Eight Rooms

by Various

  “Genius,” said Kathie delightedly, “I knew you were the right person to join me in this, you understand people so well.”

  I do not really understand at all, especially men. They are so very silly. My Mama struggled without my father, but she survived. She always said that no man at all was better than a bad one, that she didn’t really need a man. I wonder whether there were friendships I knew nothing about, whether she was shielding me or whether she really did spend the whole of her life without the company of men. No man in her bed, no-one to wake up to. She was worn out, old before she needed to be, with no creams and make-up to help her to be the beautiful woman I know she must have been. She was always wrapped in blacks and dark browns like an old lady, her hand shielding her tired eyes, strained from the translation work she took to make extra money.

  I worked hard at school and at college because I wanted to leave it all behind, didn’t ever want a life like hers. It has taken me a long time to realise that wishing this was not disrespectful to my mother. I was simply being honest. Communism was like a bad joke, especially to those people who were so very damaged by it.

  “It will never happen again,” she used to say, then would mutter fretfully, “No, there may be something even worse.” She was always looking over her shoulder, always scraping together enough to get by on. I am sure that permanent low level of stress contributed to her too early death.

  When we learned about the effects of stress in my Diploma course, something broke inside me and I cried and cried and could not stop, great gulpy sobs and one of the girls had to give me tissues. I could not explain to them what my mother’s life had been like, but I was sure then what had caused her to die. She always used to be hoarding things. Little pathetic things that might be useful, pieces of string, rolled and tied neatly, paper bags folded smooth, candle stubs. Things that here would be thrown out into the trash. Then sometimes when she had been shopping, she would produce little luxuries for us. It shames me now to remember how even then I was moving beyond what she could provide for me. The littleness of what she could offer embarrassed me, but beneath my shame, I knew there was so much love, and that made me cruel. Oh how very much I loved her, how much I would give to have her here with me, enjoying these everyday things that they all take for granted.

  I have a huge sense of homesickness, or rather childhood-sickness. I don’t want to be back there now, how it would be with Mama gone, but I sometimes crave the safe place of my childhood. There was a drabness, a concreteness to much of the town, but the countryside around it was so very beautiful. I suppose I could go back and visit my cousins, my aunts. But there seems little point. I have nothing to go back for but memories, and they do me little credit. My life is here now, here in this room, my safe place.

  And my flat of course. It is very small, but it is mine and I am paying for it all myself. I save my money for further training, for my home, for safety. I hoard my money as she hoarded her tins of meat and potatoes. Maybe I will finally let myself grow roots, but aerial roots like the orchids Kathie grows in her office, stretching out, always reaching up, not confined. I couldn’t give up my space. No-one is allowed there. This room, yes, they can come to, undress, bare their bodies and unburden their minds, but my home is my own.

  John shifts beneath my hands, as if I have been pressing too hard, as if my anger is spreading through my hands into him. My wrists ache. Sometimes I want to say to my clients, ‘Hey, my back hurts as well, why do you not rub me for a change?’

  I would love to see their faces if I did that. Kathie, I think she would laugh. Recently she sent me on a special new course, designed to alleviate the strains we put ourselves under. I had not realised until then how much she cared.

  “You need to save yourself,” she said, “for a long and healthy career.” It is true that sometimes I go home with cramp in my arms and stiff fingers, aching legs and sore feet.

  “Maximum effect with minimum effort – that should be your mantra.”

  I think she is right, for when I get in my trance, that is how I feel. I do not even need to think, but can perform like a perfect smiling robot.

  The other week I heard a song playing in the foyer here – the radio was out of tune, so the words were faint, but I could hear them well enough and they stayed with me all day. “Everybody needs somebody,” it went, a jaunty melody. It made me a little sad though. They say that we are all the same, under the skin, and I know that is mostly true. I have seen so much skin, many colours and wrinkles and rolls of flesh. And yet the people are very similar, for all that. There is a yearning for contact. That is why they come here, for the power of touch, for the feeling of my fingers on their body, making them feel loved, wanted. There is a need in John. He thinks I don’t notice, or hopes I don’t. He won’t ever do anything about it; you can tell the ones who will, the ones who will never utter a word. It is a shame.

  “Same time next week then?” He asks me, trying to keep the hope from his voice.

  “You will have to check and see if there is an available appointment,” I say. Cool as spring water. It is our formula, a safety thing. I know it will be free, for I ask Kathie to block it out every week for him. But he mustn’t know that. I would say yes though, maybe, if he liked. If he ever asks.

  6

  Guy Mankowski

  This is the room where I got to know the body of strangers. I don’t know how many Visitors have been in here. At times I wonder if it’s hundreds or merely a few tens. When there are too many to mentally hold I think of them as units. Units of intimacy.

  It doesn’t seem important how I got to know this room, or how it became an extension of my body. Perhaps what happened was a consequence of having been alone for too long. If some of what follows seems strange, I believe the solitary nature of my work can at least partly explain it.

