How much is fiction and how much is true? There can be no objective truth about our memories, so perhaps it is idle to even attempt the distinction. We are the sum of our pasts, it is true: we are altogether composed of memories: but a memory is a chancy thing, experience experienced, filtered coarse or fine according to the mood of the day, the pattern of the times, the company we happen to be keeping: the way we shrink from certain events or open our arms to embrace them.
Was my mother in a strait-jacket, a real tangible, canvas strait-jacket, or is this merely how I envisage her? Do I pinion her in fact as she was pinioned in her mind, prevented by circumstance and her own nature from stretching her soul and encompassing Hypatia and myself in the warmth of unconditional love? Did Hypatia really stand Audrey Denver on her head to shake the rat-thoughts out of her brain? Of course not. But she stood me on mine, metaphorically, often enough, until I doubted the truth of my own perceptions.
It is all over now: it lives only in my mind. Dead and gone, as is the reality of my mother, and Hypatia, and as I fear if things go on like this, shall be my own reality. My whole foot is swollen now: if I look closely I can see a puncture on the shiny red skin near the outer edge of the nail of my big toe. This, I imagine, is where the infection entered. I should ask for help. People do help, I tell myself. Miss Leonard helped – and see where it landed her.
Mind you, it is pleasanter to help the young than the old. The young need crutches for a time, and then throw them away, going boldly forward of their own volition. Give the old crutches, and they use them for ever, complaining of their poor quality the while.
But that is not the real reason for my hesitation: why I continue to sit here, in pain and frightened, instead of crawling out of the door and into the street, and demanding help, charity and release from passers-by.
No.
It seems to me that the wall between my own reality and theirs is so high, so formidable, as to preclude any waving or smiling over the top: let alone the touching of hands or the healing of minds: certainly not the actual calling of an ambulance. Other peoples’ realities are non-existent: they vanish to the touch; like my own past, they are the sorry projection of a drifting imagination. My mind may leap ahead to practical action, envisaging this course or that: my body, knowing better, simply stays where it is, and waits for the end. It prefers death. It really does.
I am alone in the reality I have created for myself. In my mind I invented old age, illness, grief, and now I am stuck with them, and serve me right.