Perfect People (39 page)

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.

But the message came up:

After thinking for some moments, John reversed the order of their names.

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.

The rest of his family were already seated at the oak refectory table, which was laden with cereal packs, bowls of fruit salad, muesli, yoghurts, a basket of brioches and another of toast, and a heaped platter of fried eggs, bacon, sausages and tomatoes. Luke was pouring out Rice Krispies, managing the large pack with great precision. Phoebe, like a little madam, was spooning chocolate yoghurt from a pot.

John kissed his mother-in-law good morning, then Harriet, who was engrossed in the weekend
Financial Times.
‘How did you sleep?’ he said, taking his seat.

His mother-in-law was dressed rather formally, in a two-piece, as if she was about to go to church. John had noticed over the years that she always dressed smartly on Sunday, a throwback to her strict, religious upbringing. In her timid voice, she said, ‘Well, thank you. Like a log. I always sleep so well here.’

Harriet, in a chunky fisherman’s sweater, black hair unbrushed, looked up from the paper and tapped at the page with her finger. ‘Do you ever read Arnie Wilson’s column? He’s the best ski writer – quite a funny piece about carver skis.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ John said. He smiled absently and helped himself to some fruit salad, watching Luke spoon an obscene amount of sugar over his cereal.

‘I think that’s enough sugar, darling,’ Naomi said.

Ignoring her, Luke dug the spoon into the bowl.

Irritated, Naomi snatched the bowl away from him. ‘I said enough!’

Luke gave her an insolent stare. There was an awkward silence.

‘Did you sleep well, Luke and Phoebe, darlings?’ his mother-in-law asked.

Both of the twins ignored her.

‘Answer Granny,’ Naomi said, pouring milk onto Luke’s cereal.

Phoebe licked her spoon clean, then, holding it up in front of her as if inspecting it, said, ‘Sleeping is silly.’

Luke chewed a mouthful of cereal, then said, ‘I don’t sleep.’

‘Really?’ his grandmother said. ‘You don’t sleep?’

He spooned more Rice Krispies into his mouth and chewed slowly, and for a moment the crunching of the cereal was the only sound in the room.

John and Naomi exchanged a glance. John was signalling,
Hey, at least they’re talking, this is a breakthrough, this is progress! Some kind of progress, anyhow . . .

Harriet turned the page. ‘Why don’t you sleep, Luke?’

‘Coz only dead things sleep,’ he said.

This time John avoided catching Naomi’s eye. He forked a slice of mango and ate it without tasting it, his eyes now on Harriet, watching her reaction.

‘I slept last night,’ Harriet said. ‘But I don’t think I’m dead!’

‘I slept, too,’ Luke’s grandmother said. ‘But that doesn’t make me dead, darling, does it?’

Luke dug his spoon into his cereal, then said nonchalantly, ‘You will be soon, Granny.’

Naomi’s Diary

Am I wrong, making constant comparisons between L and P and Halley? My poor, darling, sweet, innocent Halley. OK, everyone knows that children say strange things, and Mum took it in good humour. But . . . thank God neither she nor Harriet noticed the guinea pigs had gone. What a really observant family I come from!

Halley, my little darling, I miss you so much. This may sound crazy, but when we first went to Dr Dettore’s clinic, you know what I was hoping? That we’d get you back, but all made better. That our new baby would really be you, in a new, healthy incarnation. But there is nothing of you in Luke or Phoebe, at least, nothing that I can see. You were so gentle, so sweet, so loving. You said funny things, sometimes, but I can’t imagine, ever, you saying what Luke said to Mummy at breakfast today. I can’t imagine you ever killing anything.

You may think this sounds strange, but there are times when I really sense you around me, holding my hand, telling me not to worry. If I didn’t feel that, I really think I’d crack up. John is so much stronger than me. I wish I had the calm he has, that inner strength, that confidence about how things are going to turn out.

