by S. L. Powell
‘All right.’
Dad scanned Gil’s face for a while. His eyes were serious. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘Think about it very carefully, that’s all I ask. Don’t be too quick to dismiss what I do because you assume it’s cruel.’
They left the room and Gil began to follow Dad through the maze of corridors and stairs and doors that led to the animals. They went deep into the heart of the building, inwards and upwards, as if they were heading for the canopy of a rainforest. Everything was very clean and bright, although Gil noticed they didn’t pass a single window. Dad was silent. There was nothing for Gil to hear except the tapping of their feet on the polished floors, and his own heart thudding in his ears.
Gil tried not to think what he might find at the end of the journey. In fact he tried not to think at all, but he could not prevent a really hideous thought that bubbled up from somewhere. What if Dad had lured him to the labs to experiment on him? What if he needed a human subject, and Gil happened to be convenient?
Don’t be stupid, he’s my dad, Gil told himself. But he couldn’t squash the thought completely, and as they climbed the final flight of stairs it trailed behind him like a Halloween balloon.
There was one last automatic door, and then a loose curtain of clear plastic strips across the corridor. Dad pushed the strips aside to let Gil through, and he found himself in a space that looked like a changing room, only it was as spotless as the kitchen at home and there was no smell of stinky trainers.
‘We need to clean ourselves up first,’ said Dad, steering Gil towards a washbasin.
‘What for?’
‘This isn’t a zoo. We don’t want the animals exposed to any more germs than they have to be.’
‘I thought you said they had diseases anyway?’
‘All the more reason to protect them. They’re vulnerable enough as it is. Here, put this on.’ Dad handed Gil a blue boiler suit made of some very light material. As Gil struggled into it, Dad pulled it up over his back and then did the Velcro fastenings right up to his chin.
‘It tickles,’ Gil complained, pulling at the Velcro. Crap, he thought. The boiler suit completely covered the camera lens, even though he’d put the camera as high as possible, just as Jude had suggested. Before he had time to do anything about it. Dad shoved a plastic cap on Gil’s head, pulling it down over his ears, and passed him a pair of thin rubber gloves like the ones dentists wear. Gil pulled them on quickly and then turned away from Dad so that he could pull apart the Velcro strip on the front of his boiler suit without Dad noticing. It was a fiddle because the gloves made his fingers feel tight and fat. By the time Gil looked round again, Dad had put on his own boiler suit and cap and gloves. He looked ridiculous, like a giant baby, and Gil started to laugh.
‘I suggest you take a look at yourself before poking fun at me,’ said Dad. ‘Now we need a shower to hose off any remaining microbes.’ He pointed Gil towards a square cubicle set into the wall.
‘A shower? But . . . but . . .’ Gil protested.
It didn’t look like a shower. It looked like a portal to another universe. As Dad pushed Gil inside he pressed a button and big jets of air suddenly blasted them on all sides. It was like being on top of a mountain in a high wind, and when it stopped Gil couldn’t speak for a minute or two.
‘Air shower,’ said Dad with a small smile. ‘Bet you’ve never had one of those before.’
They stepped out of a door on the other side of the air shower and walked towards another of the plastic curtains. We’re here, Gil thought. This was it. He closed his eyes and plunged through the curtain behind Dad.
‘So, this is where we keep some of our torture victims,’ said Dad softly.
Gil couldn’t open his eyes. They felt glued shut. All sorts of pictures of sad and damaged animals crowded his head, and now he’d got this far he couldn’t bear to see any real ones, not even if it was going to make Jude think he was a superhero. He wanted to turn and run.
He felt Dad nudge him.
‘Open your eyes,’ he said. ‘I thought this was what you wanted to see. You look as if you’re expecting someone to hit you.’
Gil opened one eye a crack, just enough to let in a blur of light between his eyelashes. There was daylight coming from somewhere, the first daylight he’d seen since they’d entered the building. The room smelt of straw. Gil realised that he had his arms folded tightly across his chest, as if he really did think someone was going to attack him. He dropped his arms to his sides, opened his eyes properly and looked around, shaking.
