The Girl With All The Gifts Read Online Free

Miss Justineau anywhere in the world; Melanie wishes she was a god or a Titan or a Trojan warrior, so she could fight for Miss Justineau and save her from Heffalumps and Woozles. She knows that Heffalumps and Woozles are in
Winnie-the-Pooh
, not in a Greek myth, but she likes the words, and she likes the idea of saving Miss Justineau so much that it becomes her favourite thought. She thinks about it whenever she’s not thinking about anything else. It makes even Sundays bearable.
    So one day when Miss Mailer unstraps everybody’s right arms from the elbow down, slots the tray tables on to their chairs and tells them to write a story, that’s the story that Melanie writes. Miss Mailer is only interested in their vocabulary, of course, and doesn’t care much at all what their stories are about. This is really obvious because she gives out a word list alongside the assignment and tells the class that every word from the word list they use correctly gets them an extra point in the assessment.
    Melanie ignores the word list and cuts loose.
    When Miss Mailer asks who would like to read their story aloud, she’s the first to wave – as far as you can wave with just your forearm free – and say “Me, Miss Mailer! Pick me!”
    So she gets to read her story. Which goes like this.
    Once upon a time there was a very beautiful woman. The most beautiful and kind and clever and amazing woman in all the world. She was tall and not bent over, with skin so dark she was like her own shadow, and long black hair that curled around so much it made you dizzy to look at her. And she lived in ancient Greece, after the war between the gods and the Titans, when the gods had already won.
    And one day, as she was walking in a forest, she was attacked by a monster. It was a frigging abortion, and it wanted to kill her and eat her. The woman was really brave, and she fought and fought, but the monster was very big and very fierce and it didn’t matter how many times she wounded it, it just kept on coming.
    The woman was afraid. She hugged her fear to her mortal soul.
    The monster broke her sword, and her spear, and it was about to eat her.
    But then a little girl came along. She was a special little girl, made by all the gods, like Pandora. And she was like Achilles too, because her mother (the beautiful, amazing woman) had dipped her in the water of the River Styx, so she was all invulnerable except for one little part of her (but it wasn’t her heel because that’s obvious; it was a place that she kept secret so the monster couldn’t find it).
    And the little girl fought the monster and killed it and cut off its head and its arms and legs and all the other bits of it. And the beautiful woman hugged her to her mortal soul, and said, “You are my special girl. You will always be with me, and I will never let you go.”
    And they lived together, for ever after, in great peace and prosperity.
    The last sentence is stolen word for word from a story by the Brothers Grimm that Miss Justineau read to the class once, and some of the other bits are sort of borrowed from Miss Justineau’s Greek myths book, which is called
Tales the Muses Told
, or just from cool things she’s heard people say. But it’s still Melanie’s story, and she’s very happy when the other kids all say how good it is. Even Kenny, in the end, says he liked the part where the monster got chopped up.
    Miss Mailer seems happy too. The whole time Melanie was reading the story out, she was scribbling in her notebook. And she recorded the reading on her little hand recorder machine. Melanie hopes she’ll play it back to Miss Justineau, so Miss Justineau will get to hear it too.
    “That was really interesting, Melanie,” Miss Mailer says. She puts the recorder down on Melanie’s tray table, right in front of her, and asks her a lot of questions about the story. What did the monster look like? How did the girl feel about the monster when it was alive? How did she feel about it