More Than Human

Topically, for it was wartime, Janie said, ‘- meat market.’

Wima bared her teeth. ‘Run along back to your room, darling. I’ll come and tuck you in in a minute.’ Someone looked straight at the blond man and laughed. Someone said in an echoing whisper,’ There goes the Sunday sirloin.’ A drawstring could not have pulled the fat man’s mouth so round and tight, and from it his lower lip bloomed like strawberry jam from a squeezed sandwich.

Janie walked quietly towards the door and stopped as soon as she was out of her mother’s line of sight. A sallow young man with brilliant black eyes leaned forward suddenly. Janie met his gaze. An expression of bewilderment crossed the young man’s face. His hand faltered out and upward and came to rest on his forehead. It slid down and covered the black eyes.

Janie said, just loud enough for him to hear, ‘Don’t you ever do that again.’ She left the room.

‘Wima,’ said the young man hoarsely, ‘that child is telepathic.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Wima absently, concentrating on the fat man’s pout. ‘She gets her vitamins every single day.’

The young man started to rise, looking after the child, then sank back again. ‘God,’ he said, and began to brood.

When Janie was five she began playing with some other little girls. It was quite a while before they were aware of it. They were toddlers, perhaps two and a half years old, and they looked” like twins. They conversed, if conversation it was, in high-pitched squeaks, and tumbled about on the concrete courtyard as if it were a haymow. At first Janie hung over her window-sill, four and a half storeys above, and contemplatively squirted saliva in and out between her tongue and her hard palate until she had a satisfactory charge. Then she would crane her neck and, cheeks bulging, let it go. The twins ignored the bombardment when it merely smacked the concrete, but yielded up a most satisfying foofaraw of chitterings and squeals when she scored a hit. They never looked up, but would race around in wild excitement, squealing.

Then there was another game. On warm days the twins could skin out of their rompers faster than the eye could follow. One moment they were as decent as a deacon and in the next one or both would be fifteen feet away from the little scrap of cloth. They would squeak and scramble and claw back into them, casting deliciously frightened glances at the basement door. Janie discovered that with a little concentration she could move the rompers – that is, when they were unoccupied. She practised diligently, lying across the window-sill, her chest and chin on a cushion, her eyes puckered with effort. At first the garment would simply lie there and flutter weakly, as if a small dust-devil had crossed it. But soon she had the rompers scuttling across the concrete like little flat crabs. It was a marvel to watch those two little girls move when that happened, and the noise was a pleasure. They became a little more cautious about taking them off, and sometimes Janie would lie in wait for forty minutes before she had a chance. And sometimes, even then, she held off and the twins, one clothed, one bare, would circle around the romper, and stalk it like two kittens after a beetle. Then she would strike, the romper would fly, the twins would pounce; and sometimes they caught it immediately, and sometimes they had to chase it until their little lungs were going like a toy steam engine.

Janie learned the reason for their preoccupation with the basement door when one afternoon she had mastered the knack of lifting the rompers instead of just pushing them around. She held off until the twins were lulled into carelessness and were shucking out of their clothes, wandering away, ambling back again, as if to challenge her. And still she waited, until at last both rompers were lying together in a little pink-and-white mound. Then she struck. The rompers rose from the ground in a steep climbing turn and fluttered to the sill of a first-floor window. Since the courtyard was slightly below street level, this put the garments six feet high and well out of reach. There she left them.

One of the twins ran to the centre of the courtyard and jumped up and down in agitation, stretching and craning to see the rompers. The other ran to the building under the first-floor window and reached her little hands up as high as she could get them, patting at the bricks fully twenty-eight inches under her goal. Then they ran to each other and twittered anxiously. After a time they tried reaching up the wall again, side by side. More and more they threw those terrified glances at the basement door; less and less was there any pleasure mixed with the terror.

At last they hunkered down as far as possible away from the door, put their arms about one another, and stared numbly. They slowly quieted down, from chatters to twitters to cooings, and at last were silent, two tiny tuffets of terror.