by S. L. Powell
‘Oh my God . . .’ There was a long hissing sigh, like a dragon breathing in its sleep. ‘Gil, I can’t tell you what to do. I can’t. You’re only a kid. It’s not right.’
‘I am not —’ Gil had to stop for a moment. ‘I am not a kid. Jude, I really want to do this. You told me it was impossible to get inside the labs, but I’ve actually got a chance to get in there and do something. Maybe it’s the only chance. So are you seriously saying I can’t do it because I’m just a kid?’
Jude was quiet, and when he spoke again his voice had the crisp, clean bite that Gil wanted so much to hear.
‘OK, Gil, you’re on. Let’s go for it. Here’s the plan.’
Listening to Jude’s plan was like watching a magician do a clever card trick. It unfolded so quickly and easily that Gil knew he must have done this kind of thing hundreds of times before.
‘You’ll be a mole,’ said Jude at the end, and laughed.
‘What do you mean, a mole?’
‘You know, a double agent. Everybody thinks they’re on one side, but secretly they’re working for the enemy, too. That’s what moles do – they dig hidden tunnels into places they’re not supposed to go. And then they pop their heads up and make a real mess.’ He laughed again. ‘So, I’ll see you tomorrow morning?’
‘Yes, OK. If I can get out of school again.’
‘We need to crack on with this,’ said Jude. ‘Don’t want to miss our golden opportunity, do we?’
Gil sat in the shed for at least five minutes after the call had ended, checking the call register obsessively to make absolutely sure he’d deleted Jude’s number and that no trace of it remained on Mum’s mobile.
He didn’t sleep much that night. He lay in the dark with his eyes open, running over every detail of Jude’s plan, and trying to visualise the building Dad worked in, although he had never seen it. It would have high blank concrete walls, Gil reckoned, and heavy doors, like prison doors, and bars on the windows, if there were any windows at all. He imagined the rows and rows of tiny metal cages where Dad’s victims sat injured and terrified, waiting for death.
Gil’s entire body buzzed and hummed with anticipation. He was determined to make Jude proud of him. He was going to be a hero.
‘Last couple of days, then,’ said Dad as they drove to school on Thursday morning.
‘Huh?’ said Gil.
‘I mean we’re coming to the end of your period of sanctions. I don’t think I’ll need to take you to school next week. You’ve done pretty well, on the whole. Your mother and I are proud of you.’
‘Oh.’
He was going to have to be extra-careful. If he got caught today it would wreck everything. He’d have to slip out of school in a way that drew as little attention as possible. And today there was no fog. It was brilliantly sunny, the first real taste of spring.
‘So, are you still interested in coming to see the labs?’ said Dad, glancing sideways.
‘Uh – yeah.’ Gil tried not to sound too excited in case it raised Dad’s suspicions.
‘You don’t sound terribly enthusiastic. Are you sure?’
‘Dad, of course I’m sure. It’ll be a real experience.’ Gil remembered what Mum had said. ‘It’ll be good for me, to try and see things from your point of view.’
He saw Dad’s eyes widen in surprise and pleasure, and knew he’d pressed exactly the right button.
‘Ah,’ Dad said, nodding his head very slightly, just like Mr Montague did when someone gave the answer he wanted to hear.
As Gil got out of the car near the school gates he saw the crowds of people surging down the hill towards school, and decided at once that it would be much easier to disappear before school started than to try and escape later. As soon as Dad had driven off he began to battle his way uphill through the streams of kids, away from school. But suddenly there was Louis, bowling happily down towards him, and there was no time to dive out of the way.
‘Hi, Gil! Where are you going?’
‘Just – coming to meet you, actually.’ Oh crap, thought Gil. Why hadn’t he got some excuse ready? Any old lame thing would have done for Louis.
‘Oh, great! Have you been here long? I’ve been rushing the whole way, thinking I was going to be late, but I’m not, am I? God, it’s really warm, isn’t it? Too warm for this time of year, my mum says. Oh, hang on a minute, I’ve got to get this sweatshirt off before I melt . . .’
