The Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

meet. She smiled at me, but I can’t remember us saying anything.
    She had big, beautiful eyes and shiny hair. It was lovely. I was enchanted.
    When we kissed it was as if she was me. I was me, but she was me too.
    —
    When we came out again she stood there looking at me for a long time. Charged. Changed. As if I’d shown her something entirely new. Something big. Something she hadn’t quite been prepared for and didn’t know how to handle. She turned on her heel and walked away. As far as I was aware, she went straight home.
    As for me, I stayed for a while sucking the sweet.

14.
    Someone had made a snowman in the courtyard below my window, but it wasn’t very good at all. The two bottom balls were roughly the same size, and the top one was only marginally smaller, which meant that it didn’t have anything like the traditional snowman shape that a snowman ought to have. And it didn’t have a nose. Whoever had made the snowman hadn’t bothered to find a carrot or anything else that would have functioned as a nose, and had just left it as it was. Maybe they had lost interest halfway through? Such is life, I thought.
    That night I lay in bed and went through the evening, moment by moment. Over and over again. From the frosty greeting and Hannah’s strange comments, to the encounter with Margareta from reception, to my strong sense of having been master of the situation. In some ways it was a novel experience. A feeling of power.

15.
    Stupid people don’t always know that they’re stupid. They might be aware that something is wrong, they might notice that things don’t usually turn out the way they imagined, but very few of them think it’s because of them. That they’re the root of their own problems, so to speak. And that sort of thing can be very difficult to explain.
    I got an e-mail from Karl the other day. It was a group e-mail to the whole department. The introduction alone made me suspect trouble: “We will be putting staffing issues under a microscope.”
    Anyone with even a basic understanding of the language knows that you put things under “the” microscope, with the definite article. (Sadly this sort of sloppiness is becoming more and more common as text messages and e-mail are taking over.) I let it pass this time but knew that I would have to act if it happened again. I wondered what suitable comment about the proper use of language I could drop into the conversation next time I spoke to Karl.

16.
    The morning after the party I got to work early.
    A lot of the signs were still there. There was a sour smell, and plastic glasses and napkins on the floor. I wondered what preparations they had made for the clearing up.
    “Things don’t just clear themselves up, do they?” I said to Hannah with the ponytail when she arrived, still looking sleepy, a couple of minutes later. She glanced at me with annoyance, and I know she was impressed that I was there first, even though I wasn’t part of any cleaning team. I sat down on the sofa by the kitchen and looked at a few newspapers, so that she would realize I had chosen to come on my own initiative rather than because I was told to.
    After a while I noticed that she had chosen to start clearing up in a different part of the office, rendering my presence pointless. I folded the newspaper and went over to the lift.
    I went down to reception and caught sight of Margareta hanging up her outdoor clothing in the little cloakroom behind the desk. I stopped beside the plastic Christmas tree and waited. From the other side of the counter I could see her standing in the little cloakroom adjusting her hair and clothes in a small mirror. Her skirt was nice, but she was wearing a dull-colored blouse that wasn’t at all attractive. I’d have to remember to tell her not to wear it when she was with me if the two of us were going to get together, I thought. She must have felt she was being watched, because suddenly she started and turned toward me.
    “Goodness,