The Dumb House

by John Burnside

  Not that I was ever disrespectful. When he asked me to take a walk with him, I always assented readily, and we would go out, pretending there was some purpose to our excursion. Usually, he would ask me to go fishing. He had no idea of how fishing was done, but he must have thought it was appropriate, the sort of thing fathers do with their sons. We would carry our rods and baskets to the river, then sit on the bank in silence, watching the water flow over the dark weeds. I was certain the place we usually chose was wholly unsuitable. I never saw a fish there, in all our visits.

  We would spend a couple of hours like that, then we would gather up our equipment and turn for home. I think my father enjoyed being near the water. It set him at his ease and, on the way back, he would seem more relaxed; he would make efforts at conversation, asking me questions about school, or what books or music I liked. I would answer as well as I could; I think I wanted to be friendly, but the questions were too simple, too closed. Then, as the conversation petered out, he would fall back on his favourite stand-by, which was to ask if there was anything I wanted, anything I needed. To begin with, I must have thought these questions were nothing more than conversational gambits, and I told him I was fine, there was nothing I could think of. Eventually, when I saw how disappointed he was with this reply, I began naming things, just to keep him happy, and perhaps also to see what would happen. I was surprised to begin with, then later, slightly irritated by the fact that he always remembered what I had asked for. Inevitably, the requested item would arrive: without ceremony, it would appear in the hall, or on the table in the breakfast room. There would be no gift wrap, no tags or ribbons, nothing to say who had sent it. Most often, these gifts were delivered to the house, and usually when my father was away. Mother must have been aware of the parcels, but she made no comment. It was as if they had been delivered to us by accident.

  In a spirit of loyalty, I tried to ignore them, too; but I have to admit there were times when I was pleased. My father’s interpretation of even my vaguest request would be uncanny. No matter what I asked him for – a bicycle, a new violin, a tennis racquet, a fountain pen – no matter what it was, it would always be the size, the style, the colour I would have chosen. Yet I never felt these objects were gifts as such, because I never felt they were entirely mine. I used them the way I would have used something borrowed, taking care of them the way you might care for something that, sooner or later, would have to be returned. Occasionally I asked for things I didn’t really want, to see what he would do. Yet still, no matter what it was, he only chose the best, and I would be embarrassed, as if I had been caught out in a mean practical joke. Sometimes I even forgot what I had asked for. I would just say the first thing that came to mind, to give him something to think about as we made our way home across the meadow. But he always remembered. Whatever I requested would appear, in its plain packaging, like a bundle of exotic flotsam, washed up on the doorstep. Most of the time, he wasn’t there for me to thank him. I think he arranged it that way, to avoid any difficulty. Looking back, in spite of his seeming collaboration with our regime, I see that he was secretly and perversely trying to find some way into the world I shared with Mother, and these gifts were his crude attempts to win my confidence. I feel sorry for him now, in retrospect. He must have been lonely; it must have pained him to know he was little more than a stranger to us, someone we treated with courtesy, but whom we regarded, essentially, as a guest in our house.

  Nevertheless, I felt guilty sometimes, when the parcels arrived and I stripped them open to find some expensive object that I couldn’t use, glittering in the morning light. Occasionally I would go to the river alone and stay there all day, as if paying a forfeit, or enduring some kind of penance. The river seemed different when I was by myself: it was a mysterious place, whose strangeness I was interrupting. Sometimes I took my rod and pretended to fish, for my father’s sake. I wanted to tell him I had been out there while he was away, carrying on where we had left off. Sometimes I even convinced myself that I would catch a fish. It would have been good to have something to show him on his return. Most of the time, though, I just took off my shoes and socks and waded out into the cold, quick water, to feel the long streams of riverweed against my shins. My feet would be chilled to the bone, but I still felt the current on my skin, and I would stand for as long as I could, letting the cold sink in, trying to become another element of the river, as natural, as neutral, as the silt and the water. I looked for fish, but I never saw any. I remembered a story Mother had told me once, about an ancient water spirit who lived amongst the weeds in dark ponds and rivers. The spirit was called Jenny Greenteeth, and I suppose, in the book, it was meant to be a woman, but I imagined it as a near-hermaphrodite, part-woman, part-man, part-fish, something wired into the sway of the water, aware of the least flicker or ripple. In my mind, it possessed that special fish-sensitivity where even rainfall is a tapping at the spine; it knew the difference between ordinary disturbances of the surface, and the steps of a child, or the tug of a probing stick. In the book, it was shown as a wrinkled, bone-and-hair fiend, surging from the water, its long nails and jagged teeth coated with weed and moss. But on those visits to the river, I would imagine something subtle, almost invisible. Quick as a pike, it would rise to its prey, then disappear into the depths, but there would be no cries, no blood, no immediate horrors. A deceptive calm would return to the river: birds would sing again, the sun would break through the clouds. The victim would be unaware of what had happened. After a while, he would grow bored, and return home, where no one would notice any change. Yet the change would have happened under the surface, behind the appearance of normality. That child would never be the same again. He would grow into something dark and cold, something that belonged to the river. He would see possibilities that others missed, and he would act upon them. People would begin to see him as a monster, but as far as he was concerned, they were nothing more than phantoms. His world was different from theirs. In his world, their thoughts, their actions, their judgements were immaterial.

