Fergus Sinnott
The Other Room
And there they go again, the voices in the other room. She cannot say that she has grown accustomed to them. In fact, she cannot say much of anything. As of yet, the other room is one into which she is not permitted.
They bring her cups of tea with milk, sugar in a little packet on the saucer. A plate of lemon squares, which she smells but does not eat. The tea, however, she cannot resist. It is an unusual blend, a distillation of a far-off country, with its foreign scents and dazzling effect on the mind. She wonders whether the people whose voices she can hear in the other room are drinking the same tea, or perhaps are even talking of their travels to the far-off country. She likes to think that this is indeed the case, but even when she presses her ear against the door, or down to the narrow slit between the floor and the base of it, she cannot make out a single word.
She does not know to whom the voices in the other room belong. Even when they deliver her food, or the spare change of clothes or a blanket once the days begin to grow colder, she is made to turn around and cover her eyes as they enter, and only allowed to uncover them to see what they have brought her once she has heard the door shut and the key turn. The voices in the other room are all of the same murmuring cadence, no variance in intonation, so it is impossible to tell whether they are male or female or some combination of the two. For a week or two, she tried to hazard a guess as to what the person who came to deliver her things might look like, based on the sounds of their feet on the floorboards. That was something families do, she remembered her father telling her when she was a young girl, many years ago. A family always knows who is coming up the stairs, just by the sounds of their feet. She remembered finding that idea somewhat strange, but sure enough, the next time her older sister came to ask her if they could borrow her sealing wax for a letter they were going to send to their grandmother, she had known it was her before she had even knocked on the half-shut door.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had written a letter. There were many things she found she could not remember, or rather, that the majority of her memories were not clear images as it were, more like a shifting series of colours, out of focus. Otherwise, she would try to think about the past, and would only be able to feel twinges and movements in certain parts of her body, as if an insect had landed on her bare arm with its light, spindly little legs before flitting off and away after a moment or two. Sometimes, the feelings come from inside her, swelling up like a balloon being filled with air, before they too subside and she lies back down on the floor of the room to finish the rest of the tea.
In her room, there is one window. It looks out onto a flat plain of short dry grass and a sky whose colour never seems to change from a murky brown. The brown is the colour of the tea she always abandons at the bottom of the cup, so that it mixes in with the stray tea leaves from the far-off land, a land which she supposes, she hopes, bears no resemblance to the one she can see.
Eventually, the voices in the other room come to a stop. There is a moment of silence, and then another. And then, again, as always, the sound of someone knocking at the door.
Fergus Sinnott
Fergus Sinnott studies English and Theatre Studies at The University of Melbourne. His work has been published with Beyond Queer Words, The Greyhound Journal and The Crawfish.