Room by Emma Donoghue
In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don’t have jobs, so I don’t know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there’s only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.
Also everywhere I’m looking at kids, adults mostly don’t seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don’t want to actually play with them, they’d rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there’s a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn’t even hear.
In the library live millions of books we don’t have to pay any moneys for. Giant insects are hanging up, not real, made of paper. Grandma looks under C for Alice and she’s there, the wrong shape but the same words and pictures, that’s so weird. I show Grandma the scariest picture with the Duchess. We sit on the couch for her reading me The Pied Piper, I didn’t know he was a book as well as a story. My best bit is when the parents hear the laughing inside the rock. They keep shouting for the kids to come back but the kids are in a lovely country, I think it might be Heaven. The mountain never opens up to let the parents in.
There’s a big boy doing a computer of Harry Potter, Grandma says not to stand too near, it’s not my turn.
There’s a tiny world on a table with train tracks and buildings, a little kid is playing with a green truck. I go up, I take a red engine. I zoom it into the kid’s truck a bit, the kid giggles. I do it faster so the truck falls off the track, he giggles more.
“Good sharing, Walker.” That’s a man on the armchair looking at a thing like Uncle Paul’s BlackBerry.
I think the kid must be Walker. “Again,” he says.
This time I balance my engine on the little truck, then I take an orange bus and crash it into both of them.
“Gently,” says Grandma, but Walker is saying, “Again,” and jumping up and down.
Another man comes in and kisses the first one and then Walker. “Say bye-bye to your friend,” he tells him.
Is that me?
“Bye-bye.” Walker flaps his hand up and down.
I think I’ll give him a hug. I do it too fast and knock him down, he bangs on the train table and cries.
“I’m so sorry,” Grandma keeps saying, “my grandson doesn’t—he’s learning about boundaries—”
“No harm done,” says the first man. They go off with the little boy doing one two three whee swinging between them, he’s not crying anymore. Grandma watches them, she’s looking confused.
“Remember,” she says on the way to the white car, “we don’t hug strangers. Even nice ones.”
“Why not?”
“We just don’t, we save our hugs for people we love.”
“I love that boy Walker.”
“Jack, you never saw him before in your life.”
• • •
This morning I spread a bit of syrup on my pancake. It’s actually good the two together.
Grandma’s tracing around me, she says it’s fine to draw on the deck because the next time it rains the chalk will all get washed away. I watch the clouds, if they start raining I’m going to run inside supersonic fast before a drop hits me. “Don’t get chalk on me,” I tell her.
“Oh, don’t be such a worrywart.”
She pulls me up to standing and there’s a kid shape on the patio, it’s me. I have a huge head, no face, no insides, blobby hands.
“Delivery for you, Jack.” That’s Steppa shouting, what does he mean?
When I go in the house he’s cutting a big box. He pulls out something huge and he says, “Well, this can go in the trash for starters.”
She unrolls. “Rug,” I give her a huge hug, “she’s our Rug, mine and Ma’s.”
He lifts up his hands and says, “Suit yourself.”
Grandma’s face is twisting. “Maybe if you took it outside and gave it a good beating, Leo . . .”
“No!” I’m shouting.
“OK, I’ll use the vacuum, but I don’t like to think what’s in here . . .” She rubs Rug between her fingers.
I have to keep Rug on my blow-up in the bedroom, I’m not to drag her all around the house. So I sit with her over my head like a tent, her smell is just like I remember and the feel. Under there I’ve got other things the police brung too. I give Jeep and Remote especially big kisses, and Meltedy Spoon. I wish Remote wasn’t broken so he could make Jeep go. Wordy Ball is flatter than I remember and Red Balloon is hardly at all. Spaceship is here but his rocket blaster’s missing, he doesn’t look very good. No Fort or Labyrinth, maybe they were too big to go in the boxes. I have my five books, even Dylan. I get out the other Dylan, the new one I took from the mall because I thought he was my one but the new is way shinier. Grandma says there’s thousands of each book in the world so thousands of persons can be reading the same at the same minute, it makes me dizzy. New Dylan says, “Hello, Dylan, nice to meet you.”
“I’m Jack’s Dylan,” says Old Dylan.
“I’m Jack’s one too,” says New.
“Yeah, but actually I was Jack’s first.”
Then Old and New bash each other with corners till a page of New rips and I stop because I’ve ripped a book and Ma will be mad. She’s not here to be mad, she doesn’t even know, I’m crying and crying and I zip away the books in my Dora bag so they don’t get cried on. The two Dylans cuddle up together inside and say sorry.
I find Tooth under the blow-up and suck him till he feels like he’s one of mine.
The windows are making funny noises, it’s drops of rain. I go close, I’m not very scared so long as the glass is between. I put my nose right on it, it’s all blurry from the rain, the drops melt together and turn into long rivers down down down the glass.
• • •
Me and Grandma and Steppa are all three going in the white car on a surprise trip. “But how do you know which way?” I ask Grandma when she’s driving.
She winks at me in the mirror. “It’s only a surprise for you.”
