See Through Me. Kevin Brooks

sample of your DNA and use it to build up a kind of map that shows the details of all your genes, and then they analyse all the details to see if you’ve got any of the genetic faults that cause particular diseases. I mean, I know it’s a lot more complicated than that . . .’

      I remembered, I remember . . .

      Leaving the hospital with Finch and Dad, the three of us heading across the car park in bewildered silence. We’d just spent an hour with a doctor we’d never met before who was supposed to be giving us the results of Finch’s gene sequencing and telling us what it all meant, but none of us could understand what he was talking about. It wasn’t that he used too much medical jargon or anything, or that we couldn’t understand his accent – he didn’t have one – in fact, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the way he spoke at all. His voice was perfectly clear, the words he used easily understandable, and every time he began a sentence it seemed at first to make sense. But by the time he’d got to the end of it, it had somehow become incomprehensible. And if you told him that you didn’t understand, and asked him to explain it again, exactly the same thing would happen.

      It was the weirdest thing.

      And by the time we left his office, we were all so dazed and bemused by it that all we could do was walk in stunned silence together – along the hospital corridors, through the hospital doors, across the hospital car park . . .

      We were nearly at the car, and Dad was just getting the keys out of his pocket, when Finch broke the silence.

      ‘Imagine serving him at McDonald’s,’ he said. ‘You’d be there for ever, wouldn’t you?’

      We all pictured it for a moment – the doctor ordering something, the server not understanding, the doctor repeating it, the server still not understanding – and then I turned to Finch and saw the big stupid smile on his face, and that was it. We both just cracked up, laughing away like idiots, and once we’d started we couldn’t stop – snorting and hooting and giggling, falling about all over the place . . . we laughed so hard it hurt. It was so infectious that even Dad joined in after a while, and when we finally managed to control ourselves – our bellies still sore from laughing, our eyes still wet with tears – there was a moment when we were all together again . . . the three of us just standing there smiling at each other, not thinking, not worrying, not anything . . .

      It was as happy as we were ever going to be.

14

      ‘We don’t usually carry out gene sequencing on our patients unless there’s a strong indication that their disease is genetic,’ Dr Reynolds said. ‘And of course we’ll always consider it for a patient who’s tested negative for everything else. But in your case, Kenzie, your condition was so extraordinary that we decided to start testing you for everything straight away, including genetic disorders.’

      He went quiet for a few moments then, and from the way he looked away from me, focusing on something across the room, I thought he was bracing himself to give me some bad news. But either he changed his mind, or I was wrong in the first place.

      ‘As you know,’ he said, turning back to me, ‘genetic disorders can be hereditary, passed down from the parents’ genes. Some disorders only affect males, some only females, and others can affect both. Similarly, some conditions can only be inherited from the mother’s side, and others can only come from the father. So in cases like yours, when there are so many unknowns, it’s sometimes possible to narrow things down by looking into the patient’s family history. It’s a time-consuming process, and it often proves fruitless anyway, but as soon as we began asking questions about your family, we knew we might be onto something.’

      ‘Because of Finch, you mean?’ I said.

      ‘Well, we were reasonably confident there was no direct correlation between your condition and your brother’s, but that didn’t necessarily mean there was no connection at all. And because Finch had already had his DNA sequenced, all we had to do was get hold of the results and start looking for anything that might possibly relate to you.’

      ‘Did you find anything?’

      ‘It’s complicated . . .’

      Everything, it seemed, was complicated.

      ‘I’m not trying to be evasive, Kenzie,’ Dr Reynolds explained. ‘It’s just that everything will make a lot more sense once I’ve told you about your grandmother and your mum. So if you’ll let me –’

      ‘What’s my mum got to do with it?’

      He was just about to answer when Dad suddenly leaned forward on the settee, taking us both by surprise. It gave Dr Hahn a bit of a start too. We all turned to look at him, our heads moving in unison, and when I saw Dad sitting there – perched alertly on the edge of the settee, staring hard at Dr Reynolds – I knew he was back.

      ‘I told you already,’ he said. ‘I don’t want anything to do with that woman.’

      He was definitely back.

      Sometimes it was easier when he was gone.

      ‘That woman’ was Nan, my grandmother. Elsa Forde. Dad never called her by name. She was always ‘that woman’ to him.

      She was blind.

      ‘We’ve spoken to her GP and her ophthalmologist,’ Dr Reynolds said, ‘and there seems to be some uncertainty around the precise cause of her blindness. Some of her symptoms are indicative of a condition called Fuchs’ disease, or Fuch’s corneal dystrophy, but she also has symptoms that aren’t typical of Fuchs’.’

      ‘What’s any of this got to do with Kenzie?’ Dad said. ‘She’s not blind, is she?’

      I’m not sure why I didn’t say anything then. It might have been that I didn’t want to agitate Dad any further, and I knew that if I told him that actually I had lost my sight for a while, it wouldn’t just make him look a bit stupid, it would also make him think that I was somehow siding with Nan, and that was something I’d learned to avoid a long time ago. Or it might have been something else that stopped me from saying anything about my temporary blindness. It might have been that at times I was finding it hard to distinguish between the weird stuff I’d actually been through and the weird stuff I’d just dreamed or imagined, and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself by claiming I’d been blind when in fact I’d only dreamed it. But from the knowing glance that Dr Reynolds gave me – as if to say, ‘Keep it to yourself for now,’ – I guessed I hadn’t dreamed it after all. Unless, of course, I was still dreaming now . . .

      There were brief moments in those early days when I thought it all had to be a dream. I’d look at myself, see the stuff of myself – guts, bone, muscle – and I’d know it was impossible. This . . . this thing, this mutant body . . . it just couldn’t be. It had to be a dream . . . a nightmare . . . it had to be.

      But I never believed it for more than a moment.

      You can think things are real when you’re dreaming, but it doesn’t work the other way round. You can wish for your reality to be a dream, and you can live out those wishes in books and films, but in reality – the real reality – you can’t mistake anything for a dream.

      ‘At the moment, Mr Clark,’ Dr Reynolds said calmly, ‘all we’re trying to do is examine the possibility that there might be a hereditary factor to Kenzie’s condition, and in order to do that thoroughly we have to consider every possible connection, no matter how unrelated it might seem. For example, there’s no obvious link between your mother-in-law’s blindness and Kenzie’s condition, but despite the uncertainty over the cause of her blindness, it’s clearly a genetic disorder of some kind, and – more to the point – it’s a disorder that affects the cornea. Do you know what that is?’

      Dad just shrugged.

      Dr Reynolds