The curtains were drawn, and the room was dark and close and tainted; no one, so far, had seen Melanie wash. She had hauled her mattress onto the floor, and heaped the sheets and blankets and pillows into the middle of it. At first Anna thought that the bed was empty, and Melanie had somehow escaped; but then there was a slight movement at the center of the heap, and the girl stuck her head out. “Do you prefer to sleep on the floor?” Anna asked.
Melanie stood up amid the wreckage. Sheets fell away from her body. She was wearing a pink T-shirt that belonged to Becky. It was painfully tight under her arms, and rode up to show the frail rack of her ribs. “Where did you get that?” Anna asked. She wondered if it had been on the washing line, but thought not. “You shouldn’t go into Becky’s room without telling her, you know. She won’t like it.”
“She won’t like it,” the girl mocked, aping her tone.
“You’re welcome to borrow anything. Anything you like. But you should ask.”
“Why?”
Because, Anna thought. Because … for a thousand reasons. Because it is what civilized people do. She heard the flat anthropologist’s tone of the question: why? Passing no judgment: just, why?
“Besides, you’re a big girl, Melanie, Becky’s things won’t fit you. Would you like Kit to lend you something?”
“Borrow. Lend,” the girl said. “Snobby cows.”
“I was thinking we’d go out.” Anna tried to make her tone easy. “Go to the seaside.”
“For kids,” Melanie said.
“Yes, but a shopping trip. To get you some clothes.”
“I had clothes.”
“Yes, but you burned them.”
“Before that. My own clothes.”
“I know you did. Don’t pick your fingers like that.” Melanie’s fingertips were raw: the skin peeling, the nailbeds inflamed. She constantly tore at them, tormenting each one with her other nails and her teeth; it was a habit she had picked up in her amphetamine phase, it was something that these children did. And it hurt; Anna remembered—memory like a needle under the skin—her own
fingernails, cropped to the quick. And then a picture flashed into her mind of Enock standing in the compound with a scythe in his hand, wasted nature at his feet: the torn-out blossom that would only have annoyed him, anyway, for a few hours before the sun killed it.
“What’s the matter with you?” the girl said. Anna looked up and met her eyes. What she saw shocked her; almost evidence of humanity.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
But the girl persisted, her tone cold. “Did you think about something you shouldn’t have?”
“Yes.”
“What sort of thing?”
“I can’t say.”
“I can’t say.” Again the imitation, cruel and strangely exact. “A bad thing, was it?”
“Yes … if you like.”
“How bad?” The girl’s face was intent: for once, she was asking a proper question. She needed evidence of iniquity, Anna thought, of fallibility at least. How not? She needed comparisons and juxtapositions, if she were ever to find her own place in the scale of things. “Like killing somebody?” Melanie inquired.
“Yes.”
“Have you ever killed somebody?”
“What a question! I’d be in jail.”
“Have you ever been in jail?”
“Yes.” The answer surprised Anna. “I have.”
“For nicking things?”
“No. Not that.”
“You’d have no need, would you? You’ve got everything.”
“You may think so.”
“You’ve got a house,” Melanie said.
“Yes, that’s true.”
“I haven’t got a house. I’ve been in homes.”
Anna’s face softened. “Yes … they shouldn’t call them that, should they? Homes. Look, Melanie, your mum and dad … how long is it since you saw them now?”
At this question, Melanie’s eyes dulled; but behind her locked-and-barred expression Anna sensed a small movement of mind, the dawn of a precarious desire for cooperation: saw the mind moving, vaguely, around the months and years. Perhaps she was trying to come to terms with an alien chronology, the dates of court orders and social inquiry reports. “I’ve forgot them,” she said.