He saw a room full of hutches stacked two high – normal-looking hutches with chicken wire and straw, each one about two metres long and a metre deep. They were arranged around a big enclosed square that looked like a sandpit, and each hutch had a tunnel or a sloping wooden ladder leading out into the sand.
There were white rabbits everywhere. Gil did a quick count. He could see about thirty of them, stretched out in the straw on the floor of their cage, or hopping about, or washing themselves, or digging in the sand. Occasionally there was a snuffle and the thump of a rabbit’s hind legs.
It was weird, thought Gil. It reminded him of the petting area in a zoo, except it was cleaner and quieter. It was only the clipboards attached to the cages that told him these rabbits were not pets. Dad was silent, and Gil moved closer to a line of cages, acutely aware of the camera burning a hole in his chest. Not too close, Jude had said, otherwise the film would be useless. He shuffled round slowly, examining the rabbits one by one. None of them looked like the pictures in Jude’s booklet, as far as he could see. There were no visible wounds, no dreadful injuries.
A feeling of unreality washed over Gil and for a moment he lost track of where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. It was a long time since he’d had a pet, he thought. Maybe a rabbit would be good. He’d never had one before. Then he jumped as a woman burst through one of the plastic curtains, wearing a boiler suit and cap and carrying a portable cage. She glanced at Gil in some surprise before she spotted Dad.
‘Oh, hi, Matt,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you were in today.’
Dad dipped his head with a smile. The woman inspected the clipboard on one of the hutches, opened the door, lifted out a huge floppy rabbit, popped it in the portable cage and marched back out through the curtain.
‘What’s she going to do with the rabbit?’ Gil asked Dad after the woman had disappeared.
‘I’m not sure, exactly. This isn’t my project. Most of these rabbits are being used to study reproductive disorders – problems in pregnancy, that sort of thing.’
‘But it doesn’t look as if there’s anything wrong with them.’
‘Are you disappointed? What were you expecting, blood and screaming?’
Gil didn’t answer. Suddenly all his terror had soaked away and he felt completely flat. It was impossible to imagine that Jude would be interested in a bunch of ordinary rabbits sitting quietly in their cages. Gil put his hand down to where the recorder sat in his trouser pocket, buried under the boiler suit. If he could have reached it he might even have switched it off altogether. It felt like a huge risk to have taken for so little.
‘Do you want to come and see my mice?’ asked Dad.
Gil followed him, pushing through another plastic curtain into the next room. It was like a room full of filing cabinets, except that the drawers were made of transparent amber-coloured plastic. There were over five hundred drawers, Gil calculated, in stacks of eight. Each one had a miniature clipboard attached to it.
Gil walked along the rows of cabinets and looked in the drawers. They all had mice living in them. Some held one mouse, some two or three, which meant there must be roughly a thousand mice altogether. There was sawdust on the floor and piles of shredded paper for the mice to burrow in, and toilet-roll tubes and home-made exercise wheels and boxes to hide in. The mice looked like – well, mice. Gil examined the drawers carefully, half hoping to find a mouse with some kind of appalling deformity, like the
cancerous rat he’d seen in Jude’s booklet, carrying a huge tumour on its back like a snail shell.
‘So – what are they all for?’ asked Gil after a while. ‘Why are there so many of them?’
‘Pretty much all of these mice are being used for genetic studies,’ said Dad. ‘They’ve had their genes manipulated in some way, and then we study the results and extend our understanding of how genes work. Or if the result of the genetic manipulation is a disease we try to find ways to make the mice better.’
‘Are there any that look . . .’ Gil tried to find a way of asking the question that wouldn’t sound too obvious. ‘I mean, I’ve read about experiments that made . . . well, you know. Mice with two heads, or something like that.’
‘Ah, yes. The notorious two-headed mouse,’ said Dad. ‘And the five-legged frog. And of course the three-winged chicken. The thing is, Gil, those so-called monsters were made mostly by accident by people studying the development of embryos. So no two-headed mice here, I’m afraid. We have nude mice. That’s about as bizarre as it gets.’
