The Girl with All the Gifts

16

But that’s partly because the next thing he does is to wheel the chair out through the steel door and – backwards all the way, bump, bump, bump – up the stairs beyond.

For Melanie, this is like sailing over the edge of the world.

The steel door has marked the furthest horizon of her experience for as long as she can remember. She knows she must have come in through there, sometime in the distant past, but that feels like a story from a really old book, written in a language that nobody can speak any more.

This feels more like that passage in the Bible that Dr Selkirk read to them once, where God makes the world. Not Zeus, but the other god.

The steps. The vertical space they’re climbing through (like the corridor, but laid on its end so it points upwards). The smell of the space, as they get higher and higher and the chemical disinfectant smell of the cells starts to fade. The sounds from outside, coming from above them through a door that isn’t quite closed.

The air. And the light. As Sergeant pushes the door open with his backside and drags her out into the day.

Total overload.

Because the air is warm, and it’s breathing; moving against Melanie’s skin like something that’s alive. And the light is so intense it’s like someone dipped the world into a barrel of oil and set it alight.

She’s lived in Plato’s cave, staring at the shadows on the wall. Now she’s been turned around to face the fire.

A sound is forced out of Melanie. A painful exhalation from the centre of her chest – from a dark, damp place that tastes of bitter chemicals and the acetone tang of whiteboard markers.

She goes limp. The world pours in through her eyes and ears, her nose, her tongue, her skin. There’s too much of it, and it never stops coming. She’s like the drain in the corner of the shower room. She closes her eyes but the light still hits her eyelids, makes patterns of spangled colour dance inside her brain. She opens them again.

She endures, and collates, and begins to understand.

They pass buildings made of wood or shiny metal, set on concrete foundations. The buildings are all the same shape, rectangular and blocky, and mostly the same colour – dark green. Nobody’s tried to make them look nice. Their function is what matters.

The same is true of the chain-link fence that rises in the distance to a height of four metres, completely enclosing all the structures that Melanie can see. It’s topped with razor wire, held outwards from the main fence at an angle of about thirty degrees by elbowed concrete pylons.

They pass some of Sergeant’s people, who watch them go by and sometimes raise their hands to salute Sergeant. But they don’t speak to him, and they don’t move from where they’re standing. They carry rifles at the ready. They watch the fence, and the gates in the fence.

Melanie lets these facts run together in her mind. Their possible meanings form spontaneously at the points of confluence.

They come to another building, where two of Sergeant’s people are on guard. One of the two opens the door for them. The other – a man with red hair – salutes crisply. “You need a guard detail for that one, sir?” he asks.

“If I need anything, Gallagher, I’ll ask for it,” Sergeant growls.

“Yes, sir!”

They go inside, and immediately the sound of Sergeant’s footsteps changes, gets louder, with a hollow reverberation. They’re on tiles. Sergeant waits, and Melanie knows what he’s waiting for. This is a shower, like the one in the block. The chemical spray starts up, pouring down over the both of them.

It takes longer than the shower in the block. The shower heads actually move, sliding down the walls on metal tracks, angling as they descend to spray every inch of their bodies from every direction.

Sergeant endures this with his head down, eyes tight shut. Melanie, who’s used to the pain and knows her eyes will sting just as much whether they’re shut or open, keeps watching. She sees that there are steel shutters at the end of the shower area through which they’ve just entered. A simple ratchet-based mechanism allows them to be raised or lowered by the turning of a handle. This building can be sealed off from the base outside, can become a fortress. What goes on here must be very, very important.

All this time Melanie is trying hard not to think about Marcia and Liam. She’s scared about what might happen to her here. She’s scared of never being able to go back to her friends, and the classroom, and Miss Justineau. Perhaps it’s that fear, as much as the novelty, that makes her so acutely aware of her surroundings. She’s registering everything she sees. She’s also doing her best to memorise it all, especially the route they’ve taken. She wants to be able to find her way back, if she’s free at any point to do that.

