Sheep on the Fourth Floor Read online

  ‘Good idea,’ said the woman. ‘That pneumonia has been harder to treat than I anticipated. Let me know if he doesn’t perk up overnight.’

  The two white coats left the room and silence filled their space. Rom let himself drift into an uncomfortable state of semisleep where a steady infusion of thoughts began to weigh him down; thoughts of his flock, of grass, blackbirds, sunshine, dandelions, hot rocks, cold rain, sparrows, dogs, chickweed, magpies and the feeling of soft earth under his feet. He wasn’t sure which was worse: the bittersweet memories plaguing him when all he could see and smell was man and rat and rabbit, or the realization that the memories were gradually becoming dimmer. He knew the sun made his back feel good but now he couldn’t quite remember why or how. And he knew the birdsong was sweet to his ears but now the tunes wouldn’t play in his head and he wondered if he had imagined them in the first place. And what exactly was it about the company of other sheep that used to make him feel so secure, and whose absence filled him with sorrow? Rom let out a hiss of air and gently lay his head down on the straw. Surely they would be finished with him soon? Then someone would come and lead him down the corridors and back out into the sunlight. In the meantime, he longed to switch himself off, like they did with the lights and machines at the end of the day. Just switch himself off and bring it all to an end.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Anna sat on a cold concrete floor. Her back ached and she wished she could stand up to stretch her legs but the roof of the cage was too low. On the ground in front of her was a plate on which sat some kind of lettuce sandwich. It looked fresh enough but Anna didn’t feel like eating. Beside the plate was a stainless steel bowl half filled with water. She frowned; surely they could have given her a cup? As she reached out to touch the bars that imprisoned her, she noticed with surprise that she was dressed in pyjamas. Beyond her cage Anna could see some intermittently flashing red and white lights. Their glow reflected on the steel bars of several smaller cages lining the walls. She could hear sounds above the low hum of machinery: a snuffling and scratching, a thumping, a tired sigh.

  ‘Hello?’ Anna called out hesitantly into the room. ‘Hello, is anyone here?’

  Only growls, grunts and squeals answered. With the realization that she was the only human in the room came a sickening feeling of dismay.

  ‘Hello!’ she called again, her voice unsteady this time. ‘Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me?’ Her own voice echoed back into her ears, increasing her feeling of isolation and dread. ‘Help!’

  A shaft of light caught her eye and she turned her head. A door had opened on the other side of the room, and a cool breeze slipped through it. The smell of freshly cut lawn wafted in with the draught. Something stepped through the doorway and started walking into the room. It made a quiet tik-tik-tik sound on the floor as it moved. A shriek of terror caught at the back of Anna’s throat. What sort of horrifying monster was coming to get her? She looked around desperately for some escape route but there was nowhere for her to run or hide. With trepidation Anna looked up, straight into the eyes of a white, woolly sheep.

  She sighed with relief. ‘Rom! Rom, you’ve got to help me. I’m stuck in this cage. Can you get me out?’

  Rom stared at her sadly, then he lowered his head and pushed at the bars of her cage. They didn’t budge.

  ‘Rom! Help me!’ Anna pleaded to the sheep. ‘Help me get out of here. Please, I don’t like it in here. Where have all the people gone?’ She held the bars tightly and pushed her face closer to Rom’s. ‘I’m scared,’ she whispered.

  The sheep stared at her with its golden, cat-like eyes.

  ‘Mmaaaaaaahhhh.’ Rom bleated softly and shook his head gently from side to side. Then he turned around and started tik-tik-tikking his way slowly back across the room.

  ‘No!’ Anna howled, reaching her arms through the cage. ‘Don’t go! Rom, don’t leave me here!’

  But the sheep kept walking and soon it disappeared back through the open door. The door closed behind him with a heavy thump, leaving Anna alone again in the small, cold and frightening cage.

  Anna woke up with her heart pounding. Quickly she realized she was in her bedroom, lying in her warm bed, and the relief she felt was enormous. No cold cage. No strange locked-up creatures. No bowl of water. The dream left a lingering feeling of abandonment and loneliness and she was grateful to know her parents were close by, fast asleep in their own bedroom. She turned over and glanced at her clock.