Louis chattered on, the usual waterfall of nonsense gushing out of his mouth. Gil followed him reluctantly back down the hill, knowing that if he tried to disappear now Louis would stick to him like chewing gum. He’d ask a load of questions about where Gil was going and what he was up to and then go all suspicious and silent again.
It would have to be lunchtime, then, thought Gil.
The morning crept along much too slowly. By the time Gil came out of the last lesson with Louis he had almost lost his nerve. It was a stupid idea anyway, he told himself. It would never work. But he made himself say to Louis, ‘I’m going out to get lunch.’
‘We’re not allowed off site at lunchtime,’ said Louis immediately, just as Gil had expected.
‘So? Who’s going to notice? Oh, unless you grass me up, of course.’
‘Oh.’ Louis looked hurt. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’
‘You’d better not.’
‘Why do you need to go out, anyway?’
‘I’m sick of chips and beans. The canteen’s vegetarian food is rubbish. I want to get a takeaway.’
‘Oh.’ Louis looked envious. ‘Could you get me one?’
‘No. If you’re too much of a wuss to come with me you can just eat the canteen crap.’ Gil held his breath and hoped Louis wouldn’t find it in himself to be brave. Louis gazed at him plaintively and said nothing.
‘See you later, then,’ Gil said, and walked away to the school gates without him.
The bus ride to Jude’s house was much quicker than Gil expected. The fog three days ago had made it seem like a journey halfway across the world, full of mysterious twists and turns and sudden stops. In sunlight it didn’t feel that far. Gil hadn’t bothered to bring the map this time. He knew what Albert Street looked like and just how far down Jude’s house was. He was even prepared to find Sally sprawled across the path again. But the little garden was empty and quiet, and the front door was shut.
The doorbell rang somewhere deep inside the house. Gil stood on the broken tiles of the path in a bubble of warm sunshine and waited. Jude was a while coming to the door, but then he whisked Gil inside quickly without a word as if he feared someone was snooping on him. After the spring sun the house was as chilly and dark as a cave.
‘I thought you might have changed your mind,’ Jude said quietly, when his door was safely shut. ‘I thought you’d be here earlier.’
‘I didn’t want anyone to suspect anything, so I had to wait till lunchtime.’
‘Oh. Right.’
‘I’ve only got about twenty minutes.’
Jude stood with his heels just off the ground, like an animal getting ready to run. He looked tense and serious, quite unlike the relaxed figure Gil had seen hanging out in a tree two weeks ago. Gil began to feel nervous, and he wondered what there was to be nervous about. After all, he wasn’t going to do anything really dangerous, was he? No break-ins, no weapons, no bombs, no direct confrontation. Just a bit of spying, that’s all.
‘You do know what you’re letting yourself in for, don’t you?’ said Jude.
‘Um – I think so.’
‘You’re almost certainly going to be breaking the law. I don’t know what the rules are for kids – sorry, I mean people of your age – but if I did this I could end up in prison.’
‘But you’ve done it yourself, haven’t you? And it wasn’t a problem then. You didn’t get found out.’
‘No, but I’m just concerned for you,’ said Jude. ‘All you need is for one tiny thing to go wrong. They might have a body scanner, like the ones they have in airports. They
might even frisk you, I don’t know.’
‘I’m going to do it, OK?’ Gil’s heart was banging so loudly he wondered if Jude could hear it.
‘You don’t know how much help this could be to us, if you can carry it off,’ said Jude very softly.
‘Could you just get on with it,’ said Gil, ‘before you freak me out completely?’
A hint of a smile crossed Jude’s face and was gone again at once. He pulled a small bunch of keys out of the pocket of his jeans and unlocked a drawer in his desk. Then he took out a big metal cash box and unlocked that too. Inside, Gil could see something wrapped in a tea towel. And when Jude unfolded the tea towel, there was a tiny square thing.
‘This is the camera,’ said Jude. It was so tiny that Gil couldn’t believe it would really work.
‘It’s got a button stuck to it,’ Gil said, puzzled.
