Fifty Fifty (26 page)

‘Don’t, Gil,’ Jude said, almost kindly. ‘I really don’t want to hurt you.’

Gil swung his fist backwards, and the edge of his hand smashed into the fire alarm.

The sound unleashed by the sirens made Gil feel as if his head was being smacked against the wall again and again. He saw Jude start to put his hands to his ears, and then grab the big box of
mice and run from the room.

Gil nearly cried with relief. Dad’s mice were safe. He leant back against the wall for a moment, his head jangling so badly from the noise and the bump Jude had given him that it took a
moment to notice that his left hand hurt too, the one he’d used to break the glass on the fire alarm.

Gil fumbled in his bag to find the torch. When he switched it on he saw blood pouring from the side of his hand, halfway between the little finger and the wrist. He watched as his palm slowly
began to fill with a pool of red under the plastic glove. Then Gil realised that the glove must have split somewhere, because blood was also dripping steadily on to the floor. There were already
big splodges of blood on his jeans. The sight of the thick dark liquid shocked him into action. It was the middle of the night. The alarms were going off in a building he should never have been in.
Jude had fled, and the police would be on their way. And Gil was marooned at the top of the labs, leaking blood and waiting to be caught red-handed.

He ran. In the washroom he grabbed a roll of kitchen paper and wound it round his damaged hand while he skidded through the corridors to the top of the stairs. Then he stopped, battered by the
shriek of the sirens. If the police were coming, would he be able to make it to the back door before they trapped him? Oh God, he didn’t want to be caught. Gil thought of the smell of the
police car, days and days and days ago, and a morsel of sick started to rise up in his throat. But if he didn’t go down the stairs there was nowhere to go. He didn’t know any other way
out.

Gil stood there helplessly while signals rocketed up and down the pathways inside his brain. He found himself wondering why the luminous fire escape signs on the wall were all pointing the wrong
way.
You’re wasting time, moron,
he told himself desperately. Why was it that you always noticed stupid, irrelevant things, especially when you needed to concentrate? The arrows
didn’t point down the stairs, they all pointed back the way he’d come, back to the animal rooms. It was crazy. Except of course . . .

Gil thought of Dad’s office, and wheeled round suddenly. He had the key. That was it. He charged back through the corridors, the walls and floors and ceilings all vibrating with noise. It
was left and left again as you came out of the washroom. Gil flashed his torch up at every door he passed, although he knew exactly which one was Dad’s.

Dr Matthew Walker.
Gil yanked the keys out of his pocket and shone the torch on them, but he couldn’t think which keys he’d already used for the doors downstairs. The howl of
the sirens assaulted him in wave after wave of sound and Gil had to try every key on the ring at least twice before he got the one that fitted. As he burst through the door into Dad’s office
he took a big sobbing gulp of air and headed straight for the window.

Then the smell of the room hit him. It was familiar somehow, like coming home after a long holiday. Gil sniffed, and as the smell filled his nose he knew suddenly it was Dad. A bit of
aftershave, a bit of coffee, a clean shirt, warm skin, proper fountain pen ink, just a hint of mouse pee – Gil had a memory of sitting on Dad’s lap when he must have been quite small.
Dad was holding him while he cried. His foot was hurting. Gil had buried his face in Dad’s chest and smelt his smell.
Don’t worry, Gil. Your body will mend it. Your body is so
clever.

As Gil hesitated in front of the window he looked back at the picture above Dad’s desk. That’s me
,
thought Gil. He stared up at the cluster of cells, and could not begin to
understand how he had travelled all the distance that lay between those specks of nothing and the person who stood in Dad’s office with the scream of the sirens filling his head.

Go, he thought. Before you run out of time.

The window slid open fairly easily. There was plenty of room to get through. Gil fiddled with the box under the window, trying to release the escape ladder. Inside the box, the ladder was packed
in a neat roll. Gil pulled it out and hurled it through the window. The ladder didn’t feel heavy enough, even though the entire thing was made of metal chains with metal rungs fixed across
them. He heard the ladder rattle against the wall as it fell, and quickly he swung one leg and then the other out over the windowsill and found a foothold on a rung.