  In the holidays, when I was home from school, Mother would take me out looking for corpses. To begin with, it was her idea: she wanted me to see how things looked when they were dead, and she got me to come by making a game of it, an odd form of hide and seek. She said every animal had a place of its own where it would go to die if it could; wild animals wanted to be alone when they were sick or dying, and they would crawl away into the undergrowth, to be out of the light and the wind. The only dead things I had seen until then were pheasants and hedgehogs on the road to the village, but Mother had a gift for knowing where to look: animals I had only ever encountered in books became real as corpses, life-size, as it were, with hard claws and tiny, blood-threaded teeth, flesh I could prod and turn, fur I could stroke, disturbing the flies, drawing the cold or the warmth of decay through the palm of my hand. As we searched for fresh bodies, we would revisit the sites of earlier finds. There was always something new to see, something strangely beautiful – not only in summer, when the bodies imploded slowly and the smell was dark and sickly, but also in autumn and winter, when they lay for weeks, cold and untarnished, frozen voles laid out on the grass, small birds lying under the hedges with their legs stretched, their eyes clenched and wrinkled. It was odd, but as I followed the process of decay, there seemed to be something curative in it all, as if the animal was being renewed, or purified, leaching away in the rain, drying in the sun, vanishing slowly, leaving behind only a faint yellowish aftermath in the grass, in which form was implicit, with a half-life of its own.

  After a while, I started going out on these hunts alone. At some level, at the level of an undercurrent, I had begun to think it might be possible to be incorporated into this process in some way; or rather, I began to form a primitive, superstitious notion that I could make it work for my own purposes, propitiating it with small offerings, vague gestures of rehearsal and assent. At school we performed an experiment with moulds, sealing a piece of moistened bread in
ajar and leaving it in a warm place to see the lime-green and ochre life-forms growing on the surface, and I repeated this experiment at home, unscrewing the lid of the jar each day for the sweet perfume of new life arising from decay, probing the black and silvery hairs, watching them blossom and collapse in their hundreds. I varied the contents of the jar: lemon rind, scraps of meat, cabbage leaves, egg-yolk – everything had its own way of becoming something new, and I made my own private catalogue of implosions and seepages, ergots and mildews, sickening odours, twitches, vanishings. One afternoon I loosened a tangle of hair from Mother’s brush, wrapped it in tissue paper and buried it out in the garden amongst her irises, so the freshening rain could wear it down and make it new, irresistibly, in the cold earth. That same year I began to collect the skulls and bones of the animals I found, laying them out on beds of sawdust in old shoe boxes, giving each its own label to show the date and place where it had been found. I think even then I knew what I was doing, but at the same time it had the quality of a game – as if I were preventing myself from fully understanding that these rituals, these clumsy flirtations with death and renewal, were really my childish attempts to prevent Mother from dying. I remember that there was an afternoon, around that time, when it first came home to me that she was mortal. Of course, I must have known before then that she would die, but there had never been real understanding, the idea of her death had always been vague, lacking in intimacy.

  I think there are places in the mind where nothing changes: a garden shed, the space beneath a bridge, the urine-scented steps to an old air-raid shelter littered with rags and broken glass. It may be that what happened in those places are the moments you would choose to remember clearly if you could, the scenes you erase without knowing you have erased them, the events that populate your dreams in muted form, which you abandon in waking, a deliberate yet poignant loss. If only you could remember, something would be whole again; even if the memory was difficult to accept, it would be better than the not-knowing which has defined and limited you for years, making you weak and irresolute, a creature attuned to fear, incapable of fully assenting to your own life. This is a psychologist’s cliché, and yet I accept it, almost unconditionally. I have no clear idea of what happened to me, one summer’s day, out hunting in the grass. I picture a man in a grubby business suit, strangely out of place amongst the cow parsley and wild geraniums. I picture him taking hold of me, pressing me to a fence, and fumbling at my groin – but this is all there is for sure, an imagined act, no more convincing or immediate than a scene from a book or a film. I have one clear memory of an overwhelming powerlessness, of being unable to move, or struggle free. As far as I recall, he did not speak: whatever it was that happened, took place in silence. Then I remember running home across the meadow – and this memory is perfectly clear – I remember finding the door to our walled garden locked and thinking it was part of a conspiracy, thinking someone inside the walls was in league with the man who had caught me out there. I shouted and hammered desperately at the locked door until Mother came and opened it. She stood looking at me quizzically, with her secateurs in her hand, slightly mocking, as if she wanted me to understand, of my own accord, that I was making a fuss about nothing.

  ‘What is it?’ she said, after a moment. ‘You’re all dirty.’

  ‘The gate was locked.’

  ‘Well, there’s no need to get upset. You only had to knock.’

  ‘I was locked out,’ I repeated. I could hear how loud my voice was, how unacceptably vehement.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Go and get cleaned up,’ she said. ‘You look like something the cat dragged in.’

