Fifty Fifty (17 page)

‘This is the freezer where we keep eggs, sperm and embryos until we’re ready to use them,’ said Dad, pulling out a small round dish and shutting the door immediately.
‘What we do, inside that cabinet, is to pick up a single egg with a pipette, and inject it with a single sperm using a fine syringe. It’s difficult and time-consuming because the eggs
and sperm are so tiny – but, if it works, you’ve got an embryo.’

Dad stood cupping the tiny dish carefully in his clumsy gloves, his hair flopping over his face, his eyes shining as he looked at Gil.

‘Gil,’ he said, ‘have you any idea at all how extraordinary life is? How utterly astonishing it is to see a creature build itself from virtually nothing?’

‘I’ve never really thought about it,’ said Gil, trying to keep his voice ordinary. Dad looked as excited as a boy who’s found a really spectacular bug in the playground,
and it made Gil feel old. He stood watching Dad, filming him, concentrating on keeping still and keeping his distance so that the picture would be as clear and steady as possible.

‘When the sperm fuses with the egg you have a single cell. And after a few hours the cell divides. And then those two cells divide again, and again, until you have a tiny ball of eight
cells. The embryo’s still microscopically small, just a speck. But that ball of cells . . .’ Dad stopped for a moment, breathing fast with excitement. ‘It contains all the
information you need to build a mouse. Can you imagine that? It’s like putting eight bricks in a field, and watching them slowly turn themselves into a house . . .’

Dad was fizzing with so much energy that Gil almost thought he could see him glowing. It was just like the day when they’d gone to see the fossilised fish at the museum. Gil tried to
remember when he had last felt that excited about anything, but it seemed years ago. Then he noticed that Dad had stopped, waiting for him to say something.

‘Wow,’ said Gil. Even he could hear that it didn’t sound very convincing.

A flash of irritation crossed Dad’s face. ‘Look, do you want to know what I do or not?’ he said. ‘It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to set this visit up. The
least you can do is show a bit of interest.’

‘Sorry, Dad. I
am
interested, really. Just go on.’

Dad looked at Gil, frowning slightly, and Gil put his hands behind his back to stop the urge to fiddle with the fake button on his shirt.

‘So what do you think I do this for?’ Dad said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why do I go to all this trouble? As you pointed out, it’s an awful lot easier to let the mice get on with making their own babies.’

‘I don’t really know,’ said Gil.

‘Do you know what
transgenic
means?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘If a creature is transgenic it means it contains genes from a different kind of organism. So the mice we make here —’

‘Oh, OK,’ Gil interrupted. ‘I’ve heard about this. I heard they’ve made a strawberry with a fish gene spliced into it.’

‘Yes.’ Dad had started to fiddle with the big microscope cabinet, and he didn’t sound remotely bothered.

‘Isn’t that really dangerous?’

‘No, of course not. Putting a single fish gene into a strawberry doesn’t turn it into a fish. It doesn’t even make it
half
fish. Look, think about a toaster and a car.
They’re both made of largely the same materials, aren’t they, although they’re entirely different? So if you used part of the car to mend the toaster – a bit of wire, say,
or a nut and bolt – it wouldn’t turn the toaster into a vehicle, would it? It’d still be a toaster. It’s exactly the same with living things. They all have remarkably
similar DNA, and much of it is interchangeable.’

‘Oh,’ Gil said. But in his head he had a picture of a big flabby flatfish-shaped strawberry with slimy eyes, and he couldn’t get rid of it. He stood and waited for Dad to
finish whatever it was he was doing with the glass cabinet. It took ages, and slowly the fear in his stomach transformed itself into impatience. Here he was, wasting valuable battery time filming
Dad doing something completely irrelevant.
For God’s sake hurry up,
he said silently.

‘Here,’ said Dad. ‘Look.’ He stepped away from the microscope cabinet and waved Gil forwards.

When Gil put his eyes to the microscope he had to blink a bit before he could bring anything into focus. Then he saw it. A clump of little spheres like frogspawn, just like the pictures in
Dad’s secret photo album. It was impossible to tell how big the spheres were, and for a second Gil had the bizarre feeling that he was gazing through a telescope rather than a microscope, and
that the spheres were as big as stars spinning across the galaxy.

‘What is this thing?’ said Gil.

‘It’s a mouse embryo. I’ve introduced a sequence of human DNA that will give this mouse a genetic disease.’The words hummed in Gil’s ear. ‘The next step is to
put the embryo back into a female mouse and let her grow it for me.’

‘But you said it’s got a disease.’

‘Yes.’ Dad’s voice was calm. ‘I guess you don’t like the thought of that, do you?’

‘What kind of disease?’

‘Well, in this case, a peculiarly dreadful genetic condition that gradually destroys the brain.’

‘What?’ Gil jerked away from the microscope, genuinely revolted. ‘That’s
horrible.
So you’re going to let this mouse grow until its brain just disintegrates?
How can you
do
that deliberately to a mouse?’

‘It’s far more horrible for people than it is for mice, I can tell you that.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because the mice we make don’t know that they’re ill. Mice can’t think about themselves in the way that people do. And we don’t let them suffer physically. As soon
as they become unable to do the basic things that make mice happy, we put them out of their misery. But human beings who have this disease have to live for years with the knowledge that their brain
cells are slowly and irreversibly choking to death. Every single day they have to face the fact that they will end up unable to do anything at all for themselves, even think. It takes an unbearably
long time. It destroys lives, Gil. It destroys whole families. Because it’s a genetic disease, you see, so parents often pass it on to their children.’

Dad was quiet. All his excitement had evaporated. Gil stepped down from the microscope, and Dad bent over it again. He was there for a long time, while Gil hopped impatiently from foot to foot
and fretted about the camera battery.

‘Sorry,’ Dad said at last, straightening up. ‘I was miles away. Do you want another look?’

‘No, I want to go and see the animals. Especially the ones you’ve given diseases to.’

‘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.