by S. L. Powell
‘What happened to them?’ Gil asked.
‘They don’t exist any more. We had four failed attempts at IVF before we had you – eight embryos that were put back inside Mum but miscarried shortly afterwards. Those are the ones she gave names to. I thought it was a bad idea, but she insisted. They were so real to her. You had a twin sister who died in the womb when she was twelve weeks old and nearly killed you too. And the others – when you were born, we let them go. We felt you were enough.’
‘You let them die, you mean.’
‘They weren’t human beings yet, Gil. They were just cell clusters. They didn’t feel any pain. They didn’t know anything about it.’
‘But they would have been human beings, wouldn’t they? They would have turned out exactly like me.’
‘Not exactly like you,’ said Dad. ‘You’re unique. You’re Gil.’
Gil closed his eyes and listened to Dad breathing quietly. Was it possible to cry if you had your eyes shut? But he wasn’t going to cry, he didn’t need to cry. He thought of the photos in Dad’s secret album. Why me? he wondered. Why was he here and not Thomas or Imogen or any of the dozens of others who’d been kick-started into life and then never allowed to grow up? It was like the scene at the end of Titanic, the scene with hundreds of people floating frozen and dead in a dark sea. Gil was the one who was rescued, the only one who was pulled to safety, the random survivor. Everyone else was dead.
And now Mum – Dad was telling him that Mum was – she was . . .
‘What’s going to happen to Mum?’ Gil managed to say.
‘We don’t know.’
‘Is she ill or not? Has she got this – this Huntington’s Disease or not?’
‘Gil, we don’t know. I promise you we don’t know. We made a decision not to find out. All we did was check to make sure that any child we had would be free from the disease.’
‘But Mum could find out if she was ill?’
‘Yes.’
‘So why doesn’t she?’
‘Because she doesn’t want to know.’
‘Why not? I would!’
‘Are you sure?’ Dad’s voice was warm and strong. ‘You would risk being told that you had a disease that is completely inescapable, and that currently has no cure? Mum felt it would be like living on death row. She decided it was better just to wait and see what happened. But of course it becomes harder and harder the older she gets, and we didn’t really anticipate that. She’s about the same age now as her mother was when she started to show signs of illness. Whenever Mum thinks she’s getting a symptom of the disease she panics. It’s triggered by little things, like —’
‘Like dropping a plate,’ Gil said suddenly.
‘Yes, exactly. The early symptoms of Huntington’s are things like clumsiness and forgetfulness. Every time Mum drops something or forgets something she thinks she might be getting ill, even though it might well be nothing sinister at all.’
‘But how would she find out? Is there a test?’
‘Yes, it’s quite simple. I could even do it in my lab, if I wanted to. You just take a sample of cells and separate out the DNA, then use a technique that makes lots of copies of the gene you want to test for, in this case gene IT- 15. Huntington’s Disease is caused when this gene is faulty and —’
‘IT-15? That was on the labels for your mice in the lab, wasn’t it?’
‘Well remembered,’ said Dad softly. ‘Now maybe you can understand what I’m trying to do there.’
There was a moment where Gil saw the shock before he felt it, the way you always see the lightning flash before you hear the rumble of thunder. Then the room heaved under him as if bombs were exploding all around him. The mental world he had lived in for so long began to topple and collapse. His view of Dad, his view of Mum, his view of Jude, his view of himself – he watched it all changing, shifting, falling.
Dad was researching Huntington’s Disease. He was trying to find a cure for the illness that might kill Mum, the illness that had destroyed Granny’s brain so that she no longer recognised even her own daughter. That was what the mice were for. The mice were there to try and save Mum’s life.
‘Gil,’ said Dad after a while. ‘Talk to me. Are you all right?’
Gil didn’t reply. He sat, stunned, and listened to the explosions as they continued in his head. One thought hung clear above the debris. How long did he have to stop Jude? How was he going to stop Jude?
