Room: A Novel

by Emma Donoghue

“Oh, honey. Well, better out than in.”

  I want some, I really really want some, I can’t get to sleep without. I suck on Tooth that’s Ma, a bit of her anyway, her cells all brown and rotten and hard. Tooth hurted her or he was hurted but not anymore. Why is it better out than in? Ma said we’d be free but this doesn’t feel like free.

  Grandma’s singing very quietly, I know that song but it sounds wrong. “ ‘The wheels on the bus go—’ ” “No, thanks,” I say, and she stops.

  • • •

  Me and Ma in the sea, I’m tangled in her hair, I’m all knotted up and drowning—

  Just a bad dream. That’s what Ma would say if she was here but she’s not.

  I lie counting five fingers five fingers five toes five toes, I make them wave one by one. I try the talking in my head, Ma? Ma? Ma? I can’t hear her answering.

  When it starts being lighter I put the duvet over my face to dark it. I think this must be what Gone feels like.

  Persons are walking around whispering. “Jack? ” That’s Grandma near my ear so I curl away. “How are you doing?” I remember manners. “Not a hundred percent today, thank you.” I’m mumbly because Tooth is stuck to my tongue.

  When she’s gone I sit up and count my things in my Dora bag, my clothes and shoes and maple key and train and drawing square and rattle and glittery heart and crocodile and rock and monkeys and car and six books, the sixth is Dylan the Digger from the store.

  Lots of hours later the waah waah means the phone. Grandma comes up. “That was Dr. Clay, your ma is stable. That sounds good, doesn’t it?” It sounds like horses.

  “Also, there’s blueberry pancakes for breakfast.”

  I lie very still like I’m a skeleton. The duvet smells dusty.

  Ding-dong ding-dong and she goes downstairs again.

  Voices under me. I count my toes then my fingers then my teeth all over again. I get the right numbers every time but I’m not sure.

  Grandma comes up again out of breath to say that my Grandpa’s here to say good-bye.

  “Tome?”

  “To all of us, he’s flying back to Australia. Get up now, Jack, it won’t do you any good to wallow.” I don’t know what that is. “He wants me not born.”

  “He wants what?”

  “He said I shouldn’t be and then Ma wouldn’t have to be Ma.”

  Grandma doesn’t say anything so I think she’s gone downstairs. I take my face out to see. She’s still here with her arms wrapped around her tight. “Never you mind that a-hole.”

  “What’s a—? ”

  “Just come on down and have a pancake.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Look at you,” says Grandma.

  How do I do that?

  “You’re breathing and walking and talking and sleeping without your Ma, aren’t you? So I bet you can eat without her too.” I keep Tooth in my cheek for safe. I take a long time on the stairs.

  In the kitchen, Grandpa the real one has purple on his mouth. His pancake is all in a puddle of syrup with more purples, they’re blueberries.

  The plates are normal white but the glasses are wrong-shaped with corners. There’s a big bowl of sausages. I didn’t know I was hungry. I eat one sausage then two more.

  Grandma says she doesn’t have the juice that’s pulp-free but I have to drink something or I’ll choke on my sausages. I drink the pulpy with the germs wiggling down my throat. The refrigerator is huge all full of boxes and bottles. The cabinets have so many foods in, Grandma has to go up steps to look in them all.

  She says I should have a shower now but I pretend I don’t hear.

  “What’s stable?” I ask Grandpa.

  “Stable?” A tear comes out of his eye and he wipes it. “No better, no worse, I guess.” He puts his knife and his fork together on his plate.

  No better no worse than what?

  Tooth tastes all sour of juice. I go back upstairs to sleep.

  • • •

  “Sweetie,” says Grandma. “You are not spending another entire day in front of the goggle box.” “Huh?”

  She switches off the TV. “Dr. Clay was just on the phone about your developmental needs, I had to tell him we were playing Checkers.” I blink and rub my eyes. Why she told him a lie? “Is Ma—?”

  “She’s still stable, he says. Would you like to play checkers for real?”

  “Your bits are for giants and they fall off.”

