Room Service (11 page)

The dirty kitchen was the headquarters of her dirty personality: a gas stove with a grease cosmetic, an ulcerated porcelain sink, a wooden drying board greasy to the touch, a refrigerator smelling of perishing rubber, burning carbon from the motor, decaying food, odorous containers, shells and carcasses of insects under the refrigerator, and the bottom shelf having a dark, congealed stain that looked as if it had seeped from a wound, and that he called privately, every time he opened the refrigerator, ‘refrigerator blood'. He was having a nervous breakdown and had been ejected from his domestic home, low on funds, and someone, a so-called friend, had arranged for him to have a room in this house. He was a non-paying guest unable to make other arrangements for himself, a slumped and bruised psyche. He had no rights in the house but on the other hand, no responsibilities. When he had first focused on the kitchen he was too exhausted and personally defeated to clean it himself, but then lying tranquillised on his bed in the attic room he concluded that he had no ‘right' to clean it even if he had had the energy. That it would be some sort of infringement of her living style, an implied comment on her as a person, if not a pointed and insulting criticism of her hygiene,
an offence to her hospitality, and a ‘statement', worse, about him and his obsessiveness.

Jesus, he thought, I'm trapped with that kitchen. I can't make a move. His estimation of the age of the accumulated filth in the kitchen, his carbon-dating of it, by examining the carcasses of insects, the expiry dates on packets, was that it had been like that for three years. It had been building up like that for at least three years. She was only 30. It was not the result of senility or palsy. She was not crippled with arthritis.

All he could manage with the kitchen was to have coffee. He bought his own cup, stirred it with his own teaspoon, used his own instant coffee (being too defeated to begin to reassemble the elaborate coffee-making equipment that had been lost in the domestic warfare). He took to placing a sheet of white A4 paper on the sink and putting his cup and teaspoon on it. He replaced the A4 every two days. This was his only use, his only visit to the place. She used it for making nothing else, it seemed, than toasted sandwiches. He could not believe that three years of toasted sandwiches could produce such decay and domestic rubble.

He had smelled the unmistakeable smell of toasted sandwiches and had observed her on the rare occasions that they crossed tracks in the house. She was ‘considerate' and did not make social demands on him.

She lived on toasted sandwiches. He'd always considered the smell of toasted bread homely. But she changed it to a smell of domestic wretchedness. It was
the poverty of her imagination as a person, the absence of flair, and a carelessness about her diet that began to be represented by the smell of toasting bread from that squalid kitchen.

She did sometimes call to him, offering him a toasted sandwich. He always declined with a polite, appreciative voice that concealed a raging repugnance.

He would lie on his bed, tranquillised, just sufficiently, he realised, to prevent his repugnance towards her from screaming out. He began to form in his mind a map of her household and her bodily function. He used a poetry of naming learned from army map-reading – polluted-creek, old-dump, disused-well, swampy ground, unexploded shells.

He called her respiratory system the ‘polluted creek'. She had a congenital congestion of the nose and lungs – a chronic sinusitis. She hawked too, from cigarette smoking, like a sick cat. He had at first tolerated it by telling himself that it was a seasonal cold. But they passed from one season to another and it persisted. He realised it was a permanent congestion and it would always be heard through the house like strained plumbing in an old hotel.

On the occasions when there was obligatory conversation – standing around pretending to be chatting in her kitchen, he trying not to rest his hand on any of the surfaces – this permanent congestion would not only punctuate her chat, but he found that she also examined her soggy tissue for the results of her effort. Maybe the doctor had advised her to watch for
blood. He would, of course, look away, but he found it optically compelling and his fringe vision would still watch her do it.

In the second week or so he tried to joke her into an awareness of the impoliteness or vulgarity of her action. He said that his grandfather had called looking into one's phlegm ‘gold mining'.

To his horror, she took the joking to be an acceptance of the behaviour – as a shared, if not intimacy, then domestic playfulness.

She would push her tissue at him, laughing, saying ‘Here, like to fossick around?'

So he would lie on his bed of nerve nails high in the house, hearing her hawking and blowing her nose and inescapably, no matter how much he concentrated on other things, or tried to read, inescapably a laughing image of her would be before him thrusting a sodden tissue at him, screaming, ‘Here, like to fossick around?' He suspected that it was a gesture of domestic closeness intended to make him at ease and to make him feel he belonged. Oh, Jesus.

She cleaned her ears too much. He found ear-wax-stained cotton ‘buds' – he found the word ‘bud' so ill-used that that too became repulsive, as though one took, say, rose buds and cleaned one's nostrils or ears or whatever. He found these cotton-wad sticks browned like used toilet tissue, he found them everywhere, but always at the telephone. When she called to him, ‘Phone – for you!' he would clamber downstairs from his dim room knowing, knowing, and wanting to cry, that there
would be a wax-stained cotton-wad stick somewhere near the telephone, which was in the dark hall.

In the first few days at her place, in the dark hall, called to the telephone, he had put his hand accidentally on the cotton-wad, wax-stained. He had felt the soft, near wetness while engaging with the voice on the telephone, and consequently with only part attention, had removed whatever it was that was sticking to his palm. The first time he could hardly believe it and had removed it with a visceral spasm of distaste. He thought it was an aberration on her part. But it happened again. And again. He concluded that she sat at the telephone cleaning her ears, or whatever part of her body the cotton-wadded sticks would enter. When she called, ‘Phone – for you!', he would go down knowing that he had to watch out for these things, which could be on the telephone table, on the stool, or in some unexpected place. He now always remembered to take a clean tissue, to pick them up and throw them somewhere down the dark hallway to fall onto the dark, dirty carpet along with whatever else had accumulated there. That was none of his business, that part of the house. Indeed, nowhere but his room was properly and technically ‘part of his business'.

In his map of her house and personality he called these wax-stained, or whatever-stained, cotton-wad sticks, ‘landmines'.

She didn't clean, but instead trusted heavily in vermin powder. She sprinkled this toxic powder about the house, with irresponsible abandon.

But she never removed the kill. The body count was obvious, but she left them. He was intrigued to see that they did eventually disappear, either eaten by other insects or by decomposition into dust.

Maybe she liked the carcasses around as evidence of her good and effective work. Or as trophies. He called these ‘enemy dead'.

The sodden, or at least
used
tissues were everywhere in the house, like turds.

She did not wear new clothes, but always bought second-hand ones. Maybe this was a clever ‘style' thing to do, but he found that, because of her personality and habits, the old clothes she bought became as repugnant and as frightening as a shroud. As they stood ‘chatting' in the kitchen, he standing well clear of any fixture, the clothing would inflame his imagination.

He could not stop himself seeing the old bodies that had inhabited the clothing before she had bought it. She would say ‘this is a real find'. She would twirl around in some dress from the 1940s. He would see the old women's bodies that had left their deposits in the clothing. His mind would, like some forensic scientist, examine the fabric under a microscope of nausea, the evidence of blood, of menstruation, of disease, of vomit, of urine, of excreta, of saliva, of phlegm. Of how many owners before her?

‘Chic?' she would say, holding the dress to her body, proudly. Her underwear also came from second-hand shops.

‘Feel the quality of this silk,' she would say, holding
out to him some second-, third-, two-hundredth-hand slip or bra.

She would in this way force him to touch the material.

When his birthday arrived like a gloomy, bored friend, he expected that no one would remember. Nor did he care. But one of his friends must have mentioned it to her, in the interests of his morale.

In the interests of his morale, she cooked him a cake. Cooked it in the vermin-littered, toxic-powdered, greasy kitchen.

When she called him to the kitchen and he saw her spreading icing on the cake, he knew that was what he could smell that was different in the house. For the first time, it was not a toasted sandwich, but it hadn't been all cake-smell either.

The cake was sitting on the wooden cutting board, dangerously close to a piece of rusted steel-wool. He had a vision of a piece of rusted, food-speck-encrusted steel wool accidentally being baked in her cake.

The cake looked fly-specked. Flies drifted around the kitchen untouched by the toxic vermin-powder.

‘I'm touched,' he said, ‘I'm very touched.'

The oven door was open and he could see for the first time into the oven, the fatty deposits of years of cooking burned into the walls of the oven. At least, he thought, the heat would have killed some of the bacteria.

She began to cut it. He realised that, of course, he would have to eat it.

‘I don't – it sounds silly – but I can't eat cake.'

The smell of the cooking cake had not been all cake smell because the rarely used oven had had to burn off its residue of past bakings, and roastings. The fatty decay had to be burned off and had filled the house. He could now identify the smell that pervaded the house, displacing the toasted and burnt-bread smell that was its characteristic smell.

The cake was probably imbued with the burnt rot of all that had passed through the sleazy oven.

‘You can't eat cake!' She obviously disbelieved him. ‘But you are the first man I've cooked a cake for.'

‘I'm sorry – I'm thrilled – but I can't.'

‘Come on,' she said, ‘just a mouthful.'

She cut a slice with a dirty knife, which he saw was corroded, not the blade so much, as the imitation bone handle. The bone had corroded away from the knife blade revealing an ugly spine, like a gangrenous fracture.

She held it out to him, the slice wobbling on the blade of the knife, holding it steady with her fingers.

She broke off a piece and put it in her mouth, salivating, he thought, quite heavily. Her saliva-wet fingers returned to the slice of cake and broke off a piece, ‘Mmmmmmmm, quite delicious, even if I say so myself.'

‘I can't honestly eat cake. It's an allergy.'

‘Nonsense – here.' She pushed the piece held in her saliva-wet fingers towards his mouth, and he reared back.

‘No, I've never eaten cake.'

‘You eat biscuits – I've seen you eating biscuits. Worse, I've seen you smuggling packets of biscuits into your room. Bingeing.'

‘No. Please.'

She was backing him across the kitchen, part of his mind was hysterically avoiding contact with the kitchen and the other part hysterically moving from the menace of the filthy cake.

‘I'm not a well person.'

‘A teensy piece of cake on your birthday will do wonders for your morale. Every person deserves at least that – a birthday cake.'

She must have thought he was being ‘playful'.

She darted at him with the cake piece held in her fingers.

He weaved like a boxer.

‘Please stop!'

‘I think baby wants to be fed by mama.'

He had gone around the kitchen table once, once had put his hand on the kitchen table and pulled it away as if bitten, glancing at it to see how it had been contaminated, moving all the while away from her advancing fingers. She finally grabbed him and, laughing, forced the cake into his partly closed mouth, some of it getting onto his tongue. He gagged.

She pulled back from him, a bit shaken by the genuineness of the gagging.

He coughed.

‘Please stop.' He staggered from the kitchen into the small backyard, and spat out the cake.

‘You're serious,' she said, following him.

‘Yes. I can't eat cake.'

‘I'm sorry. I thought you were playing. Never mind. I'll eat it up.'

One night, rigid with insomnia and torment from all the wrong he'd done people and himself, his mind roved the house and poked its nose into all its foul corners.

The mind came back to his room, having made a nauseous tour of the dark decay of the house and its mistress.

The mind stopped at the bed and the mattress and for the first time wondered about the mattress. The sheets and blankets were his, but not the mattress.

Next day, he asked her outright whether the mattress was second hand.

She was bemused by the question, thought, and said, ‘No, the mattress in your room is not second hand. It's my old mattress.'

‘Your old mattress.'

‘Yes, from my childhood.'

He must have gone pale and perhaps rocked slightly.

‘I slept on that mattress for twenty-five years.'

Before his mind, in a foul gust, swept the years of bed-wetting, years of her menstruating, the colds and running noses, the sweatings of the night fever, the festering of childhood sores, the weeping of wounds,
the dirty hair, the dirty feet, the whole mess of excretions that had seeped down into the mattress over those years.