“No. You can’t have.”
“I can. I have.”
“So, now … what about this day out we’re going to have?” She smiled with a professional brightness. She had learned from Ralph to talk in this way: to presume assent to any initiative, to state always the positive, never to consider the possibility of no for an answer.
“Are we? Us? Going out?” Melanie’s eyes were like two big gray pebbles; she rocked back on her heels, as if Anna might try to haul her by force into the open air.
“Yes. Why not?”
“I like it here.”
“You do? That’s something.”
Melanie saw that she had lost an inch of ground. “And these clothes, I like these clothes, I don’t want any others.”
“I’m sure you know why that is quite unreasonable,” Anna said. “You’re clearly not without intelligence.” Ralph’s tone was less evident; she was cool, at the end of her patience. “You know perfectly well that you can’t spend the rest of your life wearing a T-shirt that belongs to a child two or three years younger than yourself, so it’s only a matter of when you get new clothes, isn’t it, not whether?”
They surveyed each other: level ground. Anna calculated that Melanie might hit her: it would not be unprecedented, in a Visitor. She weighed the prospect: the pale stringy arms below the tight sleeves, arms laced with cuts, and the torn hands, the right middle finger with its cheap heart-shaped ring. She knew that she should step back a few inches, beyond Melanie’s reach. The girl’s arms hung at her sides, and Anna—who had seen men fight—imagined that she might jerk one fist up, straight-armed, to catch the point of her jaw. But I will not step back, she thought. I will not give way. Melanie whispered, “Tell me what you thought.”
“What do you mean, what I thought?”
“Before. When you thought about killing somebody.”
“What will you do, if I tell you?”
“Come with you. Get clothes.”
“No, you’ll break your promise.”
“I won’t. I’ll come. But tell me.”
“All right.” Their eyes locked: Anna thought, I’ll tell you something you don’t know. “I had another child once,” she said. “A boy. A baby. He was taken from my house and murdered.”
The girl nodded. Her eyes slid away. Stayed on the floor: on the heap of crumpled bedding. “That was hard,” she whispered.
And it was that—the very poverty of her response, the laughable poverty of her vocabulary—that made Anna speak again. “Hard. Yes. Extremely hard. You ask me what I was thinking about—I’ll tell you, Melanie, why not? I was thinking about the man who did it. About how I would kill him, if I had him.”
Melanie watched her. “And how would you?”
“I don’t know. I think about it, but I can’t choose. You see, there are so many ways.”
The girl dropped her head again, and for the first time Anna saw it as a frail, living thing; half destroyed, bruised, but a blossom on the stem of her thin neck. Her skin was white and fine, her hair, no doubt, had a color of its own, and only parts of her body were cut and marked. She is retrievable, she thought: possibly, in some small way. But I should not have said what I did, I should have found some way to lie; I should have tried to retrieve her, but not by that method.
She moved to the door. “You made a promise,” she said. She held the door open. “Come on now, Melanie, you drove a bargain and you got more than you asked for. You made a promise that you’d come and buy some clothes.”
Melanie nodded. Again, there was no expression on her face now: no reaction to what she had been told. She will suppose it is a dream, Anna thought; she lives from moment to moment, perhaps, her memory constantly erased. Behind her, the big boots descended the stairs. In the strong sunlight that shone through the kitchen window, she observed the girl’s flawed, bluish face, and put up her hand to touch her jaw. “Do you not sleep, Melanie?”
“No. Cough keeps waking me.”
“Keep off the glue, and your cough will clear up,” Anna said briskly.
Anna lapsed into silence as she drove; Melanie was silent anyway. When they arrived in Cromer she lifted her feet in the big black boots and locked her arms around her knees, wrapping herself into a knot in the backseat. She didn’t want to see the sunlight on the cold North Sea, or hear the ice-cream van chimes and the gulls’ cries. Kit saw the birds’ bodies floating and skimming, mirrored in the high windows of the old seafront hotels: skimming the turrets and dormers and gables of the red-brick houses, wheeling inland to swoop and cry among the pines. The gulls leave an afterimage, on the ear and eye, and the waves have the sound of a labored breath; trippers tramp over mastodon bones, and plaice is fried in cafes with plastic tables.
Melanie shut her eyes tight; she wasn’t getting out of the car. Anna seemed to have run out of energy to coax her.
“You know you need clothes,” she said feebly.
“I’ve got clothes,” Melanie said. “I told you.”
Kit said, “You’ve got what you stand up in, and some of that stolen. Come on, you silly bitch! What you’re wearing has to be washed, for our sake if not for yours.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Kit said mildly, “if you start to smell any more we’ll make you go and live in one of the bike sheds.”
