Fifty Fifty (29 page)

‘Oh my God,’ said Louis, when Gil stopped. ‘Oh my God. Is your mum going to be OK?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Gil. ‘I think she’s going to have a test done soon.’

‘Oh my
God
. Didn’t you know
any
of this?’

‘No, but I knew there was something going on. I knew there was stuff they weren’t telling me. I think maybe that’s the reason I’ve been behaving like a bit of a
—’

‘Prat?’ said Louis. ‘Arsehole? Moron? Loser?’

‘Yeah, OK, OK. Don’t rub it in.’

‘Well, it explains a lot,’ said Louis. ‘Especially that stuff about your genes. I always knew you were a mutant monster.’

Gil nearly managed a smile. He was suddenly grateful to Louis just for being Louis.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Do you want to come over again later and do something? I don’t know – watch a DVD maybe?’

‘I can’t.’ Louis looked serious. ‘I’ve got someone else coming round.’

‘Who?’ Gil’s heart sank. How badly had he messed things up with Louis? ‘Ben?’

‘No, not Ben. I’ve decided he’s kind of a pain in the arse. It’s just a guy from skating. You don’t know him.’

‘Oh. All right.’

‘How about after school tomorrow? You’re not still grounded, are you?’

‘I haven’t got a clue,’ said Gil, thinking of a catalogue of reasons why Dad might ground him for the rest of his life. ‘I’ll let you know.’

Gil waited for punishments but none arrived. In fact the opposite happened. A few days after the raid on the labs Mum and Dad gave him a mobile phone, a really good one. With
the phone came permission to go where he wanted when he wanted, on his own – within reason. The sudden freedom almost scared him and for a couple of days he did nothing at all with it. But as
he came out of school on Friday Gil knew there was something he needed to do. He needed to go and visit Jude.

He knew Jude wouldn’t be there any more, but that wasn’t the point. He had to make the journey. As the bus carried him closer to the rundown Tesco on the Chesapeake Road, Gil
wondered if this was what it felt like to visit the grave of someone who’d died unexpectedly – to go and say goodbye, or say sorry, or any one of the hundreds of things you hadn’t
managed to say when the person was alive.

The house looked just the same. The weeds in the front garden were taller, the tiles on the path were still cracked. Gil knocked twice just to make sure. There was no reply, but as he stepped
back out of the gate into the quiet street a voice called from behind him.

‘Hello?’

It was Sally.

‘Hello, Sally,’ Gil said.

‘He’s not here, you know,’ she said immediately. She didn’t open the door more than a crack. ‘He’s gone.’

‘Yeah, I kind of knew that. Thanks.’

‘I miss him,’ Sally said. She began to cry. ‘He was good to me. Do you know where he is?’

‘No, I don’t. I’m sorry.’

‘I’m hungry,’ she said through her tears. ‘Can you lend me some money?’

Gil hesitated. Jude would not have walked away. Jude would have got her something to eat.

‘I’ll buy you some food, if you like,’ he said.

They walked slowly to the kebab shop round the corner, and Gil bought Sally a wrap. He watched her eat it fast, saying nothing. When it was finished she sighed happily.

‘That was nice,’ she said. ‘Thank you. You’re just like him, you know. You’re a good person.’

‘I don’t think I am,’ Gil said.

‘Yes you are. Most people ignore me. He didn’t, and you don’t either. You treat me like I matter, not just like I’m some mad woman. He was your friend, wasn’t
he?’

‘I’m not sure.’

He had felt the connection with Jude so strongly, and now Gil wondered if he had imagined the whole thing. Had Jude just used him? Had Jude cared about him at all, really, or did the rights of
animals matter more to him than any human being ever could?

‘Will you ever come and see me again, now he’s gone?’ said Sally.

‘Maybe,’ Gil said.

He didn’t really want to, but it was a link of some sort and he was reluctant to let it go. He missed Jude terribly. He missed the way that he had made everything so clear and calm and
simple. It had been like standing in a street on a scorchingly sunny day, with the buildings on one side of the street shimmering in the heat, and the ones on the other side in the deepest of black
shadow. Down the middle of the street ran the line that divided dark from light. Jude had made him absolutely sure which side of the street he should be on. And then the sun had gone in and the
clouds had come over, and the street was plunged into shades of grey. Nothing would ever be that clear and simple again.

