Authors: Kate Thompson
My heart led me. ‘We’re safe, Mom. Safe and warm and well-fed.’
‘But where?’
‘It doesn’t matter. How are you? And Maurice?’
‘We’re fine.’
I could hear Maurice in the background, saying, ‘Is it them? Is it them?’
‘Things aren’t so bad in the country,’ Mom went on. ‘There’s more trouble in the towns.’
I could hear Maurice again, and Mom said, ‘Please tell us where you are.’
‘We’re with . . . with friends.’
‘What friends?’
‘You don’t know them,’ I began, but Maurice’s voice, at the receiver now, interrupted me.
‘You’re in Scotland, aren’t you?’
I hesitated, and by the time I tried to deny it, it was too late.
‘We found a map in Danny’s room,’ said Maurice. ‘You had it all planned, didn’t you? You and her?’
‘No! It didn’t happen like that at all!’
Maurice ploughed on, as though he wasn’t listening to me at all.
‘We can’t come for you, you know. Not yet, anyway. But I’m going to send the police.’
Anxiety began to rise into my chest again, but then a strange thing happened. My fear fell away and I knew I was not the sullen, lazy boy that had left home those long weeks ago. I was someone else, now; someone who had made an incredible journey, come close to death, and learnt how to fend for himself.
My thoughts cleared and I remembered the television pictures I had just seen. ‘The police aren’t going to be interested,’ I said. ‘Not with all this other stuff going on. Besides, you should see Danny. He’s never been happier, Maurice. He’s found a purpose in life.’
Maurice went ominously quiet. I noticed that my card was running out.
‘What purpose?’ he said, breathlessly.
‘He’s working in the garden.’
Maurice let his breath out, and as he spoke again, his tone had quite changed. Suddenly we were speaking man to man.
‘Listen to me, Christie,’ he said. ‘You may be right about the police. But will you promise me one thing?’
‘What?’
‘Look after Danny. Don’t take your eyes off him. Maggie’s persuasive, I know that. But she’s not to be trusted. You understand? There are things you don’t know.’
The read-out flashed down from £1.20 to £1.00.
‘Like what?’ I said.
‘A lot of things.’
‘My money’s running out, Maurice.’
It galvanised him, and he blurted it all out. ‘When he was a baby, only two months old, she tried . . .’
‘It’s nearly gone.’
‘She tried to drown him!’
I was shocked into silence.
‘Watch him, Christie. Promise me.’
‘I promise.’
And then Mom was on again.
‘When will you be coming home?’
‘Whenever I can, Mom.’
‘Be careful, Christie. Be careful.’
And Maurice said, ‘Look after yourself as well!’
Then the line went dead, and the long miles were back between us again.
4
MY HEART WAS
in my boots as I trudged back along the glen, and my mind was somewhere down there, too, trying to find it. And failing. It wasn’t only Fourth World that was incomprehensible to me. All worlds were. Not least my own. How could I possibly find truth in the midst of so much chaos? Every time I thought I had found it, something else came along and proved me wrong. I didn’t want to believe what Maurice had said, but I couldn’t dismiss it, either. Maybe I was a fool to trust anyone or anything. Even Oggy, trotting dogwise ahead of me, was an impenetrable mystery again. I turned everything over in my mind, but it made me more uneasy, not less. Because something in that missing link business didn’t quite ring true. There was a failure of logic somewhere in the story, but at that moment in the damp, quiet glen, I couldn’t locate it. The only missing links I could find were the ones in my brain. I couldn’t think straight at all.
As I helped Danny wash his muddy hands that evening, I made a silent promise to him. Whether Maurice’s words were true or not, I
would
never leave Fourth World without him, and I would watch him night and day.
At dinner, Tina made an announcement that turned the meal into a celebration. One of Iggy’s babies had said its first word.
Maggie was ecstatic.
‘You realise what it means?’ she said. ‘The gene can be transmitted through the bloodlines. It could mean that every one of the talking animals can have talking offspring.’
‘A new world order!’ said Sandy.
‘Hope they’ll use their intelligence better than humans have,’ said Tina.
And Danny, because everyone else seemed so happy, just laughed and laughed and laughed.
Everyone except me, that was. I accepted the drop of champagne that Maggie gave us all, and I drank the piglets’ health. But I was still wrestling with the problem of the missing link. There was definitely something about the story that was wrong.
It wasn’t until the washing-up was over and I was about to take Danny off to bed that the penny finally dropped.
‘That’s what I don’t understand,’ I said, turning back into the room as I spoke. ‘You’ve found the missing link, so you say, and you’ve isolated it and put it into the animals?’
‘That’s right,’ said Maggie.
‘Then where have Bernard and Colin gone? What is there left to find?’
Maggie smiled. ‘So there is something
between
your ears, after all,’ she said. I fought down another blush, unsuccessfully.
‘Sit down, Christie,’ she went on. ‘You, too, Tina. You may need to be sitting down to hear this.’
We all took our places again and Maggie drained the last of the champagne into her glass. Then she turned to me.
‘You said something this morning that I thought was quite shrewd. You said that what we are doing in the lab is a bit like playing God.’
I nodded, feeling more flattered than I deserved to.
‘In a sense you’re right,’ Maggie went on. ‘And some say that we’re interfering in a process that has always been taken care of by nature; or by God, if you prefer.’
Tina wasn’t looking at Maggie, but I could tell she was all ears. Sandy stifled a yawn. She had heard all this before.
‘What we’ve done here may be unethical,’ Maggie continued. ‘Maybe you think so, Christie?’
At that moment, at least, I did. But I just shrugged.
‘One of the reasons I’ve been able to live with my conscience is that neither I, nor Maurice, has ever looked for any profit from anything we’ve done.’
‘You hardly need to,’ said Tina, with a hint of her old bitterness.
‘There are other kinds of profit,’ said Maggie. ‘Prizes. Fame. Power. But anyway, that’s neither
here
nor there. There’s another reason as well, based upon a conclusion that Bernard and I reached in our work together.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘If it’s true that we’re playing God,’ said Maggie, ‘then we have reason to believe that we’re not the first ones to have done it.’
‘What?’ said Tina and I together.
‘If our research has been conducted properly, it seems that someone else once played God with us.’
5
I LAY ON
the floor in Danny’s room, where I had made up my bed for the night. The moon was grinning at me through his window, taunting me to come out into its realm again. But there would be no more midnight jaunts, not for the moment, anyway. I was staying where Danny was; night and day.
I hadn’t understood much of what Maggie had gone on to tell us that evening. A lot of it was technical stuff about the structure of DNA and how it created the blueprint for the different forms of life on the planet. But I think I had understood the overall results. She and Bernard had studied their missing link gene and found it was in some way subtly different from other genes. There was nothing quite like it in any living creature, and they had gone into meticulous studies of ape genetics to try and find if there was anything around that might be a precursor to it. But there was nothing remotely like it. The gene seemed not to have evolved, but to have appeared from nowhere. The only conclusion they could come to was that someone, or something, must have put it there. So Bernard, with Colin and a handful of animals,
had
set off for the places where prehistoric man was believed to have originated, looking for evidence that some other form of life, more advanced than ours, had been there.
It made my mind jump through hoops; it was surely too far-fetched to be true. I wondered how much more I was going to have to absorb on my way towards coming to terms with Fourth World.
There was something comforting about being there in Danny’s room, listening to his deep, slow breathing as he slept. He hadn’t understood a word that Maggie had said, and I was glad that his innocence protected him from it, because it meant he had no insight into what he really was. Not a gardener, as he thought, but an experiment gone wrong. And one, if what Maurice said was true, that his mother had tried to get rid of.
6
I WOKE IN
the morning to the sound of Danny singing as he got himself dressed. I wished I could feel as bright in the mornings, but I didn’t, and I pulled my covers up over my head and tried to go back to sleep.
Maggie came in soon afterwards.
‘Who’s that?’ she said, giving me a prod with her toe.
I revealed my face.
‘What are you doing in here?’
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ I said. ‘Had a nightmare.’
‘And you thought your big brother would protect you?’
Danny laughed and assured me he would die for me.
‘Sorry, Christie,’ said Maggie. ‘I’m not being very sympathetic. Was it a bad one?’
