The Other Room

by James Everington

  ***

  His suicide note was confused and rambling.

  It was left in their bedroom, between the pages of a physics compendium, opened on the imposing double bed. She had just come back into the house with one of her old friends. Her friend read the note too, and instantly took charge of the situation. Instinctively they both ran to the bathroom, the only room with a lock. They pulled at the door handle but it wouldn’t open, they shouted but no answer came from inside.

  “Quick,” her friend said, “he might still be alive.”

  That ‘might’ made her shiver.

  Her friend rushed to phone for help, and she was left outside the locked bathroom. She frantically wondered why he had locked himself inside there to do it. She couldn’t help but think of the pet cat she’d had when young, and how after it had been hit by a car it had crawled away somewhere dark to die, and it had been days before they had found it. She listened against the shut door, but couldn’t hear anything. As if deaf, all she could hear was her own panicked breathing. Tears ran down her cheek, which was pressed against the rough wood.

  Was he dead? Was he still alive? She couldn’t think – insanely, given the unique situation she had the feeling of déjà vu, which only added to her hysteria. She felt as if everything was pressing down upon her, the floors and walls seemed to contract around her, and slight sounds from outside seemed very close. Was this how he had felt all the time, was this why he had done this? Her mind seemed to be working too hard trying to deal with everything, it was racing ahead of the available facts and predicting differing outcomes…

  If she could just get the door open! She banged and pounded against it, but it was no use. How had he done it, had he taken pills? If she could just get inside and make him vomit then he might be all right! Or maybe he had lost his nerve at the last moment and made himself sick and was lying unconscious and ill but all right inside. Or maybe… If she could just know; if she could just get in! Or maybe he was dead. It was like she was two people, both imagining different things, two equally plausible futures. Her mind felt torn in half by what she was thinking and she sobbed against the unyielding door - if she could just see…!

  Alive and dead…; then something in her seemed to click, to shut down and turn itself off, like overloaded machinery.

  Her hysterics died away. She felt numb, not quite contained within the building. Men in bright uniforms were running up the stairs now, people were shouting, and action was being taken. Everyone was frantic and active, it was all so confusing, better just to shut herself away from it. Someone barged into her, but she didn’t even react. It was like the walls and ceilings had peeled away, like the sounds and meaning had bled from the world…

  The men rammed against the shut door, and she heard the sound of wood splintering around the lock. The sound made her nervous, for it signalled the return of something, like something was about to crash back down on her again, the universe would soon align itself one way or the other… She opened her mouth to ask them to stop, to leave things be…

  Then the door was opened, and she saw.

  The Watchers

  Regina was used to feeling followed. It was because of the way that she looked; or more accurately because of the way that people looked at her. It could range from a pair of eyes following her around the room, to actually being followed on the street. Every time she turned around she saw people hurriedly change direction, or pretend to study a shop window with sudden interest. Some of them were students following her home from university, lecturers too; some were just random people from the streets whom she had somehow caught up in her wake. Some of them hung around until they had plucked up enough courage to actually speak to her; others eventually faded away, like a blurriness rubbed from the eyes.

  Even her father had used to follow her upstairs, his body blood-sick with lust and guilt. So Regina was used to being followed. When the feeling came again, she paid it no mind.

  ***

  “Regina,” she said, introducing herself, all too aware of the way that they were staring at her. She had to say it twice, because they weren’t listening. The repetition made her words seem even more inadequate, made her introduction seem even more like some falsehood.

  They had agreed to get together in the Union bar after the lecture, to see if they had understood it. The lecture had been entitled “Is Existence a Predicate of Individuals?” - they didn’t think that they had understood it. Except for Regina, who was there because she didn’t think the philosophy went far enough. And because she fancied a drink. And because she was lonely.

  “What he was saying,” one of the students said, “is that sentences like ‘Vampires don’t exist’ don’t make sense because by naming ‘vampires’ you’re effectively saying that they…”. He glanced at Regina. “…by naming you’re effectively saying…” He flicked her another nervous glance, then looked away as another boy placed a drink in front of her.

  She shifted slightly in her seat, but refused to feel uncomfortable, or to lose the thread of what he had been saying. She knew she looked beautiful and only took partial notice of the effects anymore. Her beauty was one that she wouldn’t have been able to define, save that she knew it was non-sexual. Oh, it caused men to lust after her, obviously, but there was not the corresponding jealousy or dislike from females. She had no idea about fashion, and didn’t need to. Her beauty seemed to be the kind that didn’t date.

  Which was odd, given what she saw in the mirror each morning.

  She tried to pay attention, but it was hard – everyone kept stopping mid-sentence, as if distracted. It had been a mistake to come.

  “But,” one of the girls, Kylie, was saying, “you can have the fictional idea of vampires without having to have real vampires… Don’t you agree Regina?”

  Regina had so far contributed little to the 1st year debate; but they all appealed to her as though she was Russell; Frege; Kant. Except that wasn’t quite true. They appealed to her more as though she was the winner of the latest reality TV show; as though she were someone not quite real whose opinion obscurely mattered. They attended to what little she did say with the same avid vacuity with which lechers attended to Miss World’s opinions on world peace.