The chemical spray dribbles and sputters to a stop. Sergeant wheels her forwards, through a double swing door, along a corridor, to another door over which a bare red light bulb shines. A sign on the door reads: NO ADMITTANCE TO UN-AUTHORISED PERSONNEL. Sergeant stops there, presses a buzzer and waits.

After a few seconds, the door is opened from the inside by Dr Selkirk. She’s in her usual white gown, but she’s also wearing green plastic gloves, and around her throat there’s a thing like a white cotton necklace. She raises this now with a tug of her index finger and thumb. It’s a mask, made of white gauze, that fits over the lower part of her face.

“Good morning, Dr Selkirk,” Melanie says.

Dr Selkirk looks at her for a moment as though she’s deciding whether or not to answer. In the end, she just nods. Then she laughs. It’s a hollow, unhappy sound, Melanie thinks. The laugh you’d make if you rubbed out a mistake in a sum you were doing and accidentally tore the paper.

“Postman,” Sergeant Parks says laconically. “Where do you want this?”

“Right,” Dr Selkirk says, her voice muffled by the mask. “Yes. You can bring her in. We’re ready for her.” She stands aside and pulls the door wide so Sergeant can wheel Melanie inside.

This room is the strangest thing Melanie has ever seen. Of course, she’s starting to realise that she hasn’t seen all that much, but there are more things here of more baffling variety than she would have thought the whole world could hold. Bottles and tanks and jars and boxes; surfaces of white ceramic and stainless steel that gleam in the harsh radiance of strip lights overhead.

Some of the things in the bottles look like parts of people. Some of them are animals. Closest to her is a rat (she recognises it from a picture in a book) suspended head down in clear liquid. Thin grey strings like shoelaces – hundreds of them – have exploded from the rat’s body cavity and filled most of the interior space of the bottle, wrapped loosely around and around the little corpse as though the rat had decided to try to be an octopus and then hadn’t known how to stop.

One bottle along from the rat is an eyeball with gaudy streamers of nerve tissue attached behind.

These things fill Melanie’s mind with wild surmise. She says nothing, drinks it all in.

“Transfer her to the table, please.” It’s not Dr Selkirk who says this, it’s Dr Caldwell. She’s standing at a work surface on the far side of the room, arranging shiny steel objects in a precise order. She touches some of them several times over, as though the distance and angles between them matter a great deal to her.

“Good morning, Dr Caldwell,” Melanie says.

“Good morning, Melanie,” Dr Caldwell says. “Welcome to my laboratory. The most important room on the base.”

With Dr Selkirk’s help, Sergeant transfers Melanie from her chair on to a high table in the centre of the room. It’s a complex manoeuvre. They untie her hands from the armrests and handcuff them in front of her. They lock her feet to a restraint bar. Then they undo the neck strap and lift her on to the table. She weighs almost nothing, so they don’t have any trouble carrying her.

Once she’s sitting on the table, they strap her feet into harnesses low down on its sides, which Dr Selkirk adjusts carefully so that they’re tight. Then they remove the restraint bar, which is no longer needed.

“Lie down, Melanie,” Dr Caldwell says. “And hold out your hands.” The women take one hand each, and as Sergeant unlocks the cuffs, they carefully set her wrists in two more harnesses. Dr Caldwell ties them up.

Melanie is completely immobile now, apart from her head. She’s grateful that there’s no neck strap like the one on the chair.

“You need me?” Sergeant asks Dr Caldwell.

“Emphatically not.”

Sergeant wheels the chair back to the door. Melanie takes this in, and reads it right. She won’t be needing the chair again. She won’t be going back to her cell. Tales the Muses Told is lying under her mattress back there, and she crashes head first into the realisation that she may never see it again. Those pages that smell of Miss Justineau are now, and perhaps for ever, inaccessibly distant.

She wants to cry out to Sergeant to wait – or ask him to carry a message to Miss J. She can’t say a word. Misgivings are crowding in on her. She’s in uncharted territory, and she fears the blank, inscrutable future into which she’s being rushed before she’s ready. She wants her future to be like her past, but knows it won’t be. The knowledge sits like a stone in her stomach.

The door closes behind Sergeant. The two women begin to undress her.

They use scissors, cutting her out of her cotton shift.