by S. L. Powell
They both went into the kitchen, and Gil went back to Fireman Sam. He watched him rescue Bella’s cat Rosa from the top of a tree while he weighed up the choice he needed to make.
Dad or Jude?
It was simple, really, Gil realised – as simple as Fireman Sam plucking the cat out of the tree. He didn’t need to know whether animal experiments were right or wrong. He didn’t need to know anything about them at all. The only thing that mattered was that Jude had pushed Dad to the limit. They’d gone head to head, and it had taken Jude less than five minutes to defeat him completely.
It was suddenly clear to Gil that he had found the thing he was looking for, the secret power that could make your enemy crumble into a pile of dust. Animal rights – this was the issue that made Dad froth and fall apart like a piece of chalk dropped in acid. If Gil joined Jude’s campaign against the labs it would drive Dad crazy. It was even better than taking up smoking, because it wasn’t illegal for a thirteen-year-old and it wasn’t likely to kill him.
Gil’s first step came at lunch on Sunday. Dad had roasted the venison he’d bought from the market. It smelt good, but Gil had already decided what he was going to do. He watched Dad carve slices of meat and pile them up on the dish, while steam rose from the bowls of roast potatoes and parsnips and peas and broccoli and carrots. Gil waited until Dad was about to put the meat on his plate before he made his announcement.
‘Actually, you know what?’ he said. ‘I really don’t want any meat.’
‘What?’
Dad stopped with the meat in mid-air.
‘I’ve been thinking about becoming a vegetarian,’ Gil went on. ‘I might as well start now.’
‘Gil, are you sure?’ said Mum anxiously. ‘You’re growing like mad at the moment. It might not be good for you.’
Dad didn’t move.
‘Is this a result of all that animal rights nonsense yesterday?’ he said at last.
‘No, of course not,’ Gil said, innocently. ‘Actually it’s a result of what you said, Dad.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘When we were at the market you said you shouldn’t eat any animal unless you were prepared to kill it yourself. Well, I agree with you. I wouldn’t be prepared to kill the deer this venison came from. So I’d better not eat it, had I?’
‘It’s organic,’ said Mum. ‘And RSPCA-monitored.’
‘You mean it was happy before it was murdered? No thanks. I’ll just have the veg.’
Gil went to help himself to roast potatoes, but Dad moved the dish before he could get to it.
‘Sorry, Gil,’ he said. ‘You’d better not have those. They’ve been cooked in the meat juice, I’m afraid. And that means you can’t have the parsnips, either. Or the gravy.’
As Dad whisked away the potatoes, a gorgeous meaty smell wafted up Gil’s nose and all at once he had a vivid glimpse of what he was letting himself in for. No meat. No chicken, no pork, no bacon, no ham, no beefburgers, no sausages. It was going to be really hard. He shut his eyes briefly. He was going to need every gram of willpower he possessed.
‘I think I’ll just have some bread and cheese, then,’ Gil said.
Mum started to get up, but Dad put a hand on her arm.
‘I think you’ll just go and get it yourself, then,’ he said to Gil.
As Gil came back to the table with bread and butter and cheese he was aware of Dad watching him intently.
‘You know, Gil, if you’re going down this route, you might want to consider doing it properly,’ Dad said through a mouthful of meat.
‘What do you mean, properly?’
‘You shouldn’t be eating cheese either,’ said Dad. ‘Do you know how they make cheese? They mash up dead calves’ stomachs and use it to break down the milk.’
‘Matt, please,’ said Mum, putting down her fork. ‘Not over lunch.’
‘I’m just telling him the facts,’ said Dad. ‘That butter you’ve got there – it’s a direct consequence of killing animals for their meat. Cows start to produce milk only when they have calves. The female calves are allowed to grow up to have more babies, but the male calves end up on the dinner table as beef. Milk is just a useful by-product of the meat industry. So you see, Gil, if you’re not going to eat meat, the only logical choice is to become a vegan and not eat anything at all that comes from an animal.’
Gil swallowed a lump of cheese with an effort. Jude would know how to argue back, he thought. Jude would be able to smash Dad’s stupid facts to a pulp and wipe that self-satisfied grin off his face. He was still considering how to reply when, to his complete surprise, Mum stepped in.
‘Don’t give him such a hard time,’ she said. ‘Let him make up his own mind. He needs to think these things through for himself.’
Dad looked as surprised as Gil felt.
‘I’m helping Gil to think things through, that’s all,’ he said.
‘No, you’re not. You just want to win the argument. Look, he’s allowed to have principles, Matt. After all, we did. We stood up for what we believed in. I was a vegetarian for years. Ten years, at least. Just – let Gil have a bit of space. Even if you don’t agree with him.’
There it was – a tiny crack in the wall. Gil couldn’t believe it. Very gently, like a butterfly stamping, Mum was putting her foot down. She was disagreeing with Dad.
‘I never knew you were a vegetarian,’ Gil said. ‘Why did you give up?’
‘Well,’ Mum said. ‘I suppose there was a point in my life where it no longer seemed terribly important.’
Dad suddenly looked up at Mum. On his face was another of those expressions that Gil knew he wasn’t meant to notice, let alone understand. Mum just concentrated on her dinner, and a silence settled over them.
Gil finished his bread and cheese first, but for once he didn’t try to get away from the table as quickly as possible. He waited until Dad had put his knife and fork neatly on his plate and leant back in his chair, and Mum looked as if she was about to get up, and then he jumped up and started to clear the table without even being asked. He ferried plates and dishes and cutlery to the dishwasher and passed them to Mum for stacking. Mum thanked Gil for every single plate – as if he was handing her ten pound notes, Gil thought. He was impressed at how easy it was. If he worked at it a bit he might be able to get Mum on his side, and then Dad would be out on his own in the cold.
There was just the big meat plate left on the table.
‘Let me get that,’ said Mum.
‘No, it’s OK,’ said Gil. ‘I can do it.’
He carefully lifted the oval plate that was as big as a tray and passed it to Mum. She took it from him, smiling. And immediately – Gil saw at once what was going to happen, but he could not stop it – her fingers buckled and it slid out of her hands.
Gil felt the crash of the heavy plate smashing into the tiled floor like a physical shock, but it was Mum’s scream that really scared him. It was a scream like feedback through a microphone. It hurt his eyes and the inside of his skull as well as his ears. And it didn’t stop. Dad sprang up from the table and looked at the smashed plate, the meat splattered on the tiles. Then he looked at Gil.
Gil shook his head. ‘I didn’t . . .’ he started to say, but he couldn’t make himself heard above Mum. She was screaming, screaming, screaming, her hands hanging at her sides, tears pouring down her face. Dad stepped over the mess of meat and crockery and put his arms around her. She didn’t move. She went on screaming.
‘Shhh, shhh,’ whispered Dad. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.’
Mum’s scream gradually turned to sobbing. She howled into Dad’s chest. Please, make her stop, begged Gil inside his head. It was horrible to watch, like one of those news reports with women wailing because their whole village has been wiped out by some catastrophe. He wanted to run away but he was pinned to the spot.
‘It’s all right,’ Dad said, over and over again. ‘It’s all right.’
‘I – I
dropped – dropped it,’ she sobbed at last. ‘I dropped it, Matt. Oh God, I’m so scared. I’m getting so clumsy. And I forget things now – I forget things all the time. Like yesterday, locking myself out. I’m so scared. I don’t think I can stand it. What am I going to do?’
‘It’s just a plate, Rachel,’ said Dad. ‘Everybody drops things sometimes. It’s completely normal.’
‘It was my mum’s plate.’ Mum started to cry again.
‘Look, perhaps it wasn’t you. Gil passed you the plate, didn’t he? Perhaps it was his fault.’
Dad turned his head towards Gil, and at once Gil opened his mouth to deny everything. But then he read Dad’s face properly and stopped, bewildered. Dad wasn’t accusing him of anything. He was pleading with Gil to take the blame away from Mum.
‘Yeah, I wasn’t very careful, Mum,’ Gil said at last. ‘I’m sorry.’
He felt sick, as if he’d been blindfolded and spun round in a room he didn’t know. It was impossible to tell what was going on. Half an hour ago Dad had been stalking him like a lion looking for a chance to pounce on its prey. Now he seemed to be begging Gil to join in with some kind of weird game to make Mum feel better. And there was Mum, crying like a baby in Dad’s arms, when at lunchtime she’d stood up to Dad and told him to leave Gil alone.
What the hell were they doing to him?
Dad took Mum out of the kitchen. Gil listened to her sobs growing fainter as she went up the stairs. He knelt on the floor and began to pick up chunks of broken plate and put them in a carrier bag one by one. After a while Dad came back and tapped him on the shoulder.
‘Leave it, Gil,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it later.’
Gil watched him go to the little medicine cupboard high up on the kitchen wall and take out a packet of tablets.
‘What’s wrong with Mum?’ Gil said.
‘She’s just upset, that’s all.’
‘Dad, it was a plate. She screamed like someone was trying to kill her.’
Dad fiddled with the tablets and didn’t reply.
‘Is she ill?’ asked Gil.
Nothing.
‘Dad, please tell me. I can handle it.’
‘No, I think she’s all right,’ said Dad at last. ‘Honestly, Gil, it’s nothing you need to worry about.’
‘So what are those tablets for?’
‘It’s just something to calm her down a bit.’ Dad slipped the little box into his pocket and turned away, but Gil had already seen the label.
‘It’s Valium, isn’t it?’ Gil said. ‘I know about Valium. We did it at school, in drug education.’
Dad didn’t look round. ‘Yes, it’s Valium. But Mum’s not taking it because she’s ill. She’s just got herself into a bit of a state and she needs a sedative. I’ll be down in a while.’
Valium. People who were mentally ill took Valium. If you took it for more than a few weeks you could become addicted to it.
So was Mum having a breakdown? Was she going mad? Why was Dad trying to pretend she was fine when it was obvious she wasn’t?
Gil stared at the dishwasher. He could start the wash cycle, that might cheer Mum up.
Was any of this his fault? he wondered.
Why did they never tell him anything?
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.’
