The Girl With All The Gifts (5 page)

“Anyone know what this is?” Miss Justineau asks.

Nobody speaks. Melanie is thinking about it hard, trying to match it up with something she’s already seen, or maybe been told about in class. She’s just about to get it, because the word means what it says – the way the big stick breaks into smaller sticks, and again and again, so there’s more and more of them, like breaking down a great big number into the long list of its prime factors.

“It’s a branch,” Joanne says.

Dummy, dummy, dummy
, Melanie scolds herself. Her rainforest picture is just full of branches. But the real branch looks different somehow. Its shape is more complicated and broken up, its textures rougher.

“You’re damn right it’s a branch,” Miss Justineau agrees. “I think it’s an alder. A couple of thousand years ago, the people who lived around here would have called this time of year the alder month. They used the bark of the tree for medicine, because it’s really rich in something called salicin. It’s kind of a natural pain relief drug.”

She goes around the class, unstrapping the children’s right arms from their chairs so that they can hold the branch and look at it right up close. It’s kind of ugly, Melanie thinks, but absolutely fascinating. Especially when Miss Justineau explains that the little green balls are buds – and they’ll turn into leaves and cover the whole tree in green, as though it’s put a summer dress on.

But there’s a lot more stuff in the bag, and when Miss Justineau starts to unpack it, the whole class stares in awe. Because the bag is full of colours – starbursts and wheels and whorls of dazzling brightness that are as fine and complex in their structures as the branch is, only much more symmetrical. Flowers.

“Red campion,” Miss Justineau says, holding up a spray that’s not red at all but sort of purple, each petal forked into two like the footprint of an animal in a tracking chart Melanie saw once.

“Rosemary.” White fingers and green fingers, all laced together like your hands clasped together in your lap when you’re nervous and you don’t want to fidget.

“Daffodils.” Yellow tubes like the trumpets angels blow in the old pictures in Miss Justineau’s books, but with fringed lips so delicate they move when Miss Justineau breathes on them.

“Medlar.” White spheres in dense clusters, each one made out of overlapping petals that are curved and nested on themselves, and open at one end to show something inside that looks like a tiny model of more flowers.

The children are hypnotised. It’s spring in the classroom. It’s equinox, with the world balanced between winter and summer, life and death, like a spinning ball balanced on the tip of someone’s finger.

When everyone has looked at the flowers, and held them, Miss Justineau puts them in bottles and jars all around the classroom, wherever there’s a shelf or a table or a clear surface, so the whole room becomes a meadow.

She reads the class some poems about flowers, starting with one by Walt Whitman about lilacs and how spring always comes back again, but Walt Whitman hasn’t got very far at all before he’s talking about death and offering to give his lilacs to a coffin that he’s seen, so Miss Justineau says let’s quit while we’re ahead and reads Thomas Campion instead. He even has the same name as a flower, Melanie thinks, and she likes his poem a whole lot better.

But maybe the most important thing that comes out of this day is that Melanie now knows what date it is. She doesn’t want to stop knowing again, so she decides to keep count.

She clears a place in her mind, just for the date, and every day she goes to that place and adds one. She makes sure to ask Miss Justineau if this is a leap year, which it is. Once she knows that, she’s good.

Knowing the date is reassuring in some way she can’t quite figure out. It’s like it gives her a secret power – like she’s in control of a little piece of the world.

It’s not until then that she realises she’s never had that feeling before.

Caroline Caldwell is very skilled at separating brains from skulls. She does it quickly and methodically, and she gets the brain out in one piece, with minimal tissue damage. She’s reached the point now where she could almost do it in her sleep.

In fact, it’s been three nights since she slept, and there’s an itchiness behind her eyes that isn’t eased by rubbing them. But her mind is clear, with only the very slightest sense of a hallucinatory edge to that clarity. She knows what she’s doing. She watches herself do it, approving the virtuosity of her own technique.

The first cut is to the rear of the occipital bone – easing her slimmest bone-saw into the gap that Selkirk has opened up for her, through the peeled-back layers of flesh and between the nubs and buds of exposed muscle.

