Room: A Novel

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 tummy.”

“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—”