The Girl With All The Gifts (4 page)

Like blood.

Like something about her is wounded, and not healing, and hurting her all the time.

That’s a stupid idea, Melanie thinks, because Miss Justineau always smiles and laughs and her voice is like a song. If something was hurting her, she wouldn’t be able to smile so much. But right then, Miss Justineau isn’t smiling at all. She’s staring down at the ground, and her face is all twisted up like she’s angry, sad, sick – like something bad is going to come out of her anyway, and it might be tears or words or vomit or all three.

“I’ll stay,” Melanie blurts. She’s desperate to make Miss Justineau feel okay again. “If you have to stay here, I’ll stay with you. I wouldn’t want to be in Beacon without you there.”

Miss Justineau lifts her head and looks at Melanie again. Her eyes are very shiny, and her mouth is like the line on Dr Caldwell’s EEG machine, changing all the time.

“I’m sorry,” Melanie says quickly. “Please don’t be sad, Miss Justineau. You can do whatever you want to do, of course you can. You can go or stay or…”

She doesn’t get another word out. She crashes into total, tongue-tied silence, because something completely unexpected and absolutely wonderful happens.

Miss Justineau puts out her hand and strokes Melanie’s hair.

She strokes Melanie’s hair with her hand, like it was just the most natural and normal thing in the world.

And lights are dancing behind Melanie’s eyes, and she can’t get her breath, and she can’t speak or hear or think about anything because apart from Sergeant’s people, maybe two or three times and always by accident, nobody has ever touched her before and this is Miss Justineau touching her and it’s almost too nice to be in the world at all.

Everybody in the class who can see is watching. Everybody’s eyes and mouths are big and wide. It’s so quiet, you can hear Miss Justineau draw a breath, with a little tremor at the end of it, as though she’s shivering from cold.

“Oh God!” she whispers.

“Here endeth the lesson,” says Sergeant.

Melanie can’t turn her head to look at him, because of the neck strap on her chair. Nobody else seems to have seen Sergeant come into the room either. They’re all just as surprised and scared as she is. Even Miss Justineau looks scared, which is another one of those things (like Sergeant having a name) that changes the architecture of the whole world.

Sergeant walks into Melanie’s line of sight, right behind Miss Justineau. Miss Justineau has already snatched her hand away from Melanie’s hair, as soon as Sergeant spoke. She ducks her head again, so Melanie can’t see her face.

“They go back now,” Sergeant says.

“Right.” Miss Justineau’s voice is very small.

“And you go on a charge.”

“Right.”

“And maybe you lose your job. Because every rule we got, you just broke.”

Miss Justineau brings her head up again. Both her eyes are wet with tears now. “Fuck you, Eddie,” she says, as quietly and calmly as if she was saying good morning.

She walks out of Melanie’s line of sight, very quickly. Melanie wants to call her back, wants to say something to make her stay:
I love you, Miss Justineau. I’ll be a god or a Titan for you, and save you
. But she can’t say anything, and then Sergeant’s people come and start to wheel the kids away one by one.

Why? Why did she do that?

Helen Justineau has no good answer, so she just keeps on asking herself the question. Stands forlorn in her room in the luxuriously appointed civilian block, a foot on every side bigger than a regular soldier’s room, and with an en suite chemical toilet. Leaning against the mirror on the wall, avoiding her own sick, accusing gaze.

She scrubbed her hands until they were raw, but she can still feel that cold flesh. So cold, as though blood never ran in it. As though she was touching something that had just been dredged up from the bottom of the sea.

Why did she do it? What happened in that laying on of hands?

Nice cop is just a role she plays – observing and measuring the children’s emotional responses to her so she can write mealy-mouthed reports for Caroline Caldwell about their capacity for normal affect.

Normal affect.
That’s what Justineau is feeling now, presumably.

It’s like she dug a pit trap, nice and deep, squared off the edges, wiped her hands. Then walked right into it.

Except that it was test subject number one, really, who dug the pit. Melanie. It was her desperate, obvious, hero-worshipping crush that tripped Justineau up, or at least threw her far enough off balance that tripping became inevitable. Those big, trusting eyes, in that bone-white face. Death and the maiden, all wrapped up in one tiny package.

