The Gift (11 page)

“Which one of us is the real me?”

“Neither of you, if you ask me.”

Lou finally turned to look at him then, and frowned. “Enough of the deep insights, please. They don’t work on me.”

Gabe sighed. “Both of you are real. You both function as you always do. You’ll eventually merge back into one and be as right as rain again.”

“And who are you?”

Gabe rolled his eyes. “You’ve been watching too many holiday movies. I’m Gabe. The same guy you dragged off the streets.”

“What’s in these?” Lou took the pills out of his pocket. “Are they dangerous?”

“Just a little bit of insight. And that never killed anyone.”

“But these things…you could make some real money. Who else knows about them?”

“All the right people—the people who made them—and don’t you go trying to make a fortune off them, or you’ll have a few serious people to answer to.”

Lou backed off for the moment. “Gabe, you can’t just double me up and then expect me to accept it without question. This could have dire medical consequences for me, not to mention life-changing psychological reactions. And the rest of the world really needs to know about this. This is insane! We really need to talk about this—I need to know much more.”

“Sure, we will.” Gabe studied him. “And then, when you tell the world, you’ll either be locked up in a padded cell or you’ll become a freak-show act, and every day you can read about yourself in exactly the same amount of column inches as Dolly the cloned sheep. If I were you, I’d just keep quiet about it all and make the best of a very fortunate situation.” He paused. “Wait, you’re very pale. Are you okay?”

Lou laughed hysterically. “No, I’m not okay! This is not normal. Why are you behaving like this is normal?!”

Gabe shrugged. “I’m just used to it, I guess.”

“Used to it?” Lou asked, bewildered. “Then you tell me, where do I go now?”

“Well, you’ve taken care of business at the office, and it looks like your other half is taking care of business here.” Gabe smiled. “That would leave one special place for you to go.”

Lou thought about that, and then a smile slowly crawled onto his face as he finally understood Gabe for the first time that evening. “Okay, let’s go.”

“I think Ruth would rather you come home alone to
night,” Gabe said. “She liked me, but she didn’t like me
that
much.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I’m not going home. Let’s go to the pub. We have to celebrate.”

Gabe stared at him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Go
home
, Lou.”

“Home?” Lou scrunched up his face. “Why would I do that? You’ve just given me a free ticket to stay out late.
He
can bloody well go home.” He turned back to watch himself at the dinner table, launching into yet another story. “Oh, I’m telling the one about the time I was stranded in the Boston airport. There was this woman on the same flight as me…” He grinned, turning around to tell Gabe the story, but his friend was gone.

“Suit yourself,” Lou mumbled. He watched himself for a little bit longer, still in shock and unsure whether he was really experiencing this night. He definitely deserved a pint, and if the other half of him was heading home after the dinner, that meant he could stay out all night and nobody would notice—nobody, that was, but the person he ended up with. Happy days.

A
TRIUMPHANT
L
OU ROLLED UP
to his home, gratified by the sound of the gravel beneath his wheels and the sight of his electronic gates closing behind him. The dinner meeting had been a success: he had commanded the conversation and had done some of the best convincing, negotiating, and entertaining he’d ever done. They’d laughed at his jokes, all his best ones, and they’d hung on his every word. All the gentlemen had left the table content and in full agreement. He’d shared a final drink with an equally jubilant Alfred before driving home.

The lights in the downstairs rooms were out, but they were all on upstairs, despite this late hour, bright enough to help land a plane.

He stepped inside, into the blackness. Ruth usually left the entrance-hall lamp on, and he felt around the walls for the light switch. There was an ominous smell in the air.

“Hello?” he called. His voice echoed three flights up to the skylight in the roof.

The house was a mess, not the usual tidiness that greeted him when he came home. Toys were scattered around the floor. He tutted.

“Hello?” He made his way upstairs. “Ruth?”

He waited for her shushing to break the silence, but it didn’t.

Instead, once he reached the landing, Ruth ran from Lucy’s bedroom and dashed by him, hand over her mouth, eyes wide and bulging. She hurried into their bathroom and closed the door. This was followed by the sound of her vomiting.