  She sighs. “I keep telling you, they’re regular ones, and the same with the chess and the cards. The mini magnetic set you and your Ma had was for traveling.” But we didn’t travel.

  “Let’s go to the playground.”

  I shake my head. Ma said when we were free we’d go together.

  “You’ve been outside before, lots of times.”

  “That was at the Clinic.”

  “It’s the same air, isn’t it? Come on, your ma told me you like climbing.”

  “Yeah, I climb on Table and on our chairs and on Bed thousands of times.”

  “Not on my table, mister.”

  I meant in Room.

  Grandma does my ponytail very tight and tucks it down my jacket, I pull it out again. She doesn’t say anything about the sticky stuff and my hat, maybe skin doesn’t get burned in this bit of the world? “Put on your sunglasses, oh, and your proper shoes, those slipper things don’t have any support.” My feet are squished walking even when I loose the Velcro. We’re safe as long as we stay on the sidewalk but if we go on the street by accident we’ll die. Ma isn’t dead, Grandma says she wouldn’t lie to me. She lied to Dr. Clay about Checkers. The sidewalk keeps stopping so we have to cross the street, we’ll be fine as long as we hold hands. I don’t like touching but Grandma says too bad. The air is all blowy in my eyes and the sun so dazzling around the edges of my shades. There’s a pink thing that’s a hair elastic and a bottle top and a wheel not from a real car but a toy one and a bag of nuts but the nuts are gone and a juice box that I can hear still some juice sploshing in and a yellow poo. Grandma says it’s not from a human but from some disgusting dog, she tugs at my jacket and says, “Come away from that.” The litter shouldn’t be there, except for the leaves that the tree can’t help dropping. In France they let their dogs do their business everywhere, I can go there someday.

  “To see the poo?”

  “No, no,” says Grandma, “the Eiffel Tower. Someday when you’re really good at climbing stairs.”

  “Is France in Outside?”

  She looks at me strange.

  “In the world?”

  “Everywhere’s in the world. Here we are!”

  I can’t go in the playground because there’s kids not friends of mine.

  Grandma rolls her eyes. “You just play at the same time, that’s what kids do.”

  I can see through the fence in the diamonds of wire. It’s like the secret fence in the walls and Floor that Ma couldn’t dig through, but we got out, I saved her, only then she didn’t want to be alive anymore. There’s a big girl hanging upside down off a swing. Two boys on the thing I don’t remember the name that does up and down, they’re banging it and laughing and falling off I think on purpose. I count my teeth to twenty and one more time. Holding the fence makes white stripes on my fingers. I watch a woman carry a baby to the climber and it crawls through the tunnel, she does faces at it through the holes in the sides and pretends she doesn’t know where it is. I watch the big girl but she only swings, sometimes with her hair nearly in the mud, sometimes right side up. The boys chase and do bang with their hands like guns, one falls down and cries. He runs out the gate and into a house, Grandma says he must live there, how does she know? She whispers, “Why don’t you go play with the other boy now?” Then she calls out, “Hi there.” The boy looks over at us, I go into a bush, it pricks me in the head.

  After a while she says it’s chillier than it looks and maybe we should be getting home for lunch.

  It takes hundreds of hours and my legs are breaking.
/>   “Maybe you’ll enjoy it more next time,” says Grandma.

  “It was interesting.”

  “Is that what your ma says to say when you don’t like something?” She smiles a bit. “I taught her that.” “Is she dying by now?”

  “No.” She nearly shouts. “Leo would have called if there was any news.”

  Leo is Steppa, it’s confusing all the names. I only want my one name Jack.

  At Grandma’s house, she shows me France on the globe that’s like a statue of the world and always spinning. This whole entire city we’re in is just a dot and the Clinic’s in the dot too. So is Room but Grandma says I don’t need to think about that place anymore, put it out of my mind.

  For lunch I have lots of bread and butter, it’s French bread but there’s no poo on it I don’t think. My nose is red and hot, also my cheeks and my top bit of my chest and my arms and the back of my hands and my ankles above my socks.

  Steppa tells Grandma not to upset herself.

  “It wasn’t even that sunny,” she keeps saying, wiping her eyes.

