Emma Donoghue - Room - A Novel

“You opened them,” says Ma, looking in the envelopes.

“Believe me, you need this stuff filtered. F-E-C-E-S, and that’s just for starters.”

“Why somebody sent us poo?” I ask Ma.

Morris is staring.

“He’s a good speller,” she tells him.

“Ah, you asked why, Jack? Because there’s a lot of crazies out there.”

I thought the crazies were in here in the Clinic getting helped.

“But most of what you’re receiving is from well-wishers,” he says. “Chocolates, toys, that kind of thing.”

Chocolates!

“I thought I’d bring you the flowers first as they’re giving my PA a migraine.” He’s lifting up lots of flowers in plastic invisible, that’s what the smell.

“What toys are the toys?” I whisper.

“Look, here’s one,” says Ma, pulling it out of an envelope. It’s a little wooden train. “Don’t snatch.”

“Sorry.” I choo-choo it all along the table down the leg and over the floor up the wall that’s blue in this room.

“Intense interest from a number of networks,” Morris is saying, “you might consider doing a book, down the road . . .” Ma’s mouth isn’t friendly. “You think we should sell ourselves before somebody else does.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that. I’d imagine you’ve a lot to teach the world. The whole living-on-less thing, it couldn’t be more zeitgeisty.” Ma bursts out laughing.

Morris puts his hands up flat. “But it’s up to you, obviously. One day at a time.”

She’s reading some of the letters. “ ‘Little Jack, you wonderful boy, enjoy every moment because you deserve it because you have been quite literally to Hell and back!’ ”

“Who said that?” I ask.

She turns the page over. “We don’t know her.”

“Why she said I was wonderful?”

“She’s just heard about you on the TV.”

I’m looking in the envelopes that are fattest for more trains.

“Here, these look good,” says Ma, holding up a little box of chocolates.

“There’s more.” I’ve finded a really big box.

“Nah, that’s too many, they’d make us sick.”

I’m sick already with my cold so I wouldn’t mind.

“We’ll give those to someone,” says Ma.

“Who?”

“The nurses, maybe.”

“Toys and so forth, I can pass on to a kids hospital,” says Morris.

“Great idea. Choose some you want to keep,” Ma tells me.

“How many?”

“As many as you like.” She’s reading another letter. “ ‘God bless you and your sweet saint of a son, I pray you discover all the beautiful things this world has to offer all your dreams come true and your path in life is paved with happiness and gold.’ ” She puts it on the table. “How am I going to find the time to answer all these?”

Morris shakes his head. “That bast — the accused, shall we say, he robbed you of the seven best years of your life already. Personally, I wouldn’t waste a second more.” “How do you know they would have been the best years of my life?”

He shrugs. “I just mean — you were nineteen, right?”

There’s super cool stuff, a car with wheels that go zzzzzzhhhhhmmm, a whistle shaped like a pig, I blow it.

“Wow! That’s loud,” says Morris.

“Too loud,” says Ma.

I do it one more time.

“Jack—”

I put it down. I find a velvety crocodile as long as my leg, a rattle with a bell in it, a clown face when I press the nose it says ha ha ha ha ha .

“Not that either, it gives me the creeps,” says Ma.

I whisper bye-bye to the clown and put it back in its envelope. There’s a square with a sort of pen tied to it that I can draw on but it’s hard plastic, not paper, and a box of monkeys with curly arms and tails to make into chains of monkeys. There’s a fire truck, and a teddy bear with a cap on that doesn’t come off even when I pull hard. On the label a picture of a baby face has a line through it and 0–3, maybe that means it kills babies in three seconds?

“Oh, come on, Jack,” says Ma. “You don’t need that many.”

“How many do I need?”

“I don’t know—”

“If you could sign here, there, and there,” Morris tells her.

I’m chewing my finger in under my mask. Ma doesn’t tell me not to do that anymore. “How many do I need?”

She looks up from the papers she’s writing. “Choose, ah, choose five.”

I count, the car and the monkeys and the writing square and the wooden train and the rattle and the crocodile, that’s six not five, but Ma and Morris are talking and talking. I find a big empty envelope and I put all the six in.

“OK,” says Ma, throwing all the rest of the parcels back into the huge bag.

“Wait,” I say, “I can write on the bag, I can put Presents from Jack for the Sick Kids .”

“Let Morris handle it.”

“But—”

Ma puffs her breath. “We’ve got a lot to do, and we have to let people do some of it for us or my head’s going to explode.” Why her head’s going to explode if I write on the bag?

I take out the train again, I put it up my shirt, it’s my baby and it pops out and I kiss it all over.

“January, maybe, October’s the very earliest it could come to trial,” Morris is saying.

There’s a trial of tarts, Bill the Lizard has to write with his finger, when Alice knocks over the jury box she puts him back head down by accident, ha ha.

“No but, how long will he be in jail?” asks Ma.

She means him, Old Nick.

“Well, the DA tells me she’s hoping for twenty-five to life, and for federal offenses there’s no parole,” says Morris. “We’ve got kidnapping for sexual purposes, false imprisonment, multiple counts of rape, criminal battery . . .” He’s counting on his fingers not in his head.

Ma’s nodding. “What about the baby?”

“Jack?”

“The first one. Doesn’t that count as some kind of murder?”

I never heard this story.

Morris twists his mouth. “Not if it wasn’t born alive.”

“She.”

I don’t know who the she is.

“ She, I beg your pardon,” he says. “The best we could hope for is criminal negligence, maybe even recklessness . . .” They try to ban Alice from court for being more than a mile high. There’s a poem that’s confusing,

If I or she should chance to be

Involved in this affair,

He trusts to you to set them free

Exactly as we were.

Noreen’s there without me seeing, she asks if we’d like dinner by ourselves or in the dining room.

I carry all my toys in the big envelope. Ma doesn’t know there’s six not five. Some persons wave when we come in so I wave back, like the girl with the no hair and tattoos all her neck. I don’t mind persons very much if they don’t touch me.

The woman with the apron says she heard I went outside, I don’t know how she heard me. “Did you love it?”

“No,” I say. “I mean, no, thanks.”

I’m learning lots more manners. When something tastes yucky we say it’s interesting, like wild rice that bites like it hasn’t been cooked. When I blow my nose I fold the tissue so nobody sees the snot, it’s a secret. If I want Ma to listen to me not some person else I say, “Excuse me,” sometimes I say, “Excuse me, Excuse me,” for ages, then when she asks what is it I don’t remember anymore.

When we’re in pajamas with masks off having some on the bed, I remember and ask, “Who’s the first baby?”

Ma looks down at me.

“You told Morris there was a she that did a murder.”

She shakes her head. “I meant she got murdered, kind of.” Her face is away from me.

“Was it me that did it?”