‘Yeah, that’s why it’s called a buttonhole camera,’ said Jude, rolling his eyes ever so slightly. ‘The button’s clipped to the camera lens, which is just a pinhole. You put the button through your jacket, or whatever, with the camera hidden behind it, and no one suspects a thing.’
‘What if I haven’t got any clothes with the right sort of buttons?’
‘What about that shirt you’ve got on?’
‘This? It’s a school shirt.’
‘It’s perfect.’
‘But I never wear this sort of thing at weekends,’ said Gil.
‘Wear it,’ said Jude. He poked about in the cash box and pulled out a small white button, almost identical to the buttons on Gil’s shirt. Jude snapped it on to the lens, and then dropped the camera into Gil’s hand.
‘Slip it inside your shirt,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a look.’
The camera felt cold against Gil’s skin as he buttoned the lens cover into his shirt. A thin wire trailed back over his shoulder. Jude took a step away and inspected him carefully.
‘You’ll need to put something dark underneath to disguise the camera,’ he said. ‘A T-shirt, maybe. Then you can run the lead down to the recorder in your pocket. It’d be a good idea to tape it in place so it doesn’t get tangled or pop out of your collar.’
Jude came closer and touched the button with the tip of his finger, gently pressing the camera against the place where Gil’s ribs met, and a sudden weird feeling flooded Gil’s head. It was as if everything he had ever felt in his life was squeezed into the tiny space under Jude’s fingertip, like the invisible speck that contained all the matter in the universe in the instant before the Big Bang. Time didn’t exist. Everything was waiting, and Gil waited too, his mind as light as dust. He felt that Jude’s finger might burn a hole into his chest and right out the other side.
Jude stood there, frowning, thinking. His voice, when it came, sounded as loud as thunder. ‘The best thing would be to take the real button off altogether, and make a slit in the material. Then you’ll be able to button the camera through both layers. It’ll be better hidden that way.’
‘OK,’ Gil said, with some difficulty. Jude was still fingering the button in the centre of his chest.
‘And put it a bit higher up, just in case they make you wear a lab coat or something.’
Jude bounded away to his desk so unexpectedly that Gil nearly fell over, as if the fingertip had been the only thing holding him upright.
‘See how well this fits in your pocket,’ Jude said. The recorder that went with the camera was about the size of a mobile phone. Gil’s trouser pocket swallowed it whole. ‘Feed the lead down under your shirt and we’ll do a dummy run. Remember, the main thing is not to get too close to your subject, otherwise you’ll just get a big messy blur.’
Gil tried hard to concentrate while Jude ran through how to operate the controls by touch while the recorder was hidden in his pocket.
‘Now film me,’ said Jude.
‘Is that a good idea? I mean, what if I got caught with a shot of you on the camera?’
‘We’ll wipe it afterwards, don’t worry.’
Gil pressed the record button and tried to angle the camera towards Jude as he leaned back against his desk, grinning.
‘Say something, then,’ said Gil.
‘The revolution will not be televised,’ said Jude. ‘At least I bloody hope it won’t.’ He cackled loudly.
Gil pressed stop, and Jude played the footage back through the tiny LCD screen on the back of the recorder. Gil was surprised at how good the picture was. He’d managed to cut the top of Jude’s head off, but it didn’t seem to bother him.
‘Whatever you do, don’t walk like this trying to point the camera higher,’ said Jude, strutting about the room with his chest puffed up. ‘You’ll be rumbled in no time.’
‘You look like a chicken,’ Gil said, and Jude immediately began to flap his elbows and make clucking noises, jerking his knees nearly up to his chin as he pranced around. Gil started to laugh and found he couldn’t stop. He laughed and laughed, hysterically and stupidly, until his face ached and his stomach hurt. It was horrible, like being drowned in laughter.
Then there was a knock at the door and Jude froze. ‘Who is it?’ he said casually, as Gil quickly stuffed the video recorder back in his pocket.
‘It’s me,’ said a quavering voice.
Jude opened the door a crack, and Gil could see a little piece of Sally’s face.
