Something that Dr Michaelides had said was repeating over and over in his mind.
I’m not sure that your children are able to make certain distinctions about some aspects of what constitutes normal behaviour in society.
Was this her way telling them, in a thinly veiled way, that their children were psychopaths?
83
Back at home, the house was quiet. No one else up yet. Good. The children needed to be punished for what they had done, but how? What would show them that what they had done was wrong? What the hell would get through to them?
Still in his tracksuit, sweaty and cooling down fast from his run, he made Naomi her usual Sunday morning cup of tea, toast and Marmite, and took it up to her, with the newspapers, on a tray.
She was sitting up in bed, watching Andrew Marr interviewing the Chancellor. He picked up the remote, turned the volume down, and, reluctant to spoil her morning, told her about the guinea pigs.
After a long silence, her face pale, she gripped his hand and said, ‘Can we not tell Harriet – or my mother? Can we keep this to ourselves?’
He sat down on the bed beside her, glancing at the headlines of the Sunday Times. ‘I agree, I don’t want them to know.’
‘We could tell them that – that – they left the door open and they ran away – couldn’t we?’
‘I just put the hutch outside,’ he said. ‘Your mother isn’t going to notice anyway. If Harriet says anything, I’ll tell her I put them outside and didn’t shut the door properly.’
‘We need to speak to Luke and Phoebe. We have to explain to them that what they’ve done isn’t right. We have to get through to them, John, we have to make them understand. They have to be punished for this.’
‘Tell me how we do that? Because I don’t know. Dr Michaelides said-’
‘I remember very clearly what she said. But we’re their parents, we brought them into this world, it’s our responsibility. They’re only three years old, for Christ’s sake! What are they going to do when they’re four? Or five? Start cutting you and I open to see what our vital organs look like?’
She went to the bathroom and closed the door. John flicked through the paper, but couldn’t concentrate on any article. Some minutes later she came out, wrapped in her dressing gown, her hair brushed and her breath smelling minty from toothpaste. Her face looked like thunder. She dug her feet into her slippers, went out into the landing along to the box room. Luke and Phoebe sat on the floor in front of the computer, in their pyjamas, close together, peering at a chess game. Without any warning, she grabbed Phoebe’s arm and started dragging her out of the room. ‘You and me are going to talk, Phoebe, if it takes us all day, you and me are going to talk. And your Daddy and Luke are going to talk. If it takes them all day. If it takes them all day and all night.’
‘Luke!’ John said.
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!