Fifty Fifty

by S. L. Powell

  ‘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.

  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, an
yway, 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?’