Room 102

Japan is not where I thought it was on a map. Lucien said I would die today and I nearly went without ever knowing the exact location of Japan. It’s closer to Russia than it is to Australia and it’s shaped like a dragon rather than a roundish blob. I love sushi and Murakami, you’d think I’d have known better. I nearly wrote “Here be ninjas” over it, but I don’t have a pen.

I wonder where Japanese people think Scotland is on a map. Maybe they’re smarter than me. Maybe they know. Or maybe they think it’s right next to Germany and write things like “Here be kilts” in Japanese over us.

On the day of my death, these are the things I have: a map of the world and a watch. I’m not thinking about my family as much as one is supposed to in these situations. The ticking watch, on the other hand, is really pissing me off. It’s got diamonds on the face. Fancy. I throw it on the floorboards and it still doesn’t break so I grind into it with my heel. Tick tick tick. Damn it.

I suppose I should think about love. That’s the thing to do. Love you’ve had, love you’ve lost, love you’ll miss. But I went through my whole life not knowing where Japan is. Love has never taken me by surprise; my abominable geography has shocked the proverbial socks off me. Maybe I would have loved a Japanese man. Maybe he would have surprised me. I have not been surprised by myself often enough. My tears are for that fact alone.

If my body was a map of the world, I would know every location. Here, on the Finland of my left thigh, there would be no cause for astonishment. The Canada of my left earlobe would be exactly where I always pictured it. My breasts are as familiar to me as the Italian tongue is to the Sicilians. They have even tasted Italian tongue. It was pleasant, but no real revelation. They responded exactly as I expected them to. The Nicaragua of my big toe was broken once. It’s fine now. That’s what happens when you walk into walls.

My brain is Belgium. Maybe not as the Belgians see it, but it’s Belgium to me. My cerebellum makes nice chocolate and people come to taste it from time to time, but there are other places they’d prefer to visit. Truffles. Praline truffles. I wish it had made a nougat or a fondant. Even a coffee cream, just once. But it makes praline truffles of thoughts that plop onto little silver trays and people sometimes like them, tell their friends good things, then go to brains that are more like Outer Mongolia or someplace that ends in a –stan and taste thoughts that would never even dream of being praline truffles.

The click of the safety being released shatters the air. Lucien wasn’t lying: I will die and it will be now. I grasp at the map, my tears overriding my ability for cohesive speech. I don’t know if he understands what I’m saying. Or if he cares.

But I’m begging to look at the map once more, to find something I didn’t know was there. I’m pleading for a chance to surprise myself just once more before I die. It is my final thought.

Does the size of the aubergine really matter? None is so different from another as to be noticeable and it’s not like she wants it for a specific recipe. But still she examines each one under the synthetic light as though she’s judging a contest. I want to go home.

The skin of the aubergine is smooth and unblemished; inside lies a tougher flesh, one that does not yield easily and will offer only bitterness unless care is taken in preparation. She is the antithesis of it.

When they first sent me to her, she gave me money. She seemed to think community service was something people volunteered for and their generosity should be rewarded. When her lip quivered, I stopped trying to explain and took the cash. I bought a packet of chewing gum with it.

On my first visit, she showed me thick albums of photos that were cracked with age and I forgot who was in them when she turned the page. On my second visit she told me the stories behind each dusty ornament in the glass cabinet that dominated the living room. My third visit brought the mutual realisation that our time together needed a focus. It was that or feign interest in each other’s lives until smiles became snipes.

Cleaning was out – she had someone who did that for her while she napped. I can’t cook and she didn’t seem to want me to, so there was no sense in trying that. No garden to speak of either.

Care and interest can be mutually exclusive. I had never seen such a delicate creature until I met her. Her sweetness seemed less to do with age than a naiveté imbued in her DNA. There had been a husband once. I tried to imagine her having sex, but in my mind, it snapped her. Perhaps if she had been born in another, later era, she would have found a woman’s touch preferable, softer. Perhaps she had. I wasn’t going to ask her. The past holds no more interest for me than the future does for her. The present wasn’t something either of us had much to say about. Hovering death smells like urine and boiled potatoes.