Then he stopped. One hand gripped the chain of the ladder but his injured left hand was too thickly wrapped in kitchen paper to be able to hold on to anything. Gil ripped at the paper with his
teeth and it came away in blood-soaked lumps and fell to the ground far below. Immediately his hand began to bleed again but he made himself start to descend the ladder, feeling the blood drip
warmly on his face every now and again. The ladder swung slightly and scraped the smooth stone wall.

Gil felt as if the descent would go on for ever. This was his existence now. There were no more choices to make. There was nothing but the stinging smell of the metal chains, and the drip of the
blood from his hand, and the feel of his foot poking the empty air to find the next rung. The screams of the fire alarms were muffled, but other noises pushed their way into his head: dogs barking
somewhere below, and police sirens in the distance. He took no notice. He just had to keep going down the ladder. That was all.

Without warning, Gil’s foot touched something hard and flat and for a moment he couldn’t work out what it was. It felt nothing like the metal rungs pressing into the soles of his
feet. Then it dawned on him that it was the ground. He had reached the ground. Gil let go of the chains of the ladder and collapsed on to his side. The dogs sounded closer now. He should get up and
run back to his bike before the dogs came. But he lay there for a minute longer, and the dogs didn’t come, although they still barked. The guards didn’t appear either. Gil wondered what
Jude had done to them. He sat up carefully and found he was lying in the little garden that he had seen from Dad’s window, the one he had watched the guards walk through on their patrol of
the building.

Slowly, Gil picked himself up and began to make his way to the road. His legs were too shaky to run and so he stumbled as fast as he could away from the building, round the corner and back to
the alleyway where he’d left the bike. The road that ran past the labs was empty and silent. There was no sign of Jude, no sign of the police, no sign of anyone. But the police sirens were
getting louder.

Gil knew he would have to bandage his hand again somehow, otherwise he would leave a trail of blood that would lead the police straight to him, like Hansel and Gretel following the pebbles home
through the wood. He couldn’t think of anything to use as a bandage except the T-shirt he was wearing under his hoodie, so he stripped quickly to the waist and stood there shuddering with
cold while he peeled off the gloves and dumped them and wrapped the T-shirt firmly round his hand. Then he pulled the hoodie back on, flipped up the hood and pushed his bike out of the alley.

At first Gil couldn’t balance on the bike at all. His legs didn’t feel part of him any more, and when he finally managed to stay on the saddle his legs didn’t remember how to
pedal.
Push. Now. Down. Up. That’s it. Push.
About five minutes after leaving the alley he heard the police cars race up a street parallel to him, and he caught a flash of the blue
lights of a fire engine at the end of a side road. He kept going, head down, the freezing air pouring through his hoodie and chilling him to the bone.
Push. Push. Push.

When at last Gil fell off his bike in the driveway that led up to his front door, the house still looked reassuringly dark and silent. He parked his bike under the lean-to and scrambled in over
the conservatory roof. Twice he nearly slid back off the roof. It was almost impossible with only one good hand, and the slightest touch to his left hand made it hurt like crazy. As Gil dropped
through the bedroom window, a blanket of weariness fell over him and it was all he could do not to crawl into bed just as he was and give up. But he couldn’t give up; he hadn’t
finished. He had to put all Dad’s things back where they belonged before Dad discovered they were missing. He reached up to pull the rucksack off his back and yelped quietly with pain.

Carefully, Gil touched his hand. If he didn’t sort that out first he was going to bleed everywhere again. The desk still blocked his bedroom door and he had to hook a foot around one of
the legs to drag it away. It made far too much noise, and Gil made himself listen at his bedroom door for a while in case Mum or Dad had heard anything. Then he kicked off his trainers and tiptoed
across the dark landing to the bathroom, where he locked the door behind him before he switched on the light.