Down the hall, Lucy started to cry and call for her mother.

Lou stood in the middle of the landing, looking from one room to the other, frozen on the spot.

“Go to her, Lou,” Ruth just about managed to say before another encounter with the toilet bowl.

He was hesitant, and Lucy’s cries got louder.

“Lou!” Ruth yelled, more urgently this time.

He jumped, startled by her tone, and made his way to Lucy’s room. He slowly pushed open the door and peeked inside, feeling like an intruder as he entered a world he had never ventured into before. The smell of vomit was pungent inside. Her bed was empty, but her sheets and pink duvet were unkempt from where she’d been sleeping. He followed her sounds into the bathroom and found her on the tiles, bunny slippers on her feet, throwing up into the toilet. She was weeping quietly as she did so. Spitting and crying, crying
and spitting, her sounds echoing into the base of the toilet.

Lou stood there, looking around, briefcase still in his hand, unsure of what to do. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and covered his nose and mouth, both to block the smell and to prevent the infection from spreading to him.

Ruth returned, much to his relief, and noted him just idly standing by and watching his five-year-old daughter being ill, then barged by him to tend to her.

“It’s okay, sweetheart.” Ruth fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around her daughter. “Lou, I need you to get me two damp facecloths.”

“Damp?”

“Run them under some cold water and wring them out so they’re not dripping wet,” she explained calmly.

“Of course, yes.” He shook his head at himself. He wandered slowly out of the bedroom, then froze once again on the landing. Looked left, looked right. He returned to the bedroom. “Facecloths are in the…?”

“Hall closet,” Ruth said.

“Of course.” He made his way to the closet and, with his briefcase still in hand and his coat on, fingered the various colors of facecloths inside. Brown, beige, or white. He couldn’t decide. Choosing brown, he returned to Lucy and Ruth, ran them under the tap, and handed them to her, hoping what he’d done was correct.

“Not just yet,” Ruth explained, rubbing Lucy’s back as her daughter took a break.

“Okay, erm, where will I put them?”

“Beside her bed. And can you change her sheets? She had an accident.”

Lucy started to weep again, tiredly nuzzling into her mother’s chest. Ruth’s face was pale, her hair tied back hastily, and her eyes tired, red, and swollen. It seemed it had already been a hectic night.

“The sheets are in the closet, too. And the Dioralyte is in the medicine cabinet in the utility room.”

“The what?”

“Dioralyte. Medicine. Lucy likes the black-currant flavor. Oh God,” she said, jumping up, hand over her mouth, and running down the hall to their own bathroom again.

Lou was left in the bathroom alone with Lucy, whose eyes were closed as she leaned up against the bathtub. Then she looked at him sleepily. He backed out of the bathroom and started to remove the soiled sheets from her bed. As he was doing so, he heard Bud’s cries from the next room. He sighed, finally put down his briefcase, took off his coat and suit jacket, and threw them out of the way, into the Dora the Explorer tent in the corner of Lucy’s room. He opened the top button of his shirt, loosened his tie, and rolled up his sleeves.

L
OU STARED DEEP INTO HIS
Jack Daniel’s and ice and ignored the barman, who was leaning over the counter and speaking aggressively into his ear.

“Do you hear me?” the barman growled.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” Lou’s tongue stumbled over his words, already unable to remember what he’d done wrong.

“No, not
whatever
, buddy. Leave her alone, okay? She doesn’t want to hear your story; she is not interested in you. Okay?”

“Okay, okay,” Lou grumbled then, remembering the rude blonde at the bar who’d kept ignoring him. He’d happily not talk to her—he wasn’t getting much conversation out of her anyway—and the journalist he’d just shared a drink with earlier didn’t seem much interested in the amazing story that was his life. He kept his eyes down into his whiskey. A phenomenon had occurred tonight, and nobody was interested in hearing about it. Had the world gone mad? Had they all become so used to new inventions and scientific discoveries that the very thought of a man being cloned no longer had shock value? No, the young occupants of this trendy bar would rather sip away at their cocktails, the young women swanning about in the middle of December with their tanned legs, short skirts, and highlighted hair, designer handbags hooked over their arms like candelabras, each one looking as exotic and as at home as a coconut in the North Pole. They didn’t care about the greater events of the country. A man had been cloned. There were two Lou Sufferns in the city tonight. Bilocation was a reality. He alone knew the great depths of the universe. He laughed to himself and shook his head at the hilarity of it all.