  I always believed that a person’s home is an extension of their body. I first developed this belief as a little boy when my father, for reasons still only clearest to him, swept me in his arms without notice and took me away to somewhere we couldn’t be recognised. I had never experienced the sensation of being torn before, but somewhere inside me I realised that this feeling would become familiar. When this happened so many times that the feeling it brought was no longer a surprise, I resolved to do three things about it. Firstly, I would to find a home in words. Secondly, when I could, I would find a home in people. Thirdly, I would one day find a home in certain rooms. I decided that when this happened the home would embody me.

  It only makes sense then that the room that I embody as an adult is like a limb to me. Therefore, the people who have occupied this room are in some way a part of me, as they are a part of my body. What troubled me at first was the thought that I did not know everyone who is in there. The Key Players had been explained by Anna, and after a fairly short while I got to know them and allowed them to exist in here with me. As a consequence The Key Players are rarely a threat, as I have had time to familiarise myself with their presence. It is The Visitors who cause me the most trouble.

  Anna and I discussed this early on in our relationship. We decided that it was normal for a couple to entertain a certain number of Visitors. It would not stop us being a couple. It would merely make us more socially minded. We devised The Formula for how many people we should entertain. When the numbers eventually started to become too much of a struggle for me, Anna took over that business on my behalf. When I had to think of them, I depersonalised them as a series of situational occurrences. Each one was tied to a very specific event. By not allowing them the colour of a personality by tying them to one scene, I stripped them of their power to threaten me.

  The first Visitor chosen by me was hesitant and distant. Tiffany was a dark-haired student in her late-twenties who was working at the college. She had a steady unflinching gaze, although her dress suggested a certain absent-mindedness, almost as if her mind was occupied with something of extreme importance. She saw my advertisement for a lodger and came a
round to visit that very afternoon. This straight away suggested that Tiffany did not have many ties, and this was fine by me.

  Tiffany appeared at my door with a brown leather satchel over her right shoulder. She was wearing no makeup, but there was something lunar and iridescent about her clean face. When I opened the door she was looking straight at me, confidently, as though she knew the precise moment that she would be revealed. Her face broke into a tight smile. It was not an unattractive face, with fairly soft features and large brown eyes, but it was a serious face. On the rare occasions that she smiled she looked nearly beautiful, but she had a mole on her left cheek that was pretty much a blemish. In a black leather jacket with jeans covering her heeled boots, at first glance she just looked like another postgraduate student, lost in the earnest thrust of words.

  “Hello,” she whispered, “I’ve come to see the room?”

  I opened my arms.

  “In that case, I must let you in to show it to you.”

  Curling a lock over her ear and pulling the satchel closer to her chest, she stepped inside. It was at this moment, as she stepped inside that I first noticed the lights changing. I remember glancing over her shoulder as we made small talk and it registering with me. She explained how she was working on a thesis, something about feminist writers in South Africa. Her type of work was close enough to mine that I knew she would fit in.

  As she composed herself in the bathroom after seeing the flat, I stood and waited in the living room. The room was bare and night had fallen while we were talking, seemingly without either of us realising. My flat was one storey above the pavement, and a small road was visible beneath my windowsill. In the day you could see the city from there, but at night an ochre sheen rose from the row of streetlights. In my youth I had imagined that it covered the city with a romantic, almost filmic sheen. With experience I learnt to be wary of such thoughts. As I noticed its shift to something darker, for a second I imagined that the crumbling wall opposite my window had been hit by a bomb, and that my flat was somehow still standing among the surrounding rubble. A black car slid slowly past, hesitating outside my door, and then switched its lights off. I watched as it slowly eased down the hill.

  I remember standing closer to the window at what seemed like an important moment when Tiffany came back in. She said that she thought she could be happy living here. It was only later that I realised she had little choice but to say so.

  For a second we both stood underneath the bare lightbulb that was hanging from my living room ceiling. I saw her eyes pass over the ochre light that had moved onto my dark blue shirt.

  I said I was happy for her to be a Visitor, but there had to be boundaries. I said that if it is my home, and therefore an extension of my body, then there must be boundaries. She agreed that this was understandable.

  Certain things were placed in her room so that I felt the room was still mine. This little infringement seemed reasonable, even Anna agreed. At first it was merely a lampshade, and a broken fridge (which I said would soon work) and a gilt-edged mirror that I had owned longer than I like to remember, which was adorned with cherubs. Tiffany was quite mild and she agreed that this was okay. I sensed that she wanted to ask why those three objects had to stay in her room while she was there, but she did not ask and so I did not answer. Had she asked, I would have said that the room belonged to a brother of mine who had died, and I wanted to keep some features of the room as they were when he was alive. I need hardly tell you that that would have been a lie.

  Life started well with Tiffany. She had a great deal of books, and when I passed her room late at night I often noticed that the light was on. I must admit that occasionally I listened in close enough to hear the sound of pages turning. Sometimes quite a few pages were turned in one sitting, so I took from this that she was studying late into the night.

