When Melanie is all strapped into the chair, and she can’t move her hands or her feet or her head, they wheel her into the classroom and put her at her desk. The teacher might be talking to some of the other children, or writing something on the blackboard, but she (or he, if it’s Mr Whitaker, the only teacher who’s a he) will usually stop and say, “Good morning, Melanie.” That way the children who sit way up at the front of the class will know that Melanie has come into the room and they can say good morning too. Most of them can’t see her when she comes in, of course, because they’re all in their own chairs with their neck straps fastened up, so they can’t turn their heads around that far.
This procedure – the wheeling in, and the teacher saying good morning and then the chorus of greetings from the other kids – happens nine more times, because there are nine children who come into the classroom after Melanie. One of them is Anne, who used to be Melanie’s best friend in the class and maybe still is except that the last time they moved the kids around (Sergeant calls it “shuffling the deck”) they ended up sitting a long way apart and it’s hard to be best friends with someone you can’t talk to. Another is Kenny, who Melanie doesn’t like because he calls her Melon Brain or M-M-M-Melanie to remind her that she used to stammer sometimes in class.
When all the children are in the classroom, the lessons start. Every day has sums and spelling, and every day has retention tests, but there doesn’t seem to be a plan for the rest of the lessons. Some teachers like to read aloud from books and then ask questions about what they just read. Others make the children learn facts and dates and tables and equations, which is something that Melanie is very good at. She knows all the kings and queens of England and when they reigned, and all the cities in the United Kingdom with their areas and populations and the rivers that run through them (if they have rivers) and their mottoes (if they have mottoes). She also knows the capitals of Europe and their populations and the years when they were at war with Britain, which most of them were at one time or another.
She doesn’t find it hard to remember this stuff; she does it to keep from being bored, because being bored is worse than almost anything. If she knows surface area and total population, she can work out mean population density in her head and then do regression analyses to guess how many people there might be in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time.
But there’s sort of a problem with that. Melanie learned the stuff about the cities of the United Kingdom from Mr Whitaker’s lessons, and she’s not sure if she’s got all the details right. Because one day, when Mr Whitaker was acting kind of funny and his voice was all slippery and fuzzy, he said something that worried Melanie. She was asking him whether 1,036,900 was the population of the whole of Birmingham with all its suburbs or just the central metropolitan area, and he said, “Who cares? None of this stuff matters any more. I just gave it to you because all the textbooks we’ve got are thirty years old.”
Melanie persisted, because she knew that Birmingham is the biggest city in England after London, and she wanted to be sure she had the numbers exactly right. “But the census figures from—” she said.
Mr Whitaker cut her off. “Jesus, Melanie, it’s irrelevant. It’s ancient history! There’s nothing out there any more. Not a damn thing. The population of Birmingham is zero.”
So it’s possible, even quite likely, that some of Melanie’s lists need to be updated in some respects.
The children have lessons on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. On Saturday, they stay locked in their rooms all day and music plays over the PA system. Nobody comes, not even Sergeant, and the music is too loud to talk over. Melanie had the idea long ago of making up a language that used signs instead of words, so the children could talk to each other through their little mesh windows, and she went ahead and made the language up, which was fun to do, but when she asked Miss Justineau if she could teach it to the class, Miss Justineau told her no, really loud and sharp. She made Melanie promise not to mention her sign language to any of the other teachers, and especially not to Sergeant. “He’s paranoid enough already,” she said. “If he thinks you’re talking behind his back, he’ll lose what’s left of his mind.”
So Melanie never got to teach the other children how to talk in sign language.
Saturdays are long and dull, and hard to get through. Melanie tells herself aloud some of the stories that the children have been told in class, or sings mathematical proofs like the proof for the infinity of prime numbers, in time to the music. It’s okay to do this out loud because the music hides her voice. Otherwise Sergeant would come in and tell her to stop.
Melanie knows that Sergeant is still there on Saturdays, because one Saturday when Ronnie hit her hand against the mesh window of her cell until it bled and got all mashed up, Sergeant came in. He brought two of his people, and all three of them were dressed in the big suits that hide their faces, and they went into Ronnie’s cell and Melanie guessed from the sounds that they were trying to tie Ronnie into her chair. She also guessed from the sounds that Ronnie was struggling and making it hard for them, because she kept shouting and saying, “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” Then there was a banging sound that went on and on while one of Sergeant’s people shouted, “Christ Jesus, don’t—” and then other people were shouting too, and someone said, “Grab her other arm! Hold her!” and then it all went quiet again.
Melanie couldn’t tell what happened after that. The people who work for Sergeant went around and locked all the little screens over the mesh windows, so the children couldn’t see out. They stayed locked all day. The next Monday, Ronnie wasn’t in the class any more, and nobody seemed to know what had happened to her. Melanie likes to think there’s another classroom somewhere else on the base, and Ronnie went there, so she might come back one day when Sergeant shuffles the deck again. But what she really believes, when she can’t stop herself from thinking about it, is that Sergeant took Ronnie away to punish her for being bad, and he won’t let her see any of the other children ever again.
Sundays are like Saturdays except for chow time and the shower. At the start of the day the children are put in their chairs as though it’s a regular school day, but with just their right hands and forearms unstrapped. They’re wheeled into the shower room, which is the last door on the right, just before the bare steel door.
In the shower room, which is white-tiled and empty, the children sit and wait until everybody has been wheeled in. Then Sergeant’s people bring chow bowls and spoons. They put a bowl on each child’s lap, the spoon already sticking into it.
In the bowl there are about a million grubs, all squirming and wriggling over each other.
The children eat.
In the stories that they read, children sometimes eat other things – cakes and chocolate and bangers and mash and crisps and sweets and spaghetti and meatballs. The children only eat grubs, and only once a week, because – as Dr Selkirk explains one time when Melanie asks – their bodies are spectacularly efficient at metabolising proteins. They don’t have to have any of those other things, not even water to drink. The grubs give them everything they need.