Emma Donoghue - Room - A Novel

When she’s gone I sit up and count my things in my Dora bag, my clothes and shoes and maple key and train and drawing square and rattle and glittery heart and crocodile and rock and monkeys and car and six books, the sixth is Dylan the Digger from the store.

Lots of hours later the waah waah means the phone. Grandma comes up. “That was Dr. Clay, your ma is stable. That sounds good, doesn’t it?” It sounds like horses.

“Also, there’s blueberry pancakes for breakfast.”

I lie very still like I’m a skeleton. The duvet smells dusty.

Ding-dong ding-dong and she goes downstairs again.

Voices under me. I count my toes then my fingers then my teeth all over again. I get the right numbers every time but I’m not sure.

Grandma comes up again out of breath to say that my Grandpa’s here to say good-bye.

“Tome?”

“To all of us, he’s flying back to Australia. Get up now, Jack, it won’t do you any good to wallow.” I don’t know what that is. “He wants me not born.”

“He wants what?”

“He said I shouldn’t be and then Ma wouldn’t have to be Ma.”

Grandma doesn’t say anything so I think she’s gone downstairs. I take my face out to see. She’s still here with her arms wrapped around her tight. “Never you mind that a-hole.”

“What’s a—? ”

“Just come on down and have a pancake.”

“I can’t.”

“Look at you,” says Grandma.

How do I do that?

“You’re breathing and walking and talking and sleeping without your Ma, aren’t you? So I bet you can eat without her too.” I keep Tooth in my cheek for safe. I take a long time on the stairs.

In the kitchen, Grandpa the real one has purple on his mouth. His pancake is all in a puddle of syrup with more purples, they’re blueberries.

The plates are normal white but the glasses are wrong-shaped with corners. There’s a big bowl of sausages. I didn’t know I was hungry. I eat one sausage then two more.

Grandma says she doesn’t have the juice that’s pulp-free but I have to drink something or I’ll choke on my sausages. I drink the pulpy with the germs wiggling down my throat. The refrigerator is huge all full of boxes and bottles. The cabinets have so many foods in, Grandma has to go up steps to look in them all.

She says I should have a shower now but I pretend I don’t hear.

“What’s stable?” I ask Grandpa.

“Stable?” A tear comes out of his eye and he wipes it. “No better, no worse, I guess.” He puts his knife and his fork together on his plate.

No better no worse than what?

Tooth tastes all sour of juice. I go back upstairs to sleep.

“Sweetie,” says Grandma. “You are not spending another entire day in front of the goggle box.” “Huh?”

She switches off the TV. “Dr. Clay was just on the phone about your developmental needs, I had to tell him we were playing Checkers.” I blink and rub my eyes. Why she told him a lie? “Is Ma—?”

“She’s still stable, he says. Would you like to play checkers for real?”

“Your bits are for giants and they fall off.”

She sighs. “I keep telling you, they’re regular ones, and the same with the chess and the cards. The mini magnetic set you and your Ma had was for traveling.” But we didn’t travel.

“Let’s go to the playground.”

I shake my head. Ma said when we were free we’d go together.

“You’ve been outside before, lots of times.”

“That was at the Clinic.”

“It’s the same air, isn’t it? Come on, your ma told me you like climbing.”

“Yeah, I climb on Table and on our chairs and on Bed thousands of times.”

“Not on my table, mister.”

I meant in Room.

Grandma does my ponytail very tight and tucks it down my jacket, I pull it out again. She doesn’t say anything about the sticky stuff and my hat, maybe skin doesn’t get burned in this bit of the world? “Put on your sunglasses, oh, and your proper shoes, those slipper things don’t have any support.” My feet are squished walking even when I loose the Velcro. We’re safe as long as we stay on the sidewalk but if we go on the street by accident we’ll die. Ma isn’t dead, Grandma says she wouldn’t lie to me. She lied to Dr. Clay about Checkers. The sidewalk keeps stopping so we have to cross the street, we’ll be fine as long as we hold hands. I don’t like touching but Grandma says too bad. The air is all blowy in my eyes and the sun so dazzling around the edges of my shades. There’s a pink thing that’s a hair elastic and a bottle top and a wheel not from a real car but a toy one and a bag of nuts but the nuts are gone and a juice box that I can hear still some juice sploshing in and a yellow poo. Grandma says it’s not from a human but from some disgusting dog, she tugs at my jacket and says, “Come away from that.” The litter shouldn’t be there, except for the leaves that the tree can’t help dropping. In France they let their dogs do their business everywhere, I can go there someday.

“To see the poo?”

“No, no,” says Grandma, “the Eiffel Tower. Someday when you’re really good at climbing stairs.”

“Is France in Outside?”

She looks at me strange.

“In the world?”

“Everywhere’s in the world. Here we are!”

I can’t go in the playground because there’s kids not friends of mine.

Grandma rolls her eyes. “You just play at the same time, that’s what kids do.”

I can see through the fence in the diamonds of wire. It’s like the secret fence in the walls and Floor that Ma couldn’t dig through, but we got out, I saved her, only then she didn’t want to be alive anymore. There’s a big girl hanging upside down off a swing. Two boys on the thing I don’t remember the name that does up and down, they’re banging it and laughing and falling off I think on purpose. I count my teeth to twenty and one more time. Holding the fence makes white stripes on my fingers. I watch a woman carry a baby to the climber and it crawls through the tunnel, she does faces at it through the holes in the sides and pretends she doesn’t know where it is. I watch the big girl but she only swings, sometimes with her hair nearly in the mud, sometimes right side up. The boys chase and do bang with their hands like guns, one falls down and cries. He runs out the gate and into a house, Grandma says he must live there, how does she know? She whispers, “Why don’t you go play with the other boy now?” Then she calls out, “Hi there.” The boy looks over at us, I go into a bush, it pricks me in the head.

After a while she says it’s chillier than it looks and maybe we should be getting home for lunch.

It takes hundreds of hours and my legs are breaking.

“Maybe you’ll enjoy it more next time,” says Grandma.

“It was interesting.”

“Is that what your ma says to say when you don’t like something?” She smiles a bit. “I taught her that.” “Is she dying by now?”

“No.” She nearly shouts. “Leo would have called if there was any news.”

Leo is Steppa, it’s confusing all the names. I only want my one name Jack.

At Grandma’s house, she shows me France on the globe that’s like a statue of the world and always spinning. This whole entire city we’re in is just a dot and the Clinic’s in the dot too. So is Room but Grandma says I don’t need to think about that place anymore, put it out of my mind.

For lunch I have lots of bread and butter, it’s French bread but there’s no poo on it I don’t think. My nose is red and hot, also my cheeks and my top bit of my chest and my arms and the back of my hands and my ankles above my socks.

Steppa tells Grandma not to upset herself.