I wish I wanted to hear her stories. I wish I could give her that. She won’t be hearing mine – the purity of her shouldn’t be sullied with my tales.

So, we had a stalemate until visit number six when she mentioned the supermarket had stopped doing home deliveries. Perfect, for both of us.

When I arrived for visit number seven, she greeted me at the door wearing a hat, gloves and coral lipstick that hadn’t quite stayed on her lips. We bought milk that day, and butter. She studied every carton of milk on the shelves before settling on just one and my visit took nearly an hour longer than it was supposed to.

Visit eight took us to the canned good aisle to pick up two tins of sweetcorn and some sardines in brine. She’s very selective about her sardines. I was late for my meeting with the probation officer after that one.


And here we are, visit number nineteen: aubergines. We’ve been standing in the vegetable aisle for over an hour. Everything looks too waxy, as if the shelved items are showroom cars instead of vegetables.

Finally, she selects the aubergine she wants and pops it in the basket.

“Ready to go to the till?” I ask.

“Yes, dear. Oh, look – a two headed mushroom! I bet your Billy would get a kick out of that.”

“Billy? How do you…”

“The day we bought the cereal, dear. You told me all about him.”

I had, now she came to mention it. Funny, I hadn’t realised it at the time. We pay for the single aubergine and I take her arm as we return to the car.

When we get to her house, I go through the ritual: place the aubergine in the crisper section of her fridge after removing the mouldy vegetables that have been gathering all week; not a single one of them with so much as a bite out of it.

Think Tom Waits’ voice after a night of sex and booze. Think the corner of Hieronymus Bosch’s brain that even he didn’t know was there. You wouldn’t really be close, but it’s something to work with.

I thought the cat would talk first. He seemed the type. But no, he laid dead mice at my feet like I was his disgusting queen and never uttered a word. The cactus did the talking instead.

There’s nothing wrong with me, you understand. Not the kind of wrong that needs to be whispered about behind my back, sympathetic overtones masking relief that it’s not you, fear that one day it could be. I pay my bills on time and button my coat up correctly. Folly finds me no more or less than it finds everyone else. My parents are neither happy nor sad enough to give me cause for issues beyond the usual childhood wishes of finding out I was secretly adopted and my real family are royalty from a country whose name I can’t pronounce.

The cactus just started talking.

Cacti are members of the Cactaceae family. The flowers are bisexual and, in this particular cactus, only bloom at night. I’d like to say that’s why I bought it – so that when the moon was ripe for milking I could watch flowers bloom in the half-light and be in wonder. But I bought it because I pricked my finger on it and taking home something that had made me bleed by virtue of sitting there doing nothing seemed like the thing to do.

For seven whole months, it didn’t say a word. The cat got a face full of spines in the first week after a failed attempt at domination and refused to look at it again. The seasons happened, as they do, and when spring came around, hitching a ride on winter’s coattails and thickening blades of green, the cactus told me I had nice hair. I said thank you. Manners are a reflex conducive to sanity. If you ever find your houseplant complimenting your hair, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Upon asking the cactus how life was treating it, I discovered that cacti don’t think in terms of life doing anything for them. I discovered this because it laughed at me. I asked it if it planned on creating some kind of cacti army to enslave humanity and it made a noise that sounded like what a shrug would sound like if it had a noise. Then it told me I had pretty eyes. I blushed.

When I came home from work the next day, it wolf-whistled at me. I took my hair out of its clasp. It told me the cat sometimes peed behind the television when I wasn’t home. I told it about Louise in accounting’s obsession with counting the staples in the stationary cupboard to make sure nobody was stealing supplies. It tutted at me when I reached for the cookie jar – I lost four whole pounds in a month.

