Emma Donoghue: Room: A Novel

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 Steppa, he starts running at the sea.

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 Digger s 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.