  01:16.

  Anna lay on her back and tried to get the image of Rom’s sad gaze out of her head. She knew she should never have started meddling around on the Internet. She was just coming to terms with the fact that, sometimes, you had to sacrifice a sheep to save a bunch of small, sick children. But it was the phantom voice in her head that had driven her to the computer earlier that night.

  Do they really need to use the sheep? the phantom voice had inquired in its quiet but resolute way. Are the experiments going to provide useful information? Is that any way for an animal to live, locked in a cage on the fourth floor in the city? Has technology not advanced so that we no longer need to use animals?

  On and on the voice had gone, questioning insistently. It was driving Anna insane. Even a book about an alien invasion of Earth and a blast of Beethoven couldn’t shut it out.

  She hadn’t spoken to her mother about the animal laboratory since the night of the visit. Now Anna turned around in her lounge chair and faced her.

  ‘Mum, have you started using that drug on people yet? You know, the one that Jeff was studying?’ She tried to sound casual, not even mentioning the sheep. Some good news might shut the voice up.

  ‘Good lord, no!’ said Penelope, not looking up from the pile of papers on her knee. ‘We do the animal trials and then more animal trials and then some toxicity testing and then we have to present the findings to the governmental drug administration before we can even think about planning human trials.’ Still looking at the papers, she pushed her hair away from her face with the end of a biro. ‘It takes years.’

  Years! More and more animal trials! Toxicity testing! Without saying anything, Anna calmly got up and went into the office and switched on the computer. Into the search engine she typed ‘SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS + SHEEP’. She found many sites that backed up her mother’s explanation, and yet she found an equal number which argued against it. She devoured every bit of information she could comprehend. After two hours she turned off the computer, mentally exhausted. The room was strangely silent. It was a little while before Anna realized that it wasn’t the room that was silent but her own head. For some reason, the phantom voice had nothing to say.

  Anna lay in her bed in the dark, still feeling the effects of the dream. Was that what Rom felt like, when she had looked down on him in his cage? Trapped and scared? Lonely? Hopeful that she was going to be the one to set him free? Unable to get back to sleep, Anna got out of bed and wandered downstairs. She walked towards the kitchen, intending to get herself a glass of water. As she passed the television, she noticed the grey and red flowery curtains in the lounge were pulled slightly. Anna glanced again and frowned. Why was the balcony door open? She walked towards the open door, her bare feet silent on the brown woollen carpet. Cautiously she held the curtain back and looked outside. The night was quiet and still. To her left she was surprised to see her father propped up in one of the outdoor wooden loungers, staring out into the night. He had his feet crossed and he looked very relaxed. She smiled wryly; perhaps her father had had a bad dream as well. She was just about to call out to him when she saw Peter lift his hand to his mouth. The end of a cigarette flared briefly as he sucked on it, then it paled again; an orange dot in the gloomy night. Peter tilted his head back, pursed his lips and blew two perfect smoke rings into the air. Anna’s smile vanished. It took several seconds for her to find her voice.

  ‘Dad!’ she shrieked. ‘Dad! What are you doing?’

  Peter had just put the cigarette to his lips again. No
w his head snapped around in fright and he drew in his breath sharply. Suddenly his face turned red and he groped at his throat and started to cough wildly. The lit cigarette dropped onto the balcony and rolled under the wooden lounger. Peter’s whole body crumpled forward in the chair as he struggled to get his breath back.

  ‘Anna,’ he croaked, and then he coughed again. ‘Cripes, you gave me a hell of a fright.’

  ‘Dad, what are you doing?’ Anna repeated. She stepped through the doorway and stood a short distance from the lounger, looking at him with distress. ‘You were smoking!’

  Peter opened his mouth and pointed his finger like he was about to say something, then he stopped. He closed his mouth and his hand dropped silently back to the chair. He said nothing.