We watched movies and soaps together. I discovered it had a thing for French cinema so I pretended the subtitles didn’t give me tension headaches. I started taking baths instead of showers so it could sit on the windowsill and talk to me whilst I scrubbed.
The first flower grew out of the top of my head four nights ago. It tickled. Now, the spines have begun to form on the tops of my thighs. Louise in accounting told me I looked a little green. I smiled. It’s waiting for me when I get home. Just for me.

My father is dead, I should get the armrest. The space my feet should be in is encroached upon by the luggage of the mother and child opposite. Not even a “Do you mind?” first. Hunched knees and a dead father should make that armrest mine.
I can’t make out what he’s reading. He’s bent back the cover to spill the book’s innards, casing concealed. Whatever it is, it seems to require rest for his elbows and half of his arms.
In lieu of the position I want, I hang towards the window and survey scenery I’ve seen so many times before it no longer registers. A tree’s a tree.
Mr Elbows shifts again and what is left of the armrest is swallowed by his forearm. I try nudging my own, smaller arm into some nook, but he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.

When the phonecall came, I was dyeing my hair. Sunset red. I wanted a change. My mother was indecipherable. I knew my dad was dead, nothing else could be awful enough to throttle my mother’s words that way. I left the receiver lying beside the rest of the phone then washed off the hair dye. It had been on for a while. Once I’d dried my hair and got dressed, I decided to have some toast. On discovering the butter had run out, I pulled every plate from the cupboard and smashed each one against the kitchen walls. When the woman downstairs banged on the ceiling, I went to her door and slapped her when she answered. Then I booked my train ticket home.

Mr Elbows gets up to go to the toilet. I slide down in the hard seat and casually allow my arm to land on the armrest. Bliss. Even not being able to unfold my legs past ninety degrees seems bearable now. Then Luggage Mother’s child somehow manages to catapult her teddy bear in my direction. It lands at my feet. Right side. Armrest side. I see Mr Elbows swaying towards his seat. Luggage Mother’s child’s lip begins to shudder in a way that can only mean noise is coming. Luggage Mother looks at me. I try to grab the teddy with my left hand, but the angle is wrong. I’m going to have to use my right one. I peel it off the armrest and swiftly swoop up the stuffed bear, handing it to the grateful mother, then… he’s back in his seat, arm on the armrest. Bastard.

I never imagined my father as the suicidal type. He always seemed perfectly happy to me. Still, it’s not like I’m shocked by it. I’ve got secrets of my own, I understand. He needed something and he took control. I almost admire him for it. Almost. It’s worse for my mother. She’s not the suicidal type. Not even the hidden kind, like my father obviously is. Was. She just doesn’t think like that. Suicide requires a certain imagination. The thought projections that will conjure up images of a life so unbearable that the only way up is the way out. My mother is too literal for all that. So she’ll live with this until she dies a natural death, whatever one of those is. She’ll live with the knowledge her husband chose to leave her and never said goodbye, reading his note over and over because the proof that he did this is the only comfort that’s left.
He took some pills. Her death will be much slower.

Mr Elbows has fallen asleep. A triangle has been formed by the top of his arm, the back of the seat and the tiny piece of armrest he hasn’t claimed. It’s a bewitching little niche. I don’t even care that my arm would end up touching his if I put it there. Gently does it, just slide right in and he won’t even notice. He grunts, turns his head and slams his arm into the back of the chair, almost catching my skin on his way. The triangle is gone. Damn it.

I had a friend at school whose brother murdered someone. I worked with a man whose mother had a sex-change operation and became Dennis instead of Denise. There was the family I read about in the newspaper who ran a jewel smuggling operation with their neighbours none the wiser till the son got caught at customs with diamonds in his boxer shorts.
My family doesn’t even have a belligerent old auntie to talk about. I used to be embarrassed to take friends home for tea. The sheer normalcy of life in our house seemed wrong. No drunken rows, no criminal records. Not even a weird birthmark between us. It wasn’t shame I felt exactly, more a sense of exclusion. Myriad missed opportunities to share in knowing smirks and head-nods when conversations about family came up. Our level of normal wasn’t normal at all.
Well, we’re normal now alright. My place amongst the smirkers and nodders has been assured. Alcoholic mother? My dad killed himself. I win.

Now I’m crying. Now. On the bloody train. Not a single tear this far, and then they decide to all come at once while I have nowhere to put my right elbow.
I try putting my hands over my face and pretending to rub tired eyes, but it’s not very convincing and Luggage Mother is looking dangerously close to asking me if I’m okay. I don’t trust myself to say excuse me so I stand and look at Mr Elbows until he gets up to let me pass.
The toilet stinks. There is no lid on the loo seat so I prop myself in the corner between the sink and the window and try not to inhale too much. I cry till it hurts. Hurts more. My father would have hugged me if he’d seen me.
I have no idea how much time passes. The train jerks to a halt and my leg bashes against the toilet. I make my way back to my seat in time to notice this is my stop.
Mr Elbows and Luggage Mother are pulling on coats and shunting cases. They must be getting off here. My coat is crumpled on my seat. I knew I’d regret sitting on it instead of putting it in the overhead compartment.
Mr Elbows helps Luggage Mother with her cases and they leave the train. My stop. I should be getting off here. But there is space under the table for my feet now. The armrest is free. One more stop to the end of the line.
I sit back down and put my feet up on the empty seat opposite. Then I sprawl my right arm across the armrest. Nobody else gets on. Nobody can take this armrest from me, not for one whole stop. I close my eyes and the train pulls away. I’ve never seen the scenery here before. I might open my eyes for it. But my arm is staying where it is.

My Auntie Margaret reckoned people with hazel eyes are not to be trusted. She told me this one day whilst pouring tea stewed to within an inch of its life into the cracked china cup on the table in front of me. The teapot was ensconced in a knitted shade of yellow that can only be described as urine-coloured, the shape resembling either dog or cat, depending on the light. I remember ordering tea in a café once and being shocked by the nakedness of the pot; it seemed indecent somehow.
“I’m telling you Lisa, it’s not right. Now, your blues, your greens, your browns – you know where you are with those colours. But hazel? Greedy enough to want a bit of all of them, too flighty to pick one and stick with it. Hazel eyes!” And with that she’d given a snort like a horse, disdain rippling through her enormous mono-bosom. “Biscuit?”

Mark had hazel eyes.

I’d called her Annie-ma for as long as anyone could remember. It was one of those cute kid-talk things that seemed to have stuck. Sometimes when I heard other people refer to her as Margaret, I would look around, confused, wondering who they were talking about. But Margaret she was, to everyone else (never Maggie though, that would just have been asking for trouble), and Annie-ma to me.

Mark had hazel eyes, and when he told a lie, a tiny yellow fleck would appear to the north-east of the pupil in his left one. Towards the end, I stopped searching for that yellow fleck and starting praying for its disappearance instead.

“…I’m telling you Lisa, it’s just not natural.” A chattering of birds sailed through the open kitchen window. Annie-ma could have told you in a second what kind of birds they were; I know what a seagull looks like, and that’s about it.
“No thanks Annie-ma, I’ve had three already.” I said as she lifted the plate of digestives from the centre of the doily-smothered table and clattered them down in front of me, casting a disapproving eye over my disgracefully skinny size 12 frame.
She continued talking without missing a beat.
“I mean, face, arms, shoulders: fine. But feet? Nothing good could ever come from a person with freckles on their feet.” The birds were silent for a moment as Annie-ma looked down at her own feet with a nod. “Tea?”

Jodi had freckles on her feet.

Annie-ma was rumoured to have a thick notebook full of hazel eyes and freckled feet and all the other genetic imprints of a bad sort. My mother swore she’d seen Annie-ma writing in it when the two of them were teenagers and had often begged to be allowed a look. But Annie-ma would tut-tut and hide the book somewhere my mother never, ever managed to find it, though she scoured the house and garden on more than one occasion. She had given up looking after their parents and died; she’d met my dad, had me and then Jodi, and the notebook had been relegated to the part of her brain that told her she should get a new coat, or remember to phone such-and-such. Meanwhile, Annie-ma had stayed on in the house, alone save for the birds at the window, myriad doilies and several tea cosies of questionable taste.

