Room Empty

by Sarah Mussi

  Fletcher straightens up. He takes a deep breath. He forces himself to stop pacing around. He shreds leaves with his fingers.

  ‘OK,’ he says, ‘so it’s like that, is it? OK. Shall we try to do some positive stuff?’

  ‘OK,’ I say.

  ‘We did sharing our worst fears,’ says Fletcher. ‘Now let’s share our happiest memory. Let’s try to think of something worth living for.’

  ‘OK,’ I say. I must try.

  ‘You start,’ he says. ‘I always do the talking.’

  ‘My happiest memory?’ I say.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My happiest memory,’ I say, ‘was when I was eleven. At the home, we had a day out, and our regular care worker was ill so we had a supply care worker from some agency or other. She was much older than the others, maybe in her sixties. We all went to the sea for the day. It was somewhere in Essex and the whole place smelled sugary, of toffee apples and candyfloss.’ I pause. I take a deep breath. ‘Yes, and savoury – it smelled of burgers and hot dogs and frying onions and raw sea salt. And we walked along the beach. And she let us have whatever we wanted. That day I ate Dunkin’ Donuts, a Mr Whippy ice cream, scampi and chips.

  ‘We sat on the pier and tried to skim pebbles. You can’t really skim pebbles in the sea because of the waves and we were too high up, but it didn’t matter.’ I take a breath. I can almost feel the sun on my back. ‘And Maggie, the supply care worker, was in a good mood all day, and she put her arm around me and told me I was a great kid. And the sun shone, and the afternoon lasted for ever. That was the best day of my life.’

  I close my eyes as I think of that day. I can still feel the heat on my skin and smell the frying onions.

  ‘Your turn,’ I say.

  Fletcher looks at me. His eyes are wide. ‘My best day?’ He stops.

  ‘Go on,’ I say.

  ‘My best day was when you agreed to be there for me,’ he says.

  I raise my eyebrows. ‘I thought we were doing historical best days?’

  ‘There were no historical best days,’ he says.

  I stop shivering. ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘Everything up until the time I met you was shit,’ says Fletcher. ‘That’s all. That’s all it means.’

  A strange fluttering starts at the nape of my neck. It spreads across my ribcage.

  I want to hear more.

  I want to hear how I’m the most wonderful thing in the world. I want to hear that I’m important beyond time and death.

  I want to shout out, ‘MORE. MORE. MORE.’

  But if I say anything it’ll spoil it.

  It’s like that feeling when you know that if you take one mouthful you’ll never stop eating.

  And that’s dangerous. You could swallow the universe.

  ‘You’re stupid,’ I say.

  ‘You’re goddamn right I am,’ he says. ‘For a minute I thought I was falling in love with you, but now that you’ve pointed it out, love is stupid as well as pathetic.’

  I bite my lip. ‘Yeah. Pathetic and stupid and puerile.’

  Fletcher starts to giggle. An uncontrollable, manic kind of snorting. He yanks a piece of honeysuckle from the climber that straggles over the wall.

  I start giggling as well. Yes, it’s pathetic and stupid and puerile and laughable. And I’m giggling and laughing and swallowing my laughter and choking and tears are running down my cheeks because it’s so stupid and nothing about anything is funny. And I’ve promised myself I will always laugh with Fletcher. But it’s so not funny that it’s funny.

  ‘Don’t shower me with spit again, Dani,’ warns Fletcher.

  ‘Definitely no more pathetic, stupid spit,’ I say.

  Fletcher goes down on one knee, holds up a spray of honeysuckle and says in a husky voice, as if he’s a hero in a romantic film, ‘Please accept this stupid rose as a laughable token of my undying patheticness and stupidity.’

  I laugh and choke and flap my hands.

  Fletcher shoves the sprig of honeysuckle up towards my face.

  Under my nose.

  I breathe it in.

  And nothing is funny any more.

  My breath catches.

  I swallow.

  I blink.

  The smell of honeysuckle.

  Suddenly I’m back in the room.

  The smell of honeysuckle is wafting in through the open window.

  The Alien wails from the galaxy of MACS0647-JD.