I watch out the window for new things. A girl in a wheelchair with her head back between two padded things. A dog sniffing another dog’s butt, that’s funny. There’s a metal box for mailing mail in. A plastic bag blowing.
I think I sleep a bit but I’m not sure.
We’re stopped in a parking lot that has dusty stuff all over the lines.
“Guess what?” asks Steppa, pointing.
“Sugar?”
“Sand,” he says. “Getting warmer?”
“No, I’m cold.”
“He means, are you figuring out where we are? Someplace me and your Grandpa used to bring your ma and Paul when they were little?”
I look a long way. “Mountains?”
“Sand dunes. And in between those two, the blue stuff?”
“Sky.”
“But underneath. The darker blue at the bottom.”
My eyes are hurting even through my shades.
“The sea!” says Grandma.
I go behind them along the wooden path, I carry the bucket. It’s not like I thought, the wind keeps putting tiny stones in my eyes. Grandma spreads out a big flowery rug, it’s going to get all sandy but she says that’s OK, it’s a picnic blanket.
“Where’s the picnic?”
“It’s a bit early in the year for that.”
Steppa says why don’t we go down to the water.
I’ve got sand in my shoes, one of them comes off. “That’s an idea,” says Steppa. He takes his both off and puts his socks in them, he swings them from the laces.
I put my socks in my shoes too. The sand is all damp and strange on my feet, there’s prickly bits. Ma never said the beach was like this.
“Let’s go,” says St
I stay far back because there’s huge growing bits with white stuff on top, they roar and crash. The sea never stops growling and it’s too big, we’re not meant to be here.
I go back to Grandma on the picnic blanket. She’s wriggling her bare toes, they’re all wrinkly.
We try to build a sand castle but it’s the wrong kind of sand, it keeps crumbling.
Steppa comes back with his pants rolled up and dripping. “Didn’t feel like paddling?”
“There’s all poo.”
“Where?”
“In the sea. Our poos go down the pipes to the sea, I don’t want to walk in it.”
Steppa laughs. “Your mother doesn’t know much about plumbing, does she?”
I want to hit him. “Ma knows about everything.”
“There’s like a big factory where the pipes from all the toilets go.” He’s sitting on the blanket with his feet all sandy. “The guys there scoop out all the poo and scrub every drop of water till it’s good enough to drink, then they put it back in the pipes so it pours out our faucets again.”
“When does it go to the sea?”
He shakes his head. “I think the sea’s just rain and salt.”
“Ever taste a tear?” asks Grandma.
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s the same as the sea.”
I still don’t want to walk in it if it’s tears.
But I go back down near the water with Steppa to look for treasure. We find a white shell like a snail, but when I curl my finger inside, he’s gone out. “Keep it,” says Steppa.
“But what about when he comes home?”
“Well,” says Steppa, “I don’t think he’d leave it lying around if he still needed it.”
Maybe a bird ate him. Or a lion. I put the shell in my pocket, and a pink one, and a black one, and a long dangerous one called a razor shell. I’m allowed take them home because finders keepers, losers weepers.
We have our lunch at a diner which doesn’t mean just have dinner but food anytime at all. I have a BLT that’s a hot sandwich of lettuce and tomato with bacons hidden inside.
Driving home I see the playground but it’s all wrong, the swings are on the opposite side.
“Oh, Jack, that’s a different one,” says Grandma. There’s playgrounds in every town.”
Lots of the world seems to be a repeat.
• • •
“Noreen tells me you’ve had a haircut.” Ma’s voice is tiny on the phone.
“Yeah. But I still have my strong.” I’m sitting under Rug with the phone, all in the dark to pretend Ma’s right here. “I have baths on my own now,” I tell her. “I’ve been on swings and I know money and fire and street persons and I’ve got two Dylan the Diggers and a conscience and spongy shoes.”
“Wow.”
“Oh and I’ve seen the sea, there’s no poo in it, you were tricking me.”
“You had so many questions,” says Ma. “And I didn’t have all the answers, so I had to make some up.”
I hear her crying breath.
“Ma, can you come get me tonight?”
“Not quite yet.”
“Why not?”
“They’re still fiddling with my dosage, trying to figure out what I need.”
Me, she needs me. Can’t she figure that out?
• • •
I want to eat my pad thai with Meltedy Spoon but Grandma says it’s unhygienic.
Later I’m in the living room channel surfing, that means looking at all the planets as fast as a surfer, and I hear my name, not in real but in TV.
“. . . need to listen to Jack.”
“We’re all Jack, in a sense,” says another man sitting at the big table.
“Obviously,” says another one.
Are they called Jack too, are they some of the million?
“The inner child, trapped in our personal Room one oh one,” says another of the men, nodding.
I don’t think I was ever in that room.
“But then perversely, on release, finding ourselves alone in a crowd . . .”
“Reeling from the sensory overload of modernity,” says the first one.
“Post-modernity.”
There’s a woman too. “But surely, at a symbolic level, Jack’s the child sacrifice,” she says, “cemented into the foundations to placate the spirits.”
