• • •
What wakes me up is a noise over and over. Ma’s not in Bed. There’s a bit of light, the air’s still icy. I look over the edge, she’s in the middle of Floor going thump thump thump with her hand. “What did Floor do?”
Ma stops, she puffs out a long breath. “I need to hit something,” she says, “but I don’t want to break anything.”
“Why not?”
“Actually, I’d love to break something. I’d love to break everything.”
I don’t like her like this. “What’s for breakfast?”
Ma stares at me. Then she stands up and goes over to Cabinet and gets out a bagel, I think it’s the last one.
She only has a quarter of it, she’s not very hungry.
When we let our breaths out they’re foggy. “That’s because it’s colder today,” says Ma.
“You said it wouldn’t get any colder.”
“Sorry, I was wrong.”
I finish the bagel. “Do I still have a Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Paul?”
“Yeah,” says Ma, she smiles a bit.
“Are they in Heaven?”
“No, no.” She twists her mouth. “I don’t think so, anyway. Paul’s only three years older than me, he’s—wow, he must be twenty-nine.”
“Actually they’re here,” I whisper. “Hiding.”
Ma looks around. “Where?”
“In Under Bed.”
“Oh, that must be a tight squeeze. There’s three of them, and they’re pretty big.”
“As big as hippopotami?”
“Not that big.”
“Maybe they’re . . . in Wardrobe.”
“With my dresses?”
“Yeah. When we hear a clatter that’s them knocking down the hangers.”
Ma’s face is flat.
“I’m only kidding,” I tell her.
She nods.
“Can they come here sometime for real?”
“I wish they could,” she says. “I pray for it so hard, every night.”
“I don’t hear you.”
“Just in my head,” says Ma.
I didn’t know she prays things in her head where I can’t hear.
“They’re wishing it too,” she says, “but they don’t know where I am.”
“You’re in Room with me.”
“But they don’t know where it is, and they don’t know about you at all.”
That’s weird. “They could look on Dora’s Map, and when they come I could pop out at them for a surprise.”
Ma nearly laughs but not quite. “Room’s not on any map.”
“We could tell them on a telephone, Bob the Builder has one.”
“But we don’t.”
“We could ask for one for Sundaytreat.” I remember. “If Old Nick stops being mad.”
“Jack. He’d never give us a phone, or a window.” Ma takes my thumbs and squeezes them. “We’re like people in a book, and he won’t let anybody else read it.”
For Phys Ed we run on Track. It’s hard moving Table and the chairs with hands that feel not here. I run ten there-and-backs but I’m still not warmed up, my toes are stumbly. We do Trampoline and Karate, Hi-yah, then I choose Beanstalk again. Ma says OK if I promise not to freak out when I can’t see anything. I climb up Table onto my chair onto Trash and I don’t even wobble. I hold on to the edges where Roof slants into Skylight, I stare hard through the honeycomb at the blue so it makes me blink. After a while Ma says she wants to get down and make lunch.
“No vegetables, please, my tummy can’t manage them.”
“We have to use them up before they rot.”
“We could have pasta.”
“We’re nearly out.”
“Then rice. What if—?” Then I forget to talk because I see it through the honeycomb, the thing so small I think it’s just one of those floaters in my eye, but it’s not. It’s a little line making a thick white streak on the sky. “Ma—”
“What?”
“An airplane!”
“Really?”
“Really real for real. Oh—”
Then I’m falling on Ma then on Rug, Trash is banging on us and my chair too. Ma’s saying ow ow ow and rubbing her wrist. “Sorry, sorry,” I say, I’m kissing it better. “I saw it, it was a real airplane only tiny.”
“That’s just because it’s far away,” she says all smiling. “I bet if you saw it up close it would actually be huge.”
“The most amazing thing, it was writing a letter I on the sky.”
“That’s called a . . .” She slaps her head. “Can’t remember. It’s a sort of streak, it’s the smoke of the plane or something.”
For lunch we have all the seven rest of the crackers with the gloopy cheese, we hold our breaths not to taste it.
Ma gives me some under Duvet. There’s shine from God’s yellow face but not enough for sunbathing. I can’t switch off. I stare up at Skylight so hard my eyes get itchy but I don’t see any more airplanes. I really did see that one though when I was up Beanstalk, it wasn’t a dream. I saw it flying in Outside, so there really is Outside where Ma was a little girl.
We get up and play Cat’s Cradle and Dominoes and Submarine and Puppets and lots of other things but only a little while each. We do Hum, the songs are too easy to guess. We go back in Bed to warm up.
“Let’s go in Outside tomorrow,” I say.
“Oh, Jack.”
I’m lying on Ma’s arm that’s all thick in two sweaters. “I like how it smells there.”
She moves her head to stare at me.
“When Door opens after nine and the air whooshes in that’s not like our air.”
“You noticed,” she says.
“I notice all the things.”
“Yeah, it’s fresher. In the summer, it smells of cut grass, because we’re in his backyard. Sometimes I get a glimpse of shrubs and hedges.”
“Whose backyard?”
“Old Nick’s. Room is made out of his shed, remember?”
It’s hard to remember all the bits, none of them sound very true.
“He’s the only one who knows the code numbers to tap into the outside keypad.”
I stare at Keypad, I didn’t know there was another. “I tap numbers.”
“Yeah, but not the secret ones that open the door—like an invisible key,” says Ma. “Then when he’s going back to the house he taps in the code again, on this one”—she points at Keypad.
“The house with the hammock?”
“No.” Ma’s voice is loud. “Old Nick lives in a different one.”
“Can we go to his one someday?”
