The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe Read Free Book Online Page A

PROBLEMS ’.
    In any case she was excited, there was no denying it: for they had just made an important discovery. They had stumbled upon an explanation for something which had been baffling Sarah for the last five years or more. They had discovered, that very morning, that she could not tell the difference between her dreams and her memories of real life.
    ‘Tell me about these dreams,’ Gregory was saying. ‘Tell me how long this has been happening.’
    And so Sarah took a deep breath, and told him.
    ∗
    It had started, she said, when she was fourteen or fifteen years old. She was unhappy at school, had frequent problemsfinishing her homework, and lived in particular fear of her History teacher, one Mr Mountjoy. At the end of one difficult evening, having found herself completely incapable of writing an essay on the causes of the Franco-Prussian War – an essay which she was supposed to read out in class the next day –she had gone to bed in tears, resolved in her desperation either to bunk off school the next morning or to feign illness of some sort. But instead she awoke to an immediate sensation of light-heartedness, with a pristine memory of having written the essay, and having written it, she knew, to a high standard: she could visualize it in her exercise book, four and a half sides long, several crossings-out on page three but otherwise neat and presentable, the title double-underlined in red ink and with even a few footnotes thrown in at the end to give it a scholarly sheen. And it was not until almost half past eleven that same day, the first period after break, when she opened her exercise book just before being called up to address the class, that she discovered that this essay, incredibly, did not exist. That was the conclusion she finally came to, at any rate: at first she thought she must have made some foolish mistake and written it in another book, and she searched frantically through her briefcase, looking at her English, Geography and French books, her panic mounting so visibly and audibly that Mr Mountjoy had to interrupt the current reader in mid-flow and ask what was the matter. She explained that she must have left the essay in her locker and asked permission to go and fetch it: which was granted; but a search of her Maths, German, Physics and Biology books in the unaccustomed silence of the deserted locker-room still failed to produce the vital essay; and then, seized by a bewilderment bordering on hysteria, she had fled the school building altogether and run to the municipal park where, head in hands, she had tried in vain to make sense of this sequence of events and began to wonder seriously, for the first time, whether she was going mad. The essay never turned up and she was put in detention that week (Mr Mountjoy not believing a word of her story):and while everybody else forgot the incident, Sarah did not forget it, and never spoke about it to anyone, even though she went on to experience other, similar misadventures at irregular intervals over the next few years. Once, a few terms later, she had bitterly reproved her best friend Angela for failing to meet her at a prearranged time outside the swimming baths: Angela denied that such a rendezvous had ever been suggested, and the argument led to a rift between them which was never quite healed. There was another occasion, too, when Sarah baffled her family by stopping off at the chemist’s on her way home from school, and bringing back-in response, she insisted, to a specific request from her mother – six tubes of smoker’s toothpaste, ten sachets of pot pourri and at least a year’s supply of suppositories.
    Although too ashamed to admit it even to her closest friends or family, Sarah became convinced that she was the victim of delusions: vivid, uncontrollable flights of the imagination which at first she had no reason to connect with her dreams (since the dreams she could remember usually had little to do with reality, but tended, like