Luke, totally ignoring him, pursed his lips and moved the mouse.
Whether it was Naomi’s fury transmitting to him, or his own pent-up anger finally bursting, John grabbed hold of Luke, more violently than he had ever done before, dragged him out of the door and followed Naomi and Phoebe down the stairs.
He pulled his son, who was silent and like a dead weight, across the hallway, through the kitchen and out of the back door, still following Naomi, dragging him across the lawn to the dustbins.
Naomi, still holding Phoebe with one hand, lifted the lid of a dustbin and hauled out a black bin liner. She held it up and stared at John. ‘This it? This the one?’
He shrugged. ‘Might be.’
Releasing Phoebe, who lay motionless and expressionless on the frosted lawn, she unknotted the top of the bag, then tipped the contents out. The carcasses of Fudge and Chocolate tumbled out and lay, among the detritus of their innards, on the grass.
Fighting back tears, Naomi, staring at each of them in turn, said, ‘These were your pets. You loved them. You kissed them. You were meant to be looking after them. You seemed like you loved them. Why did you kill them? Why did you do this to them? Why? Don’t you realize what you’ve done?’
Luke, speaking more lucidly and calmly than either of them had ever heard him, responded. ‘They’re a very low life form.’
Naomi looked at John. John, astonished at his son’s sudden lucidity, but trying to keep his calm, responded, probing, ‘Why does that give you the right to kill them, Luke?’
‘You gave them to us, Daddy,’ he said.
John wanted to cry and laugh. Luke was talking to them! Responding to them! This was an incredible breakthrough – and yet, it was awful. The circumstances were nothing to be happy about. He shot Naomi a look and she acknowledged it with eyes that reflected his own bewilderment. ‘Luke, we gave them to you to look after, not to kill,’ he said.
‘Guinea pigs only live five years anyway,’ Phoebe chipped in.
Both John and Naomi found themselves looking at their children in a totally new light. They were communicating! That in itself was remarkable. But it didn’t lessen what they had done. It didn’t lessen the bizarre nature of what was happening here.
‘So, don’t you think they had a right to live for five years?’ John said. ‘You’re a human being; humans live for eighty years.’
‘Chokkit had a smaller liver than Fudge,’ Phoebe said.
‘Anyhow, Fudge would have died of kidney failure at two; he had abnormal creatinine levels,’ Luke said solemnly.
And authoritatively.
Quite unbelievably authoritatively.
Naomi shivered. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘What are creatinine levels?’
‘It’s a metabolite that’s filtered out by the kidneys. Fudge’s creatinine levels were too high, meaning he was predisposed to kidney failure,’ Phoebe responded, staring at her as if she were a retard.
‘And what about Chocolate?’ Naomi asked. ‘What about her creatinine levels?’
‘They were OK,’ Phoebe answered simply.
‘So why did you kill her?’ Naomi asked.
‘I didn’t kill her,’ Phoebe said indignantly.
‘I see,’ Naomi said. ‘You cut her open and took out her insides. But you didn’t kill her. Right?’
‘No, she died. She was disobedient. We didn’t say she could die, we didn’t give her permission to die.’
84
John followed Naomi inside, went straight to the box room, unplugged the children’s computer and picked it up. He remembered when he had been naughty as a child, his father used to confiscate his bicycle, his most treasured possession. That used to hurt a lot, depriving him of his mobility, effectively confining him. Maybe taking away the computer might have an impact on Luke and Phoebe. They needed, desperately, to find something that would.
He set the computer down on the floor of his den, then plugged it in and booted it up, curious to see what else the children had downloaded from the net.
The command came up: ENTER PASSWORD
You’ve set a password, you little sods! he thought, with reluctant admiration.
He was about to go and find them and demand the password, but then he had another thought. He knelt back down and, concentrating hard, tapped a series of letters on the keyboard. ebohpkul
But the message came up: PASSWORD NOT VALID – RETRY.
After thinking for some moments, John reversed the order of their names. eklebohp
Seconds after he hit the return, he was in. Yes! He grinned triumphantly. They were using their secret language, joining their names together, reversing them and omitting every fourth letter.
Then he stopped smiling. Terrific. I’m all excited because I managed not to be outsmarted by my three- year-old children.
He went to the internet settings, which should have been blank. But as he had half expected, they weren’t. There was a MobileMe account in Luke’s name and a Hotmail account in Phoebe’s name. They had set themselves up with free email accounts!
A while ago, a very, very short while ago, he would have been incredulous; but not any more. He wasn’t sure how he felt. Some moments he wished desperately this was all some dream, and that he’d wake up and find that he and Naomi had normal, happy kids who crawled into their bed on Sunday mornings, and didn’t sit in front of the television set hooked on programmes about halogen gas, and didn’t murder their pets.
Other moments he tried to think positively, and put his mind to the awesome possibilities that lay open to Luke and Phoebe. Whatever tinkering Dettore had done, their hunger for knowledge and their skills were incredible. Maybe they just needed a firmer hand, firmer guidance, better understanding? He and Naomi needed urgently to get their heads around exactly how bright the children were, and learn to see it as a positive rather than a negative.
He double-clicked on the web browser and while he waited for it to open, he tried to cast his mind back to his own childhood, to remember if there had been some point at which he had understood it was bad to kill things. Surely it had been his conscience that made him know? The guilt over killing that sparrow that he still carried in some small way to this day. You didn’t need to teach children that killing was bad. Any normal child would instinctively know.
Wouldn’t they?
He opened the site history, to look at all the web pages Luke and Phoebe had been to. And now he became really incredulous. It had been just twenty-four hours since they had been given the computer, yet there were pages and pages full of records of websites they had visited. All of them educational, mostly science sites, some geared at kids, some at teenagers, some very advanced. Medicine, biology, physics, mathematics, chemistry, biochemistry and, interspersed, a raft of anthropological, history and biographical sites.
As he knelt, totally absorbed in his task, he was unaware of two solemn little faces watching him from the doorway.
Basic Biology. The Laws of Entropy. Formations of Nucleoid Proteins. Advanced Logic. Calculus. He felt a cold, creeping sensation down his spine as he scrolled on down the list. It wasn’t possible! There was no way three-year-old children could be reading some of this stuff – in fact, any of this stuff.
He was interrupted by Naomi calling from downstairs that breakfast was ready.
He set a new password, to prevent them from sneaking in here and using the computer. Then he realized he was still in his damp, sweaty tracksuit. Quickly peeling it off, he went into the shower. A few minutes later, as he hurried downstairs, changed into a roll-neck jumper, jeans and his battered old leather yachting slip-ons – his comfort shoes – he was still very deep in thought.
