Free The Beast by Hugh Fleetwood Page B

exist, there was nothing pathological about her condition. After all, she could and did go out sometimes, when it was absolutely essential—there were some things she couldn’t bring herself to ask even her father to buy—and it didn’t cause her any great shock or distress. Rather the contrary, in fact; that slight fear of drowning, and sense of joy that she always got as she made the effort to open the door, stayed with her the whole time she was outside, and made her return home feelingquite light-headed and flushed. So much so that she was sometimes tempted to go out more often. But then, she argued with herself, if outside wasn’t real, nor could the feeling it induced in her be real. It was simply the feeling that anyone who finds him or herself in an unreal situation must have, and while it was, or could be, pleasurable, it wasn’t a genuine pleasure, such as staying home gave her. Perhaps, she thought, it was simply the illusion of pleasure. And it was foolish, if not sinful, to indulge in the mere illusion of pleasure.
    And so, at the age of twenty-seven, she had stayed home almost every day of the year, cleaning, cooking, sewing, watching television, looking at the view from the windows—looking at it as other people might look at the mere painting of a landscape—and above all, reading books; which were, as far as she was concerned, the highest form of reality in the world.
    But then something disturbing had happened. She began to feel that the unreality of the outside world was coming inside, too. The furniture in the apartment, the shiny marble floor—they began to be infected, as if by a disease. They were becoming illusions. And then the television, and the programmes on it. And then the words that she and her father exchanged.
    It was at this point that she began to get frightened; because she foresaw the day when everything, including her books, her father, and ultimately herself, was going to become illusion. And that, she realized, would no longer be simply absurd and inexplicable; it would, in fact, be madness. And while she was quite certain that she could live and carry on quite normally even if she were thus mad—just as she was able to go out and function in the outside world—she was equally certain that she didn’t wantto live in an entirely unreal world. She wanted to have some rock to cling to; some home of reality, where she could rest and be secure. But where was such a home, such an island in the rising sea? She didn’t know—but she knew she had to find it, turn back the waters, and save the little she had left from destruction.
    It had taken two whole months to find, two months in which the infection from outside had, as she had feared, already destroyed her father and her books, and was starting to be visible on her own plump white hands when she looked at them carefully; they seemed to shudder under her eyes as the first germs of illusion invaded them. And she had found it in the most curious way. It was a Tuesday evening; her father, as usual, was out playing cards. She was sitting in the living room, trying not to look at her hands, and wishing that she could watch the television. But in the last few days it had thrown her into a panic, to see those grey ghosts on the glass screen, gibbering in a ghost language that strangely she understood; and while, of course, she hadn’t said anything to her father, now that he was out she wasn’t going to subject herself to any unnecessary torment. So after a while, she decided that she would try and find some music on the radio. She got up, went into the kitchen, and picked up the small black plastic set. And then, standing there with it in her hands, she began to think about something else: about what she was going to make for lunch tomorrow, or dinner, or about the weather. And as she thought, without really being conscious of doing so, she turned on the radio and aimlessly swivelled the knob that changed the stations. She must have