She extends that first cut out to either side, taking care to maintain a straight horizontal line corresponding to the widest part of the skull. It’s important to have enough room to work in, so she doesn’t squash the brain or leave part of it behind when she takes it out. She journeys on, the bone-saw flicking lightly back and forth like the bow of a violin, through the parietal and temporal bones, keeping the same straight line, until she comes at last to the superciliary ridges.

At that point, the straight line ceases to matter. Instead, X marks the spot; Dr Caldwell draws the saw down from top left to bottom right, then up again from bottom left to top right, making two slightly deeper incisions that cross at the midpoint between the subject’s eyes.

Which flicker in rapid saccades, focus and defocus in restless busy-work.

The subject is dead, but the pathogen that controls his nervous system isn’t even slightly deterred by the loss of a steering consciousness. It still knows what it wants, and it’s still the captain of this sinking ship.

Dr Caldwell deepens the intersecting cuts at the front of the skull, because the subject’s sinuses in effect create a double thickness of bone there.

Then she puts down the bone-saw and picks up a screwdriver – part of a set that her father received as a free gift from the
Reader’s Digest
publishing company when he subscribed to some of their products more than thirty years previously.

The next part is delicate, and difficult. She probes the cuts with the tip of the screwdriver, levering them further open where she can, but making sure that she never inserts the screwdriver’s business end deep enough to damage the brain beneath.

The subject sighs, although he has no need for oxygen any more. “Soon be done,” Dr Caldwell says, and feels foolish a half-second later. This is not a conversation, or a shared experience of any kind.

She sees Selkirk watching her, with a slightly guarded expression. Piqued, she snaps her fingers and points, making Selkirk pick up the bone-saw and hand it back to her.

Now she’s engaged in a ballet of infinitesimal increments – testing the skull with the tip of the screwdriver to see where it moves, going in with the saw again where there’s resistance, and gradually levering the whole top of the skull loose in one piece.

Which is the hardest part, now done.

Lifting the front of the calvarium, Caldwell snips loose cranial nerves and blood vessels with a number ten pencil-grip scalpel, lifting the brain gently from the front as it comes free. Once the spinal cord is exposed, she cuts that too.

But she doesn’t try to lift the brain all the way out. Now that it’s free, she hands the scalpel back to Selkirk and accepts a pair of snub-nosed pliers, with which she removes, very carefully, the few jagged edges of bone that stand proud from the rim of the hole she’s made in the skull. It’s all too easy to gouge troughs in the brain as you lift it through that makeshift trapdoor, and then it’s of such limited use you might as well throw it away.

Now
she lifts it; with both hands, from underneath, teasing it up with the tips of her fingers through the opening in the skull without ever letting it touch the edge.

And sets it down, with great care, on the cutting board.

Subject number twenty-two, whose name was Liam if you accept the idea of giving these things a name, continues to stare at her, his eyes tracking her movements. It doesn’t mean he’s alive. Dr Caldwell takes the view that the moment of death is the moment when the pathogen crosses the blood–brain barrier. What’s left, though its heart may beat (some ten or twelve times per minute), and though it speaks and can even be christened with a boy’s name or a girl’s name, is not the host. It’s the parasite.

And the parasite, whose needs and tropisms are very different from human needs and human instincts, is a diligent steward. It continues to run a wide range of bodily systems and networks without reference to the brain, which is just as well seeing as the brain is about to be cut into thin slices and set between glass plates.

“Shall I take the rest of the spinal cord out?” Selkirk asks. She has that tentative, pleading tone in her voice that Caldwell despises. She’s like a beggar on a street corner, asking not for money or food but for mercy.
Don’t make me do anything nasty or difficult.

Dr Caldwell, who is prepping the razor, doesn’t even look around. “Sure,” she says. “Go ahead.”

She’s brusque in her manner, even surly, because this part of the procedure, more than any other, hurts her professional pride. If anything were ever to make her shake her fist at the untenanted heavens, it would be this. She’s read about how brains were sliced and mounted in the good old days, before the Breakdown. There was a device called an ATLUM – an automated lathe ultramicrotome – which with its diamond blade could be calibrated to slice brains into perfect cross-sections of single-neuron thickness. Thirty thousand slices per millimetre, give or take.

