time has stopped,’ Barbara lectured him, as convinced of the rightness of her position as a political campaigner. ‘That’s why I go into his room every day. Nigel can’t bear it. Neither can I, really, but if I didn’t go in, I wouldn’t know for sure that it hadn’t changed. And someone has to keep it clean.’
She climbed the remaining stairs to the first-floor landing. Simon followed her. There were four doors, all closed. One had a large sheet of paper stuck to it, on which someone had drawn a black rectangle, sides perfectly straight, and written something inside it in small black handwriting. From where he was, Simon couldn’t read it.
‘That’s Kit’s room, with the notice on the door,’ said Barbara. Simon had guessed as much. As he moved closer, he saw that the sign was made of something thicker than paper – a kind of thin canvas board. And the words had been painted on, not written. Carefully; it looked almost like calligraphy. Kit Bowskill had intended the sign on his door to be more than a means of imparting information.
Barbara, standing behind Simon, recited the words aloud as he read them. The effect was unsettling, as if she was the voice of his thoughts. ‘Civilization is the progress towards a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.’
Beneath the quote was a name: ‘Ayn Rand’. Author of The Fountainhead. It was one of many novels that Simon wished he’d read, but never actually fancied reading. ‘This an intellectual way of saying, “Kit’s Room – Keep Out”?’ he asked Barbara.
She nodded. ‘We did. Religiously. Until Kit told us we’d seen him and spoken to him for the last time. Then I thought, “Sod it – if I’m losing my son, at least I can get a room in my house back.” I was so livid, I could have ripped the walls down.’ The electric tremor in her voice suggested she was no less angry now. ‘I went in there intending to strip it bare, but I couldn’t, not when I saw what he’d done. How could I destroy my son’s secret work of art when it was all I had left of him? Nigel says it’s not art, Kit’s not an artist, but I can’t see any other way to describe it.’
Simon was closest to the door – two footsteps away. He could have walked in and seen it for himself, whatever it was, instead of standing outside listening to Barbara describe it obliquely, but that would have felt inappropriate; he ought to wait for her permission.
‘Have you ever had your heart run over by a large truck?’ She pressed both her hands to her chest. ‘That’s what happened to me when I opened that door for the first time in eleven years. I couldn’t understand it at all – what was I looking at? Now it makes sense, now that I’ve got to know Kit a bit better, in his absence.’
Eleven years. Number eleven again. In spite of the heat, a cold shiver snaked down Simon’s back. Barbara must have seen the question in his eyes, because she said, ‘Nigel and I were banned when Kit was eighteen. He came home from his first term at university and that was the first thing he said. It wasn’t just us, because we were his parents – everyone was banned. No one set foot in his room after that – he made sure of it. He didn’t bring friends round often, but when he did, they stayed in the lounge. Even Connie, when the two of them used to come and visit, he never took her upstairs. They’d sit in the lounge, or the den. Kit had his own flat by the time they met – I don’t think Connie knew he still had a room here, one that was more important to him than any of the ones he actually lived in. You wouldn’t think of it, would you? Most people, when they move out, they move out altogether.’
Unless they had something they wanted or needed to hide, thought Simon. Most people couldn’t get away with saying to their girlfriends who lived with them, ‘This room’s mine – you’re not allowed anywhere near it.’ Come to think of it, most people couldn’t get away with saying that to their parents either. ‘In eleven years, you weren’t tempted to go in