  The room of honeysuckle and death.

  I can hear planks being unloaded, truck engines revving, iron gates screaming, and the smell is choking me. I’m leaning out of the window. The wall is covered in honeysuckle. I read the sign on the wall opposite, stencilled in old painted letters, Berkshire-based Wood Products, and the smell of honeysuckle and the smell of death.

  My hand flies to my throat.

  Fletcher grips on my arm. ‘Dani!’ he yells.

  I swallow.

  I try to speak. But I’m in the room. I throw my arm out to see if I can stop myself. The smell is too strong. All I can do is try to push the sprig of honeysuckle away from my face.

  ‘Oh, God,’ says Fletcher, ‘you’re back there.’

  His voice is coming from far away.

  ‘Use it, Dani. Don’t fight it,’ Fletcher begs. ‘Tell me where you are. Look around.’

  I’m in the room. It smells of death. There are flies everywhere. The door is locked. I can’t get out. There’s a yard opposite. There are letters stencilled on the wall. I trace them on the grimy glass of the window.

  ‘Berkshire-based Wood Products,’ I croak out.

  They’re loading wood. I’m in the room. I can’t get out. There’s a body lying across the door.

  And there’s something else at the corner of my memory, something that I want to say, but it’s too horrific to understand. I know who the body is. I know it, and I cannot know it.

  I won’t know it.

  ‘Is it the name on a paint can? Varnish?’ Fletcher is on his feet. He lets go of my arm. ‘Berkshire-based Wood Products. Is it a shop, Dani?’

  He’s got his phone out. He’s typing things into it. His face is pointed like an arrow flying at the sun.

  I want to call to him from inside the room. I want to feel his pathetic, stupid love and his puerile arms around me.

  ‘Whose body is it?’ he says. ‘Man? Woman? What’re they wearing? How did they die? Tell me more about the varnish.’

  He’s not looking at me, just typing and searching on his phone.

  I know who the body is.

  ‘Is it a place?’

  I know it, and I cannot know it.

  ‘I’ll find out where it is!’

  I refuse to understand.

  Oh, Fletcher.

  ‘OK, come out of the room, Dani,’ says Fletcher. ‘We’ve got a clue. We can do this. Everything is going to be OK now.’

  He sits down beside me on the broken bench, then jumps up again, suddenly excited. ‘I think I’ve found out where you were.’

  He holds his phone out to me. It’s a blur. I can’t even lift my arm to take it.

  He sees.

  He puts his arms around me.

  ‘It’s OK, babe,’ he says. ‘I’ve got you. You can come out now. I’m here. I won’t ever leave you.’

  I blink. The walls of the room start to fade. I’m looking at Fletcher’s smartphone.

  He’s pointing at a photo of a block of 1930s flats and a website that says:

  Berkshire Council Flats

  Sold Off to Private Company

  The old-fashioned brick flats will receive a government grant as part of a new deal with an American holding company. A spokesperson for the group said, ‘We can regenerate the area, modernize the flats, repoint brickwork and revarnish all the lovely old woodwork. Our aim is to bring life back into this once-thriving community.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘No?’ he says.

  The flats look as unfamiliar as Me
rcury.

  Fletcher’s shoulders slump.

  I take a tiny sip of breath.

  I know who the body is.

  ‘Never mind, we’ll find out.’

  I shut my memory against it.

  The honeysuckle. The smell of death.

  I refuse to remember.

  ‘I’ll find out everything, I promise you,’ says Fletcher.

  He puts his arm around me.

  I sit on the broken bench and lay my head on his shoulder.

  ‘I’ll save you, if it’s the last thing I do.’

  23

  Fletcher means it.

  He texts me during Reflection Hour. You said something about noises in the room. Tell.

  I text back: Planks being unloaded, truck engines revving, iron gates screaming.

  During Occupational Therapy he texts again. Planks being unloaded could be a building site.

  I text him: Could be but I don’t think so.

  Another text during supper. Been thinking, why not a building site? Engines fit in with that, and so does the Wood Products sign.

  I reply, Cos I didn’t hear anything else, only planks.

