1984 - Planet eBook

of suffocation.In the room over Mr Charrington’s shop, when they couldget there, Julia and Winston lay side by side on a strippedbed under the open window, naked for the sake of coolness.The rat had never come back, but the bugs had multipliedhideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty orclean, the room was paradise. As soon as they arrived theywould sprinkle everything with pepper bought on the blackmarket, tear off their clothes, and make love with sweatingbodies, then fall asleep and wake to find that the bugs hadrallied and were massing for the counter-attack.Four, five, six—seven times they met during the monthof June. Winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin atall hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it. He hadgrown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided, leaving onlya brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of coughingin the early morning had stopped. The process of lifehad ceased to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulseto make faces at the telescreen or shout curses at the top ofhis voice. Now that they had a secure hiding-place, almost ahome, it did not even seem a hardship that they could onlymeet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. Whatmattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist.To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same asbeing in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past whereextinct animals could walk. Mr Charrington, thought Winston,was another extinct animal. He usually stopped to talkwith Mr Charrington for a few minutes on his way upstairs.The old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors,