“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.