‘I want to come in,’ she said firmly.
‘Not now, Sally, we’re busy. I’ll come and see you in a bit.’
‘You’re laughing at me, aren’t you? I could hear you. Why are you laughing at me?’ She was beginning to sound upset.
‘Of course we weren’t laughing at you,’ said Jude. ‘I was being silly and it made Gil laugh, that’s all. You remember Gil. You met him on Monday.’
‘Oh, it’s that nice boy again,’ said Sally, almost managing a smile as she caught sight of Gil through the crack. ‘You all right?’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
‘I’ll come and see you in a minute,’ said Jude again. ‘We’re nearly finished.’
‘All right, then.’ Sally vanished without a sound.
Gil pulled the recorder out of his pocket and unbuttoned the tiny camera from his shirt.
‘Wrap it in this,’ said Jude. He handed Gil the tea towel. ‘The camera’s the bit you need to be careful with. It’s really delicate. We don’t want you to go through with this and then find the bloody thing didn’t work because it was damaged, do we?’
Gil carefully put the wrapped equipment into the bottom of his school bag.
‘Now, let’s just run through it one more time.’ Jude repeated the main points of the plan. The camera battery would last about four hours. Gil’s job was to film everything from the moment he got to the labs to the moment he left, because even if it seemed boring to him it would give Jude valuable information about what was going on in there. To be on the safe side, he shouldn’t phone Jude again from home, or even from Mum’s mobile. And then Gil would bring the camera back first thing on Monday.
‘You’re a total hero,’ said Jude as he showed Gil to the door. ‘There aren’t that many people who’ve got the bottle for this kind of thing. I think you’re amazing.’
Hero. Amazing. It was everything Gil had wanted to hear. He stepped out into the sunny street and Jude’s words felt warmer than the sun.
On the bus ride back across town, Gil fantasised about what Jude had asked him to do. He was going to make a film that would expose what went on in the dark heart of the animal labs. Perhaps Jude would put the film on a website for the whole world to see. Or perhaps he would turn it into a television programme. It would be just like all those fly-on-the-wall documentaries where dangerous criminals secretly got filmed doing outrageous things. Of course Gil knew he would never be able to put his name to it, but there would be a huge outcry when people saw the terrible things in his film and then they would have to close the labs. Dad would be beside himself, but he would never know that he’d led the enemy into the building hi
mself. He would never know it was Gil who had more or less single-handedly shut down his place of work.
Gil wandered back into the school playground at the tail end of the lunch break, still submerged in his spying adventure, and Louis latched on to him at once.
‘Nice lunch?’ Louis said, spikily.
‘Yeah, not bad.’
‘What did you have, then?’
Slowly Gil started to rise out of the deep place that his daydream had taken him to. Lunch? He hadn’t even thought about lunch. He was absolutely starving.
‘Um – a kebab,’ he said. ‘Actually it wasn’t that nice. I feel a bit crap now.’
‘Right. A kebab. Perfect food for a vegetarian.’
‘I don’t mean a meat kebab, you moron.’
‘What other kind of kebabs are there?’
‘Well, it had – uh – peppers, I think, and some kind of cheese . . .’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Gil, just shut up, will you?’ Louis interrupted. ‘I’m getting sick of this.’
‘Sick of what?’
‘Sick of you lying to me the whole time. I’m not stupid. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m getting to the point where I don’t believe anything you say to me any more.’
‘I’m not lying!’
‘Yeah, sure, Pinocchio. I can see your nose growing from here.’
‘God, some bloody friend you are,’ Gil said. He turned away and tried to step back into his daydream, but Louis wasn’t about to stop.
‘You want to know what sort of friend I am? I’m your only friend. Because nobody else will put up with you, will they? And I can’t say I blame them. Half the time you just use me, like when you wanted help handing out those stupid leaflets, and the rest of the time you treat me like a piece of dog poo. I mean, when was the last time we actually did anything together?’
‘I’ve been grounded for the last two weeks, remember?’
‘And when are you going to be ungrounded?’ Louis demanded.
