The Girl With All the Gifts(4)

Nobody gets bored on Miss Justineau days. It’s a thrill for Melanie even to look at her. She likes to guess what Miss Justineau will be wearing, and whether her hair will be up or down. It’s usually down, and it’s long and black and really crinkly so it looks like a waterfall. But sometimes she ties it up in a knot on the back of her head, really tight, and that’s good too, because it makes her face sort of stand out more, almost like she’s a statue on the side of a temple, holding up the ceiling. A caryatid. Although Miss Justineau’s face stands out anyway because it’s such a wonderful, wonderful colour. It’s dark brown, like the wood of the trees in Melanie’s rainforest picture whose seeds only grow out of the ashes of a bushfire, or like the coffee that Miss Justineau pours out of her flask into her cup at break time. Except it’s darker and richer than either of those things, with lots of other colours mixed in, so there isn’t anything you can really compare it to. All you can say is that it’s as dark as Melanie’s skin is light.

And sometimes Miss Justineau wears a scarf or something over her shirt, tied around her neck and shoulders. On those days Melanie thinks she looks either like a pirate or like one of the women of Hamelin when the Pied Piper came. But the women of Hamelin in the picture in Miss Justineau’s book were mostly old and bent over, and Miss Justineau is young and not bent over at all and very tall and very beautiful. So she’s more like a pirate really, except not with long boots and not with a sword.

When Miss Justineau teaches, the day is full of amazing things. Sometimes she’ll read poems aloud, or bring her flute and play it, or show the children pictures out of a book and tell them stories about the people in the pictures. That was how Melanie got to find out about Pandora and Epimetheus and the box full of all the evils of the world, because one day Miss J showed them a picture in the book. It was a picture of a woman opening a box and lots of really scary things coming out of it. “Who is that?” Anne asked Miss Justineau.

“That’s Pandora,” Miss Justineau said. “She was a really amazing woman. All the gods had blessed her and given her gifts. That’s what her name means–‘the girl with all the gifts’. So she was clever, and brave, and beautiful, and funny, and everything else you’d want to be. But she just had the one tiny fault, which was that she was very–and I mean very–curious.”

She had the kids hooked by this point, and they were loving it and so was she, and in the end they got the whole story, which started with the war between the gods and the Titans and ended with Pandora opening up the box and letting all the terrible things out.

Melanie said she didn’t think it was right to blame Pandora for what happened, because it was a trap that Zeus had set for mortals and he made her be the way she was on purpose, just so the trap would get sprung.

“Say it loud, sister,” Miss Justineau said. “Men get the pleasure, women get the rap.” And she laughed. Melanie made Miss Justineau laugh! That was a really good day, even if she doesn’t know what she said that was funny.

The only problem with the days when Miss Justineau teaches is that the time goes by too quickly. Every second is so precious to Melanie that she doesn’t even blink; she just sits there wide-eyed, drinking in everything that Miss Justineau says, and memorising it so that she can play it back to herself later, in her cell. And whenever she can manage it, she asks Miss Justineau questions, because what she most likes to hear, and to remember, is Miss Justineau’s voice saying her name, Melanie, in that way that makes her feel like the most important person in the world.





2


One time, Sergeant comes into the classroom on a Miss Justineau day. Melanie doesn’t know he’s there until he speaks, because he’s standing right at the back of the class. When Miss Justineau says, “… and this time, Pooh and Piglet counted three sets of footprints in the snow,” Sergeant’s voice breaks in with, “What the hell is this?”

Miss Justineau stops and looks round. “I’m reading the children a story, Sergeant Parks,” she says.

“I can see that,” Sergeant’s voice says. “I thought the idea was to put them through their paces, not give them a cabaret.”

Miss Justineau tenses. If you didn’t know her as well as Melanie knows her, and if you didn’t watch her as closely as Melanie watches her, you’d most likely miss it. It’s gone again really quickly, and her voice when she speaks sounds just the same as it always does, not angry at all. “That’s exactly what we’re doing,” she says. “It’s important to see how they process information. But there has to be input, so there can be output.”

“Input?” Sergeant repeats. “You mean facts?”

“No. Not just facts. Ideas.”

“Oh yeah, plenty of world-class ideas in Winnie-the-Pooh.” Sergeant is using sarcasm. Melanie knows how sarcasm works; you say the opposite of what you really mean. “Seriously, you’re wasting your time. You want to tell them stories, tell them about Jack the Ripper and John Wayne Gacy.”

“They’re children,” Miss Justineau points out.

“No.”

“Psychologically speaking, yes. They’re children.”

“Well, then f*ck psychology,” Sergeant says, sounding kind of angry now. “That, what you said right there, that’s why you don’t want to read them Winnie-the-Pooh. You carry on that way, you’ll start thinking of them as real kids. And then you’ll slip up. And maybe you’ll untie one of them because he needs a cuddle or something. I don’t need to tell you what happens after that.”