Free Fifty Fifty by S. L. Powell

sedative.
I’ll be down in a while.’
    Valium. People who were mentally ill took Valium. If you took it for more than a few weeks you could become addicted to it.
    So was Mum having a breakdown? Was she going mad? Why was Dad trying to pretend she was fine when it was obvious she wasn’t?
    Gil stared at the dishwasher. He could start the wash cycle, that might cheer Mum up.
    Was any of this his fault? he wondered.
    Why did they never tell him anything?

Gil lay on his bed for a long time, twisting Jude’s booklet in his fingers. There was a picture of the sad ginger-brown monkey on the booklet’s cover, and Gil could
hardly bear to look at it.
    His head was filled with a mess that was like the smashed plate and meat and gravy that had covered the kitchen floor. Suddenly he was terrified that Mum was ill. It had been coming for a while
– little hints here and there that she wasn’t quite the person she had been before, the way she hung about the house and seemed to rely on Dad so much – things that irritated Gil
more than anything. But now she had fallen apart so badly that he couldn’t ignore it any longer. There was something really wrong with Mum. If he did anything to upset her it might make her
worse.
    And of course that was the perfect way for Dad to keep him in line. Don’t argue, Gil, it’ll upset your mother. For your mother’s sake, please try to sort yourself out. Blah
blah blah blah blah. It’s Dad’s fault, thought Gil furiously. It’s all Dad’s fault. But his anger fizzled out as quickly as it had started. There was too much to be
scared about, all the things that Gil was now certain Dad didn’t tell the truth about, the things that he and Mum deliberately kept hidden from him. Without warning, Gil found himself staring
right at the terrible thing he’d discovered the previous day.
    Dad experimented on animals.
    Dad experimented on animals, and he had never told Gil .
    The shock of it made the inside of Gil’s head clang like a gigantic bell.
    After a while Gil sat up and smoothed out Jude’s booklet. He had to read it. He needed to know exactly what Jude was accusing Dad of. But the booklet was so hard to get through that he
nearly gave up.
    It told Gil about people who squirted toilet cleaner in rabbits’ eyes to see if it made them go blind. People who shaved the fur off guinea pigs and then dripped bleach on their skin to
see how badly it burnt them. Researchers who fed monkeys cocaine and cannabis to make them into drug addicts, who infected monkeys with AIDS and then tried to find ways to cure them. People who
made dogs eat lipstick to see if they got cancer. Scientists who fiddled with the genes in embryos and made mice with two heads, or with half their head missing altogether, or with no legs, or with
too many legs. People who grew eyes on creatures where eyes were never meant to grow. Scientists who put electrodes deep into chimpanzees’ brains and then ran electricity through them to see
how the chimps twitched.
    People like Dad.
    Some of these procedures, the booklet said, were now banned. Animal rights movements had fought long and hard to achieve this. As a result, no UK experiments were permitted on chimpanzees or
gorillas any more. The use of animals in the testing of cosmetics and household chemicals had been reduced.
    But it had not stopped. Millions of animal experiments were carried out every year in Britain alone, and millions more in the rest of Europe and in the USA. Millions of animals that could not
speak for themselves, that needed people to stand up and speak out for them.
    The pictures were awful. When Gil closed the booklet he felt sick and upset. He didn’t want to feel like this, he thought angrily. He wanted to be able to make Dad feel sick and
upset, while he stayed in control just like Jude had.
    Jude was right. It was torture. Dad took part in the torture of animals.
    The thought was too big to fit inside his head properly. The