The best that Dr Caldwell’s guillotine can manage, without smearing and crushing the fragile structures she wants to look at, is about ten slices per millimetre.

Mention Robert Edwards to Dr Caldwell. Mention Elizabeth Blackburn, Günter Blobel or Carol Greider, or any cellular biologist who ever got the Nobel prize, and see what she says.

More often than not she’ll say: I bet he (or she) had an automated lathe ultramicrotome. And a TEAM 0.5 transmission electron microscope, and a live-cell imaging system, and an army of grad students, interns and lab assistants to handle the dull routine of processing so the Nobel laureate would be free to waltz in the moonlight with his frigging muse.

Dr Caldwell is trying to save the world, and she feels like she’s wearing oven mitts instead of surgical gloves. She had her chance once to do it in style. But nothing came of it, and here she is. Alone, but complete unto herself. Still fighting.

Selkirk gives a bleat of dismay, jolting Caldwell out of her profitless reverie. “Spinal cord is severed, Doctor. Level with the twelfth vertebra.”

“Toss it,” Dr Caldwell mutters. She doesn’t even try to hide her contempt.

One hundred and seventeen days have passed since the day when Liam and Marcia were taken away and didn’t come back.

Melanie continues to think about it and worry at it, but she still hasn’t asked Miss Justineau – or anyone else – what happened to them. The closest she’s come is to ask Mr Whitaker what two little ducks means. She remembers Dr Caldwell saying those words on the day when it all happened.

Mr Whitaker is having one of those up-and-down days when he brings his bottle into class – the bottle full to the brim with the medicine that makes him first better and then worse. Melanie has watched this strange and mildly disturbing progress enough times that she can predict its course. Mr Whitaker comes into class nervous and irritable, determined to find fault with everything the children say or do.

Then he drinks the medicine, and it spreads through him like ink through water (it was Miss Justineau who showed them what that looks like). His body relaxes, losing its tics and twitches. His mind relaxes too, and for a little while he’s gentle and patient with everyone. If he could only stop at that point, it would be wonderful, but he keeps drinking and the miracle is reversed. It’s not that Mr Whitaker gets grumpy again. What he gets is something worse, something quite awful, that Melanie doesn’t have a name for. He seems to sink in on himself in total misery, and at the same time try to shrink away from himself as though there’s something inside him that’s too nasty to touch. Sometimes he cries, and says he’s sorry – not to the children, but to someone else who isn’t really there, and whose name keeps changing.

Knowing this cycle well, Melanie times her question to coincide with the expansive phase. What might those two little ducks be, she asks Mr Whitaker, that Dr Caldwell mentioned? Why did she mention them right then, on the day when she took Marcia and Liam away?

“It’s from a game called bingo,” Mr Whitaker tells her, his voice only a little blurred around the edges. “In the game, each player gets a card full of numbers from one to a hundred. The caller calls out numbers at random, and the first player to have all their numbers called wins a prize.”

“Are the two little ducks one of the prizes?” Melanie asks him.

“No, Melanie, they’re one of the numbers. It’s sort of a code. Every number has a special phrase or group of words attached to it. Two little ducks is twenty-two, because of the shapes the numbers make on the page. Look.” He draws them on the whiteboard. “They look just like ducks swimming along, you see?”

Melanie thinks they look more like swans actually, but the game of bingo doesn’t interest her very much. So all Dr Caldwell was doing was saying twenty-two twice, once in ordinary numbers and once in this code. Saying two times over that she was choosing Liam instead of someone else.

Choosing him for what?

Melanie thinks about numbers. Her secret language uses numbers – different numbers of fingers held up with your right hand and your left hand, or your right hand twice, if your left hand is still tied to the chair. That makes six times six different combinations (because holding up no fingers is a signal too) – enough for all the letters of the alphabet and special signs for all the teachers and Dr Caldwell and Sergeant, plus a question mark and a sign that means “I’m joking”.