‘I’ve got to tell Jude,’ Gil said. He thought he’d said it in his head, until he saw Dad’s eyebrows knot together.
‘Jude? Who’s Jude?’
‘No one,’ said Gil.
‘What do you mean, no one? Who is he? Is he that appalling man who nearly got you arrested?’
‘No,’ said Gil. He couldn’t really focus on what Dad was saying. The room seemed full of dust and smoke.
‘You’re hiding something from me, aren’t you? What is it? What the hell have you got involved in? I insist that you tell me.’
‘Hiding something,’ said Gil slowly. ‘Hiding something. God, Dad, that’s a joke, isn’t it, coming from you? You’ve just told me – oh my God . . .’ Gil clenched his teeth as a sudden shuddering rage surged upwards from his belly. ‘Bloody hell. I can’t – I can’t . . . You’ve known this stuff my whole life – my entire life, for God’s sake, and you’ve never told me any of it? And you call me a liar? You’ve lied to me about everything, Dad. I hate you. You’re just a lying, selfish, smug —’
‘Stop it,’ snapped Dad. ‘Stop that right now. You have no idea what it’s been like for us. You have no idea how we’ve tried to protect you —’
‘Oh yeah!’ Gil leapt up from the chair, breathing hard. ‘Well, you’ve done a really great job, Dad. Because right now I wish you were dead.’
‘Grow up,’ said Dad. He didn’t move. ‘Think about other people for once in your life.’
‘Oh my God, I wish I could kill you. I hate you, Dad.’
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said Dad, rising from his desk at last.
‘I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. I HATE YOU!’
Gil hurled his full weight at Dad. Taken by surprise, Dad staggered back against the chair by his desk. The chair rolled gently away from him and he fell, banging his shoulder on the corner of the desk. Gil kicked the chair violently and it toppled forwards on to Dad’s head. Then Gil ran from the study, his throat aching from screaming at Dad, his head howling with pain, tears of fury and terror and shock finally pouring down his face. Through the blur he saw Mum appear out of the kitchen door.
‘Gil,’ she said, catching his arm. ‘Gil, what on earth’s happened?’
He wrenched himself away and ran for the stairs.
She called after him. ‘Gil!’
He ran, sobbing, and slammed the bedroom door hard behind him. He grabbed at the desk and dragged it across the door. His chest heaved with a life of its own, with gasps and sobs that he could not bring under control. Objects came into view briefly through the distortion of his tears and he picked them up at random and threw them viciously at the desk and the door. He could hear Mum outside, knocking, trying the door, calling urgently.
‘Gil, what’s the matter? Please let me in. What’s happened? Gil?’
Gil sank to the floor at the foot of his bed. His face fell forwards on to his knees and he sat hunched up with his hands curled uselessly at his sides while the eruption inside his chest went on and on and the tears soaked the legs of his jeans.
‘Please, Gil. Please let me help.’
But Mum’s voice was impossibly far away. There was no one to help him now.
As the storm in his head began to move away, Gil lifted his wet face, wiped his eyes with his hands and listened. There were noises coming from downstairs. After a moment he realised Mum and Dad were talking loudly. Really loudly. No, wait a minute – they were arguing. Gil got up with some difficulty and crept to the door. He moved the desk a few centimetres and opened the door a crack so he
could hear.
‘I don’t believe you sometimes, Matt.’ Gil couldn’t remember ever hearing Mum sound so furious. ‘I thought we had an agreement about this.’
‘I’ve told you what happened. I didn’t mean to tell him. It just came out.’
‘You’re starting to sound like a bloody teenager yourself.’
‘I am not! Rachel, you forget this is just as difficult for me as it is for —’
‘Oh, don’t you dare. Don’t you dare. This is not just as difficult for you.’
‘Well, all right, I’m sorry, but —’
‘You’re the one who said we should wait till he was older. I wanted to tell him years ago.’
‘For God’s sake, Rachel, don’t start dragging up accusations like that. It’s not helpful.’
