The Girl With All the Gifts(8)

“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.





4


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.





5


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.