The Girl With All the Gifts(6)

So she gets to read her story. Which goes like this.

Once upon a time there was a very beautiful woman. The most beautiful and kind and clever and amazing woman in all the world. She was tall and not bent over, with skin so dark she was like her own shadow, and long black hair that curled around so much it made you dizzy to look at her. And she lived in ancient Greece, after the war between the gods and the Titans, when the gods had already won.

And one day, as she was walking in a forest, she was attacked by a monster. It was a frigging abortion, and it wanted to kill her and eat her. The woman was really brave, and she fought and fought, but the monster was very big and very fierce and it didn’t matter how many times she wounded it, it just kept on coming.

The woman was afraid. She hugged her fear to her mortal soul.

The monster broke her sword, and her spear, and it was about to eat her.

But then a little girl came along. She was a special little girl, made by all the gods, like Pandora. And she was like Achilles too, because her mother (the beautiful, amazing woman) had dipped her in the water of the River Styx, so she was all invulnerable except for one little part of her (but it wasn’t her heel because that’s obvious; it was a place that she kept secret so the monster couldn’t find it).

And the little girl fought the monster and killed it and cut off its head and its arms and legs and all the other bits of it. And the beautiful woman hugged her to her mortal soul, and said, “You are my special girl. You will always be with me, and I will never let you go.”

And they lived together, for ever after, in great peace and prosperity.



The last sentence is stolen word for word from a story by the Brothers Grimm that Miss Justineau read to the class once, and some of the other bits are sort of borrowed from Miss Justineau’s Greek myths book, which is called Tales the Muses Told, or just from cool things she’s heard people say. But it’s still Melanie’s story, and she’s very happy when the other kids all say how good it is. Even Kenny, in the end, says he liked the part where the monster got chopped up.

Miss Mailer seems happy too. The whole time Melanie was reading the story out, she was scribbling in her notebook. And she recorded the reading on her little hand recorder machine. Melanie hopes she’ll play it back to Miss Justineau, so Miss Justineau will get to hear it too.

“That was really interesting, Melanie,” Miss Mailer says. She puts the recorder down on Melanie’s tray table, right in front of her, and asks her a lot of questions about the story. What did the monster look like? How did the girl feel about the monster when it was alive? How did she feel about it after it was dead? How did she feel about the woman? And lots of stuff like that, which is kind of fun because it feels almost like the people in the story are real somewhere.

Like she saved Miss Justineau from a monster, and Miss Justineau hugged her.

Which is better than a million Greek myths.





3


One day Miss Justineau talks to them about death. It’s because most of the men in the Light Brigade have just died, in a poem that Miss Justineau read to the class. The children want to know what it means to die, and what it’s like. Miss Justineau says it’s like all the lights going out, and everything going really quiet, the way it does at night–but for ever. No morning. The lights never come back on again.

“That sounds terrible,” says Lizzie in a voice like she’s about to cry. It sounds terrible to Melanie too; like sitting in the shower room on Sunday with the chemical smell in the air, and then even the smell goes away and there’s nothing at all for ever and ever.

Miss Justineau can see that she’s upset them, and she tries to make it okay again by talking about it more. “But maybe it’s not like that at all,” she says quickly. “Nobody really knows, because when you’re dead, you can’t come back to talk about it. And anyway, it would be different for you than it would be for most people because you’re—”

And then she stops herself, with the next word sort of frozen halfway out of her lips.

“We’re what?” Melanie asks.

It’s a moment or two before Miss Justineau says anything. It looks to Melanie like she’s thinking of something to say that won’t make them feel any worse than they do already. “You’re children. You can’t really imagine what death might be like, because for children it seems like everything has to go on for ever.”

That isn’t what she was going to say, Melanie is pretty sure. But it’s really interesting, just the same. There’s a silence while they think about it. It’s true, Melanie decides. She can’t remember a time when her life was any different than this, and she can’t imagine any other way that people could live. But there’s something that doesn’t make sense to her in the whole equation, and so she has to ask the question.

“Whose children are we, Miss Justineau?”

In most stories she knows, children have a mother and a father, like Iphigenia had Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, and Helen had Leda and Zeus. Sometimes they have teachers too, but not always, and they never seem to have sergeants. So this is a question that gets to the very roots of the world, and Melanie asks it with some trepidation.

Again Miss Justineau thinks about it for a long time, until Melanie is sure she won’t answer. Then she says, “Your mother is dead, Melanie. She died when you were very little. Probably your daddy’s dead too, although there isn’t really any way of knowing. So the army is looking after you now.”