Room_ A Novel - Emma Donoghue [35]
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