  She had not washed her hair for about ten days; she had not changed her clothes for about four – there was no point. Even with greasy tangles, a blotchy unmade-up face, and stained clothes, they all still stared at her. And they all still didn’t see.

  “What about…,” she said slowly, not looking up, “what about something with no name? That has no name but is just a, a… thing? What could you say then? It could exist but you could never say that it did…”

  “Like if vampires existed but were so clever that no one had ever guessed?” the boy who had spoken earlier said. Andy was a Goth, dressed in clothes that would have been black, except they had been washed so many times that they had gone a matt grey. Regina got the impression from the way that the others rolled their eyes that he turned the conversation to vampires and the like as often as he could.

  “If you believe in something, really believe, then it has to exist,” another boy, called Josh, said. He stared at Regina fixedly to see how she took his words. He was the opposite type to Andy: smart, expensive clothes, any scruffiness faked and calculated.

  “This is all too deep for me,” a girl called Mel said. Because she wasn’t Regina, no one responded to her words.

  The conversation quickly petered out – none of the students save Regina were actually that interested in the first year module “Existence, Identity and Philosophical Logic”. After finishing one drink that Josh had bought for her, Regina stood up.

  “Hey Regina,” the girl named Kylie said to her, “I’m, uh, we’re having a party in our halls tonight, and you know, if you want to come…” Kylie trailed off, as if extinguished, as if snubbed out. It made Regina want to scream. Even the most cordial of invitations was delivered to her like a declaration of love, like homage before an i
dol, before a Michelangelo.

  She said yes to the party. Since she didn’t actually have any friends, what else could she say?

  ***

  She felt followed all the way home. She decided it was probably Josh.

  ***

  Later, Regina walked to the party. She was unconcerned by the way the wind whipped and tangled her hair, by the way it chapped and dried her lips. She ignored the occasional wolf-whistle, the licentious honks of male car horns. She carried on walking, trying to keep her figure small, huddled up inside her dirty raincoat, which was too big for her. She tried to concentrate on her own thoughts, on what was undeniably her, rather than what the world thought about her. But she could sense the cars slow down as they passed her, feel the tugs of eyes like the tugs of tiny fish-hooks in her skin. She was like a walking pornographic advertisement for – what?

  She passed a group of girls and boys playing hop-scotch on the street, and saw them stop and stare, eyes agog, mouths agape to reveal candy coloured tongues. She tried to pretend that she hadn’t seen the children react this way. Children were her hope. She imagined a scene like one from The Emperor’s New Clothes: all the adults praising her and then one of the children crying out, “But she’s not beautiful at all!” And then they would all see. And something like a normal life would begin for her. Children were therefore her hope; maybe all this philosophy was bullshit and she should become a teacher, or a habitual mother.

  She reached the halls of residence, shook her wet hair, absently picked at a scab on the corner of her mouth, then opened the door. She turned around quickly – no one. But the sense of being followed didn’t fade. Were they hiding from her? Leave me alone! she wanted to shout. What did people want? Then she went inside the halls, found the party. As she entered the faces all turned towards her like paparazzi cameras, lighting up and demanding her attention.

  ***

  She ended up in one of the bedrooms, talking to Andy, the Goth from her course. All the pretty boys, the preening sportsmen or rugged foreign students were jealous – at least she could make them hate her that way. But of course they didn’t hate her – they hated Andy. Not her; they never fucking hated her.

  Andy was still talking about the lecture, he seemingly had nothing else to talk about. But they weren’t his theories – she had read those books too. So why was he pretending that they were original thought? To impress me, Regina thought glumly. He kept talking in the darkened bedroom, saying by rote the thoughts of others that had impressed him, so as to impress her, and delay the moment when he knew that she must leave.

  “Because if you say, or think, ‘I exist’ it is a tautology; but if you say ‘I don’t exist’ then that is a statement that can never be true because then who is saying or thinking that statement…”

  I don’t exist, she said to herself, I don’t exist.

  It was so sad, she thought – not Andy’s clichéd thoughts themselves, but the desperateness with which he used them, to make her listen, to make her stay, as if none of the other girls at the party mattered, as if she were the most beautiful; and the scary thing was, the sad thing, Regina knew, was that he would say that she was.

  “And vampires, you see, vampires…,”

  She had to shut him up, she wanted something from him but it wasn’t this. She kissed him, her tongue forceful, her hands masculine and rough as they grabbed his pale wrists and guided them to her breasts. As they kissed Andy moaned: a pained cry, as if he knew his life had peaked, and that all experiences after this would be pale imitations; she hated him for this sound.

  The kiss broke, and she stared at him. “God, you’ve got such beautiful, beautiful red hair,” he said. “Like flames.” So he liked redheads did he? Her hair hadn’t been that colour the last time she had looked.

  “Turn off the light,” she said.

  “Wh… What?”

