Perfect People

82

John went for a run, feeling very distressed, trying to think clearly and make some sense of what had just happened. Should he have grabbed hold of the children, taken them down to the dead guinea pigs and shaken sense into them? Would it have done any good?

And, just what the hell had driven the children to that website? And to do what they’d done?

It was a clear, cold morning. Frost glinted in the early sunlight and glazed puddles crunched beneath his running shoes as he made his way along a rutted cart-track up into the hills.

Halfway up he stopped for breath and looked back down across the vast sweep of the valley, at the farmhouses, roads, lanes, the clock tower of a stately home on the ridge of a far hill. It was half past seven on a Sunday morning, and most people hadn’t risen yet; there was a stillness in the air, almost preternatural. Somewhere, a long way off, he heard the bleat of a sheep. Then just as far off, the bass lowing sound of a cow. High above him up in the sky he could see the vapour trail of a jet heading out towards the Channel.

He could see their own house, looking tiny, in a direct line between himself and the village church. Everything looked tiny from here. Like some kind of toy-world. Miniature fields, miniature sheep, cows, miniature houses, barns, cars, roads, lamp posts, traffic signals, steeples. So small, so insignificant.

Guinea pigs were small and insignificant, too. Their internal organs were tiny, little specks, some of them, you really had to look quite hard to tell what they were. And yet…

No life was insignificant. There were insects you might kill, like mosquitoes, because they were a threat – or a wasp in your babies’ bedroom, or something dirty and uninvited, like a cockroach, and there were wild animals you had to kill because they were a threat to you or your farm, or those you had bred for food and you were going to eat them.

But to kill them out of curiosity?

Sure, in labs. Fruit flies, mice, frogs, all kinds of creatures were dissected in the name of education, in the name of medical research. In order to learn, creatures were killed all the time. That part he had no problem with – not that he had ever liked seeing anything dead, but there was an arguable reason there.

And in truth, casting his mind back to his own childhood, there had been a time as a young boy when he had shot at wildlife with a catapult. Then one day he’d hit a sparrow and killed it outright. He’d watched it drop from its perch onto the grass. He’d rushed over to it and saw beads of blood in its beak. Held its warm body, tried to make it stand up, moved its wings, trying to make it fly away and be better. Then, crying, he’d put it back up in the tree to keep it safe from the cat. Hoping it might get better and fly off.

But it was still there the next morning, cold and hard, like feathers glued to a small rock. Ashamed, he’d carried it into the woods, scooped out a shallow grave with his bare hands and placed a stone and leaves on top of it.

It was normal for children to kill animals, he knew that. It was part of growing up. One of the rites of passage. Probably something to do with the exorcizing of dormant hunter-gatherer genes. But could he have ever killed a pet? Something he’d nurtured, cared for, cradled in his arms, played with, hugged and kissed goodnight, the way Luke and Phoebe had with Fudge and Chocolate?

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?