The next day, Saturday, Gil went back to ice-skating with Louis. When he arrived at the top of the stairs that led down to the rink Gil stood transfixed for a moment, with his
skates hanging heavily round his neck. He had a powerful flashback of the last time he’d been there, the day he’d stolen Dad’s keys for Jude, and it made him feel as if he was
falling. He clutched the rail for balance, and then Louis came bounding back up the steps.

‘You all right?’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ said Gil. ‘It’s just a bit – loud.’ It was a pathetic thing to say, but Louis nodded sympathetically.

‘Yeah, it’s a bit much sometimes,’ he said. ‘Come on, you’ll be OK when you’re out there.’

Gil put his skates on and followed Louis on to the ice. He made himself remember why he’d always enjoyed it so much. You could skate in a crowd of other people and still be completely
alone on the ice, lost in your own imagination. Gil flew round the rink, barely making contact with the ice, and tried to visualise the hundred trillion cells in his body working together like a
giant colony of microscopic creatures. They sent and received millions of messages, they produced chemicals, they burnt fuel to enable him to do this thing that should really be impossible –
gliding on a thin blade on a surface almost too slippery to stand up on. And yet each individual cell was fragile and disposable, incapable of surviving by itself. It was a miracle. He was a
miracle.

He thought about his beginnings as the ice sped away under his skates. He thought about the way Mum and Dad had cared about him when he was no more than a minute blob of eight cells. Had he been
Gil then, when they had tested that embryo for Huntington’s Disease? And if not, when had he become Gil? Was it a gradual process, or was there a particular moment when he had crossed a line
that divided ‘Gil’ from ‘not Gil’? He began to understand why some people believed that you were human from the instant the sperm and the egg fused together.

It made him feel special to know how he had been created, but it also made him feel abandoned, like Moses thrown into the river in a basket, drifting away in the hope of a better life. And
sometimes he just felt weird, no matter how often he told himself that he wasn’t a mutant monster. His genes hadn’t actually been altered at all. He had just been screened for a
disease, and chosen because he didn’t have it. But he still sometimes wondered if he was a sort of half-cousin to the grotesque fishy strawberry Jude had told him about.

The stitches came out of Gil’s hand and the wound healed steadily, growing a scary-looking scab that eventually fell off piece by piece to leave a purple line where the cut had been. The
day Gil took the plaster off the wound, Louis had noticed it immediately. He’d been really impressed.

‘Oh, wow! That’s gross! How did you do it?’

‘I cut it on some glass.’

‘Oh, God, it looks well nasty.’

Things had almost returned to normal between them. Just occasionally Gil noticed that Louis was cautious of him, as if Gil was a dog that had bitten him and might bite again if he got too close.
He couldn’t blame Louis for feeling like that. But then Louis made up for it by putting up with Gil when he drifted off into his own thoughts, times when he knew that Louis had found him
staring blankly into nothing and Gil hadn’t heard a word he’d said.

There were lots of these times. Gil often wondered what Jude had done with the animals he took from the labs. He worried especially about the nude mice who had lymphoma, and the other ones who
were ill. Sometimes he had a vision of a big green field at dusk, and rabbits and mice scurrying happily away in the grass. ‘Be free, little ones!’ said Jude’s voice. But Gil knew
it was a fantasy. The lab animals were as tame as household pets. There was no way even the healthy ones could survive in the wild. They wouldn’t last the night.

He thought about Mum, too. Most of his thoughts were hard to put into words. They came and went in Gil’s head like satellite pictures of clouds on the weather forecast. Mum seemed just the
same, but Gil watched her more closely now, looking for any tiny change that might be significant. It was exactly what Dad did, he realised after a while. It had always irritated him to see Dad
watch Mum in that special, secret way, and now Gil was doing it himself.

Without making a conscious choice, Gil still avoided eating meat. He wasn’t sure exactly why he continued to be a vegetarian, except that it felt as if some sort of trade-off was needed.
He’d prevented Jude from liberating Dad’s mice, so he had to make up for it by not eating animals any more. Gil thought this probably wasn’t strictly logical, but it made him feel
better.

