Piers Torday - The Last Wild

He points to the wolf-cub, sleeping peacefully with his oxygen mask on, a large bandage around his middle.

‘We just saved your friend here. No other animal can do that, you know — help and save another one in that way.’ I think of the stag, lying just outside. ‘But we can’t always. First came the red-eye. Now that was … savage. Total …’ He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, as if to clear the memory. ‘Unfortunately in that case, science was absolutely powerless. Even I couldn’t … We lost so many, so quickly —’ Dad stops in front of the operating table in the middle of the room, covered in piles of books on top of a dust sheet, and taps it. ‘Right in front of me on this very …’ He sighs. ‘And then of course, your mother got … well, she got very sick indeed.’

I can feel Polly glance at me anxiously. But I can’t take my eyes off Dad.

‘We couldn’t save her either. The one person I would have …’ he stops. Shakes his head. ‘I would have given anything, anything — but the fact is, we lost her. She was gone forever and I just couldn’t … You see?’ He clenches his hands together tightly, making the knuckles white. ‘So I thought … do something good in her memory. Everlasting … that was what I wanted.’

He must see the puzzlement on our faces.

‘A cure! I vowed to find a cure for the red-eye. A cure in your mum’s name.’

The lab seems to have grown quieter than before, no machines humming, and even the noise of the city from outside has faded.

‘That,’ Dad says, ‘is when my troubles really started.’

Dad sits down with a thump on a deckchair covered in shirts, which nearly collapses under his weight. A cloud of dust billows into the air.

‘I worked harder than I’d ever … down here night and day. Equations and experiments, tests and models, calculations and trials. I tried everything, but every road seemed like a dead end, every breakthrough an illusion — until!’ He jabs his finger in the air. ‘One night, I was tired and … perhaps just a bit absent-minded, so Factorium might have a small point …’ He looks embarrassed. ‘I made a mistake. A very big one.’

‘Something big, Kes,’ he’d said that night. ‘Something big —’ his fingers moving quickly over the keyboard.

Click click.

My heart catapults into my mouth, and Polly clutches my hand –

‘But it wasn’t the beginning of the red-eye!’ He stamps his foot, and more dust billows up. ‘On the contrary — it was the beginning of a cure.’

Polly clutches my hand even tighter.

‘Except,’ continues Dad, ‘all I had was a theory. It needed … research, proper testing — never mind making the thing.’ Dad rubs his hand over his face. ‘As a vet, I’d worked a lot with Factorium. They had big laboratories, processing plants … the capability! And I thought, the world’s biggest food company might just want to help me save the, you know, animals? So I went straight to the top, and had a meeting with —’

He doesn’t need to say. Polly and I swap glances. We both know who runs Factorium.

‘Best intentions and all that.’ Dad rubs his hands together. ‘So I met Selwyn Stone. Gave him my paperwork, my samples, the lot. He was very pleased. More than pleased. They offered me a huge amount of money.’

He smiles grimly to himself at the memory.

‘But I never saw a penny. Because that very evening he sent round that goon Skuldiss to threaten me. You see, Stone had been bluffing. They didn’t want a cure at all! Even worse, they wanted me to destroy all my work. Everything. Every last sum. And if I didn’t, they would —’

I stand stock still, not daring to move a single muscle.

Dad points at me.

‘You. They said they would take you away. I didn’t believe it. But that didn’t stop them. A week later. They took you away, ransacked my …’ he gestures around at the lab. ‘Said if I so much as thought about an equation relating to a cure, that your life would be …’ He looks down at his large feet as if he’s never seen them before. ‘That your life would be in danger,’ Dad says quietly. ‘And then — they locked me up too. In, you know —’

We look around at the bed, the clothes and the lonely toothbrush. This isn’t what I expected. This isn’t what I expected at all .

But it’s my turn to ask a question now, the question I’ve been wanting to ask for six years. I find a pen, grab a sheet of paper off one of the tottering piles and scrawl over it one simple question:

WHY?

He grabs the note from my hand, scans it quickly, and snorts.

‘Why did they do it? I’ll tell you. Formula! I had invented a cure that could save the last few animals in the world, but what I didn’t know was that Selwyn had just invented formula. The magic chemical that replaces food. Stone’s success now depended on there being no more animals. Nothing else to eat at all. And that’s exactly what happened. Factorium killed all the remaining creatures left alive and became very rich. Very rich and very powerful.’

The sky is black outside, rain clouds gathering once more above the towers.

Polly and I are looking at my dad with new eyes. Maybe, just maybe –

Polly’s face lights up. ‘But can you still help them, Professor Jaynes? Do you still have a cure for the virus?’

‘Hmm.’ Dad looks out of the window at the clouds. ‘I’m afraid … the short answer is … no, not after what Facto destroyed. No, I don’t.’

No.

He can’t –

I feel like I’ve just been thumped in the chest –

After everything –

I take a step back in shock.

Dad comes round the other side of the worktop and makes as if to hug me again, but I back away. I don’t know how to feel. I –

‘Kes.’ He stands there, hands in his grubby jacket pockets. ‘Wait. Let me explain.’

I don’t want him to. I don’t want him to explain away –

Everything I believed in!

And then –

‘NO!’

Just a single word, that’s all it is. I say ‘No’ to my dad.

He and Polly look at me in amazement.

So I say it again.

‘No.’

‘Kes, did you …?’ and then — ‘What did you just say?’

‘No.’ It gets easier every time.

‘No’ — because that’s not good enough. And not that I can say all this, but that’s not what I came hundreds of miles for. That’s not what I brought the animals for.

‘You spoke, Kes! Oh my, that’s fantastic, that’s …’

‘No!’ I thump my fist on the table, and another mountain of paper slides on to the floor.

‘Listen to me,’ says Dad, ‘I haven’t finished —’

‘No!’ I say.

It’s only one word. I can’t say ‘You’ or ‘Can’t’. You’ve no idea how badly I want to, but it doesn’t matter. He knows, he knows what I’m trying to say.

Everything that I’ve been telling myself. Telling the wild.

And now –

‘Listen to me,’ Dad says, trying to calm me down, waving his hands. ‘You’re right, Kester, you’re right. That wouldn’t be … acceptable.’

Then he points at me. ‘Your watch, please, Kes.’

My watch? I don’t believe this.

‘Yes, Kester,’ says Dad, holding his hand out. ‘Give me your watch, and I can show you what happened next.’

Too surprised to argue any more, I take the watch off. The screen is smeary and cracked, the plastic strap covered in mud and blood. I pass it to him, Polly and I both watching his every move.