  I ask, “Is my skin going to fall off?”

  “Just little bits of it,” says Steppa.

  “Don’t frighten the boy,” Grandma says. “You’ll be fine, Jack, don’t worry. Put on more of this nice cool after-sun cream, now. .” It’s hard to reach behind me but I don’t like other persons’ fingers so I manage.

  Grandma says she should call the Clinic again but she’s not up to it right now.

  Because I’m burned I get to lie on the couch and watch cartoons, Steppa’s in the recliner reading his World Traveler magazine.

  • • •

  In the night Tooth is coming for me, bouncing on the street crash crash crash, ten feet tall all moldy and jaggedy bits falling off, he smashes at the walls. Then I’m floating in a boat that’s nailed shut and the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out—

  A hiss in the dark that I don’t know it then it’s Grandma. “Jack. It’s OK.”

  “No.”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  I don’t think I do.

  At breakfast Grandma takes a pill. I ask if it’s her vitamin. Steppa laughs. She tells him, “You should talk.” Then she says to me, “Everybody needs a little something.”

  This house is hard to learn. The doors I’m let go in anytime are the kitchen and the living room and the fitness suite and the spare room and the basement, also outside the bedroom that’s called the landing, like where airplanes would land but they don’t. I can go in the bedroom unless the door’s shut when I have to knock and wait. I can go in the bathroom unless it won’t open, that means anybody else is in it and I have to wait. The bath and sink and toilet are green called avocado, except the seat is wood so I can sit on that. I should put the seat up and down again after as a courtesy to ladies, that’s Grandma. The toilet has a lid on the tank like the one that Ma hit on Old Nick. The soap is a hard ball and I have to rub and rub to make it work. Outsiders are not like us, they’ve got a million of things and different kinds of each thing, like all different chocolate bars and machines and shoes. Their things are all for different doing, like nailbrush and toothbrush and sweeping brush and toilet brush and clothes brush and yard brush and hairbrush. When I drop some powder called talc on the floor I sweep it up but Grandma comes in and says that’s the toilet brush and she’s mad I’m spreading germs.

  It’s Steppa’s house too but he doesn’t make the rules. He’s mostly in his den which is his special room for his own.

  “People don’t always want to be with people,” he tells me. “It gets tiring.”

  “Why?”

  “Just take it from me, I’ve been married twice.”

  The front door I can’t go out without telling Grandma but I wouldn’t anyway. I sit on the stairs and suck hard on Tooth.

  “Go play with something, why don’t you?” says Grandma, squeezing past.

  There’s lots, I don’t know which. My toys from the crazy well-wishers that Ma thought there was only five but actually I took six. There’s chalks all different colors that Deana brought around only I didn’t see her, they’re too smudgy on my fingers. There’s a giant roll of paper and forty-eight markers in a long invisible plastic. A box of boxes with animals on that Bronwyn doesn’t use anymore, I don’t know why, they stack to a tower more than my head.

  I stare at my shoes instead, they’re my softies. If I wiggle I can sort of see the toes under the leather. Ma! I shout it very loud in my head. I don’t think she’s there. No better no worse. Unless everybody’s lying.

  There’s a tiny brown thing under the carpet where it starts being the wood of the stairs. I scrape it out, it’s a metal. A coin. It’s got a man face and words, IN GOD WE TRUST LIBERTY 2004. When I turn it over there’s a man, maybe the same one but he’s waving at a little house and says UNITED STATES OF AMERICA E PLURIBUS UNUM ONE CENT.

  Grandma’s on the bottom step staring at me.

  I jump. I move Tooth to the back of my gums. “There’s a bit in Spanish,” I tell her.

  “There is?” She frowns.

  I show her with my finger.

  “It’s Latin. E PLURIBUS UNUM. Hmm, I think that means ‘United we stand’ or something. Would you like some more?” “What?”

  “Let me look in my purse. .”

  She comes back with a round flat thing that if you squish, it suddenly opens like a mouth and there’s different moneys inside. A silvery has a man with a ponytail like me and FIVE CENTS but she says everybody calls it a nickel, the little silvery is a dime, that is ten.