She presses her mouth with her hand. “I’d rather go to your grandma and grandpa’s house.”
“We could swing in the hammock.”
“We could do what we liked, we’d be free.”
“When I’m six?”
“Definitely someday.”
There’s wet running down Ma’s face onto mine. I jump, it’s salty.
“I’m OK,” she says, rubbing her cheek, “it’s OK. I’m just—I’m a bit scared.”
“You can’t be scared.” I’m nearly shouting. “Bad idea.”
“Just a little bit. We’re OK, we’ve got the basics.”
Now I’m even scareder. “But what if Old Nick doesn’t uncut the power and he doesn’t bring more food, not ever ever ever?”
“He will,” she says, she’s still breathing gulpy. “I’m nearly a hundred percent sure he will.”
Nearly a hundred, that’s ninety-nine. Is ninety-nine enough?
Ma sits up, she scrubs her face with the arm of her sweater.
My tummy rumbles, I wonder what we’ve got left. It’s getting dark again already. I don’t think the light is winning.
“Listen, Jack, I need to tell you another story.”
“A true one?”
“Totally true. You know how I used to be all sad?”
I like this one. “Then I came down from Heaven and grew in your tum
my.”
“Yeah, but see, why I was sad—it was because of Room,” says Ma. “Old Nick—I didn’t even know him, I was nineteen. He stole me.”
I’m trying to understand. Swiper no swiping. But I never heard of swiping people.
Ma’s holding me too tight. “I was a student. It was early in the morning, I was crossing a parking lot to get to the college library, listening to—it’s a tiny machine that holds a thousand songs and plays them in your ear, I was the first of my friends to get one.”
I wish I had that machine.
“Anyway—this man ran up asking for help, his dog was having a fit and he thought it might be dying.”
“What’s he called?”
“The man?”
I shake my head. “The dog.”
“No, the dog was just a trick to get me into his pickup truck, Old Nick’s truck.”
“What color is it?”
“The truck? Brown, he’s still got the same one, he’s always griping about it.”
“How many wheels?”
“I need you to concentrate on what matters,” says Ma.
I nod. Her hands are too tight, I loosen them.
“He put a blindfold on me—”
“Like Blindman’s Buff?”
“Yeah, but not fun. He drove and drove, I was terrified.”
“Where was I?”
“You hadn’t happened yet, remember?”
I forgot. “Was the dog in the truck too?”
“There was no dog.” Ma’s sounding cranky again. “You have to let me tell this story.”
“Can I pick another?”
“It’s what happened.”
“Can I have Jack the Giant Killer?”
“Listen,” says Ma, putting her hand over my mouth. “He made me take some bad medicine so I’d fall asleep. Then when I woke up I was here.”
It’s nearly black and I can’t see Ma’s face at all now, it’s turned away so I can only hear.
“The first time he opened the door I screamed for help and he knocked me down, I never tried that again.”
My tummy’s all knotted.
“I used to be scared to go to sleep, in case he came back,” says Ma, “but when I was asleep was the only time I wasn’t crying, so I slept about sixteen hours a day.”
“Did you make a pool?”
“What?”
“Alice cries a pool because she can’t remember all her poems and numbers, then she’s drowning.”
“No,” says Ma, “but my head ached all the time, my eyes were scratchy. The smell of the cork tiles made me sick.”
What smell?
“I drove myself crazy looking at my watch and counting the seconds. Things spooked me, they seemed to get bigger or smaller while I was watching them, but if I looked away they started sliding. When he finally brought the TV, I left it on twenty-four/seven, stupid stuff, commercials for food I remembered, my mouth hurt wanting it all. Sometimes I heard voices from the TV telling me things.”
“Like Dora?”
She shakes her head. “When he was at work I tried to get out, I tried everything. I stood on tiptoe on the table for days scraping around the skylight, I broke all my nails. I threw everything I could think of at it but the mesh is so strong, I never even managed to crack the glass.”
Skylight’s just a square of not quite so dark. “What everything?”
“The big saucepan, chairs, the trash can . . .”
Wow, I wish I saw her throw Trash.
“And another time I dug a hole.”
I’m confused. “Where?”
“You can feel it, would you like that? We’ll have to wriggle . . .” Ma throws Duvet back and pulls Box out from Under Bed, she makes a little grunt going in. I slide in beside her, we’re near Eggsnake but not to squish him. “I got the idea from The Great Escape.” Her voice is all boomy beside my head.
I remember that story about the Nazi camp, not a summer one with marshmallows but in winter with millions of persons drinking maggot soup. The Allies burst open the gates and everybody ran out, I think Allies are angels like Saint Peter’s one.
“Give me your fingers . . .” Ma pulls on them. I feel the cork of Floor. “Just here.” Suddenly there’s a bit that’s down with rough edges. My chest’s going boom boom, I never knowed there was a hole. “Careful, don’t cut yourself. I made it with the zigzag knife,” she says. “I pried up the cork, but the wood took me a while. Then the lead foil and the foam were easy enough, but you know what I found then?”
“Wonderland?”
Ma makes a mad sound so loud I bang my head on Bed.
“Sorry.”
“What I found was a chain-link fence.”
“Where?”
“Right there in the hole.”
A fence in a hole? I put my hand down and downer.
“Something metal, are you there?”
“Yeah.” Cold, all smooth, I grab it in my fingers.
“When he was turning the shed into Room,” says Ma, “he hid a layer of fence under the floor joists, and in all the walls and even the roof, so I could never ever cut through.”
We’ve wriggled out now. We’re sitting with our backs against Bed. I’m all out of breath.
“When he found the hole,” says Ma, “he howled.”
“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.
Dying
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.