As soon as I got home and stepped through our front door and into the hallway, I realized something was terribly wrong. A thick, damp smell hit my nostrils, and I could hear tinny pop music being played through Dad’s old radio somewhere in the distance. Mum appeared from the kitchen, Nigel brushing up against her legs.
“Matthew, where have you been? Dad wanted to talk to you about your room …”
I didn’t let her finish.
I ran up the stairs without taking my shoes off and came face-to-face with my mattress, which was propped up vertically against one wall. My bed linen was dumped in a pile, and beside that was my white bedside table, my clock and lamp still on top. Notebooks, a pot of pens, the box of gloves, and the few remaining cleaning things that had been hidden under my bed were all now on the floor next to the bathroom. The sound of the radio and Dad whistling along came from the other side of my closed bedroom door.
“Dad?” I said and I slowly opened the door. My room was unrecognizable. The frame of my bed had been moved to the middle of the room, and dust sheets covered the carpet, my desk, and the bookcase. The Harrington’s Household Solutions cardboard box that Gordon had delivered earlier was empty and sat next to the door. The stench of wet, sodden wallpaper made me want to vomit.
“What are you doing?”
Dad was standing halfway up a stepladder, holding a wallpaper steamer in his left hand. He hadn’t heard me come in, and I stood frozen in the doorway as I watched him press it against my wall. Curled vapors of smoke seeped from the edges.
“Ah, Matthew, there you are! I thought I’d freshen it up in here a bit for you as a surprise! These walls are good; I’ll get this off and then give it a couple of coats of paint tomorrow and it’ll be done.”
He lifted the steamer off and, with his other hand, scraped the paper away in one clean sweep. The yellowing strands fell to the floor in a wet shlump. He moved the steamer down the wall, and it bubbled away again like a boiling kettle.
“Stop it! Stop it, Dad,” I said, but I said it too quietly.
“Mum’s going to make up a bed in the office for you for a couple of nights,” he said loudly over the noises and the radio. “You won’t want to sleep in here with all this mess, eh?”
Behind him I could see the Wallpaper Lion was still there, cowering in his little corner. A line of sweat was seeping through Dad’s T-shirt, making a dark trail down his spine.
“B-but I didn’t want you to decorate. Why are you doing this? IT’S MY ROOM!”
I wondered if I could just push him off the stepladder and put a stop to the whole thing. He scraped off another section, and the paper peeled away like curls of soft butter.
“Don’t be silly, Matthew,” he said without looking at me. “It needs doing. And it’ll be nice and clean then, just how you like it!”
SCRAPE.
Another strand fell to the floor. Behind him the steamer was just inches away from the Wallpaper Lion’s mane. Condensation glistened across the paper and tears streamed out of his drooping eye and down his flat, wide nose. He’d always been there for me, day and night. What would I do without him? I ran to the ladder just as Dad placed the square, plastic steamer over the Wallpaper Lion’s face.
“No! Please! Take it off! TAKE IT OFF!”
He frowned down at me, his arm held still as he waited for the heat to slowly work through the layers of paint. When he turned back to the wall and released his hand, a cloud of steam escaped and, with one swift sweep of the scraper, the Wallpaper Lion was gone. A soggy curl fell down and landed on top of the mound of old paper beside me. I picked it up and desperately tried to unfurl it, but it was falling apart in my hands.
“Matthew, what are you doing? What is the matter with you?”
I began to cry.
“You don’t know what you’ve done! You’ll never, ever know! You’ve killed him, Dad. You’ve killed him!”
I ran from the room with the wet wallpaper in my hand and locked myself in the bathroom. Laying it carefully down on the floor, I pieced it together, sobbing as I tried not to damage it any further. I couldn’t make out any part of him: his mane, his flattened nose, his domed forehead. It all just looked like a slimy mess.
Dad was on the other side of the door, pounding away.
BANG, BANG, BANG!
“Matthew! What’s going on? Come on out and stop being so silly.”
I turned the paper this way and that, trying to work out which way was up. Another piece fell off in my hand.
BANG, BANG, BANG!
“I thought you’d be pleased! You like things clean, don’t you? Make up your bloody mind!”
BANG, BANG, BANG!
And then I saw it, barely visible along the side of the paper: I spotted his eye. His weird, droopy eye, which had watched over me for so long.
“Matthew! Are you listening to me?!”
“I heard you, Dad! Can you leave me to go to the bathroom, please, or is that too much to ask?”
I braced myself for more bangs, but he just huffed and I heard my bedroom door slam shut. I gently tore around the eye and threw the rest of the paper down the toilet, flushing it with my elbow. I carefully put the piece on the windowsill in the corner and hoped it would dry.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered as I washed my hands. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Thirty-seven times I washed my hands. Thirty-seven times. My worst count ever. Dad came back now and then and knocked on the door, but I told him I had an upset stomach and to go away. I heard them both murmuring on the landing and then the sounds of them shifting my mattress into the office. The cupboard door opened and Mum must have got out some clean sheets.
The Wallpaper Lion’s eye curled and crisped as it dried on the windowsill and eventually began to look like the old, yellowing eye I knew so well. I picked up the fragment, not much bigger than my thumbnail, and slipped it into my back pocket.