Fifty Fifty by S. L. Powell Page A

albums full of holidays, school shows, skating galas, friends – photos that made them all look happy and normal. If this one was locked away then Gil wasn’t meant to see it, for
sure.
    Put it back, right now, said the voice in Gil’s head. He stared at the plain black cover of the album. Whatever secrets it held, he had to face up to them sometime. He let the album
fall open in his hands.
    There was no blood, no dying animals, in fact nothing at all that made much sense to him. He found page after page of photos, all nearly identical, all labelled neatly. Each photo was a smudgy
picture of a cluster of blobs, like a spoonful of frogspawn. A few of the pictures were labelled with dates and names. Thomas. Imogen. Anna. David. Gil flicked through, mystified. The dates
seemed to be from before he was born, and the photos were going brown at the edges.
    There was a tiny noise from upstairs. Gil jumped as if a balloon had suddenly popped in his ear. He slid the album back in the bottom drawer, closed it gently, turned the key and slipped out of
the study, scudding hurriedly back to the kitchen.
    No one came.
    Gil took the stairs two at a time and dived into the safety of his bedroom.
    He waited. When nothing had happened for another ten minutes, he went downstairs to the front room with the phone number from Jude’s booklet.
    He knew he had to act quickly, but he was so agitated that he stood and stared at the phone for a stupidly long time while he got up the courage to dial the number. It took him three attempts to
get it right because his fingers kept missing the numbers. And then the phone just rang and rang and rang. Gil shut his eyes and listened to the dial tone buzzing in his ear. The strange blobs from
the photos floated behind his eyelids, like the after-image you get when you’ve stared at a bright light for too long. At last there was a little click and a woman’s voice said,
‘ Hi, thanks for calling. There’s nobody here right now, so please leave your number and a message after the tone and we’ll get back to you. ’
    Gil hung up immediately and tried the number again to check he hadn’t made a mistake. When he got the same answerphone he bottled out of leaving a message and put the phone down well
before the bleep began. He sat and gazed at the dead screen of the television again.
    The blobs must be something to do with Dad’s research. They were probably photographs of cells, tiny fragments of the animals he experimented on in the labs. What was so important about
them to make Dad put them in a special album? Maybe he’d poked about inside them, changing their DNA, trying to create the kind of monsters Jude had accused him of making.
    And why did all the blobs have names? Weird names, too. More like names of people than something you would call a mouse or a frog or even a monkey. Surely scientists didn’t bother to name
all the creatures they experimented on? Gil shivered. It was freaky enough to think of Dad creating a two-headed, four-eyed mouse and calling it ‘Imogen’. It was even worse to think he
could do that and then come home and pretend to be a normal dad by making cheese on toast.
    The phone rang very suddenly and loudly next to his elbow. Gil grabbed it, convinced that Jude must be on the end of the line somehow, even though there was no logical reason why he would be,
and sent the phone crashing to the floor.
    ‘Hello?’ Gil said, scooping up the phone. ‘Are you still there?’
    ‘You nearly blew my bloody ear off,’ said a familiar voice. ‘What are you trying to do, smash the phone up?’
    It was Louis.
    ‘Oh,’ Gil said. ‘It’s you.’ He made no effort to hide his disappointment.
    ‘Look, I want to say sorry about last week, that’s all.’
    Gil couldn’t be bothered to think of a reply.
    ‘Gil?’
    ‘Yeah, I’m still here,’ Gil said in a bored voice.
    ‘So is that OK, then? Can we just go back to normal?’
    Back to normal. Where was