makes him stop. It’s like a door just slammed inside his chest. “What? What did you say?”
“Please, Eddie. Sergeant Parks. Let me talk to her.”
The little monster found out his name somehow. She’s sneaking up inside his guard, waving his name like a white flag.
Mean you no harm.
It’s like if one of those paintings that looks like a real door in a real wall opened right in front of you, and a bogeyman leered out of it. Or like you turn over a stone and see the things crawling there, and one of them waves at you and says “Hi, Eddie!”
He can’t help himself. He reaches down and grips her throat – which is just as big an offence against regulations as Justineau stroking her like a fucking pet. “Don’t ever do that,” he says, between his bared teeth. “Don’t ever use my name again.”
The kid doesn’t answer. He realises how hard he’s pressing on her windpipe. She probably can’t answer. He takes his hand away – it’s shaking badly – and puts it back where it belongs, on the handle of the wheelchair.
“We’re going to Dr Caldwell now,” Parks says. “You got any questions, you save them up for her. I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.”
And he doesn’t.
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
“Please, Eddie. Sergeant Parks. Let me talk to her.”
The little monster found out his name somehow. She’s sneaking up inside his guard, waving his name like a white flag.
Mean you no harm.
It’s like if one of those paintings that looks like a real door in a real wall opened right in front of you, and a bogeyman leered out of it. Or like you turn over a stone and see the things crawling there, and one of them waves at you and says “Hi, Eddie!”
He can’t help himself. He reaches down and grips her throat – which is just as big an offence against regulations as Justineau stroking her like a fucking pet. “Don’t ever do that,” he says, between his bared teeth. “Don’t ever use my name again.”
The kid doesn’t answer. He realises how hard he’s pressing on her windpipe. She probably can’t answer. He takes his hand away – it’s shaking badly – and puts it back where it belongs, on the handle of the wheelchair.
“We’re going to Dr Caldwell now,” Parks says. “You got any questions, you save them up for her. I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.”
And he doesn’t.
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
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