The Book of Other People

The Monster by Toby Litt

The monster didn’t know what it was – what kind of monster or even, now and again, whether a monster at all. It had lived for what felt like a long time without mirrors, which didn’t exist, or puddles, which it instinctively avoided. There were other monsters in creation, or the monster assumed they were other monsters (it did not philosophize on the nature of monstrosity – all could be monsters, without a norm from which to deviate), and, had it asked them, these other monsters would probably have described it to itself, using the few words and concepts available to them: monster, creation, sun, tree, fruit, merd, good, bad, up and down. But the monster was for some reason averse to this, just as it was averse to puddles, and had only learnt of the practice by overhearing one monster being described by another. The sentence it overheard was: ‘Monster up up good fruit, down down bad merd.’ And so the monster had always found out most about itself by touch. There were two soft floppy growths upon each side of its head, and its long curved back felt rough at the bottom, like the skin of a fruit. The monster couldn’t see its own feet because its belly, which was huge, got in the way. Every time the monster explored itself, though, its hands (it definitely had hands) seemed to encounter something different. With no written language, it was impossible for the monster to record these changes or the supposed status quo which had preceded them. For example, the monster had a vague sense that, sometime in the distant past, it had either been smaller or had walked upon four legs rather than two. It didn’t have a very good memory, but it was disturbed by the thought that once upon a time it had had to look up at things which now it looked down at, yes, and it had had to stretch on tiptoes to reach things which were now at eye level. Most of these things observed and grabbed were fruit, fruit on trees, and of course trees grew, too – as the monster rediscovered countless times. But not everything in creation grew at the same rate, as the monster had rediscovered more rarely. The monster tended to conclude that one of the best explanations for its sense of bigness was that it was growing faster than the rest of creation. Also, the memory of walking upon all fours could be deceptive: if the monster wanted to, it could still do this – just as, when tired, it would lower itself down until its back was flat on the ground. Because of the size of its belly, the monster could lie in no other position but this. Again because of the belly, the monster had only an intimation of what sex it was – and this it gained socially, from the kinds of monster which most commonly approached it with what seemed to be sexual intent, meaning an intent to sexually describe. ‘Up up good fruit down down good good sun creation fruit.’ Our monster, however, was not interested in pleasure or reproduction – it was put off the latter by its doubt as to its own nature, the former by its misery. At night, it slept – under the stars, there were many stars in creation, and its dreams were frequently of absolute certainty of being. I am this thing. This thing is me. Waking, the fact of waking and the quality of it, was invariably a disappointment. Despite its morning rage, the monster was almost always gentle with the world of creation. It had never killed anything, and if it had harmed anything, that harm had been done accidentally (except, that is, harm the monster had done to itself). It knew of the quality of good and constantly aspired towards it. And it was this sense, rather than a visual image of beauty or handsomeness, that the monster thought of as its true parentage. Someone had taught the monster not to be unnecessarily cruel, and that was mother, someone had warned it never to be unwarrantedly proud, and that was father. Whatever kinds of creation they had been, the monster’s memory had finally failed any longer to remember them. Perhaps this was because the monster had lived so many days and nights. Among all the things it monstrously lacked, an accurate sense of time was the most disturbing. It knew there were days and, halfway through the days, it believed there were nights. Just after waking, it knew that the time of dreaming had passed in a different way to the time it was now in; just before sleeping, it felt joy: something was about to change and for the better. One definite experience was pain. When our monster hit its head against a tree, by accident or at full force, it knew for certain it had done it. The sharp stab at first and the dull ache afterwards helped it locate parts of its body in relation to one another. The monster wondered whether this behaviour, being cruel to itself and proud of its badness, was bad behaviour. For periods, the monster gave it up – but then it came to an indistinguished lump of time, usually during the middle of the day, and its desire for certain knowledge grew into an unbearable anguish. If the monster could have been content with the pain of anguish rather than the pain of pain, perhaps it could have been content in all areas of its life – though this thought was beyond it. The monster wandered around the areas of creation it knew best, aware that certain features were identities: trees were always different or the plural was a lie; in other words, there was only a single tree which was sometimes close to, sometimes far away from, where the monster had slept, or there were multiple trees but placed so far apart that they were not visible, one to the other, and by the time the monster had walked far enough away from one tree to find another, it had forgotten the memorized features of the first, and so was able to make a comparison. On the tree or trees were fruit, which were tastily colourful – the monster reached in the morning to touch their brightness, then found itself with half of one in its mouth. Eating had been reinvented, yet again – and the monster knew it was something that had happened before. It knew this because the action felt, like mother, both comfortable and comforting; the sensation of chewing seemed repetitive and, thus, repeated from before. This was probably, apart from the moments just after a headbash, when our monster came closest to happiness. Excretion, too, unexpectedly occurred. But, being a business of the unseen nether regions, beneath the belly, the monster wasn’t all that involved with it. Just as the fruits were bright, off the ground and attractive, so the merds were dull, underfoot and repellent. Whether by instinct or not, the monster only deposited them at some little distance from the tree or the nearest tree. And when the slight straining was done, which took care of itself, the monster would walk away – usually without looking. Again, because of the belly, if the monster did become curious about its merds, it couldn’t examine them from close up – not from above, anyway. The monster could have lain down and rolled towards the dull round smelly objects, but, before it ever did this, a feeling overcame it that nothing dull and smelly was worth the effort of rolling towards. Round objects, the monster had no objection to – and in the case of fruit was actively attracted towards. In hope, sometimes, the monster thought of its belly as a big round fruit. But just as often, in despair, the belly’s roundness was that of a merd. It, the belly, was where merds came from, after all – though the monster was capable of forgetting this. The trees were also possessed of leaves. If these taught the monster any lesson, it was one of uselessness – and use. By mistake, the monster sometimes ate some leaf along with the fruit. It wasn’t a bad taste, not proud or cruel like a monster could be, but it was useless. The monster spat them out, away from the tree, towards the merds. When the leaves became useful was when the sun overhead became too hot. This was when the cool beside the tree-trunk was the only good place. Several monsters would gather. ‘Down tree down sun good.’ The leaves were also useful when it rained and made puddles. Then, they stopped the monster becoming too cold. One day, the monster set off to – but no, there was to be no quest for true identity, no storing up of fruit for the long journey into the away-from-this-tree self. No. One day, one day of that sort, would never come. One day, instead, would continue to be one day – one day very like the day before and almost indistinguishable from the day after. The monster had no story, unless being a monster is story enough.