Melisa

Melisa is the single mother of two children who lives next door to the narrator and her family in their rural, semi-dilapidated house. She is introduced through the narrator's nighttime observations: her window is left open and the light on, and the narrator believes she is crying or moaning. Melisa earns her living by showing off her body online, a form of sex work that the narrator imagines in vivid, degrading detail—a man somewhere typing "Jesus, you're so hot" and paying more cash to look at her for a little longer, a client wanting to lick her while she spreads herself open for him in his city-centre flat. This is the narrator's portrait of a woman whose survival depends on the commodification of her own flesh, a fate rendered all the more stark by its proximity to the narrator's own domestic life.

Appearance and Degraded Circumstances

The narrator's fullest description of Melisa comes later, and it is unsparing. Melisa is thirty years old but looks more like fifty. She has a thin mouth closed tight like a slit, and long ginger locks stuck together in clumps that expose the skin of her skull, making her look like a creepy doll. This image of premature aging and physical decay places Melisa within the novel's broader landscape of rural poverty and social abandonment. The narrator groups her with the neighbours "locked up between unpainted wooden walls," people who have "stepped straight out of a brutal universe, one with no morals or laws and far removed from modern shops with electric lighting, pop music, capitalist democracies and the abolition of the death penalty." Melisa is thus situated not as an individual so much as a type—one of the sordid inhabitants of a world the narrator both despises and recognizes as her own.

Melisa's Daughter and the Sordid Inheritance

Melisa's degradation extends to her twelve-year-old daughter, Jacqueline, who lost her virginity in the abandoned house by the lake, that Gothic den, lifting her skirt between drunken moans. The narrator imagines that "they filled that doe's belly with bones," a chilling phrase that conflates the girl's sexual violation with animal sacrifice and premature death. Jacqueline, born and raised in this sordid place full of dingy cafés and people on welfare, the physically disabled and men wearing hand-me-down linen suits and espadrilles, represents the next generation of the same brutal cycle. Melisa's own fate—a young woman aged beyond her years, selling her body online—is being replicated in her daughter, who has already been sexually consumed by the time she is twelve. The narrator's disgust at this world is inseparable from her horror at her own proximity to it.

The Narrator's Identification and Contrast

Melisa functions as a dark mirror for the narrator, who is herself a university graduate, an educated woman who nonetheless feels "more of an animal than those half-dead foxes." Where the narrator is trapped in a marriage she experiences as imprisonment, Melisa is trapped in a form of sexual commerce that is even more nakedly exploitative. The narrator's own body is also being commodified—her husband uses her sexually, she is reduced to a vessel for milk and babies—but Melisa's commodification is literal and direct. The narrator's fantasies of escape, her longing for a white room with a sea breeze, stand in stark contrast to Melisa's reality, which offers no such escape, only the endless repetition of showing herself to paying strangers. Yet the narrator does not pity Melisa so much as use her as evidence of the world's brutality, a proof that the normal family she inhabits is itself a form of the same savagery.

Narrative Role and Significance

Melisa appears only in brief, peripheral glimpses, yet her presence is structurally significant. She is one of the figures who populate the narrator's landscape of abjection—alongside the fat nurse, the half-dead foxes, the neighbour Frank who shot himself in the arse—and she helps establish the novel's central claim that the boundary between civilized domesticity and brutal animality is illusory. The narrator's own son, she reflects, must think he has a normal mother, but the novel insists that normality is itself the most sinister fiction. Melisa, with her exposed skull, her slit mouth, her daughter's violated body, is the truth that the normal family tries to hide: that women are consumed, that children are abandoned, that the sordid world is not elsewhere but right next door. Her function is to make visible the violence that the narrator's own life both contains and conceals.