‘But that’s what you said! You did! Don’t try and deny it now!’
‘Yes, because I thought it would be too much for him. I thought it wasn’t fair.’
‘And how the hell do you think he feels now, with everything dumped on him at once? Tell me that. He’s up there, barricaded in his room, crying his bloody eyes out. He won’t even talk to me.’
‘He’ll be all right. He’ll calm down. It’s just teenage hysteria.’
‘Matt, how can you say that? You’re totally contradicting yourself. You know damn well he must have been feeling desperately unhappy even before he found out about all this if he’s been bunking off school and lying to us about things.’
‘He’s not unhappy. He’s trying to provoke me. God knows what he’s mixed up in, or who this Jude character is —’
‘That is just not relevant right now. Right now we have to stop him spiralling off into total despair.’
‘No, we have to bring him into line and show him we’re in charge.’
‘Oh, great. Wonderful. It’s really going to help if you’re going to go on behaving like a control freak.’
‘What did you just say?’
‘You heard me, Matt. You want to control everything he does and everything he thinks. Well, congratulations. You’ve made him hate you. And at the moment I’m not sure I like you that much either.’
‘Good God. I’m not staying here to be talked to like this.’
‘Fine. Walk away from the mess. It’ll still be here when you get back, though. Someone’s going to have to deal with it.’
The front door slammed so hard that the whole house shook. Gil closed his bedroom door and pushed the desk back against it. Perhaps this was it, he thought unemotionally. Perhaps Dad had walked out and would never come back. He had never in all his life heard his parents have a row like that.
He stood for a long time examining the surface of his desk, not thinking of much at all. There was a big new dent, he noticed, from an object he’d hurled in anger, possibly one of the speakers for his MP3 player. He ran his fingers over the sharp edges of the dent, trying to smooth it and fill it, but it made no difference. The hole was raw and deep and irreversible.
Mum was coming up the stairs again. He heard her pause outside his room, but she didn’t try the door.
‘Gil, can I make you something to eat?’ she said. It was such a normal question he couldn’t think how to answer. Was he hungry or not?
‘Gil?’
‘No,’ Gil said at last, hoarsely. ‘No, I don’t think I’m hungry.’
‘Gil, I’m really, really sorry. You were never meant to find out like this.’
‘No,’ said Gil. The dent in the desk was really bothering him. He tried wedging his little finger in the triangular hole.
‘Can I come in and talk to you?’
‘Uh – not now. Later. I’m all right, Mum. I just want to be on my own.’
‘Oh. OK.’
She padded away down the stairs again. Gil was grateful to her for swallowing such a blatant lie. There was no way she could believe he was all right. But he really didn’t want to talk to Mum right now. He needed to think.
Think. Think.
He curled up on his bed and fell asleep as suddenly as if someone had hit him over the head with a cricket bat.
He dreamed of chaos. People ran shouting through dark corridors. Torches flashed, alarms howled, a door was kicked in. A curtain of plastic strips blazed in dripping flames and beyond was the stamping of terrified feet in cages. There was something behind the big silver door of the fridge – something waiting; he could not see what it was, but it was coming for him. It was going to snap his neck as if he were a mouse, and Mum was not there. He could hear her a long way away, banging furiously on the door, but she couldn’t get in.
He woke up sweating and terrified and with one thought in his mind. I’ve got to tell Jude . . .
But what, exactly, was he going to tell Jude? Was he going to try and persuade him to abandon the raid on the labs?
Right this instant Gil wanted the raid to go ahead more than ever. He wanted Jude to smash the labs into rubble. It would be revenge on Dad, revenge on his smugness and rightness, revenge for his secrets, for the lies he had told and the truth he had not told. He deserved that level of destruction.
But Dad’s mice – when Gil thought about Dad’s mice all he could see was Mum. He saw Mum sitting in the pan of a giant pair of old-fashioned scales, while mice fell one at a time like chocolate drops into the pan on the other side. Gil let himself think about Mum. He thought about her for a long time. If she was ill, if she was going to become like Granny and slowly slip away into a place where she could not remember who Dad was or who Gil was or even who she was herself, how many mice would he sacrifice to stop that happening? How many diseased mice would he make if he thought it might save Mum? A hundred? A thousand? A million? How many mice was Mum worth? Was it even possible to weigh lives against each other like that?
There were no answers. If the raid went ahead, Dad’s research would be destroyed, and with it the hope of helping Mum if she was ill. If Gil tried to stop the raid he would be standing up for Dad when he hated Dad more than he had ever hated anyone in his life. Wasn’t there anyone he could ask for help? Gil thought of Louis and all the childish messes they had survived together. Louis might have helped him. But he’d screwed things up too badly with Louis, and in any case it would never have been fair to drag Louis into this. The mess was too big and too frightening, and Gil had made it all by himself.
Gil lay in his room, thinking and not thinking, while the day turned into night and the room darkened. Mum came up the stairs from once or twice and asked him questions through the closed door, but he didn’t really hear what she was asking, or what he said in reply. At some point he heard that Dad had come back, and Mum and Dad were talking softly together outside his room. He didn’t move. It was like being an astronaut floating way above the world with only the sound of his own breathing for company. From time to time he thought about the battered old phone under the bed and wondered about calling Jude, but he couldn’t think what he would say to him.
He would have to help himself this time. Gil didn’t know if he had the strength. If he was going to act he would have to act tonight, because tomorrow might be too late. But he was terrified. He was terrified, it was dark, and everything he had ever believed about himself and his family lay in ruins.
Sometime after midnight when he was sure Mum and Dad were asleep, Gil made himself act. It took less than ten minutes to pack his school bag with the equipment he needed. He left his desk barricading the bedroom door in case Mum or Dad tried to check on him in the night. Then he went to the window and pushed it open, slipping out of the gap on to the conservatory roof.
After the warmth of the day, Gil was completely unprepared for the chilly wind that swept out of the blackness of the night sky. As he crawled across the roof, the cold cut through his clothes and made him wish he’d put on a couple of extra layers. But he didn’t go back. He reached the edge of the wall and dropped neatly into the back garden.
His old bike was still there under the lean-to at the side of the house. Gil pushed
it through the front gate, instinctively looking up to see if there were any lights on, if anyone was watching. But the house was dark, and Gil quickly set off through the back streets with his hood up and his head bent.
It was silent and empty everywhere. Gil cycled swiftly through the pools of orange light that fell from the street lamps. His hands got colder and colder until they felt as if they were frozen to the handlebars. The thin plastic gloves he was wearing didn’t help at all.
After a while Gil lost his sense of time. He was shaking with cold and pouring with sweat at the same time. Nothing looked familiar, even though Gil was sure he knew where he was going, and when he turned the last corner and saw he’d arrived it was like an electric shock.
Dad’s building rose above the splashes of light from the few street lamps, looking more massive than ever. The stone that was so soft and yellow in daylight had turned grey and hard. The smoked glass entrance doors looked like black mirrors, and the steps were in shadow. There were no protesters on the pavement, but Gil knew there would still be security guards patrolling the building.
Gil slipped back around the corner and hid his bike in an alleyway. Then he ran to the bushes that edged the pavement opposite the labs. He crawled behind a bush and began to watch the building. Almost immediately a uniformed guard came out of the narrow road that Dad had driven him down, the one that led to the car park. The guard was being pulled along by a big Alsatian, and Gil could hear the man grumbling as he jerked the lead, trying to hold back the dog. He walked past the front of the labs, turned a corner and disappeared into an area that looked like a small garden. Gil thought he remembered looking down into it from Dad’s office, and he scanned the side of the building to see if he could locate Dad’s window, but the high walls disappeared into darkness. Moments later he heard voices and then a second guard with a much sleepier-looking dog stepped out of the garden and walked past the labs in the opposite direction, turning down the road to the car park.
