Emma Donoghue - Room - A Novel

“A new one?”

“Yeah.”

“Excellent.”

She waits till I’m all folded into her arms. I’m nibbling the second side of the apple to make it last. “You know how Alice wasn’t always in Wonderland?” That was a trick, I know this one already. “Yeah, she goes in White Rabbit’s house and grows so big she has to put her arm out the window and her foot up the chimney and she kicks Bill the Lizard out kaboom, that bit’s funny.”

“No, but before. Remember she was lying in the grass?”

“Then she fell down the hole four thousand miles but she didn’t hurt herself.”

“Well, I’m like Alice,” says Ma.

I laugh. “Nah. She’s a little girl with a huge head, bigger than Dora’s even.”

Ma’s chewing her lip, there’s a dark bit. “Yeah, but I’m from somewhere else, like her. A long time ago, I was—”

“Up in Heaven.”

She puts her finger on my mouth to hush me. “I came down and I was a kid like you, I lived with my mother and father.” I shake my head. “ You’re the mother.”

“But I had one of my own I called Mom,” she says. “I still have.”

Why she’s pretending like this, is it a game I don’t know?

“She’s . . . I guess you’d call her Grandma.”

Like Dora’s abuela . St. Anne in the picture that the Virgin Mary’s sitting in her lap. I’m eating the core, it’s nearly nothing now. I put it on Table. “You grew in her tummy?”

“Well — actually no, I was adopted. She and my dad — you’d call him Grandpa. And also I had — I have — a big brother called Paul.” I shake my head. “He’s a saint.”

“No, a different Paul.”

How can there be two Pauls?

“You’d call him Uncle Paul.”

That’s too many names, my head’s full. My tummy’s still empty like the apple isn’t there. “What’s for lunch?”

Ma’s not smiling. “I’m telling you about your family.”

I shake my head.

“Just because you’ve never met them doesn’t mean they’re not real. There’s more things on earth than you ever dreamed about.”

“Is there any cheese left that’s not sweaty?”

“Jack, this is important. I lived in a house with my mom and dad and Paul.”

I have to play the game so she won’t be mad. “A house in TV?”

“No, outside.”

That’s ridiculous, Ma was never in Outside.

“But it looked like a house you’d see on TV, yeah. A house on the edge of a city, with a yard behind it, and a hammock.”

“What’s a hammock?”

Ma gets the pencil from Shelf and does a drawing of two trees, there’s ropes between them all knotted together with a person lying on the ropes.

“Is that a pirate?”

“That’s me, swinging in the hammock.” She does the paper side to side, she’s all excited. “And I used to go to the playground with Paul and swing on the swings as well, and eat ice cream. Your grandma and grandpa took us on trips in the car, to the zoo and to the beach. I was their little girl.”

“Nah.”

Ma scrunches up the picture. There’s wet on Table, it makes her white all shiny.

“Don’t be crying,” I say.

“I can’t help it.” She rubs the tears over her face.

“Why you can’t help it?”

“I wish I could describe it better. I miss it.”

“You miss the hammock?”

“All of it. Being outside.”

I hold on to her hand. She wants me to believe so I’m trying to but it hurts my head. “You actually lived in TV one time?”

“I told you, it’s not TV. It’s the real world, you wouldn’t believe how big it is.” Her arms shoot out, she’s pointing at all the walls. “Room’s only a tiny stinky piece of it.”

“Room’s not stinky.” I’m nearly growling. “It’s only stinky sometimes when you do a fart.”

Ma wipes her eyes again.

“Your farts are much stinkier than mine. You’re just trying to trick me and you better stop right this minute.”

“OK,” she says, all her breath hisses out like a balloon. “Let’s have a sandwich.”

“Why?”

“You said you were hungry.”

“No I’m not.”

Her face is fierce again. “I’ll make a sandwich,” she says, “and you’ll eat it. OK?”

It’s peanut butter just, because the cheese is all gooey. When I’m eating it, Ma sits beside me, but she doesn’t have one. She says, “I know it’s a lot to take in.”

The sandwich?

For dessert we have a tub of mandarins between us, I get the big bits because she prefers the little ones.

“I wouldn’t lie to you about this,” Ma says while I’m slurping the juice. “I couldn’t tell you before, because you were too small to understand, so I guess I was sort of lying to you then. But now you’re five, I think you can understand.”

I shake my head.

“What I’m doing is the opposite of lying. It’s, like, unlying.”

We have a long nap.

Ma’s already awake, looking down at me about two inches away. I wriggle down to have some from the left.

“Why you don’t like it here?” I ask her.

She sits up and pulls her T-shirt down.

“I wasn’t done.”

“Yes you were,” she says, “you were talking.”

I sit up too. “Why you don’t like it in Room with me?”

Ma holds me tight. “I always like being with you.”

“But you said it was tiny and stinky.”

“Oh, Jack.” She says nothing for a minute. “Yeah, I’d rather be outside. But with you.”

“I like it here with you.”

“OK.”

“How did he make it?”

She knows who I mean. I think she’s not going to tell me, and then she says, “Actually it was a garden shed to begin with. Just a basic twelve-by-twelve, vinyl-coated steel. But he added a soundproofed skylight, and lots of insulating foam inside the walls, plus a layer of sheet lead, because lead kills all sound. Oh, and a security door with a code. He boasts about what a neat job he made of it.”

The afternoon goes slow.

We read all our books with pictures in the freezing kind of bright. Skylight’s different today. She’s got a black bit like an eye. “Look, Ma.” She stares up and grins. “It’s a leaf.”

“Why?”

“The wind must have blown it off a tree onto the glass.”

“An actual tree in Outside?”

“Yeah. See? That proves it. The whole world is out there.”

“Let’s play Beanstalk. We put my chair here on top of Table . . .” She helps me do that. “Then Trash on top of my chair,” I tell her. “Then I climb all the way up—”

“That’s not safe.”

“Yeah it is if you stand on Table holding Trash so I don’t wobble.”

“Hmm,” says Ma, which is nearly no.

“Let’s just try, please, please?”

It works perfect, I don’t fall at all. When I’m standing on Trash I can actually hold the cork edges of Roof where they go in slanty at Skylight. There’s something over her glass I never saw before. “Honeycomb,” I tell Ma, stroking it.

“It’s a polycarbonate mesh,” she says, “unbreakable. I used to stand up here looking out a lot, before you were born.”

“The leaf’s all black with holes in it.”

“Yeah, I think it’s a dead one, from last winter.”

I can see blue around it, that’s the sky, with some white in it that Ma says are clouds. I stare through the honeycomb, I’m staring and staring but all I see is sky. There’s nothing in it like ships or trains or horses or girls or skyscrapers zooming by.

When I climb back down off Trash and my chair I shove Ma’s arm away.

“Jack—”

I jump onto Floor all on my own. “Liar, liar, pants on fire, there’s no Outside.”

She starts explaining more but I put my fingers in my ears and shout, “Blah blah blah blah blah.”