was obvious why Dad would want to ban him from the study. There was probably all kinds of sensitive stuff in there that
he wanted to keep secret.

But it’s my house too, Gil thought. It’s my life. I’ve got a right to know. He slipped off his shoes and padded up the hall to the study door. As he stood with his fingers on
the handle, listening carefully for any sound from upstairs, he felt his heart thumping uncomfortably.
Don’t be stupid,
he told himself.
It’s just a room.
But it was a
room he knew he shouldn’t enter, in the same way that he knew he shouldn’t steal things or hit anyone even if they hit him first. It was hard to break a rule that had been in your head
for as long as you could remember.

He pushed open the study door. It felt as heavy as a slab of rock.

Most of the house had wooden floors but Dad’s study was carpeted, and the small room seemed soft and muffled. One whole wall was lined with bookshelves, and there were several filing
cabinets and an armchair, and then Dad’s big desk with everything laid out neatly – pens and trays of papers, a holiday photo of the three of them, Dad’s laptop and a notebook.
Above the desk was a big fossil fish in a glass box. In the middle of the desk was Jude’s booklet. Gil pounced on it with relief. Quickly he tore a page out of Dad’s notebook and copied
the phone number from the back of the booklet. He stuffed the paper in his pocket.