You were born on a Sunday and you died on a Sunday. Lots of people love Sundays, but I don’t. I feel so down, sometimes, on Sundays. I’m down today. It was such a beautiful morning, and then it was ruined by what happened to Fudge and Chocolate. Now, this afternoon, it’s raining and windy. Granny’s watching an Agatha Christie movie on television and Auntie Harriet has gone home. P is on the kitchen floor in front of me, doing a three-dimensional jigsaw, and John is playing chess with L in the living room. Four o’clock and it’s dark already. At six thirty they have evensong in the village church. Every Sunday. There are times, like now, when I feel a pull to go there. Are you pulling me?

Or am I just clutching at anything, in desperation?

John was smarting over his total annihilation at chess by his son.

Naomi said, ‘This is what you wanted, John, isn’t it? All this
hot-housing
you did in those months after they were born? Those hours you spent up in their room, endlessly playing them all that New Age music, all that talking to them and that tactile stuff. You wanted them to be smart, well, you’ve got what you wanted.’

It was Sunday evening and they were alone in the kitchen. Naomi’s mother, suffering a migraine, had excused herself and gone to bed early. On Sunday evenings John always made supper, mostly something light and simple, which they would eat off trays on their laps in front of the television. Tonight he was making mushroom omelettes and a Greek salad.

‘Not like this,’ he said. ‘I never intended this.’

‘You laughed at my objections at the time. Now you’re miffed because Luke beat you at chess.’

Noticing the box of guinea-pig food was on the floor, she picked it up and put it away in a cupboard.

‘Naomi, he’s
three years old
, for God’s sake! A lot of kids aren’t even potty trained at three! And he didn’t just
beat
me. He wiped the floor with me. And the speed at which he made his moves – that was awesome.’

‘A few years ago when those Rubik’s Cube things were popular, adults had big problems doing them, but small children could do them in minutes. I remember someone saying it was because no one had told them it was impossible! Do children have an aptitude for puzzles that they lose when they grow older? Chess is a kind of puzzle, at one level, right?’

Standing over the pan, he concentrated for some moments on closing up the omelette. Normally he loved the smell of grilling mushrooms, but tonight his stomach was knotted with anxiety, and he had no appetite. ‘Part of it is that kids at that age think about things less, they intellectualize about them less, they just get on and do it.’

‘Maybe the same applies to chess? Nobody told Luke it was impossible to beat you, so he did, do you think? You told me you beat your grandfather when you were seven, and he was some kind of a chess master, wasn’t he?’

‘I beat him
once
,’ John said. ‘And that was after months of playing him. And—’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe he deliberately let me win that one time.’

He cut the omelette in two with the spatula, scooped each of the halves onto plates, removed the pan from the heat, and pulled down the hob lid of the Aga. ‘All set.’

They carried their trays into the living room; John went to the kitchen and returned with two glasses of Shiraz, then they sat in silence in front of the TV while they ate.
Antiques Roadshow
was on, the volume low.

‘You do make the best omelettes ever,’ Naomi said, suddenly sounding cheerier. Then she added, ‘Maybe we should take the kids out more. Dr Michaelides might be right, that we’re confining them in too much of a childhood world. They enjoyed the zoo.’

‘Yep, they picked up a real love of animals from it, didn’t they?’ John retorted.

Naomi ate for some moments in silence.

‘I’m sorry, hon,’ John said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

Naomi shrugged. They watched a meek, bearded man standing in front of a tray of Victorian surgical instruments.

‘Maybe we should take them to a post-mortem,’ John said. ‘I’m sure they’d find that lot more fun than Mr Pineapple Head. Or take them to a dissection room at a medical college department of anatomy.’

‘You’re being silly.’

‘I don’t think so – that’s the problem, they might really enjoy that. I think they want to see adult things.’

‘So, you work at one of the techiest places in Britain. Why don’t you take them on a tour of Morley Park? Show them the particle accelerator, show them the cold fusion lab.’

John put his tray on the floor.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’m not hungry. I can’t eat, I feel really – I don’t know – I just wonder how we’re going to cope; where we go from here.’

He stared at the television for some moments. A little old lady in a velvet hat was being told the value of a small marquetry box.