Gil held his hand over the basin while he unwrapped the T-shirt. It was soaked with blood. He threw the T-shirt in the bath and began to run his hand under the cold tap. The stream of water
immediately turned scarlet and the wound began to ache even more intensely. The gash was deep, so deep that it would not stop bleeding no matter how much water he ran over it. Maybe it needed
stitching. Gil worried briefly about bleeding to death. He rummaged through the bathroom cabinet for wads of cotton wool and a roll of bandage and bound up the wound as tightly as possible. The
T-shirt would just have to stay where it was, he thought. He could always claim he’d had a nose bleed.

Just before Gil switched off the light he glanced at himself in the mirror. He looked dreadful. There were bloodstains on his face but he decided to leave them there to back up his nose bleed
story. There was also a spot of blood on the silver door-release pendant that still hung round his neck. He washed it as thoroughly as he could with one hand and dropped it into a towel.

Then he crept downstairs to Dad’s study.

He’d dumped the gloves in the alley near the labs, so this time Gil used the towel to handle everything he put back in the drawer. It was awkward, and at one point he dropped Dad’s
keys with a gigantic crash that sent him scuttling away from the desk in a panic. No one came, and he had got as far as locking the desk drawer and was struggling to push the key back behind the
photo frame without leaving fingerprints on anything when the phone suddenly started to ring in the front room.

In the quiet house it sounded as loud as the sirens Gil had set off in Dad’s building, and it went on and on. When the answerphone clicked in there was a little pause before the ringing
began again almost immediately. It wasn’t going to stop until someone answered it. Gently Gil pushed the study door closed and stood with his back against it.
Please,
he pleaded.
I’ve had enough now. Let me stop.

He heard the creak of a door above him, and then someone stepping very softly down the stairs. A few seconds later the ringing stopped in the front room and Gil heard Dad’s voice, low and
sleepy and muffled through the wall.

He took his chance to escape from the study, slipping upstairs and back into his room, where he put the backpack under the desk and climbed into bed just as he was. He left the door ajar so it
looked exactly the way Dad would have seen it as he’d passed the room on his way down to answer the phone.

Gil pulled the duvet over himself. He lay on his back with his eyes wide open and tried to relax, but it was impossible. His whole body screamed with shock. Every pulse of blood in his injured
hand felt like a fresh bruise and his mind jangled with voices and sirens and flashing lights. He felt Jude push him aside again and his skull rang with pain as it hit the wall. He felt mouse feet
running over him. He was buried in mice. They would suffocate him. The feeling was so strong that Gil had to sit up and take a gulp of air. Then he heard Dad’s feet on the stairs and quickly
lay down again, turning away from the door and pulling the covers up to hide his clothes. The footsteps stopped by the bedroom door and Gil tried to fake sleep while he listened to Dad’s
breathing and imagined him looking in through the partly-open door.

‘Gil?’ Dad whispered at last.

Gil lay completely still until he heard Dad give a sigh and shuffle away.

The numbers on the alarm clock next to his bed shone red in the darkness. It was three o’clock in the morning.

What have I done? thought Gil.

He drifted in and out of sleep. Several times he jerked awake as if someone was holding his head under water and he was about to drown. When the clock said half past four Gil woke properly and
knew that it was useless trying to get back to sleep. His jeans were as heavy as chain mail, and his feet were freezing. For a while he tried to warm his feet by gripping them one at a time behind
his knees. He longed to be able to get up and wander into Mum and Dad’s room, like he used to when he was little and had a nightmare. Dad would always sleepily roll out of bed without protest
and go off to Gil’s bed and Gil could climb into the warm hollow he’d left behind and fall asleep in safety. But he was much too old for that now.

Thoughts ran crazily through his head in a continuous flood. He had saved Dad’s mice. He had got his own back on Dad. He had committed a serious crime. He had let Jude down and now Jude
would despise him. He should have let the mice go free. He’d been brave. He’d been unbelievably stupid. He would get away with it and no one would ever find out. He would be hunted down
and sent to prison. Dad would forgive him. Dad would hate him for ever.

He lay and gazed at the ceiling as the night crawled through hours of nothingness towards morning.