Free Room by Emma Donoghue Page A

always thirsty, they have beer and juice and champagne and lattes and all sorts of liquids, sometimes they click their glasses on each other’s glasses when
they’re happy but they don’t break them. I read the line again, it’s still confusing. “Who’s the he and the I, are they the kids?”
    “Hmm,” says Ma, reading over my shoulder, “I think the kids means kids in general.”
    “What’s in general ?”
    “Lots of kids.”
    I try and see them, the lots, all playing together. “Actual human ones?”
    Ma doesn’t say anything for a minute, and then, “Yeah,” very quiet. So it was true, everything she said.
    The marks are still there on her neck, I wonder if they’ll ever go away.
    •   •   •
    In the night she’s flashing, it wakes me in Bed. Lamp on, I count five. Lamp off, I count one. Lamp on, I count two. Lamp off, I count two. I do a groan.
    “Just a bit more.” She’s still staring up at Skylight that’s all black.
    There’s no trash bag beside Door, that means he must have been here when I was asleep. “Please, Ma.”
    “In a minute.”
    “It hurts my eyes.”
    She leans over Bed and kisses me beside my mouth, she puts Duvet over my face. The light’s still flashing but darker.
    After a while she comes back into Bed and gives me some for getting back to sleep.
    •   •   •
    On Saturday Ma makes me three braids for a change, they feel funny. I wave my face to whack myself with them.
    I don’t watch the cartoon planet this morning, I choose a bit of a gardening and a fitness and a news, and everything I see I say, “Ma, is that real?” and she says yeah, except
one bit about a movie with werewolves and a woman bursting like a balloon is just special effects, that’s drawing on computers.
    Lunch is a can of chickpea curry and rice as well.
    I’d like to do an extra big Scream but we can’t on weekends.
    Most of the afternoon we play Cat’s Cradle, we can do the Candles and the Diamonds and the Manger and the Knitting Needles and we keep practicing the Scorpion except Ma’s fingers
always end up stuck.
    Dinner is mini pizzas, one each plus one to share. Then we watch a planet where persons are wearing lots of frilly clothes and huge white hair. Ma says they’re real but they’re
pretending to be people who died hundreds of years ago. It’s a sort of game but it doesn’t sound much fun.
    She switches the TV off and sniffs. “I can still smell that curry from lunch.”
    “Me too.”
    “It tasted good but it’s nasty the way it lingers.”
    “Mine tasted nasty too,” I tell her.
    She laughs. The marks on her neck are getting less, they’re greenish and yellowish.
    “Can I have a story?”
    “Which one?”
    “One you never told me before.”
    Ma smiles at me. “I think at this point you know everything I know. The Count of Monte Cristo ?”
    “I’ve heard that millions of times.”
    “ GulliJack in Lilliput ?”
    “Zillions.”
    “ Nelson on Robben Island ?”
    “Then he got out after twenty-seven years and became the government.”
    “ Goldilocks ?”
    “Too scary.”
    “The bears only growl at her,” says Ma.
    “Still.”
    “ Princess Diana ?”
    “Should have worn her seat belt.”
    “See, you know them all.” Ma puffs her breath. “Hang on, there’s one about a mermaid . . .”
    “The Little Mermaid.”
    “No, a different one. This mermaid is sitting on the rocks one evening, combing her hair, when a fisherman creeps up and catches her in his net.”
    “To fry her for his dinner?”
    “No, no, he brings her home to his cottage and she has to marry him,” says Ma. “He takes away her magic comb so she can’t ever go back into the sea. So after a while the
mermaid has a baby—”
    “—called JackerJack,” I tell her.
    “That’s right. But whenever the fisherman’s out fishing she looks around the cottage, and one day she finds where he’s hidden her comb—”
    “Ha ha.”
    “And she runs away to the rocks, and