Chapter 26
‘Kitty bumped, Mummy. Poor Kitty’s hurt.’
‘Yes, darling, I know. Kitty can’t see. Auntie Meg’s vet came over yesterday and said he couldn’t make her better. Remember?’
‘Kitty’s isn’t ill!’ Seb shouted at her, stamping his feet. ‘Kitty can’t see!’
‘She can’t manage without seeing, darling. We talked about that, didn’t we?’
‘Don’t want Kitty deaded!’
‘You know it happens, Sebbie. You know everything dies.’
‘Old things die; my Kitty’s not old.’
‘Not always, darling. Sometimes a pet is too sick to live. It’s kinder not to let them suffer. The vet is coming this morning to put Kitty to sleep. We talked about that yesterday.’
‘She isn’t tired.’
‘I think you should say goodbye, Sebbie. Give Kitty a big hug.’
‘Seb help Kitty,’ he mumbled, head buried in the cat’s fur. He held his pet tightly to himself, trying not to allow the tears. ‘My Kitty. You can’t dead her.’ Grief welled out under his eyelids, down his cheeks; long gulps of grief.
‘She’d always be hurting herself, Sebbie. It wouldn’t be fair on her. She might jump on the cooker and burn her paws – ’
‘Poor Kitty,’ he kept saying. ‘Poor Kitty.’
Jeffers and Jiminy, infected by their brother, also began to cry. Even Janus, Lisa saw, his eyes solemn, had a single large teardrop running down his cheek.
Lisa gently took the calico cat from Sebastian and put her in the willow basket, shutting the lid. ‘She needs to sleep now, Sebbie.’
He tried to get back to the cat, wriggled out of her restraining arms. Even Seb could show a nasty temper when he was upset.
‘Why not play a game on Daddy’s computer?’ Lisa distracted him, taking his hand and leading him to Alec’s study. ‘There’s just time for one before we have to leave.’ She turned the machine on and inserted the latest game Alec had bought him.
Seb sat on Alec’s chair, an unusual look of anger in his eyes, and thumped his fingers over the keyboard. ‘Why’s Jansy staying home?’ he asked. ‘Is he sick?’
‘He’s going to see Dr Morgenstein again,’ Lisa evaded the issue. ‘As soon as he comes back from holiday.’
‘Jansy’s not in bed,’ Seb said. ‘Jansy’s not ill.’ His look was openly hostile. ‘Is Jansy going to be deaded?’
Lisa had to clear her throat several times before the words would come. ‘Don’t be silly, Seb. Daddy is taking him to the doctor soon,’ she managed. ‘Then he can go to school again.’ She put her arms around the child. ‘Come along, Sebbie. Time to get ready.’
‘I’m not finished!’ he insisted, overturning Alec’s chair, banging the table. ‘I’ve nearly won – ’
‘When you get back, Seb. We have to go now, we’ll be late.’
‘It isn’t fair!’
Lisa walked all four children to the school, then walked back with Janus. He was often difficult, destructive even. But the fits of bad temper were not as uncontrolled as before. She could only be thankful that something seemed to have changed.
Without the competition from his brothers Lisa had been surprised to find herself drawn to the child. He was extraordinarily perceptive, and positively gifted. His drawings were remarkably accomplished. An early artistic talent, Lisa assumed. The bond between them, so often disturbed, was cementing into more than the usual love between mother and child. Lisa felt admiration for her son, pride in the way he handled an attribute he had to live with but could not regulate.
She saw him take Seb’s place at Alec’s desk. She must have forgotten to turn the machine off. ‘You’re too young to be playing with the computer,’ she said gently, looking at the screen as Janus knelt on the chair and flicked deft fingers over the keyboard. ‘Let’s do some drawing.’
The child ignored her, clicked keys, brought up one screen after another. No real harm in that, Lisa thought to herself, relieved to have time to clear the breakfast. He couldn’t mess up Alec’s files, they needed a password to be accessed.
When Lisa finally returned, about to switch the computer off, the screen which greeted her spelt FLAXTON PLC in enormous letters. There was a list of names and figures beneath. These must be Alec’s private files, the figures he was putting together for the company.
She knew Alec was working towards an initial public offering of Flaxton shares, due to come out within weeks. Lisa had had neither time nor energy to give thought to that aspect of Alex’s work before. With a start she realised she must, from now on. She had to work out what she could do to stop Flaxton selling Multiplier.
‘How did you get that screen, Jansy?’
‘Daddy files,’ the child said easily.
They were top secret. How could he know Alec’s password to get to the Flaxton files, let alone the one for the spreadsheets? That couldn’t be coincidence. Was this child really bright enough not merely to have remembered Alec’s passwords, but to have memorised them as Alec keyed them in?
‘Look, Mummy.’ Janus leant backwards and twisted his head towards her, beckoning at the screen. ‘Pretty,’ he said, encouraging her.
She examined the colour monitor. It wasn’t displacing a spreadsheet. What she saw there were some graphs and some lettering. Janus must have brought up the biological files, the ones that dealt with the components which made up Multiplier and Flaxton’s other products.
‘You like those?’ she asked the boy. Perhaps if she approached a government agency and told them about the disks…
He pointed to the illustration. ‘Find Jansy,’ he said. He tapped his fingers over the keys and brought up another screen.
‘How do you know what to do, Jansy?’
‘Just know.’ The screen had changed again. The screen showed several similar structures on different backgrounds. Colour-coded, just like her triplets’ clothes.
‘Look, Mummy!’ he said, again. There was an urgent tone in his voice.
Lisa stared as the child flicked from screen to screen. They all seemed virtually identical to Lisa. The boy was positively excited. Strings of symbols spread across the monitor.
The child was looking, rapt, at the different characters. Molecular structures, perhaps - or chromosomal charts.
One screen seemed to interest the child more than the rest. He pointed at it with his fingers, traced out the lines, took her index finger in his hand and traced them with her. They meant nothing to Lisa; just a diagrammatic form of something she didn’t recognise and wasn’t interested in.
‘Very nice, darling,’ she said, as she turned off the computer.
Lisa was more concerned with Janus’s body. The swelling, so rapid once it had started in the past, had slowed down in the last few days. He was definitely puffing up again, parts of his body painfully swollen. But Janus was nothing like as belligerent, nor as waterlogged, as in the two weeks before the cloning in the Priddy Woods. Something was clearly different. But what?
The child was curiously intent on only eating certain foods. He appeared to adore the large supermarket just outside Glastonbury, refusing the organic produce grown in their own garden, the good food proffered by neighbours. He simply wouldn’t eat it.
Lisa, reluctantly, had consulted Gilmore.
‘They all go through a stage of refusing food,’ he’d told her. ‘Don’t worry about it. The more you worry, the more he’ll hold back.’
None of the boys had ever been fussy about their food. Lisa had always boasted how they ate everything in sight, clearing their plates, aware of competition from their brothers.
She had the feeling that Janus was trying hard to tell her something. It was possible that he knew what brought on the cloning. It happened to his body, and he was trying to avoid it. As far as Lisa could judge, he was trying to avoid any food grown locally.