Fifty Fifty by S. L. Powell Page B

‘normal’, exactly? Normal was ages ago, before Gil had discovered Dad’s horrible secret, before he’d met Jude, before he’d broken
Dad’s rules and gone into town and nearly got arrested. Normal was before he’d read Jude’s booklet, before his head had filled up with pictures of suffering animals, before Mum
had screamed so terribly about so little that he knew there must be something seriously wrong. It was like looking through binoculars the wrong way round. Everything normal was very small and far
away and Gil knew he couldn’t go back there even if he tried.
    ‘OK,’ Gil said. ‘If you want.’ He didn’t care much one way or the other. Louis probably only wanted to make up so he could get Gil to help him with maths and
science.
    ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then,’ said Louis.
    Gil put the phone down. He had plans for tomorrow, or at least he wanted to have plans for tomorrow. He sat in the dark in the front room waiting for inspiration. By the time Dad found him
sitting there and sent him to bed, Gil knew that he had to do something tomorrow, but he still hadn’t worked out what the something was.
    Before he went to bed, Gil was allowed into Mum and Dad’s room to say goodnight to Mum. He almost didn’t want to see her in case it really was his fault that she’d got so
hysterical at lunchtime and the sight of him set her off again. But she was sitting propped up in bed with a book, and looked up brightly as Gil came in.
    ‘Night night, darling,’ she said, as if nothing at all had happened.
    ‘Come on, then,’ said Dad, before Gil could decide if he wanted to ask Mum how she was. ‘Bed.’
    When Dad had gone, Gil packed his school bag as if he was preparing for an expedition. He spent twenty minutes digging about in drawers and cupboards, looking for things that might be useful,
but since he wasn’t sure what he was preparing for it was difficult to decide exactly what he needed. A torch? A penknife? String? A compass? A city street map? In the end Gil threw
everything into his bag, together with the animal rights office phone number and his wallet. He could only hope that on Monday he would wake up with a clear idea of what he was supposed to do.

When Monday morning arrived it was so grey and foggy that Gil couldn’t even see the apple tree from his bedroom window, though it was only a few metres away. Mum
didn’t appear at breakfast, and it felt wrong. Dad moved silently and efficiently round the kitchen making porridge and toast and coffee, hardly speaking, and Gil tried to attract as little
attention as possible, like a mouse hiding from the hawk circling above him.
    ‘How’s Mum?’ Gil asked as they left the house.
    ‘Still asleep,’ Dad said. That was it.
    The car crawled to school through the thick fog. Gil watched the fog lights of oncoming cars as they appeared in pairs and disappeared again in the gloom. Dad dropped him at the school gates and
was gone again at once. The distance from the gates to the school building seemed to have doubled, and shapes loomed up in unfamiliar places. Gil didn’t like it much. But at least it meant
Louis didn’t manage to find him until they’d both got into the classroom.
    Louis was chattering excitedly before he was even close enough for Gil to hear him properly.
    ‘Man, that was weird,’ he said. ‘I waited for you at the gate but I couldn’t see a thing. Then I got completely lost coming across the playground and ended up in the
sixth-form block. Do you reckon this is what it’s like to be almost blind?’
    Gil shrugged.
    ‘God, I’d hate to be blind,’ Louis rattled on. ‘That fog is so bright it hurts your eyes. It’s given me a headache already. Hey, do you think there’s such a
thing as fog blindness? You can get snow-blind, can’t you? I remember, you told me about it, when we used to play that brilliant game you came up with, about being Arctic explorers, and we
hid in the freezer, and —’
    ‘Yeah,’