He pulled out a drawer, and Gil looked in. Two pink, wrinkly, shiny mice blinked up at him. They had no hair at all, except for a fringe of fine whiskers around their eyes and under their chins.
‘Yuk,’ said Gil under his breath. The mice looked repulsive. He hung over the drawer a little longer, wondering if the camera angle was right. ‘Why are they bald?’
‘They’ve been bred like that,’ said Dad.
‘What for?’
‘I think these ones have lymphoma,’ said Dad, studying the clipboard. ‘It’s a disease that’s a bit similar to leukaemia.’
‘You mean they’ve got cancer?’
‘Yes, they’re probably trying to find a new kind of treatment that will —’
‘Someone’s actually given these mice cancer?’ Gil stared at the nude mice. They looked shivery and pathetic, and too delicate to handle. He felt sorry for them. ‘It’s not fair.’
‘Perhaps not, but neither is lymphoma. And there’d be very few ways of treating it unless we did this kind of research on animals first.’ Dad pushed the drawer back in and turned away without waiting for Gil to reply.
‘These are mine,’ he said, running his hand down a stack of mouse drawers right at the end of the row.
Drs Walker and Patel, it said in neat handwritten letters on every clipboard. Gene IT-15, CAG expansion. Then there were dates, and a lot of scientific words that Gil didn’t understand.
These were the mice that Dad had condemned to a lifetime of illness, Gil reminded himself. They would live only until their brains turned to mush. He pulled out a drawer and looked at the two mice scurrying around the box, popping in and out of the toilet-roll tube. They were going to die a slow and dreadful death. Possibly they were in pain right now. Gil poked and prodded himself with the thoughts, trying to provoke a reaction, but nothing happened. He just felt numb.
‘Do you want to pick one up?’ said Dad.
‘Um – OK,’ said Gil.
He reached into the box with fingers that still felt tight and awkward inside the rubber gloves, grasped the tail that was poking out of the tube and pulled. The mouse wriggled and came out backwards into mid-air, its feet spread out as if it was doing a parachute drop. One of its back legs had a tiny identification tag on it, and Gil was just turning the mouse to get a better look when there was a sharp cry from Dad.
‘Put him down!’
‘Why?’ Gil lowered the mouse back into the box. It ran away immediately and hid in the shredded paper. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘Have you any idea how much stress you were causing that mouse? Didn’t you notice his body language, for goodness’ sake?’ Dad sounded really cross.
‘I didn’t think it mattered how you picked them up,’ Gil mumbled.
‘Mice are prey,’ said Dad. ‘To them, we are gigantic predators. If you pick that mouse up by the tail he thinks you’re going to eat him. I really thought you knew better than that. You had pet mice for years.’
‘I forgot,’ said Gil defensively. He remembered with a flicker of guilt that it had always amused him to pick Turbo and Minky up by their tails so he could watch them wriggle and squirm in mid-air, trying to clamber back up their own bodies.
Dad put his hand palm-up on the bottom of the mouse drawer, and after a minute or two the mouse came out of the shredded paper, sniffed his hand and then crept on to it. It didn’t seem bothered about Dad’s rubber glove.
‘Hello, little fellow,’ said Dad.
‘Is that one ill?’ said Gil. ‘What’s going to happen to him?’
‘This one? No, he’s a control mouse. There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s just one of the normal ones that we do exactly the same tests on as we do for the diseased mice. Then we have something to measure our results against.’
‘What sort of tests?’
‘Do you want to see one?’
Gil remembered the camera again, and felt a little flutter of nervous excitement. A test would be good. A real live experiment. What would it be like? A joke tumbled into his head from nowhere, one of Louis’ all-time favourites. What’s green and turns red at the touch of a button? A frog in a blender! It was enough to make Gil feel sick.
Dad was opening one of the cupboards on the wall. He took out a small plastic container no bigger than a sandwich box, and carefully popped the control mouse into it. Then he pulled out another drawer and let a mouse clamber on to his hand before placing it in the little box too.
‘So, now we have one diseased mouse and one healthy one,’ Dad said. ‘Let me show you one of our standard tests.’
