57
Melanie isn’t lost, but the sight of the flare cheers her.
She’s sitting on the roof of a house half a mile away from Rosie. She’s been sitting there for some hours now, in a steady downpour that’s already soaked her to the skin. She’s trying to make sense of something she saw late in the afternoon, just after she’d finally filled her belly. She’s been running it through in her mind ever since in endless, silent replay.
What she ate, after searching rain-slicked alleyways and sodden gardens for an hour and a half, was a feral cat. And she hated it. Not the cat itself, but the process of chasing and catching and eating it. The hunger was driving her, and driving her hard, telling her exactly what to do. As she ripped the cat’s belly open with her teeth and gorged herself on what came tumbling out, a part of her was entirely satisfied, entirely at peace. But there was another part that kept itself at a distance from the horrible cruelty and the horrible messiness. That part saw the cat still alive, still twitching as she crunched its fragile ribs to get at its heart. Heard its piteous miawling as it clawed at her uselessly, opening shallow cuts in her arms that didn’t even bleed. Smelled the bitter stench of excrement as she accidentally tore open its entrails, and saw her strew the guts in the air like streamers to get at the soft flesh underneath.
She ate it hollow.
And as she did, she dodged through all kinds of irrelevant thoughts. The cat in the picture on the wall of her cell, peacefully and intently lapping up its milk. The proverb about all cats being black at night, which she didn’t understand and Mr Whitaker couldn’t explain. A poem in a book.
I love little kitty, her coat is so warm.
And if I don’t hurt her, she’ll do me no harm.
She didn’t love little kitty all that much. Little kitty didn’t taste half as nice as the two men she ate back at the base. But she knew that little kitty would keep her alive, and she hoped that the hunger would quiet down a little now and not try to order her around so much.
Afterwards, she wandered the streets, feeling both miserable and agitated, unable to keep still. She kept coming back within sight of Rosalind Franklin to make sure it was still there, then veering off again into this or that side street and getting herself lost for an hour or so. She didn’t want to go back yet. She was starting to feel as though she’d need to eat again before she did that.
With each loop she walked a little further, and dragged her feet a little more. She was probing the edges of her hunger, exploring the feel and the urgency of it in the way Sergeant Parks explored the rooms at Wainwright House with his rifle in his hands and his eyes going backwards and forwards. It was enemy territory and she had to get to know it.
On one of her outward swings, she found herself in front of a big white building with lots of windows. The windows on the ground floor were enormous, and all broken. There were more windows higher up that were still in their frames. The sign in front of the building said ARTS DEPOT–a little ARTS and then a much bigger DEPOT, sitting right above the door. And the door used to be made of glass, so now it wasn’t really there at all. It was just an empty frame, gripping a few fragments of broken glass at its very edges.
There were noises coming from inside–shrill, short bursts of sound, like the yelps of a hurt animal.
A hurt animal would go down very nicely right around then, Melanie thought.
She went inside, into a room with a very high ceiling and two staircases at the end of it. The staircases were metal, with rubbery bits for you to put your hands on. There was another sign at the bottom of them. The light was starting to fade now, and Melanie could only just read it. It said: CHILDREN MUST BE CARRIED ON THE ESCALATOR.
She walked up the stairs. They gave a metallic groan when she first put her weight on them, and shifted slightly with each step she took as though they were about to fall down. She almost turned back, but those shrieks and squeals from inside the building were louder now and she was curious as to what sort of creature was making them.
At the top of the stairs there was a big room with pictures on the walls and lots of chairs and tables. The pictures were impossible to understand, containing words and pictures that seemed to bear no relationship to each other. One said Twisted Folk Autumn Tour, and showed a man playing a guitar. But then it showed the same man in the same position playing lots of other things–a dog, a chair, a tree, another man and so on. Some of the tables had plates and cups and glasses on them, but the cups and glasses were all empty and there was nothing on the plates except for indeterminate smears from food that had rotted away a long, long time ago so that now even the rot was gone.
Nothing seemed out of place up here, or alive for that matter. Melanie could hear sounds of rapid movement now as well as the squealing, but the room was so big and so full of echoes that she couldn’t tell which direction the sounds were coming from.
She looked around. There were staircases and doors everywhere. She took another staircase at random, then a door, then she walked along a corridor and through two other doors that swung open at her touch.
And stopped at once, the way you might stop when you suddenly saw that you’d got too close to the edge of a cliff.
The space she was in now was much, much bigger than the room downstairs, big as that had seemed. It was completely dark, but she guessed its size from the change in the echoes, and from the movement of the air in front of her face. She didn’t even have to think about these things. She just knew this place was vast.
And the sounds were coming from below her, so that vastness extended in three dimensions, not two.
Melanie held her hands out in front of her at chest height and stepped forward–little baby steps that brought her very quickly to the edge of a platform. Under her fingers was the cold metal of a rail or balustrade.
She stood silently, listening to the squeals, the pounding of feet, and other rhythmical slaps and booms that came and went.
Then someone laughed. A high, delighted trill.
She stood rooted to the spot, amazed. She could feel that she was trembling. That laugh could have been made by Anne or Zoe or any of her friends in the class. It was a little girl’s laugh–or just possibly a little boy’s.
She almost shouted out, but she didn’t. It was a nice laugh, and she thought that perhaps the person who made it must be nice too. But it couldn’t just be one person making all that noise. It sounded like lots and lots of people running around. Playing a game, perhaps, in the dark.
She waited for so long that something strange happened. She started to be able to see.
There wasn’t any more light to see by. It was just that her eyes decided to give her more information. She’d been told in a lesson once about something called accommodation. The rods and cones of the eye, especially the rods, change their zone of sensitivity so that they can see details and distinctions in what previously looked like total darkness. But there are functional limits to that process, and the resulting picture is mostly black and white because rods aren’t good at gradations of colour.
This was different. It was like an invisible sun came up in the room, and Melanie could see by its light as well as she could see by day. Or like the space below her went from black ocean to dry land over the space of a few minutes. She wondered if this was something only hungries could do.
She was in a theatre. She’d never seen one before, but she knew that was what it had to be. There were rows and rows of seats all facing the same way–and where they were facing there was a wide flat place with a wooden floor. A stage. There were more seats on a balcony on top of the first lot of seats, and that was where Melanie was–at one end of the balcony, standing at the edge where it looked down into the main auditorium below.
And she was right about there being more than one person down there. There were at least a dozen.
They weren’t playing a game, though. What they were doing was quite different.
Melanie watched them in silence for a long time–perhaps as long as she’d listened to them, or a little more. Her eyes were wide, and her hands gripped very tight on to the balcony rail as though she were afraid of falling down.
She watched until the noises and the movement died away. Then she slipped out, as quietly as she could, through the swing doors and down the stairs.
Out on the street, where it was raining harder than ever, she walked a few faltering steps and came to a halt in the shadow of a wall whose ancient graffiti had faded to ghost patterns of black and grey.
Something was happening to her face. Her eyes were burning, her throat convulsing. It was almost like the first breath you take in the shower room after the showers have been turned on and the air fills with bitter spray.
But there was no spray here. She was just crying.
The part of her mind that had stayed detached and watched her eat the cat watched this performance too, and mourned a little that–because of the rain–it was impossible to determine whether her weeping involved actual tears.