  “Why is the five more bigger than the ten one if it’s five?”

  “That’s just how it is.”

  Even the one cent is bigger than the ten, I think how it is is dumb.

  On the biggest silvery there’s a different man not happy, the back says NEW HAMPSHIRE 1788 LIVE FREE OR DIE. Grandma says New Hampshire is another bit of America, not this bit.

  “Live free, does that mean not costing anything?”

  “Ah, no, no. It means. . nobody being the boss of you.”

  There’s another the same front but when I turn it over there’s pictures of a sailboat with a tiny person in it and a glass and more Spanish, GUAM E PLURIBUS UNUM 2009 and Guahan ITano’ ManChamorro. Grandma squeezes up her eyes at it and goes to get her glasses.

  “Is that another bit of America?”

  “Guam? No, I think it’s somewhere else.”

  Maybe it’s how Outsiders spell Room.

  The phone starts its screaming in the hall, I run upstairs to get away.

  Grandma comes up, crying again. “She’s turned the corner.”

  I stare at her.

  “Your ma.”

  “What corner?”

  “She’s on the mend, she’s going to be fine, probably.”

  I shut my eyes.

  • • •

  Grandma shakes me awake because she says it’s been three hours and she’s afraid I won’t sleep tonight.

  It’s hard to talk with Tooth in so I put him in my pocket instead. My nails have still got soap in. I need something sharp to get it out, like Remote.

  “Are you missing your ma?”

  I shake my head. “Remote.”

  “You miss your. . moat?”

  “Remote.”

  “The TV remote?”

  “No, my Remote that used to make Jeep go vrumm zoom but then it got broke in Wardrobe.”

  “Oh,” says Grandma, “well, I’m sure we can get them back.”

  I shake my head. “They’re in Room.”

  “Let’s make a little list.”

  “To flush down the toilet?”

  Grandma looks all confused. “No, I’ll call the police.”

  “Is it an emergency?”

  She shakes her head. “They’ll bring your toys over here, once they’ve finished with them.”

  I stare at her. “The police can go in Room?”

  “They’re probably there right this minu
te,” she tells me, “collecting evidence.”

  “What’s evidence?”

  “Proof of what happened, to show the judge. Pictures, fingerprints. .”

  While I’m writing the list, I think about the black of Track and the hole under Table, all the marks me and Ma made. The judge looking at my picture of the blue octopus.

  Grandma says it’s a shame to waste such a nice spring day, so if I put on a long shirt and my proper shoes and hat and shades and lots of sunblock I can come out in the backyard.

  She squirts sunblock into her hands. “You say go and stop, whenever you like. Like remote control.”

  That’s kind of funny.

  She starts rubbing it on my back of hands.

  “Stop!” After a minute I say, “Go,” and she starts again. “Go.”

  She stops. “You mean keep going?”

  “Yeah.”

  She does my face. I don’t like it near my eyes but she’s careful.

  “Go.”

  “Actually we’re all done, Jack. Ready?”

  Grandma goes out first through both doors, the glass one and the net one, she waves me out and the light is zigzaggy. We’re standing on the deck that’s all wooden like the deck of a ship. There’s fuzz on it, little bundles. Grandma says it’s some kind of pollen from a tree.

  “Which one?” I’m staring up at all the differents.

  “Can’t help you there, I’m afraid.”

  In Room we knowed what everything was called but in the world there’s so much, persons don’t even know the names.

  Grandma’s in one of the wooden chairs wiggling her butt in. There’s sticks that break when I stand on them and some yellow tiny leaves and mushy brown ones that she says she asked Leo to deal with back in November.

  “Does Steppa have a job?”

  “No, we retired early but of course now our stocks are decimated. .”

  “What does that mean?”

  She’s leaning her head back on the top of the chair, her eyes are shut. “Nothing, don’t worry about it.” “Will he die soon?”

  Grandma opens her eyes at me.

  “Or will it be you first?”

  “I’ll have you know I’m only fifty-nine, young man.”

  Ma’s only twenty-six. She’s turned the corner, does that mean she’s coming back yet?