He felt the barman’s stare still searing into him, and so he stopped his solo chortling and concentrated again on his ice. Around the lonesome Lou the noise continued, the sound of people being with other people: after-work flirting, after-work fighting. There were tables of girls huddled together with eyes locked in as they caught up with one another, circles of young men standing with eyes locked outward, their movements shifty.

Lou looked around to catch somebody’s eye. He was fussy at first about his chosen confidant, preferring somebody good-looking with whom to share his story for the second time, but then he decided to settle on anybody. Surely somebody would care about the miracle that had occurred to him tonight.

The only eye he succeeded in meeting was that of the barman again.

“Gimme me nuther one,” Lou slurred when the barman walked over. “A neat Jack on th’ rocks.”

“I just gave you another one,” the barman responded, a little amused this time, “and you haven’t even touched that.”

“So?” Lou closed one eye to focus on him.

“So, what good is there in having two at the same time?”

At that, Lou started laughing, a chesty, wheezy laugh with the presence of the bitter December breeze.

“I think I missed the joke.” The barman smiled.

“Ah, nobody here cares.” Lou got angry again, waving his hand dismissively at the crowd around him. “All
they care about is Sex on the Beach, thirty-year mortgages and Saint-Tropez. I’ve been listenin’ and that’s all they’re sayin’.”

The barman laughed. “Just keep your voice down. What don’t they care about?”

Lou turned quiet now and fixed the barman with his best serious stare. “Cloning.”

The barman’s face changed, interest lighting up his eyes. Finally something different for him to hear about, rather than the usual patron woes. “Cloning? Right. You have an interest in that, do you?”

“An interest? I have
more
than an
interest
.” Lou laughed patronizingly and then winked at the barman. He took another sip of his whiskey and prepared to tell the story. “This may be hard for you to believe, but I”—he took a deep breath—“have been cloned. This guy gave me pills, and I took them,” he said, then hiccuped. “You probably don’t believe me, but it happened. Saw it with my own two eyes.” He pointed at his eye, misjudged his proximity, and poked himself. Moments later, after the sting was gone, he continued chatting. “There’s two of me,” he said, holding up three fingers, then one, then finally two.

“Is that so?” the barman asked, picking up a pint glass and beginning to pour a Guinness. “Where’s the other one of you? I bet he’s as sober as a judge.”

Lou laughed, wheezy again. “He’s at home with my wife.” He chuckled. “And with my kids. And I’m here, with her.” He directed his thumb to the left of him.

“Who?”

Lou looked to the side and almost toppled off his bar stool in the process. “Oh, she’s—where is she?” He turned around to the barman again. “Maybe she’s in the toilet. She’s gorgeous, we were having a good chat. She’s a journalist, she’s going to write about this. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m here having
all the fun
, and he’s”—he laughed again—“he’s at home with my wife and kids. And tomorrow, when I wake up, I’m going to take a pill—not drugs; they’re herbal, for my headache.” He pointed to his head seriously. “And I’m going to stay in bed and he can go to work. Ha! All the things that I get to do, like…” He thought hard but failed to come up with anything. “Like, oh, so, so many things. All the places I’m going to go. It’s a fucking mir’cle. D’ya know when I last had a day off?”

“When was that?”

Lou thought hard. “Last Christmas. No phone calls, no computer. Last Christmas.”

The barman was dubious. “You didn’t take a holiday this year?”

“Took a week. With the kids.” He wrinkled up his nose. “Fucking sand everywhere. On my laptop, in my phone. And this.” He reached into his pocket and took out his BlackBerry and slammed it on the bar counter.

“Careful.”