‘Pretty bad.’ And then, before I could stop myself, I said, ‘I dreamt you tried to drown Danny.’
Danny laughed again, but Maggie didn’t. It was the first time I had ever seen her lose possession of herself. An expression of shock swept over her face, and then her features stiffened as she tried to mask it. Without a word, she left
the
room. Danny lumbered after her, leaving one sock and both his boots behind him.
My heart was pounding. I had hit on some truth, I knew. For a moment or two I lay there, staring blindly at the ceiling. Then, remembering myself, I jumped up, threw on my clothes, and followed the others down to the kitchen.
It was as though nothing had happened. Maggie was her usual, shining self, standing over the porridge on the range. Danny was whistling his football anthem, fairly tunelessly, over and over again. After a few minutes I realised he was whistling continuously, without taking a breath, and that Maggie had the fancy timer out again. When he ran out of steam and began giggling, the display read three minutes and fifty-two seconds. Not as long as he could hold his breath for, but no mean feat all the same.
Tina came in with one of the pups and sat in her place at the table.
‘No animals in the kitchen,’ said Maggie.
‘Oggy and Itchy are allowed in,’ said Tina.
‘They’re different,’ said Maggie.
‘Muffin’s different as well,’ said Tina, staying where she was, cradling the wagging pup. The little show of rebellion gave me heart. I winked at her and she winked back. Maybe there was hope for Tina yet.
When Sandy came in with the milk we sat down to eat, and as soon as we had finished, Maggie began to organise the day.
‘I think we can begin digging in the manure for the potatoes,’ she said. ‘What do you think, Danny?’
‘Manure?’ said Danny. ‘Digging it into the ground?’
‘That’s right. I’ll show you how. Maybe Sandy and Christie will fetch it for us?’ She looked at me. ‘From the muck-heap beside the sheds?’
‘Maybe I’ll help Danny with the digging,’ I said. ‘Maybe Tina can help Sandy?’
Maggie went quiet and turned a penetrating gaze upon me that I could not meet. Then she said, ‘Change of plan. I think it’s time we all went on a little outing.’
‘Where?’ said Tina.
‘Magical mystery tour,’ said Maggie. ‘Let’s go.’
We left the breakfast things where they were and Maggie led the way out of the back door. Danny followed.
‘Hang on a minute,’ I said. ‘Danny’s got no shoes.’
‘Never mind,’ said Maggie. ‘He won’t be needing them where we’re going.’
I ran back to get jackets. By the time I came out again the up-and-over door of the garage was open and Maggie was starting the engine of the car. I stood by the open passenger door.
‘But it’s not allowed,’ I called in to her. ‘You told us that yourself!’
‘Get in,’ said Maggie.
There was no arguing. Danny was pushing me aside to get in the front, and everybody else
was
already piling in. Oggy and Itchy were sharing my seat in the back, deliriously excited.
As I shoved them aside to get in, Darling appeared from nowhere, flashed through the last few inches of the closing door and whirred around the confined space for a moment before settling on Danny’s headrest. Beside me, Tina was hugging the anxious pup and making soothing noises. But as soon as the car left the garage she began to sing, very quietly, ‘Goody, goody, two shoes.’
I gave her a dig with my elbow, but I didn’t have the heart for sparring.
There were too many other things on my mind.
7
WHATEVER WORRIES I
had about the police were soon submerged by the greater anxiety about where Maggie was taking us. We sped along the empty lanes, confident of meeting no other traffic, and before long we had left the glen behind us and were sailing along the coast road.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked. But Maggie didn’t reply, and no one else seemed in the slightest bit concerned.
We passed a couple of cyclists, one with a heavy basket, the other with a jumble of fishing tackle. Outside a little croft, a woman put down her spade to give us all a cheery wave. Otherwise the whole area seemed deserted. I found myself wishing we would meet a police car. There was something scary about Maggie’s mood. She drove almost recklessly, propelled by some fierce passion that I couldn’t understand. I would have preferred to be arrested.
As soon as the sea came into view, Danny stopped whistling and singing and slipped into the mesmerised state that I recognised from our journey. I put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, but the sea commanded his entire attention. I don’t think he even knew I was there.