Emma Donoghue - Room - A Novel

“Like a wolf?”

“No, laughing. I was afraid he’d hurt me but that time, he thought it was just hilarious.”

My teeth are hard together.

“He laughed more back then,” says Ma.

Old Nick’s a stinking swiping zombie robber. “We could have a mutiny at him,” I tell her. “I’ll smash him all to bits with my jumbo megatron transformerblaster.”

She puts a kiss on the side of my eye. “Hurting him doesn’t work. I tried that once, when I’d been here about a year and a half.” That is the most amazing. “You hurted Old Nick?”

“What I did was, I took the lid off the toilet, and I had the smooth knife as well, and just before nine one evening, I stood against the wall beside the door—” I’m confused. “Toilet doesn’t have a lid.”

“There used to be one, on top of the tank. It was the heaviest thing in Room.”

“Bed’s super heavy.”

“But I couldn’t pick the bed up, could I?” asks Ma. “So when I heard him comingin—”

“The beep beep. ”

“Exactly. I smashed the toilet lid down on his head.”

I’ve got my thumb in my mouth and I’m biting and biting.

“But I didn’t do it hard enough, the lid fell on the floor and broke in two, and he — Old Nick — he managed to shove the door shut.” I taste something weird.

Ma’s voice is all gulpy. “I knew my only chance was to make him give me the code. So I pressed the knife against his throat, like this.” She puts her fingernail under my chin, I don’t like it. “I said, ‘Tell me the code.’ ”

“Did he?”

She puffs her breath. “He said some numbers, and I went to tap them in.”

“Which numbers?”

“I don’t think they were the real ones. He jumped up and twisted my wrist and got the knife.”

“Your bad wrist?”

“Well, it wasn’t bad before that. Don’t cry,” Ma says into my hair, “that was a long time ago.”

I try to talk but it doesn’t come out.

“So, Jack, we mustn’t try and hurt him again. When he came back the next night, he said, number one, nothing would ever make him tell me the code. And number two, if I ever tried a stunt like that again, he’d go away and I’d get hungrier and hungrier till I died.”

She’s stopped I think.

My tummy creaks really loud and I figure it out, why Ma’s telling me the terrible story. She’s telling me that we’re going — Then I’m blinking and covering my eyes, everything’s all dazzling because Lamp’s come back on.

It’s all warm. Ma’s up already. On Table there’s a new box of cereal and four bananas, yippee. Old Nick must have come in the night. I jump out of Bed. There’s macaroni too, and hot dogs and mandarins and — Ma’s not eating any of it, she’s standing at Dresser looking at Plant. There’s three leaves off. Ma touches Plant’s stalk and—“No!”

“She was dead already.”

“You broke her.”

Ma shakes her head. “Alive things bend, Jack. I think it was the cold, it made Plant go all stiff inside.” I’m trying to fit her stem back together. “She needs some tape.” I remember we don’t have any left, Ma put the last bit on Spaceship, stupid Ma. I run over to pull Box out from Under Bed, I find Spaceship and rip the bits of tape off.

Ma just watches.

I’m pressing the tape on Plant but it just slips off and she’s in pieces.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Make her be alive again,” I tell Ma.

“I would if I could.”

She waits till I stop crying, she wipes my eyes. I’m too hot now, I pull off my extra clothes.

“I guess we better put her in the trash,” says Ma.

“No,” I say, “down Toilet.”

“That could block the pipes.”

“We can break her up in tiny pieces . . .”

I kiss a few leaves of Plant and flush them, then another few and flush again, then the stalk in bits. “Good-bye, Plant,” I whisper. Maybe in the sea she’ll stick all back together again and grow up to Heaven.

The sea’s real, I’m just remembering. It’s all real in Outside, everything there is, because I saw the airplane in the blue between the clouds. Ma and me can’t go there because we don’t know the secret code, but it’s real all the same.

Before I didn’t even know to be mad that we can’t open Door, my head was too small to have Outside in it. When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I’m five I know everything.

We have a bath right after breakfast, the water’s all steamy, yum. We fill Bath so high it nearly makes a flood. Ma lies back and goes nearly asleep, I wake her up to wash her hair and she does mine. We do laundry too, but then there’s long hairs on the sheets so we have to pick them off, we have a race to see who gets more fasterer.

The cartoons are over already, kids are coloring eggs for the Runaway Bunny. I look at each different kid and I say in my head: You’re real .

“The Easter Bunny, not the Runaway Bunny,” says Ma. “Me and Paul used to — when we were kids, the Easter Bunny brought chocolate eggs in the night and hid them all around our backyard, under bushes and in holes in the trees, even in the hammock.”

“Did he take your teeth?” I ask.

“No, it was all for free.” Her face is flat.

I don’t think the Easter Bunny knows where Room is, anyway we don’t have bushes and trees, they’re outside Door.

This is a pretty happy day because of the heat and the food, but Ma’s not happy. Probably she misses Plant.

I choose Phys Ed, it’s Hiking, where we walk hand in hand on Track and call out what we can see. “Look, Ma, a waterfall.” After a minute I say, “Look, a wildebeest.”

“Wow.”

“Your turn.”

“Oh, look,” says Ma, “a snail.”

I bend down to see it. “Look, a giant bulldozer knocking down a skyscraper.”

“Look,” she says, “a flamingo flying by.”

“Look, a zombie all drooling.”

“Jack!” That makes her smile for half a second.

Then we march faster and sing “This Land Is Your Land.”

Then we put Rug down again and she’s our flying carpet, we zoom over the North Pole.

Ma picks Corpse, where we lie extra still, I forget and scratch my nose so she wins. Next I choose Trampoline but she says she doesn’t want to do any more Phys Ed.

“You just do the commentary and I do the boinging.”

“No, sorry, I’m going back to Bed for a bit.”

She’s not much fun today.

I pull Eggsnake out from Under Bed real slow, I think I can hear him hiss with his needle tongue, Greetingssssss . I stroke him especially his eggs that are cracked or dented. One crumbles off in my fingers, I go make glue with a pinch of flour and stick the pieces on a ruled paper for a jaggedy mountain. I want to show Ma but her eyes are closed.

I go in Wardrobe and play I’m a coal miner. I find a gold nugget under my pillow, he’s actually Tooth. He’s not alive and he didn’t bend, he broke, but we don’t have to put him down Toilet. He’s made of Ma, her dead spit.

I stick my head out and Ma’s eyes open. “What are you doing?” I ask her.

“Just thinking.”

I can think and do interesting stuff at the same time. Can’t she?

She gets up to make lunch, it’s a box of macaroni all orangey, delicioso .

Afterwards I play Icarus with his wings melting. Ma’s washing up real slow. I wait for her to be done so she can play but she doesn’t want to play, she sits in Rocker and just rocks.

“What are you doing?”

“Still thinking.” After a minute, she asks, “What’s in the pillowcase?”

“It’s my backpack.” I’ve tied two corners of it around my neck. “It’s for going in Outside when we get rescued.” I’ve put in Tooth and Jeep and Remote and an underwear for me and one for Ma and socks too and Scissors and the four apples for if we get hungry. “Is there water?” I ask her.