“This thing. Follows me everywhere; sand in it and it still works. The drug of the nation. This thing.” He poked it, mistakenly pressing some buttons, which lit up
the screen. A picture of Ruth and the kids smiled back at him. Bud with his big silly toothless grin; Lucy’s big brown eyes peeping out from under her fringe; Ruth holding them both. Holding them all together. He studied it momentarily with a smile on his face. Then the light went out and the picture faded to black. “In the B’hamas,” he continued, “and
beep-beep
, they got me.
Beep-beep, beep-beep
, they get me.” He laughed again. “And the red light. I see it in my sleep, in the shower, every time I close my eyes, the red light and the
beep-beep
. I hate the fucking
beep-beep
.”

“So take a day off,” the barman said.

“Can’t. Too much to do.”

“Well, now that you’re cloned, you can take all the days off that you want,” the barman joked.

“Yeah.” Lou smiled dreamily. “There’s so much I want to do.”

“Like what?” The barman leaned in, looking forward to hearing this crazy guy’s dream.

“The blonde that was here a minute ago,” Lou said, then laughed loudly as the barman shook his head and wandered off to another drunk at the end of the bar.

“I
T’S OKAY, SWEETIE, IT’S OKAY
, Daddy’s here,” Lou said, holding Lucy’s hair from her face and rubbing her back as she leaned over the toilet and vomited for the twentieth time that night. He sat on the bathroom tiles in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, and leaned against the
bathtub as her tiny body convulsed one more time and expelled more vomit.

“Daddy…” Her voice was small through her tears.

“It’s okay, sweetie, I’m here,” he repeated sleepily. “It’s almost over.” It had to be. How much more could her tiny body get rid of?

Every twenty minutes he’d gone from sleeping in Lucy’s bed to assisting her in the bathroom, her body going from freezing to boiling and back again in a matter of minutes. Usually it was Ruth’s duty to stay up all night with the children, sick or otherwise, but unfortunately for Lou, and for Ruth, she was having the same experience as Lucy in their own bathroom down the hall. Gastroenteritis, an end-of-the-year gift for those whose systems were ready to wave good-bye to the year.

Lou carried Lucy to her bed again, her small hands clinging around his neck. Already she was asleep, exhausted by what the night had brought her. As he laid her down on the bed, he wrapped her now-cold body in blankets and tucked Beyoncé, her favorite bear, close to her face, as Ruth had shown him. His mobile vibrated again on the pink princess bedside table. At four a.m., it was the fifth time he’d received a phone call from himself. Glancing at the caller display, his own number flashed up on the screen.

“What now?” he whispered into the phone, trying to keep his voice and anger low.

“Lou! It’s me, Lou!” came the drunken voice on the other end, followed by a raucous laugh.

“Stop calling me,” he said, a little louder now.

In the background was thumping music, loud voices, and a gabble of nonspecific words. He could hear glasses clinking and laughter exploding every few moments from different corners of the room. He could almost smell the alcohol fumes drifting through the phone and penetrating the innocent world of his daughter. Subconsciously, he blocked the receiver with his hand.

“Where are you?”

“Leeson Street. Somewhere,” he shouted back. “I met this girl, Lou. Fucking amazing! You’ll be proud of me. No, you’ll be proud of you!” Raucous laughter again.

“What?!” Lou barked loudly. “No! Don’t do anything!” he shouted, and Lucy’s eyes fluttered open momentarily like two little butterflies, big brown eyes glancing at him with fright, but then on seeing him—her daddy—she smiled and her eyes closed again with exhaustion. That look of trust, the faith she had put in him with that one simple look, did something to him right then. He knew he was her protector, the one who could take away the fright and put a smile on her face, and it gave him a better feeling than he’d ever felt in his life. Better than the deal at tonight’s dinner, better than seeing the look on Alfred’s face when he’d arrived at the restaurant. It made him loathe the man at the end of the phone, loathe him so much that he felt like knocking him out. His daughter was at home, throwing her guts up, so much so that her entire body was too exhausted for her to keep her eyes open, and there he
was, out getting drunk, chasing skirts, expecting Ruth to do all this without him. He hated the man at the end of the phone.