Emma Donoghue - Room - A Novel

After bath I play with the clothes. Ma’s pink skirt is a snake this morning, he’s having a quarrel with my white sock.

“I’m Jack’s best friend.”

“No, I’m Jack’s best friend.”

“I banged you.”

“I zapped you.”

“I’m going to pow you with my shooter flyer pump.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got a jumbo megatron transformerblaster—”

“Hey,” says Ma, “will we play Catch?”

“We don’t have Beach Ball anymore,” I remember her. He burst by accident when I kicked him against Cabinet super fast. I wanted to ask for another instead of stupid pants.

But Ma says we can make one, we scrunch up all the pages I’ve been practicing my writing on and fill a grocery bag and squeeze it till it’s kind of ball shape, then we draw a scary face on it with three eyes. Wordy Ball doesn’t go as high as Beach Ball did but every time we catch him he makes a loud scrunch. Ma’s the best at catching, only it pings her bad wrist sometimes, and I’m the best at throwing.

Because of cake for breakfast we have Sunday pancakes for lunch instead. There isn’t much mix left so they’re thin ones that spread out, I like that. I get to fold them up, some of them crack. There’s not much jelly, so we mix water in that too.

A corner of mine drips, Ma scrubs Floor with Sponge. “The cork’s wearing away,” she says with her teeth shut, “how are we supposed to keep it clean?”

“Where?”

“Here, where our feet rub.”

I get down under Table, there’s a hole in Floor with brown stuff underneath that’s harder on my nail.

“Don’t make it worse, Jack.”

“I’m not, I’m just looking with my finger.” It’s like a tiny crater.

We move Table over to beside Bath so we can sunbathe on Rug right under Skylight where it’s extra warm. I sing “Ain’t No Sunshine,” Ma does “Here Comes the Sun,” I pick “You Are My Sunshine.” Then I want some, the left is extra creamy this afternoon.

God’s yellow face makes red through my lids. When I open it’s too bright to look. My fingers do shadows on Rug, little squished ones.

Ma is snoozing.

I hear a sound so I get up not waking her. Over by Stove, a tiny scritchy scratchy sound.

An alive thing, an animal, for really real not TV. It’s on Floor, eating something, maybe a crumb of pancake. It’s got a tail, I think what it is is, what it is is a mouse.

I go nearer and whee it’s gone under Stove so I hardly saw it, I never knowed anything could go so fast. “O Mouse,” I say in a whisper so he won’t be scared. That’s how to talk to a mouse, it’s in Alice, only she talks about her cat Dinah by mistake and the mouse gets nervous and swims away. I put my hands praying now, “O Mouse, come on back, please, please, please . . .”

I wait for hours but he doesn’t come.

Ma’s definitely asleep.

I open Refrigerator, she doesn’t have much inside. Mice like cheese, but we haven’t any left. I get out the bread and crumble a bit on a plate and put it down where Mouse was. I crouch down small and wait for more hours and hours.

Then the wonderfulest thing, Mouse puts his mouth out, it’s pointy. I nearly jump in the air but I don’t, I stay extra still. He comes up to the crumbs and sniffs. I’m only about two feet away, I wish I had Ruler to measure but he’s tidied in Box in Under Bed and I don’t want to move and scare Mouse. I watch his hands, his whiskers, his tail all curly. He’s alive for real, he’s the biggest alive thing I ever saw, millions of times bigger than the ants or Spider.

Then something smashes into Stove, whaaaaaack. I scream and stand on the plate by accident, Mouse is gone, where’s he gone? Did the book break him? She’s Pop-Up Airport, I look in all her pages but he’s not there. The Baggage Claim is all ripped and won’t stand up anymore.

Ma’s got a weird face. “You made him gone,” I shout at her.

She’s got BrushPan, she’s sweeping up the broken bits of plate. “What was this doing on the floor? Now we’re down to two big plates and one small, that’s it —”

The cook in Alice throws plates at the baby and a saucepan that almost takes off his nose.

“Mouse was liking the crumbs.”

“Jack!”

“He was real, I saw him.”

She drags Stove out, there’s a little crack at the bottom of Door Wall, she gets the bundle of aluminum foil and starts pushing balls of it into the crack.

“Don’t. Please.”

“I’m sorry. But where there’s one there’s ten.”

That’s crazy math.

Ma puts down the foil and holds me hard by my shoulders. “If we let him stay, we’d soon be overrun with his babies. Stealing our food, bringing in germs on their filthy paws . . .”

“They could have my food, I’m not hungry.”

Ma’s not listening. She shoves Stove back to Door Wall.

After, we use a little bit of tape to make the Hangar page stand up better in Pop-Up Airport, but the Baggage Claim is too torn to fix.

We sit curled up in Rocker and Ma reads me Dylan the Digger three times, that means she’s sorry. “Let’s ask for a new book for Sundaytreat,” I say.

She twists her mouth. “I did, a few weeks ago; I wanted you to have one for your birthday. But he said to quit bugging him, don’t we have a whole shelf of them already.” I look up past her head at Shelf, she could fit hundreds more books if we put some of the other things in Under Bed beside Eggsnake. Or on top of Wardrobe . . . but that’s where Fort and Labyrinth live. It’s tricky figuring out where everything’s home is, Ma sometimes says we have to throw things in the trash but I usually find a spot for them.

“He thinks we should just watch TV all the time.”

That sounds fun.

“Then our brains would rot, like his,” says Ma. She leans over to pick up My Big Book of Nursery Rhymes . She reads me one I choose from every page. My bests are the Jack ones, like Jack Sprat or LittleJack Horner .

Jack be nimble,

Jack be quick,

Jack jump over the candlestick.

I think he wanted to see if he could not burn his nightshirt. In TV there’s pajamas instead, or nighties on girls. My sleep T-shirt is my biggest, it has a hole on the shoulder that I like to put my finger in it and tickle myself when I’m switching off. There’s Jackie Wackie pudding and pie, but when I figured out to read I saw it’s actually Georgie Porgie . Ma changed it to fit me, that’s not lying, it’s just pretending. Same with

Jack, Jack, the piper’s son,

Stole a pig and away he run.

It actually says Tom in the book but Jack sounds better. Stealing is when a boy takes what belongs to some boy else, because in books and TV all persons have things that belong just to them, it’s complicated.

It’s 05:39 so we can have dinner, it’s quick noodles. While they’re in the hot water, Ma finds hard words to test me from the milk carton like nutritional that means food, and pasteurized that means laser guns zapped away the germs. I want more cake but Ma says beets chopped all juicy first. Then I have cake that’s pretty crispy now and Ma does too, a little bit.

I get up on Rocker to find Games Box at the end of Shelf, tonight I pick Checkers and I’m going to be red. The pieces are like little chocolates, but I’ve licked them lots of times and they don’t taste like anything. They stick to the board by magnetic magic. Ma likes Chess best but it aches my head.

At TV time she chooses the wildlife planet, there’s turtles burying their eggs in sand. When Alice gets long with eating the mushroom, the pigeon’s mad because she thinks Alice is a nasty serpent trying to eat her pigeon eggs. Here come the turtle babies out of their shells, but the turtle mothers are gone already, that’s weird. I wonder if they meet sometime in the sea, the mothers and the babies, if they know each other or maybe they just swim on by.