  True, he texts. Building sites have diggers and cranes and gravel and workers.

  After Think First, I get: OK. Going with wood only. What about a sawmill?

  Maybe, I send back.

  By Lights Out, he’s sent: I’m so excited. I think it’s got to be either a sawmill, a DIY place, a company that builds pallets or similar, a garden centre or a woodyard. All those fit in with planks, lorries and gates.

  I wake up to more.

  Lee has flogged all the laptops. Meet in the library tomorrow?

  I roll over and try to get back to sleep. My stomach hurts. All of me hurts.

  The Mystery Of The Body. In the library after CT?

  I pull the duvet over my head.

  Say yes.

  My phone pings.

  I love doing all this. Come up to the library. I’ll help you up the stairs.

  Reluctantly I text back. OK.

  Immediately he replies. I think I AM falling in love. Pathetic, puerile, stupid and laughable maybe, but still love. Your very own Sherlock.

  In the morning, halfway through Circle Time, during fag/coffee break, in the slanty, vast, long library, Fletcher puts me down. He’s breathing hard. His hair flops over his face. His T-shirt sticks to him. I can see the muscles of his chest outlined beneath the cloth.

  ‘I’m heavy, aren’t I?’ I say.

  He laughs. ‘You wish.’

  ‘You’re sweating,’ I point out.

  ‘It was the stairs, not you.’

  Always gallant. So gallant.

  ‘Let’s get started. We’ve only got about twenty minutes.’

  We settle down on a bench. The same bench as before. It seems to welcome us. The computer flicks on at just a touch. Everything seems waiting, ready to share deep, dark secrets.

  ‘I’ve got a really good feeling about today,’ says Fletcher.

  And before I can answer, he puts his arms around me. He pulls me into his sweaty chest. He’s warm. His heart is thumping. He smells of boy and sweat and roll-ups.

  ‘I’ve never done that before,’ he says. ‘I’ve comforted you and carried you. I’ve never just hugged you, just to hug.’

  ‘Am I too thin?’ I ask.

  ‘You are you,’ he says, and buries his face in my hair.

  But I hate being me.

  ‘Am I too fat?’ I say.

  Fletcher lets go of me. ‘Let’s start,’ he says.

  I wish we could just sit here and hug. I like the smell of sweat and smoke. Maybe I didn’t say what he wanted to hear.

  ‘I went for woodyards and DIY centres. They seemed more likely. Sawmills probably only exist where they build log cabins.’

  Maybe I should have hugged him back.

  ‘I looked for ones that featured in news headlines about finding small children,’ he adds very softly.

  Google throws up a list of websites.

  ‘Looked?’ I say.

  ‘I’ve been searching on my phone all night. I’ve hardly slept. There’s one I want you to see.’

  I put my arm through Fletcher’s.

  ‘Even if I’m too fat or too thin, it was nice being hugged,’ I say.

  Fletcher looks at me. Honey swirls in his eyes; his face is firelight. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  He shuffles closer to me on the bench.

  ‘We can share the screen,’ I say.

  Fletcher puts an arm around me.

  ‘And I don’t care if you do have head lice.’

  Fletcher gently squeezes my Thinness.

  It feels good. And my Alien is snoring. Its eighty thousand eyelids gently twitch. Deep dreams of moonbeams and stardust.

  Fletcher clicks the mouse.

  Google throws up 230,972,035 search results for ‘News. Child. Wood. Timber. Lewisham. Body’.

  ‘Here it is.’ Fletcher scrolls down and taps on a link.

  It’s a web page of a news item, dated years previously.

  And a picture.

  It’s a woodyard.

  Across the high back wall of the yard, BERKSHIRE-BASED WOOD PRODUCTS is stencilled in peeling blue paint over whitewashed brick.

  And the headline reads:

  Timber Yard Horror

  FOUR-YEAR-OLD FOUND IN ROOM WITH CORPSE. In a horrifying turn of events, workers find a four-year-old girl locked in a room with the body of her mother.

  The body of her mother.

  My mother.

  I knew.

  I knew.

  I refuse to know.

  The body of my mother.

  Please, not my mother.

  24

  What’s the point of a strategy? What’s the point if there’s no happiness out there in the world?

  It’s a big joke, all that going without food. All that careful counting, that calculation, that being on time and leaving last, and sussing out where the bathroom was in case I really couldn’t make it through one meal without eating. And all the time there was no happiness to save up for. That’s very funny. My Alien is laughing. He likes that kind of joke.

  There is no point in points.

  ‘I told you so,’ he says. ‘Outer Space is cold and empty. Now you know. The only good things out there are kind Aliens like me who are ready to be your friends.’

  There’s no point in anything.

  Flight Two

  Courage to Change

  Step Five

  The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs

  25

  At supper, Fletcher comes to sit with me.

  He has no new ideas about how to console me. So he says, predictably, ‘You need to talk about it, Dani.’

  I agree with Einstein. The kind of thinking that gets you into a problem won’t get you out of it. Fletcher has no new thinking to offer. He only has one big pathetic heart, his addiction and his codependent personality.

  ‘We need to talk about what this means for you,’ he says. ‘So I think we should carry on sharing our experiences – maybe more of our worst ones – and see if we can work on this.’

  See what I mean.

  ‘What do you think?’ he says.

  I don’t answer.

  That newspaper article is my worst one.

  The child – found dehydrated, emaciated and unable to speak – is believed to have been purposely subjected to imprisonment.

  ‘I know it’s taken some time and it’s been tough,’ says Fletcher, ‘but we’re getting somewhere. And if Judith is right, this may be a blessing in disguise. It may unlock the thing that stops you eating. Look, we found out who the dead body was.’ He’s choosing his words so carefully.

  ‘My mother.’

  He immediately realizes his mistake.

  A blessing in disguise. Seriously?

  ‘I mean, we found out something important,’ he corrects himself.

  He does not add: �
�We found out that she deliberately locked you in a room and tried to kill you, which means she was a murderer and you were her victim. And she was much more cruel to you than my mother was to me. In fact, she was the cruellest kind of mother anybody could have, seeing as she tried to kill you. So not only were you alone and unlovable, but you were also disposable. In fact, she hated you so much that in trying to kill herself she decided to take you along too. Just for nothing. Because you were worth nothing. And whatever warped thinking was going on in her mind is not an excuse – even if she was mentally ill. Doing that can never be construed as love.’

  As unequivocally pointed out by the news article:

  It appears that the mother, thirty-seven-year-old Caroline Carlton, locked herself and her child into the room in what was a calculated, suicidal act of cruelty.

  Instead, he says, ‘And now we should be able to find out where the room was and what happened after that.’

  Big deal.

  ‘And then we have to find a way for you to get over it,’ Fletcher says. ‘I mean, that’s the theory.’ He’s still trying so hard. ‘You find out what has traumatized you, you accept it, then you heal.’

  ‘So all I have to do is accept it?’ I ask.

  ‘Hey, well done,’ he says. ‘You actually spoke.’

  Accept that I was unloved, that I was locked in a room, that I was helpless and small, and my mum did it.

  And then get over it?

  I can feel a tentacle sneaking around my shoulders.

  ‘But you met me there,’ says the Alien.

  I turn my head slightly. I’m surprised to see that he’s wearing dark glasses. I’ve never seen my Alien in dark glasses before.

  ‘OK, so shall we try to accept that our mothers didn’t love us?’ says Fletcher.

  His earnestness is so painful.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ he says. ‘I’ll journal all the horrible things my mum did to me and then it’s your turn.’

  26

  Lee is running a new scam. He’s trying his hand at counterfeit money. It goes like this: you give him £100 real money and he’ll get you £500 fake money. If you’re a bit wary of this deal, he can reduce the amount. You give him £20 real money and he’ll get you £100 fake cashback. As long as you do £400 ‘change up’ for him.

  ‘We all need to get ready,’ Lee says. ‘When we leave this place, we’ll need to pay rent and be upright citizens and shop at Sainsbury’s, and you can’t do that on jobseeker’s allowance.’