Dad accepted his decision without a word of challenge. Overnight their arguments had stopped. Without exactly avoiding each other, he and Dad kept their distance. They talked about trivial
things – homework, dinner, sport – not about the labs, or Mum, or Jude, or any of the other things that occupied Gil’s thoughts. It wasn’t as much of a relief as Gil
expected. For months he’d been wanting Dad to get off his back, and now, weirdly, he missed the rows. He missed the energy they’d had.

One evening as Gil was doing homework in his room, Dad knocked on the door.

‘Busy?’ he said, when Gil looked up in surprise.

‘No, not really. I’ve nearly finished.’

‘Can I come in?’

‘Sure,’ said Gil.

Dad came in and perched on the end of the bed, but he didn’t immediately say anything. Gil wondered what he wanted. The silence was a bit awkward, and Gil pushed pieces of paper around on
his desk while he waited for Dad to start.

‘How’s your hand?’ said Dad at last.

‘My hand?’ Gil looked down at the place where he’d cut it. ‘It’s fine, thanks.’

‘Let me see.’

Gil put out his hand. Dad grasped his wrist loosely and examined the scar.

‘Mum and I have been talking about doing her test,’ he said, looking at Gil’s hand. ‘We thought we’d do it this weekend.’

‘Oh,’ said Gil. It was a strange feeling, having Dad’s fingers in a protective ring around his wrist.

‘We’d like you to be there,’ said Dad. ‘If – you know – if it’s not too much.’

‘No, no, I’ll come,’ said Gil.

‘Actually, I’d really appreciate it if you’d help me with the test.’ Dad looked up at Gil, gently tapping the scar on his hand with the tip of a finger.

‘Yeah, I’ll try,’ said Gil. He didn’t want to think about Mum’s test, but he knew he had to face up to it at some point. ‘I’m not sure I’ll be
much use, though.’

‘Oh, you will,’ said Dad. ‘I have complete confidence in you, Gil.’ He gave Gil’s hand the briefest squeeze and dropped it, getting up from the bed.

So on Saturday Gil went back to the labs with Mum and Dad.

For the third time Gil entered the labs by the back door, this time with Dad ahead of him and Mum behind. As he climbed the winding stairs that led up to the room where Dad made his mice, Gil
thought about what they were going to do when they got there. Dad would take a sample of cells from Mum’s body – cheek cells, maybe, because they were big and flaky and easy to scrape
out from inside your mouth, or maybe a few drops of blood. Then he’d show Gil how to separate out the DNA and make billions of copies of gene IT- 15, the gene that caused Huntington’s
Disease. It was a very simple gene, Dad had said – just the same three chemicals repeated over and over again, a recipe that told the cell how to make a kind of protein. But when the gene had
too many repeats, it made a protein that was too long, like a big sticky worm. Over years and years the protein gradually filled the brain cells with a tangle of goo. And then at last, like Granny,
you started to lose control of your body and your mind.

It might be good news, thought Gil, or it might be bad news. As the three of them walked together in silence down the corridor to the brightly-lit white-and-silver room, Gil looked back at the
person he had been the last time he had been here, and the time before that. He wasn’t sure how he was going to cope if the news was bad, but he had a sense that the Gil who had been in this
corridor a few weeks ago, filming the labs for Jude, would not have coped at all.

He knew so much more now. He knew what Mum and Dad had tried to protect him from, and he understood why. He knew what had made him so angry. He knew which things were his fault and which things
weren’t. He knew that Dad wasn’t a monster or a torturer. He knew that the truth looked different depending which side of the street you were standing on, and that right and wrong came
in shades of grey as well as black and white. He knew you could hurt yourself and other people so badly that it seemed like the end of everything, and still find that it was possible to survive and
mend and move on.

It was part of who he was, Gil told himself, as they got to the door of the room and he saw Dad looking round at him, and Mum trying to smile. He would face it, because he knew who he was now.
He was Gil.

With thanks to:

Martha, for everything.

Phil,

for believing in me every step of the way.

Betty and Charles, my mum and dad,

for giving me the ability to see both sides of almost every story.

Celia Catchpole, my agent,

for her unflagging persistence and enthusiasm.

Anne Clark at Piccadilly,

for making this a better book.

Dr Roli Roberts,

for his careful checking of the science (all remaining errors are mine).

Stephanie Hale at the Oxford Literary Consultancy,