  ‘Dad, you’re a doctor,’ said Anna. ‘You don’t like smoking. You said it’s an evil addiction.’ She held her arms out to him in a pleading way.

  Peter looked away from Anna, over the top of the balcony, at the night lights of the Peraki township. He stroked his chin, and ground his teeth together but he still didn’t speak.

  Anna took a step closer to her father. ‘Dad, you can’t tell your own patients off for smoking and then…’ She waved her arms at the cigarette smoke still lingering in the air. ‘And you even took that packet of cigarettes off that old man…’

  Her voice trailed off as she caught sight of the cigarette packet on the arm of the lounger. It was green and white, with ‘Menthol’ on the front. It was exactly the same as the one she had found in her father’s jacket pocket a few days ago.

  Peter slowly and carefully lowered his hand over the packet, as though he was going to do a magic trick with them.

  Suddenly Anna understood, and her heart sank further. ‘So, the cigarettes I found in your pocket the other day…?’

  Peter sighed deeply and finally he spoke. ‘They weren’t from my patient.’ His voice was quiet but steady. ‘They were mine.’

  Neither of them said anything for a while.

  ‘How long have you been smoking, Dad?’ said Anna eventually.

  ‘For years, Anna.’

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me?’ she demanded. She felt as though parent and daughter had crazily swapped roles. ‘Why did you lie to me? You always said—’

  ‘I was too ashamed, Anna,’ Peter interrupted. ‘I’m addicted. I like it and hate it at the same time. It’s so hard to give up. I’ve tried the patches and the chewing gum and meditation and acupuncture. Nothing works for long.’

  Anna folded her arms and looked over the balcony, away from her father. ‘Does Mum know you smoke?’

  ‘Oh yes, she knows.’ Peter laughed without humour. ‘She doesn’t like me smoking either. Keeps telling me I’ve got to give up.’ He tapped at the arm of the chair with the cigarette packet.

  Anna couldn’t think of anything to say. Her father’s smoking was hard to comprehend. It would be easier to imagine that he was an undercover spy! A smoker? After all those lectures about health, all those stories about helping his patients give up. Why would he lie to her? Then she thought about some of the parties they had been to, when Peter would slip outside to ‘have a word’ with the smokers. She had thought at the time that he meant he was going to tell them off. But now she realized he wasn’t ‘having a word’ with them at all; he was lighting up right along with them! Now, as well as being shocked and disappointed, she felt stupid as well. How dumb she had been to believe him without question.

  Something else occurred to Anna. ‘I don’t suppose you eat breakfast either,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ her father frowned, confused about the change of subject. ‘No, actually I’m not that fussed on breakfast. Why?’

  Anna shook her head, feeling a heavy weight of disappointment. ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ she said.

  ‘What are you doing up at this hour, anyway?’ said Peter, glancing at his watch.

  ‘Bad dream,’ Anna replied. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  Peter grasped with wild relief at the change of subject. ‘A bad dream? Oh dear, that’s no good. Nightmare, was it? What was it about? Is it anything I can help with?’

  ‘No, you can’t help,’ said Anna. ‘I can sort it out myself.’ Suddenly she needed to be alone. ‘Good night, Dad.’

  She stepped slowly back towards the balcony door.

  He father called after her. ‘Anna, I’m sorry I lied to you.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ Anna didn’t look back at him.

  ‘I’ll give up one day,’ he added. ‘It’s just a matter of time.’

  Anna stepped back through the balcony door. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she mumbled.

  Anna lay on her bed, staring at the night shadows on her ceiling. Now her alarm clock read 02:28. There was a strange sensation in her mind, as though the foundations on which her life had been built were eroding dangerously, eaten away by some niggly facts that just didn’t fit anywhere. There was her mother who refused to eat meat—‘Hearts and brains like us,’ she’d said—but she was more than happy to let all those poor animals be subjected to experiments in her laboratory. Did those animals not have hearts and brains as well, or was Penelope conveniently overlooking that fact? And her father, Peter, daily lecturing his patients that smoking increased the risk of just about every disease you could get; urging and insisting they give up. Yet there he was on the balcony, blowing smoke rings like a professional.

  As the tears dried on her cheeks her thoughts turned to her dream and the sheep, Rom. Just recently, her mum and dad had told her that animals in labs were okay. Was that really true? What if they were wrong? How could she know who was right any more? Anna felt confused and, for some reason, very lonely. The phantom voice, which would have been a good distraction at this time, remained disturbingly silent.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  No matter how hard she tried to shake it off, Anna’s pensive mood followed her around like a miserable Siamese twin. Her dad didn’t offer any other explanation for his behaviour; in fact he hadn’t spoken about it since that night on the balcony. Anna felt agitated. How was she supposed to deal with him? Should she just pretend she’d never seen him smoking? Should she now carefully dissect everything her dad said just in case he was lying? She desperately needed somebody else’s opinion, but whose? Her friends just wouldn’t understand, and Anna didn’t feel she could approach her mother either because she had her own double standards, what with the animals in the lab and everything. There was only one person Anna could think of to turn to. It wasn’t a person of great authority or education. But it was someone with seniority.

  ‘Of course I know Peter smokes,’ said Nana Richmond, carefully watering a potted chrysanthemum on the kitchen bench. She fixed her pale grey eyes on Anna, who was sitting on the couch. ‘Your mother used to too, when she was younger.’ She smiled at Anna’s look of outrage. ‘Don’t worry. I don’t think Penelope’s touched a cigarette since she was eighteen. In fact, I think that was her mutinous streak over and done with.’

  ‘But Dad lied about it,’ said Anna. She stroked the ginger cat that had smooched its way onto her lap. ‘I even found some in his pocket once, and he told me he’d taken them off a patient.’

  ‘Did he now, the cunning old dog?’ Nana Richmond sniffed. ‘I’d like to have been there, when you caught him at it. I can just about picture the look on his face.’ Anna detected a hint of pleasure in her grandmother’s tone.

  ‘But he lied,’ Anna repeated. She didn’t think Nana Richmond was taking it seriously enough. Boris, the fat old Labrador, waddled over and plonked himself on Anna’s feet.

  The inside of Nana Richmond’s house was completely at odds with her own mother’s minimalist ideas. Anna never failed to be amazed by the quantity of junk that was crammed into it. Along with the typical grandmotherly photos, books and china ornaments, there were weird arrangements of feathers, jars filled with shells and bird skeletons, several pairs of castanets and Spanish fans, African figurines and spears, and a large collectio
n of colourful tins. Triffid-like plants weaved in and out of the shelves knitting the whole lot together. Penelope called it her mother’s emporium.

  ‘Ah, lies!’ scoffed Nana Richmond. ‘Big lies, little lies, white lies; everybody lies at some stage. Lying doesn’t make Peter a bad person, it just makes him human. I don’t think he intentionally set out to hurt you.’

  Anna stared gloomily at the brown blotchy patterns on the carpet. Nana just didn’t understand that those lies had changed everything.

  ‘Goodness me, this whole smoking and lying business has made a glum girl of you,’ Nana Richmond scolded. ‘You’ve got a face like a bloodhound!’ She put down the watering can and reached for the kettle. ‘Most children find out at a much earlier age that their parents aren’t flawless.’

  ‘But everyone thinks they’re such great people,’ said Anna. ‘All Dad’s patients rely on his good judgment when they go to his surgery for treatment. And Mum’s quoted in the paper and going to conferences all over the world. They’re supposed to act like model citizens, aren’t they?’

  Nana Richmond filled the kettle from the kitchen tap, speaking over her shoulder. ‘They might have influential jobs, but they’re still only human, no different from you or me. Remember, however important a person becomes as an adult, they still started out life with someone changing their nappy.’

  Anna pictured her mother and father as tiny babies, kicking their arms and legs in the air and bellowing furiously. She snorted with laughter.

  ‘There now, that’s much better to see,’ said Nana Richmond. ‘Cup of tea, dear? How about I bring out the Queen’s China?’