She didn’t turn the compassion off in time. She didn’t remind herself, the way she does at the start of every day, that when the programme wraps up, Beacon will airlift her out of here the same way they airlifted her in. Quick and easy, taking all her things with her, leaving no footprint. This isn’t life. It’s something that’s playing out in its own self-contained subroutine. She can walk out as clean as when she came in, if she just doesn’t let anything touch her.

That horse, however, may already have bolted.

Every once in a while in the block, there’s a day that doesn’t start right. A day when all the repeating patterns that Melanie uses as measuring sticks for her life fail to occur, one after another, and she feels like she’s bobbing around helplessly in the air – a Melanie-shaped balloon. The week after Miss Justineau told the class that their mothers were dead, there’s a day like that.

It’s a Friday, but when Sergeant and his people arrive they don’t bring a teacher with them and they don’t open the cell doors. Melanie already knows what’s going to happen next, but she still feels a prickle of unease when she hears the clacking of Dr Caldwell’s high-heeled shoes on the concrete floor. And then a moment or two later she hears the sound of Dr Caldwell’s pen, which Dr Caldwell will sometimes keep clicking on and off and on and off even when she doesn’t want to write anything.

Melanie doesn’t get up off the bed. She just sits there and waits. She doesn’t like Dr Caldwell very much. That’s partly because the rhythms of the day get disrupted whenever Dr Caldwell shows up, but it’s mostly because she doesn’t know what Dr Caldwell is for. The teachers teach, and Sergeant’s people take the kids back and forth between the classroom and the cells, and feed them and shower them on Sundays. Dr Caldwell just appears, at unforeseeable times (Melanie tried to work out once if there was a pattern, but she couldn’t find one), and everyone stops doing what they were doing, or what they’re meant to do, until she’s gone again.

The clacking of the shoes and the clicking of the pen get louder and louder and then stop.

“Good morning, Doctor,” Sergeant says, out in the corridor. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“Sergeant,” Dr Caldwell answers. Her voice is almost as soft and warm as Miss Justineau’s, which makes Melanie feel a little bit guilty about not liking her. She’s probably really nice if you get to know her. “I’m starting a new test series, and I need one of each.”

“One of each?” Sergeant repeats. “You mean, a boy and a girl?”

“A what and a what?” Dr Caldwell laughs musically. “No, I don’t mean that at all. The gender is completely irrelevant. We’ve established that much. I meant high and low end of the bell curve.”

“Well, you just tell me which ones you want. I’ll pack them up and bring them over.”

There’s a rustling of papers. “Sixteen should do fine for the lower end,” Dr Caldwell says. Her heel taps on the floor of the corridor a few times, but she’s not walking because the sound doesn’t get louder or softer. Her pen clicks.

“You want this one?” Sergeant asks. His voice sounds really close.

Melanie looks up. Dr Caldwell is looking in through the grille in her cell door. Her eyes meet Melanie’s, for a long time, and neither of them blinks.

“Our little genius?” Dr Caldwell says. “Wash your mouth out, Sergeant. I’m not going to waste number one on a simple stratum comp. When I come for Melanie, there’ll be angels and trumpets.”

Sergeant mutters something Melanie can’t hear, and Dr Caldwell laughs. “Well, I’m sure you can supply some trumpets at least.” She turns away, and the
click-clack-click
of her heels recedes along the corridor.

“Two little ducks,” she calls. “Twenty-two.”

Melanie doesn’t know the cell numbers for all the kids, but she remembers most of them from when a teacher has called someone in the class by their number instead of their name. Marcia is number sixteen and Liam is number twenty-two. She wonders what Dr Caldwell wants them for, and what she’ll say to them.

She goes to the grille and watches Sergeant’s people go into cell 16 and cell 22. They wheel Liam and Marcia out, and down the corridor – not towards the classroom, but the other way, towards the big steel door.

Melanie watches them as far as she can, but they go further than that. She thinks they have to have gone through the door, because what else is down at that end of the corridor? They’re seeing with their own eyes what’s outside the door!

Melanie hopes it’s a Miss Justineau day, because Miss Justineau lets the kids talk to each other about stuff that’s not in the lesson, so when Liam and Marcia come back she’ll be able to ask them what Dr Caldwell talked to them about, and what they did, and what’s on the far side of the door.

Of course, she hopes it will be a Miss Justineau day for a lot of other reasons too.

And it turns out it is. The children make up songs for Miss Justineau to play on her flute, with complicated rules for how long the words are and how they rhyme. They have great fun, but the day goes on and Liam and Marcia don’t come back. So Melanie can’t ask, and she goes back to her cell that night with her curiosity, if anything, burning even brighter.

Then it’s the weekend, with no lessons and no talking. All through Saturday Melanie listens, but the steel door doesn’t open and nobody comes or goes.

Liam and Marcia aren’t in the shower on Sunday.

And Monday is Miss Mailer, and Tuesday is Mr Whitaker, and somehow after that Melanie feels afraid to ask because the possibility has opened up in her mind, like a crack in a wall, that Liam and Marcia might not come back at all, the same way Ronnie didn’t come back after she shouted and screamed that time. And maybe asking the question will change what happens. Maybe if they all pretend not to notice, Liam and Marcia will be wheeled in one day and it will be like they never went away. But if anyone asks, “Where did they go to?” then they’ll really be gone and she’ll never see them again.

“Okay,” Miss Justineau says. “Does anyone know what today is?”

It’s Tuesday, obviously, and more important than that, it’s a Miss Justineau day, but everyone tries to guess what else it might be. “Your birthday?” “The
king’s
birthday?” “The day when something important happened, years ago?” “A day with a palindromic date?” “A day when someone new is coming?”

They’re all excited, because they know it’s got something to do with the big canvas bag that Miss Justineau brought in with her, and they can see that she’s just as excited to show them what’s inside. It’s going to be a good day – one of the best days, probably.

But it’s Siobhan, in the end, who gets it. “It’s the first day of spring!” she shouts from behind Melanie.

“Good for you, Siobhan,” Miss Justineau says. “Absolutely right. It’s the twenty-first of March and, for the part of the world where we live, that’s … what? What’s the big deal about the twenty-first?”

“The first day of spring,” Tom repeats, but Melanie, who’s kicking herself for not seeing this sooner, knows that Miss Justineau is looking for more than that. “It’s the vernal equinox!” she says quickly before anyone else can.

“Exactly,” Miss Justineau agrees. “Give the lady a big hand. It’s the vernal equinox. Now, what does that mean?”

The kids all clamour to answer. Usually nobody bothers to tell them what date it is, and of course they never get to see the sky, but they’re familiar with the theory. Ever since the solstice, way back in December, the nights have been getting shorter and the days have been getting longer (not that the kids ever see night and day, because the rooms in the block don’t have any windows). Today is the day when the two finally balance. The night and the day are both exactly twelve hours long.

“And that makes it kind of a magical day,” Miss Justineau says. “In olden times, it meant the long dark of winter was finally over, and things would start growing again and the world would be renewed. The solstice was the promise – that the days wouldn’t just keep on getting shorter until they disappeared altogether. The equinox was the day when the promise was fulfilled.”

Miss Justineau picks up the big bag and puts it on the table. “And I was thinking about this,” she says slowly, knowing they’re all watching, knowing that they’re aching to see what’s in the bag. “And it occurred to me that nobody ever showed you, really, what spring is all about. So I climbed over the perimeter fence…”

Gasps from the children. Region 6 may be mostly cleared, but outside the fence still belongs to the hungries. As soon as you’re out there, they can see you and smell you – and once they get your scent, they’re never going to stop following you until they’ve eaten you.

Miss Justineau laughs at the horrified expressions on their faces. “Only kidding,” she says. “There’s actually a part of the camp where the soldiers didn’t bother to finish clearing when they set up this base. There’s lots of wild flowers there, and even a few trees. So…” – and she pulls the mouth of the bag wide open – “I went over there, and I just grabbed what I could find. Would have felt like vandalism, before the Breakdown, but the wild flowers are doing okay for themselves these days, so I just thought what the hell.”

She reaches into the bag and takes something out. It’s a sort of stick, long and twisted, with smaller sticks coming off it in all directions. And the smaller sticks have smaller sticks, and so on, so it’s a really crazy, complicated shape. And all over it there are these little green dots – but as Miss Justineau turns the stick in her hand, Melanie can see that they’re not dots. They bulge right out from the stick, as though they’re being forced up from inside it. And some of them are broken; they’ve split in the middle and they’re sort of peeling into ever-so-slender green lips and brackets.