  The problems started when a different sound emanated from the room. I have not yet mentioned that I am a translator, work that has made me a great deal of money and more success than I had planned for. At that time I was working on translating a brilliant paper by a young French scientist called Gerard Lefèvre. Most of my life had been spent alone among the voluptuous comfort of words. There have been few people in my life whom I have shared an understanding with. As a child I spent a great deal of time in my father’s library, which in fitting with the nature of his work contained mostly books concerning strange approaches to science. Spending little time with other children I developed my worldview through the depersonalised language of his texts. I used this analytical framework to deal with the world as I grew up, and in the relationships I engaged in.

  This formative time alone in my father’s library made me view the world as an experiment. I learned novel ways to incorporate pleasure into this paradigm during my student years, where I found cold pleasure in certain interactions with some of the elder women on my course. My time at university was spent alone learning languages, and in allowing myself occasional sexual contact. Having immersed myself in foreign words at an early age, I developed something of an awkward turn of phrase in English, which I apologise for. Once I felt that I had mastered the necessary languages, I took to translating key works of literature that captured my imagination. My perfectionism caused me to be in fairly great demand. On a few occasions my work even gained coverage in national newspapers and this led to requests for interviews so that the public could know more about me. I always turned such requests down. Unfortunately, this fuelled speculation about who I was, which had the effect of leading to me be in even greater demand. In the public eye I was discussed as a reclusive but excellent translator. I still felt, however, that my greatest work was to come. I merely worked hard, a single characteristic that separated me from my fellow man. As a consequence of this interest I came to isolate myself, in order to be able to maintain my standard, the standard that was my lifeblood.

  I usually came home at nine o’ clock, when Anna was out working. On this return, as I was passing Tiffany’s room, I heard another set of footsteps behind hers. Her footsteps seemed to be moving in tandem with another. Clomp, clomp. One step and then, a half-heartbeat later, another. Clomp, clomp. The steps grew louder… and faded. And then they ceased, with one big clomp. The light stayed on, burning brightly. Ashuffle. The light went out. And then a new rhythm began, swish swish swish. Swish swish swish. Faster and faster and then fading. And then wump, wump, wump. It was then that Anna returned after work and the troubles began in earnest.

  It was clear that I no longer had control of the room. A new stranger had entered it without me seeing, and had obviously spent the night with Tiffany. Therefore, a new part of my house, and therefore my body, had forced itself into reckoning. Although this was not a problem in itself, I was unnerved by having been unable to plan for it. I felt that Tiffany had made an aggressive move. She had staked a claim to my territory. I decided that there were two ways to deal with this situation – either to meet the man and to familiarise myself with this new limb, or to seduce Tiffany.

  Seducing Tiffany was a slow process. I had to start slowly and had to appear to be an individual whose personality was almost diametrically opposed to mine. From experience I knew that I could not be myself if I hoped to seduce a woman like her. If being myself had caused me to fail completely at this in the past, then if I wanted to be successful at seduction I had to assume a personality that was a complete contrast to my own. I therefore presented myself as a man who is interested in other people. As man who is interested in the trials and tribulations of his fellow man. As a man who has an altruistic tendency to others. This extended to an interest in the academic work of others. Having broken into Tiffany’s room during the day and read her work (not all of it, there was some in yellow folders that I didn’t feel certain I could open without leaving a trace), I began to understand where her passions lay.

  It only took three or four afternoons in the library (this was no trouble, it was very near to my place of work) to find out about femi
nist writers in South Africa. I spent my life among words; they were like elaborate buffers for the edges the world presented to me. Therefore, to absorb words on an unfamiliar subject was a process I was comfortable with and I found the new words to be a soothing challenge. They presented paradigms for representing the world that were in contradiction to my own, and in assuming their shape for my purposes I found a certain dry pleasure. I also drew comfort from knowing how secure my own representations of the world were. Merely assuming another viewpoint, as if to indulge another, filled me with a heady confidence in my own beliefs and methods.

  On certain evenings I ascertained that Tiffany’s mind was in the state of flux in which the attention isn’t drawn to some necessary chore. This was when I started to ask teasing questions about her work, which I slowly built like a web around her. She became complicit in a debate that hinged on the very passions that had made her choose this work. It wasn’t long before I could anticipate Tiffany’s responses to a certain question and provoke her into a debate. I knew what conclusion she wanted me to reach, and I stalled from making that conclusion until she had earned it. When she had, I gave the impression that I had been convinced by the power of her eloquence. This was so she would start to associate me with a feeling of satisfaction. A feeling that I shared her worldview. That my academic mind could be overcome by hers, and that consequently I made her feel more powerful for it. When we met in the hallway, or when Anna was at work, this led her to feel warm in my presence. It was only a step or two, or a functional sentence, before the seduction was complete. If I don’t explain how I seduced her, it is only because these details were only too important later.

  It made sense that the seduction took place in her bedroom. I had realigned myself with the objects I had placed in there. The objects were again useful, as they were reminders of my stake in the room (after all, surely only useful objects can ever be beautiful).