He led the way into a bigger room, almost as white and shiny as the room downstairs. In the middle of the room was something like a paddling pool, filled with a blue-green liquid that looked like a disgusting kind of soup.
‘This is a memory experiment,’ said Dad. He put the mouse box on a workbench and lifted out a mouse. It sat crouched in the palm of his hand, and Dad scratched the top of its head with a finger. ‘Watch what happens to the healthy mouse.’
He slipped the mouse into the coloured water and let go. The mouse swam. Its little nose twitched above the surface, and its legs paddled invisibly underneath. Within a few seconds the mouse had found a place which must have been shallower, because it stopped swimming and sat up on its hind legs, washing its face.
‘These mice have done this test dozens of times,’ said Dad. ‘As you can see they’ve learnt that there’s a small underwater platform, and the healthy mice can find it pretty quickly.’ He scooped out the mouse and patted it dry with a piece of kitchen paper. ‘Now for the other one,’ he said.
He put the diseased mouse into the pool. It started to swim. It swam and swam and swam, round and round, backwards and forwards, patiently and hopelessly.
‘She can’t find it,’ said Dad after a while. ‘She used to know where the platform is, but now she can’t remember. That’s because the disease is clogging up the brain cells that are used for memory.’
‘So are you going to let her drown?’ asked Gil. The mouse was still swimming. It was hard to tell if she was getting tired or not. How long could mice swim for, anyway? He badly wanted to rescue her before she gave up.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Dad. ‘What would be the point of that? We need them alive. We want to be able to measure changes in the mice, so we can tell if any of our attempts to affect the disease are working.’ He carefully grasped the mouse from behind and lifted her out of the water.
‘So – is this it? You spend your whole day doing this?’
‘This kind of thing, mostly, yes.’
‘It just seems a bit . . .’
‘Boring?’ said Dad with a smile. ‘Low-key? Repetitive?’
‘Yeah, I guess so,’ said Gil.
‘You’re right. It is.’
‘Don’t you ever . . . well, cut them up or anything?’
‘Only when they’re dead,’ said Dad.
‘
So you do kill them?’
‘Yes, of course, when we have to.’
‘How?’
‘It depends,’ said Dad. He was still holding the diseased mouse, stroking her absent-mindedly. ‘If we need to analyse the brain tissue, we give them a lethal injection, like you would for putting down a sick cat or dog. Otherwise . . .’
He paused.
‘Otherwise what?’
‘Well, we’d use another method. But they’re all humane. None of them causes the mouse any suffering, I promise you that.’
Gil looked at the mouse in Dad’s hand. What was going on in the mouse’s head? he wondered. Did she really have no idea she was ill?
‘You know, I once found a pigeon in the garden,’ Dad said. ‘It’d had its wing almost ripped off by a cat. It just lay there, thrashing about on the path. I had to wring its neck, because it would never have survived. That was worse than anything I’ve ever done to any creature in this building.’
There was a little silence.
‘So,’ Dad said. ‘Tell me, Gil. What do you think about all this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Gil said. His head felt full of a sticky liquid, like the blue-green soup in the pool.
‘Can you see now that the lives of a few hundred mice might help us find a cure for a disease that destroys the lives of thousands of people?’
‘I don’t really understand why it’s so difficult,’ said Gil. All at once he wished he’d never come here. He wanted to go home. ‘To find a cure, I mean. If there’s something wrong with the gene, why don’t you just replace it, or cut it out, or something?’
Dad shook his head. ‘You can only do that at the embryo stage, when a creature is still a single cell. Once an animal is fully grown it becomes impossible. There are around a hundred trillion cells in the human body. If you have a disease caused by a faulty gene, that gene is in every single one of those trillions of cells. Think of a field of sunflowers. Imagine there are about ten sunflowers in every square metre of the field. Now imagine the entire United States of America, every single bit of it, planted with sunflowers. That’s what a hundred trillion looks like. Finding and removing a gene from every cell would be like gathering a single grain of pollen from every one of those sunflowers. For a cure to work, it has to have an effect on the faulty gene in every cell in the body. It’s not easy to achieve that.’