Jodi had freckles on her feet, one on each, about a centimetre downwards from her big toes. She would tell me that was where God had kissed her when she was born. Sometimes would forget that I was supposed to be the older sister and would stomp off in a huff when she said this. I told her it was because I hated having her feet shoved in my face, but really it was because I couldn’t contain my jealousy: God hadn’t seen fit to kiss me.

I’d asked Annie-ma about the notebook myself one day, not long after my mother had told me about it. I was desperate to see what might be contained within its pages. I remember it being very windy that day, the sort of wind that threatens from corners then attacks with a slap, leaving you breathless in a way that seems unpleasant until you realise it wasn’t.
As soon as the question about the notebook was out of my mouth, Annie-ma went completely still. I had never seen her still before, she was always tapping or bobbing or busy, but yet here she was, her back to me as she stood over the kitchen sink, pouring away the last dregs of tea: still. Even the tea seemed to freeze between the teapot and the sink. The stillness lasted only for a split second, then she came and sat beside me at the table, covering my hand with hers.
“Lisa, that book will come to you. It was always for you. Not yet though.” She sighed softly. “It will come to you when you are ready for hindsight, and only then. But,” she tapped her right temple with her index finger “I’ll tell you something girl, you pay enough attention to hindsight, and you can avoid having to suffer from it in the future. Your old Annie-ma’s learned a few things that way, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

I handed Jodi the all the money I had in my purse. This was wrong, I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t believe I had the reserves left to hear her taunts if I refused. Did she think I didn’t already tell myself these things when I should have been working, eating, sleeping?
Her face was gaunt, her pallor a limpid grey. The defiance in her eyes as she demanded money and the trembles that racked her body, I recognised from Mark. It took me too long, far too long, to admit to the signs from him, but now I was like a satellite poised for a signal from anyone, anywhere. Jodi’s signal was loud and clear.
I saw Mark leaning against his old red car, drumming the door impatiently. He was looking very deliberately in the opposite direction, a sure sign of guilt. But which did he feel worse about? Jodi, or what he’d done to her? Jodi, with her need for newness, her zest for experience could not withstand the temptation. I could. Filthy stuff. But not her.
I was about to beg her not to get into the car with Mark, plead with her that he was in no fit state to drive, but then I saw her catch the glance I’d made from him to her, and, mistaking it for something else, she gave me a smirk of satisfaction. It was a smirk that said you see? I’ve won. I said nothing.

Annie-ma went as I would like to – quietly and in her sleep. The birds still come to the window every day and I feed them crumbs from the toaster. I’m sure they had a better diet under Annie-ma’s care, but I’m still learning. I have the book too; Annie-ma was right about the hindsight thing. Oh well. I haven’t moved a single doily.

Jodi stole my favourite doll when I was eight and she was six. I screamed and raged and took the issue straight to my mother.
“Jodi, why did you steal Lisa’s doll?”
“Because I like it better than she does!”
My mother nodded her head slowly and that seemed to be the end of it. I never did get my doll back.

I’ve read through the notebook five and a half times now, and I think I’ll start to add to it myself. I may even need to buy a new one. People think I must be lonely here, but I’m not. Annie-ma’s life is still all around me and it’s comforting in a way that I doubt anything else could ever be. All I need is to be here, to feed the birds, and to have the notebook.

Jodi’s body was easy to identify. Because of the freckles. Mark’s was more difficult, I had to ask them to open his eyes. The yellow fleck was gone. I wondered if he’d offered up his honesty to Death, or if Death had demanded it of him regardless.

The man at the door is what my mother would call a lovely young man for you to settle down with, dear. She would have been right. He’s handsome in a gently reassuring way, articulate and seemingly a pretty good sales rep. I can tell when he starts to blush that he’s about to ask me out.
But I shall have to refuse him. His earlobes are not separated from his head, and that can only mean trouble.