Huh?
“I would have thought the more relevant archetype here is Perseus —born to a walled-up virgin, set adrift in a wooden box, the victim who returns as hero,” says one of the men.
“Of course Kaspar Hauser famously claimed he’d been happy in his dungeon, but perhaps he really meant that nineteenth-century German society was just a bigger dungeon.”
“At least Jack had TV.”
Another man laughs. “Culture as a shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave.”
Grandma comes in and switches it right off, scowling.
“It was about me,” I tell her.
“Those guys spent too much time at college.”
“Ma says I have to go to college.”
Grandma’s eyes roll. “All in good time. Pj’s and teeth now.”
She reads me The Runaway Bunny but I’m not liking it tonight. I keep thinking what if it was the mother bunny that ran away and hid and the baby bunny couldn’t find her.
• • •
Grandma’s going to buy me a soccer ball, it’s very exciting. I go look at a plastic man with a black rubber suit and flippers, then I see a big stack of suitcases all colors like pink and green and blue, then an escalator. I just step on for a second but I can’t get back up, it zooms me down down down and it’s the coolest thing and scary as well, coolary, that’s a word sandwich, Ma would like it. At the end I have to jump off, I don’t know to get back up to Grandma again. I count my teeth five times, one time I get nineteen instead of twenty. There’s signs everywhere that all say the same thing, Just Three Weeks to Mother’s Day, Doesn’t She Deserve the Best? I look at plates and stoves and chairs, then I’m all floppy so I lie down on a bed.
A woman says I’m not allowed so I sit up. “Where’s your mom, little guy?”
“She’s in the Clinic because she tried to go to Heaven early.” The woman’s staring at me. “I’m a bonsai.”
“You’re a what?”
“We were locked up, now we’re rap stars.”
“Oh my go—you’re that boy! The one—Lorana,” she shouts, “get over here. You’ll never believe it. It’s the boy, Jack, the one on TV from the shed.”
Another person comes over, shaking her head. “The shed one’s smaller with long hair tied back, and all kind of hunched.”
“It’s him,” she says, “I swear it’s him.”
“No way,” says the other one.
“Jose,” I say.
She laughs and laughs. “This is unreal. Can I have an autograph?”
“Lorana, he won’t know how to sign his name.”
“Yes I will,” I say, “I can write anything there is.”
“You’re something else,” she tells me. “Isn’t he something else?” she says to the other one.
The only paper is old labels from the clothes, I’m writing JACK on lots for the women to give to their friends when Grandma runs up with a ball under her arm and I’ve never seen her so mad. She shouts at the women about lost child procedures, she tears my autographs into bits. She yanks me by the hand. When we’re rushing out of the store the gate goes aieeee aieee, Grandma drops the soccer ball on the carpet.
In the car she won’t look at me in the mirror. I ask, “Why you threw away my ball?”
“It was setting off the alarm,” says Grandma, “because I hadn’t paid.”
“Were you robbing?”
“No, Jack,” she shouts, “I was running around the building like a lunatic looking for you.” Then she says, more quietly, “Anything could have happened.”
“Like an earthquake?”
&nb
A stranger’s a not-friend, but the women were my new friends. “Why?”
“Because they might want a little boy of their own, all right?”
It doesn’t sound all right.
“Or to hurt you, even.”
“You mean him?” Old Nick, but I can’t say it.
“No, he can’t get out of jail, but somebody like him,” says Grandma.
I didn’t know there was somebody like him in the world.
“Can you go back and get my ball now?” I ask.
She switches on the engine and drives out of the parking lot fast so the wheels screech.
In the car I get madder and madder.
When we get back to the house I put everything in my Dora bag, except my shoes don’t fit so I throw them in the trash and I roll Rug up and drag her down the stairs behind me.
Grandma comes into the hall. “Did you wash your hands?”
“I’m going back to the Clinic,” I shout at her, “and you can’t stop me because you’re a, you’re a stranger.”
“Jack,” she says, “put that stinky rug back where it was.”
“You’re the stinky,” I roar.
She’s pressing on her chest. “Leo,” she says over her shoulder, “I swear, I’ve had just about as much—”
Steppa comes up the stairs and picks me up.
I drop Rug. Steppa kicks my Dora bag out of the way. He’s carrying me, I’m screaming and hitting him because it’s allowed, it’s a special case, I can kill him even, I’m killing and killing him—
“Leo,” wails Grandma downstairs, “Leo—”
Fee fie foe fum, he’s going to rip me in pieces, he’s going to wrap me in Rug and bury me and the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out—
Steppa drops me on the blow-up, but it doesn’t hurt.
He sits down on the end so it all goes up like a wave. I’m still crying and shaking and my snot’s getting on the sheet.
I stop crying. I feel under the blow-up for Tooth, I put him in my mouth and suck hard. He doesn’t taste like anything anymore.
Steppa’s hand is on the sheet just beside me, it’s got hairs on the fingers.
His eyes are waiting for my eyes. “All fair and square, water under the bridge?”
I move Tooth to my gum. “What?”