Fifty Fifty (18 page)

‘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.’

Gil tried to follow what he was saying but the scale of it was huge, too huge for him to get his head round.

‘What else do you want to see?’ said Dad.

‘Uh – where are the monkeys?’

‘There are no monkeys here,’ said Dad. ‘We don’t use them for genetic research.’

‘Oh.’

‘Do you want a drink?’ asked Dad after a while.

Gil nodded.

‘Let’s go along to my office.’

They went back through the mouse room, where Dad put the mice in their drawers, back through the rabbit room, back through the changing room where Gil had been blasted by the air shower. He took
off his protective clothes and Dad led him out between the strips of the plastic curtain. They turned left down a corridor, and left again, and there was a door with a name plate saying
Dr
Matthew Walker
. Gil stood looking up at it, and then he put his hand in his pocket and switched off the camera.

Dad unlocked the door and ushered Gil in. The office had a proper window that you could look out of. Gil went across and looked through the smoked glass. Dad must really be quite important, he
thought, if he had a room with a window in a building that had almost no windows at all. There wasn’t much to see, though, just more buildings made of cream-coloured stone and a slice of the
road they had driven down past the museum, and a little patch of garden far below. Gil pressed his face against the glass to see if he could glimpse the animal rights protesters they’d driven
past, and managed to bang his knee on a big metal box just under the window. ‘What’s this thing?’ he asked.

‘Fire escape,’ said Dad. ‘We can’t have a proper fire escape on this floor for security reasons. So all of us who work up here need to have a fire ladder next to the
window, just in case we ever have to flee a burning building.’ He grinned. ‘Makes climbing out of your bedroom on to the conservatory roof look pretty tame, doesn’t it? It’s
quite a long way down there.’

Gil sat in an office chair while Dad took a can of Coke out of a tiny fridge. Dad didn’t really approve of Coke, and Gil couldn’t imagine him drinking it himself. He wondered if Dad
had put it there specially as a reward for the end of their visit. Dad stood quietly leafing through papers while Gil sat and slurped, looking around the office. There was a huge photo above the
desk, a cluster of spheres blown up thousands of times bigger than life size. At least now he knew what they were.