Fifty Fifty

by S. L. Powell

  Nobody said anything for a long time. Then Gil made a decision.

  ‘Picture glass,’ he said, lifting his injured hand off the table. ‘I smashed a picture last night with my fist when I was upset. That’s how I cut it. Sorry,’ he added.

  He saw Mum and Dad look at each other. After a while Dad sighed deeply and ran a hand through his hair.

  ‘You’re going to need a couple of stitches in it,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ said Mum brightly. ‘I’ll run you up to casualty when you’re dressed.’

  ‘I think I just want to go back to bed for a bit,’ said Gil.

  ‘Me too,’ said Dad. He looked exhausted.

  ‘In a minute,’ said Mum. ‘There’s something else I want to say first.’

  In the short space before she spoke again Gil imagined all sorts of ridiculous soap-opera announcements. I’m leaving. I’m pregnant. You’re not my son, Gil. I’m in love with Jude. What she actually said did not come completely out of the blue, although it was still a shock to hear it.

  ‘I want to have the test for Huntington’s Disease.’

  ‘What? But Rachel —’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s time?’ said Mum. ‘Don’t you think it would be better for all of us now if we knew, instead of waiting in limbo for something that may or may not happen? At least then I can get on with my life. It’s not done any of us any good to have me drifting about the house like a ghost.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dad. ‘I really don’t know. Are you sure you want to find out?’

  Gil was suddenly aware of the pain in Dad’s voice. There was no smugness, no certainty, just pain. For the first time Gil thought what it might be like to be Dad, to have lived all these years in the knowledge that his wife might die from a disease that he had not yet managed to find a cure for.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ said Mum.

  Dad said nothing. He just put his head in his hands and gripped his fingers across the top of his skull.

  ‘I thought perhaps you’d do the test for me, Matt,’ said Mum. ‘You did say you might.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can face it.’ Dad sounded in complete agony.

  ‘Mum’s the one who’s got to face it the most,’ said Gil. ‘She’s the one who might be ill.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘You’re right. I know.’

  ‘It would really help me if we could all do this together,’ said Mum.

  ‘What are the chances of you having Huntington’s Disease?’ said Gil.

  ‘They’re exactly fifty-fifty,’ said Mum very softly.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Gil. A fifty-fifty chance meant Mum was balanced on a knife-edge. It was like having a choice of only two doors. If you opened one, you could walk through and live happily ever after. If you opened the other, you would die. No wonder Dad was scared.

  ‘You have to keep hold of the fact that there’s an even chance I’m OK,’ said Mum. ‘And if not – there’s still Dad’s research. But if neither of you want me to have the test, I will listen to you.’

  Gil couldn’t speak any more. At that moment he longed to have no sense of himself. It was too hard being human, being aware, having to choose. What should he say? Was it better to know, or not to know? Once you knew something for certain you could never choose to be ignorant again. Unless of course you had a disease like Huntington’s, and then you had no choice. Your memory was eventually wiped clean whether you liked it or not.

  ‘I think we need to know,’ Gil said at last. ‘Dad?’

  ‘OK,’ said Dad. He still didn’t look up. ‘OK.’

  ‘Sleep on it for now,’ said Mum. ‘Go back to bed, the pair of you.’

  Gil went back to bed, and buried himself deep under the duvet and both pillows so that the entire world was blocked out. He hoped he would be able to sleep without dreams.

  Gil was woken by someone coming into his room. He guessed it was time to go and get his hand stitched up.

  ‘OK, Mum,’ he mumbled. He rolled over and sat up, and then stared in amazement at Louis standing at the end of his bed.

  ‘Wha . . .?’

  ‘Your mum said it was OK,’ said Louis quickly.

  Gil watched while Louis hopped from foot to foot uncomfortably. He was too dazed with sleep to think of anything to say to him.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ Louis burst out suddenly. ‘I’m sorry, all right? I came to say sorry. I feel so crap for grassing you up to your dad yesterday. But if you’re just going to try and stare me out I’m not staying.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Gil. ‘Wa it.’ He rubbed his face. What did he need to say to Louis? ‘It’s OK. You did the right thing.’

  ‘Did I?’ said Louis uncertainly.

  ‘Yeah, you did. I mean, it needed to happen. It’s a bit like . . .’ Gil thought for a moment. His head was still fuzzy. ‘It’s like you found out I had gangrene in my leg and you knew you’d have to chop my leg off to save my life, and then you hacked my leg off with a penknife or something, and to begin with I was really angry with you but then I saw that you’d saved my life.’

  ‘What? What are you on about?’ Louis looked really agitated now. ‘Are you ill? Oh my God, are you going to die?’

  ‘No, you moron, we used to play that game, don’t you remember? Shipwrecks. And I had gangrene and you had to hack my leg off.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. Actually it was you who always chopped my leg off,’ said Louis.

  ‘Was it?’ Gil tried to remember properly.

  ‘Yeah. But I still don’t get why you’re talking about gangrene.’

  ‘Look, what I mean is that you dumped me in it big time with Dad. And I was so angry with you. But then . . . then I found out . . .’ Gil tailed off. There was too much to tell Louis. Secrets writhed and wriggled inside his head like maggots in a dead animal.

  ‘Your dad said you’d had a bit of a shock,’ said Louis, frowning.

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Yeah, when he phoned me up,’ said Louis.

  ‘When? What did he phone you for?’

  ‘To ask me to come round. He said you needed a bit of – um . . .’

  ‘Yeah, well, Dad thinks you’re wonderful, doesn’t he?’ said Gil grimly. ‘He likes you better than he likes me.’

  ‘No he doesn’t. Don’t talk crap. Look, Gil – what’s happened? You don’t look good.’

  Gil began to tell Louis about Mum, about the way she might be ill with the same disease that was slowly killing his grandmother, about the way Mum and Dad had genetically screened him as an embryo to make sure he didn’t have Huntington’s Disease. He said nothing about Jude, about the labs, about Dad’s research. He picked his way around the forbidden topics as if he was finding a path through a minefield. All the time he tried not to look at Louis, but he was aware of Louis’ mouth hanging open in stunned silence and his eyes bulging like giant marbles.

  ‘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.’