Make Your Way 7, Schulbuch mit Audio-CD

Monkey business Read the following extract from a science fiction novel and answer the questions on the next page. In this extract from the novel “Eva”, a thirteenyearold girl has had a terrible car accident. As she comes out of her coma eight months later, she begins to realise that she will have to live a completely new kind of life. 5 Eva closed her eyes and willed the nightmare into day. The accident. Her whole face must have got so badly smashed that they couldn’t rebuild it, or not yet, anyway. They were keeping it numb so that it didn’t hurt. Her jaw and mouth must be so bad that she wouldn’t be able to speak properly for ages – never perhaps – so they’d made her a voice box instead. They didn’t want her to see herself in the mirror. She wriggled her fingers out of Mum’s grip and slowly found the right keys. She pressed the “speak” bar. “Let me see,” said her voice. “Darling …,” sobbed Mum. “Let me see. Or I’ll go mad, wondering …” Eva gripped Mum’s hand again and closed her eyes. Why was the hand so small? Had her own hand …The thumb was all wrong! Why hadn’t she noticed? It was … The motor started to move the mirror. She kept her eyes closed until it stopped. “I love you darling,” said Mum. “I love you.” She opened her eyes. For a moment all she seemed to see was nightmare. Mess. A giant spiderweb, broken and tangled on the pillows with the furry black body of a spider dead in the middle of it. And then the mess made sense. The web was tubes and wires connecting the ma- chines around the bed to the pink and black thing in the centre. She stared. Her mind wouldn’t work. She couldn’t think, only feel – feel Mum’s tension, Mum’s grief, as much as her own amazement. Poor Mum – her lovely blue-eyed daughter … gone. She found the right keys and pressed. “OK,” said the voice. “It’s OK Mum.” Eva stared at the face in the mirror. She’d recognised it at once, but couldn’t give it a name. Then it came. Carefully she pressed the keys. She used the tone control to make her voice sound cheerful. “Hi Kelly,” said the voice. Kelly was – had been – a young female chimpanzee. She felt a sort of mild amazement. All her feelings were calm, a bit dreamy. They must be pumping something into her bloodstream, she reckoned, to control the shock and rejection. She pressed keys. “How?” “It’s something called neurone memory, dar- ling,” said Mum. “You were in an irreversible coma after the accident, and Professor Pradesh heard all about it. She said she’d try and … and do this, if we wanted. She’d never done a human before, you see. It was a risk, she said, but we thought, in the end, well … your poor body, it was so broken, and just lying there … anyway, we said yes. And it’s worked. That’s marvellous, isn’t it?” Eva lay looking at the face in the mirror. Me, she thought. Not Kelly, me. Goodbye blue eyes, goodbye soft pale skin, goodbye nose. Perhaps Kelly had been pretty – pretty to other chimps, except that chimps didn’t seem to think like that. The brown eyes peered down in the way you might gaze at an animal. What had hap- pened to the real Kelly, she wondered, the one who used to live in this furry skin. Where was she now? willed the nightmare into day: versuchte mit aller Willenskraft, diesem Albtraum ein Ende zu setzen 198 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv