Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Room That Must Be Tidied
My cousin has never once stayed in the spare room I keep ready for him, and every night the room hands back its tidiness one object at a time.
- perspective: first
I made the spare room ready for my cousin Roy Fenn in the spring after his letters thinned to a card at Christmas. He said it at the bus stop, in the April, with his collar up: one of these days, I'll come up and stay. I said the room would be ready, and I made it ready the same week, and it has been ready — with interruptions that are not mine — ever since.
By ready I mean a standard, and the standard is written: bed turned down one fold, jug filled and set to the left of the basin, towel squared over the rail, chair to the wall, window latched open one turn for air, and the three paperbacks Roy lent me at school standing spine-out with the tallest on the left. I have counted the room's contents twice by lamplight, on different nights, and the counts agreed at two hundred and fourteen. You cannot keep a room for a guest without knowing what a guest is walking into, down to the last object; that is not fussiness, that is bookkeeping.
Here is the bookkeeping. One thing out of place each morning. Never two. Never none.
The first month it was the jug, moved to the sill and turned so the handle faced the window. Then the chair, a hand's width off the wall, squared parallel, as if someone had sat and risen carefully. Then the paperbacks, tallest on the right, an order that is wrong and knows it is wrong. Then the fold, undone, bed smooth, as if the bed had been looked at and shut. Nothing broken, nothing dirty, nothing missing. Only moved, one turn at a time, the way a key moves a lock.
I have been over the explanations and I have evicted every one. Draughts: I weatherstripped the room in November, entire, taped the vent, and still one thing, not the light thing either — the chair. Mice: no droppings, no gnawing, and nothing moved is ever food or nest, it is always the wrong object for a mouse, which is the right object for something keeping a rate. My own nights: I do not sleepwalk; if I did, the arithmetic would show me two some mornings, or none, and the arithmetic has never shown me anything but one. One a night is a rate, and rates are kept by somebody. A draught does not keep books.
So I keep the log instead. Graph paper, two columns: NIGHTS, THINGS. The columns have been level with each other since the page I first ruled, and they are level now, and the levelness is exact — one night, one object, no repeats. In two hundred nights, two hundred different objects, and no object moved twice. I cannot find an order in it, and the absence of an order is itself a kind of order that merely declines to show me its headings. What the log cannot prove is the count before the log. Roy said one of these days in the April. If the rate was running before I made the room ready — I do not let myself finish that entry. Graph paper is patient, and so is arithmetic, and neither of them is on my side about where zero was.
Every noon I restore the room. Jug back, chair back, fold re-made, paperbacks left, towel square. The room takes its tidying the way a counter takes a form, without remark, and the next morning it presents one more item for my attention. I have never once found two things; I have never once found the room done. Roy rings at Christmas and his voice finds him well; he says one of these days in the April voice exactly, and I say the room is ready, and both of us are telling the truth, which is the difficulty.
Tidy is what I owe the room daily, and the room pays me back nightly at a rate of one, and by the arithmetic in the log the count arrives — this coming spring, by the last page — at the object I have never let myself write down, because the log is patient too and the pen is mine. On that morning every object in the room will have had its one turn and been received, and the room will stand, for the first time in this flat, arranged entirely to somebody's satisfaction, and I will still be holding the duster. So the question I keep meaning to rule at the top of the next page, and do not, because the room is listening for headings: when the last thing is moved and the room is finally, completely, as it is wanted — will that room have been tidied, or claimed?