  “You can only fuck me if you turn off the light,” she said. She used the f-word deliberately, to try and cheapen it for him, and for her, to make it into something mundane and seedy, something unglamorous and unmemorable, a drunken fuck in someone else’s bed at a so-so party. But Andy’s face was lined with awe and fear, like it was his first time. It made her feel sick in her head, it was like the echo of an echo; like a memory of suffering from deja-vu.

  The lights were turned off, but the brightness of the party still seeped in under the door. Josh was outside in that brightness she knew, one of the disappointed pretty boys, and when the dark male shape moved towards her it could have equally well have been Josh as Andy. Equally as well been all the men she had ever known since…

  I don’t exist, she reminded herself.

  His breath was harsh and jagged, like he was on the verge coming even as he unzipped. “Quiet!” she whispered angrily. “I don’t want anyone hearing, and coming in and seeing…”

  There was something as he penetrated her – something of that thing which she was looking for. Not physical pleasure, she could have had the world’s most skilful lovers eating out the palm of her hand; but something instead that she couldn’t name… But it was too bright – the light was still coming in from the party, and if she turned her head she could see the two of them in the mirror. I don’t exist, she said. She saw a college kid in black, young and flushed and looking like he was about to come or burst into tears or both, his hands clutching at her hair which slid through his fingers, and which she had no doubt he sincerely saw as red. But she saw her hair as she did in every mirror – shimmering, like it was covered in something viscous, changing colours, so rapidly that it looked to her white; just white; hag-like.

  ***

  She had first realised with her father. She was not old enough to know what the look in his eyes was sometimes, but she was old enough to unconsciously know that he was struggling with something, and hating himself for failing in his struggle. And she also understood that people couldn’t hate themselves for too long without going mad, and so his hatred was starting to switch to the thing that was causing his struggle, his failure. To her.

  He started following her upstairs when she went to bed, when she bathed. She heard his harsh breathing, like a wolf’s, outside the bedroom or bathroom door, and she felt afraid for him. It sounded on the edge of tears. And after he had cried, and shamed himself that way, then what would he do? With her bare feet she stood in something wet outside her door after he had gone away, and Regina had been young enough to think that it was his tears, gone bad and brackish.

  Then one day he had come into her bedroom. Regina’s mother was out, and her father looked dreadful, hair in mad tufts, his body turning away and then turning towards her, his eyes making the opposite movement, looking away as he advanced; looking at her as his body recoiled away from what he was about to do.

  “It’s not my fault,” he said in a voice she had never heard her father use before, but only some of the boys and girls at school. “It’s not. Look at you!” Look at her – she didn’t know what he meant. She knew she was ugly – the school kids had teased her about it, although this had recently ceased and she didn’t know why. She turned her head to look at herself in the mirror – just the usual. She couldn’t have told anyone what she looked like, how she knew she was ugly. She couldn’t even have said the colour of her eyes or of her hair. She had been scared that her eyes were bad; but the rest of the world looked clear, it was just her reflection that suffered from her blind spots, from her haziness.

  “Look at you,” her father repeated. “Like a woman. Like a slut. You’ve got tits already, like a slut’s.” She didn’t know what he meant – she knew what tits were, but knew that she didn’t have any – that was part of the reason that she was ugly. She didn’t even own a bra. Nevertheless when her father’s hands groped and wept upon her chest, they squeezed as though there was something there. He entered her as though there was something there, and not just the numbness and nothingness she’d felt as he did so.

  It had been like that ever since. Men had see
n her with a full chest, a tomboy’s chest, blonde hair, black hair, green eyes, grey eyes – whatever they wanted. Andy had seen her as a redhead because that was no doubt his secret preference. One guy had been convinced that she had been black, another that she was fat and far more domineering than she really was. And the girls too – those who secretly wanted an older sister to hold their hands through life saw her as one; those who wanted a touch of glamour were convinced that she was a model who they had once seen in a magazine, and Regina’s protests couldn’t convince them, even when a magazine was produced and the model’s evidence was compared to own. Those who wanted a shoulder to cry on saw that she had sympathetic eyes and that she was just the right height; eco-warriors and Bible-bashers saw that she would save the world. And she was sick of it. Sick of everyone else, and sick of the fact that she saw nothing.

  ***

  She left the party, feeling vacant, feeling alone. She sensed the unhappiness she left behind her, the way that her parting turned everyone else’s thoughts to leaving, to home. People scurried to get coats and scarves to try and be the one to walk her back. She had seen Josh jockeying for position; seen Andy linger behind looking at her. She ignored them, and left quickly, not caring about what the weather did to her. At least the wind and rain were against her, beating against her face as if they knew what she was, and wished to punish her for it. Her face was beaten raw, more tears were stung from her weepy eyes. Give me what I deserve, Regina thought. Maybe the rain would wash away all of her beauty, her feyness, and let everyone see what was underneath. Yes, well done Andy, she thought bitterly, thinking about the way he had made love to something that wasn’t really her, as she lay below him.