  She didn’t seriously enquire as to what had happened and I think, even then, I was already beginning to erase what it was from my mind, forgetting for her sake, as much as my own. She looked so clean, so untouchable, yet at the heart of that perfection there was something soft, something she preserved by an effort, as the shellfish preserves its soft white body, by continually renewing its shell. It was then that I first understood how vulnerable she was, and I felt sorry for her, as if I had caught her out, not so much in a lie as in a pitiful act of self-deception.

  For months afterwards I was afraid she would become ill and die. I watched her carefully for symptoms: if she fell asleep in the evening, sitting in her chair, a book or a garden magazine sliding to the floor as she drifted away, I woke her immediately. At night I would stand outside her bedroom, to hear if she was still breathing. In the daytime, when I was at school, I carried a pair of her gloves in my coat pocket, taking them out from time to time to make sure I still had them. It was one of those games children play to cheat fate – if I lost the gloves, Mother would die, but as long as I kept them, she would be invulnerable. In addition to these rituals of deceit and propitiation, I gave myself the task of listing by name all the flowers in her garden: first the irises, which she prized more than the others, then the lilies, the pinks, the roses, the shrubs and climbers, the fruit trees trained against the walls. When that was finished I moved on to something else, compiling lists of scientific terms and place names in special notebooks that I kept hidden under my bed, alongside the shoe boxes full of animal skulls.

  Perhaps my anxiety was justified. For some reason, that was a year of surprising and unexplained deaths. During the spring term alone, three children in my school were buried. It was strange to know people who were dead: I remember feeling their ghosts around me, buttoned-up and freshly combed, ghosts of the daylight, coming home from school in raincoats and fur-lined boots, mysterious for having failed to live that far: Alana Fuller, who died in her bed one night, tucked-up and quiet; Stuart Gow, run over in the street in front of the whole school at home-time; a Polish boy whose name I forget, who died from the injuries inflicted by his father one night in a drunken rage. Then there were the strangers: the men who died in a mining accident; the little unidentified boy who was found strangled and half-naked in a ditch on the road to Weston. The one that fascinated me most was the death of a woman who lived on the other side of the village. When they broke into her house, they found her decaying under a veil of blowflies. She had been there for days, as still as her strange keepsakes: the box of hair in the tallboy, the Indian miniatures, the bedside drawer full of confetti and flakes of paper snow. I remember thinking how wonderful it would have been, to walk into that room and find her there, with her whole life gathered around her.

  But Mother did not die, not that year. Some time in the autumn, though, she became ill. The doctor was called, and I started making my lists in Latin rather than English, because Latin gave me a sense of time as intimate and continuous, all history only a moment away, something I could see from my own house: a movement in the fields beyond our garden walls, a soft, deep sound, like damsons falling in the dark, falling continually and melting into the wet grass. There was nothing mystical about the world as I experienced it; there was no supernatural, but there was something mysterious there, a force that could be recognised, and with which I felt I could negotiate. That was how Latin operated. It dispelled the idea of the supernatural, but it retained the sense of the mysterious; it defined and classified, but it did not limit. Perhaps the strategy worked: though she was ill for several weeks, Mother recovered, and life went on as before.

  Later, when she did die, I found myself repeating those rituals, to no real end, other than to resurrect the past. In the evenings, when it was cool, I would go out alone, poking among the nettles and balsam along the riverbank, crossing the meadow where the owls hunt, but I had less success than I had when Mother was with me. Most of the time, I just went out for the sensation of being in the open, touched by the wind, feeling my body cool after the day’s warmth. On other days I would drive out to the graveyard and look at Mother’s headstone. When she first died, I still felt that she was close: the house contained her perfume and the other scents and textures I associated with her, honey, steamed fruits, various powders. Even as I added to this web of
smell and colour, I was still the keeper of her ghost; nothing I did replaced any part of that phantom’s complex presence. It was as if she was still there, on the air. But later she grew remote and I began to feel it was the stone that had caused the change – as if by setting in place this permanent marker to her life I was actually erasing it forever, letting her slip away to the dry, limitless space of the fairy stories she used to tell.

  I have no clear memory of the moment when the idea for the experiment came to me. It was written into my mind from the start, as much a part of me as the love I bore for Mother, as much a piece of my soul as her scent or the sound of her voice, reaching back through my existence to a point before memory, to the very origin of being. If I had to explain it, I would say this: I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew what I was expected to do – by other people, by myself, it didn’t matter. Every time I found myself making decisions, it was because I had to reconcile the two – the desire and the expectation – and the desire always won. It’s laughable, looking back, to see the processes I went through, pretending to make a reasoned decision. No choice is ever made on the basis of logic; the logic is fabricated around the impulse, the initial desire which is innate and incontrovertible. All the time, I knew where I was going, the elements of my fulfilment or ruin were always present; I only had to work my way into that seam of desire and find the hidden vein of dross or gold. It’s not a question of predestination, it’s just that free will and destiny are illusions, false opposites, consolations. In the end, they are one and the same: a single process. You choose what you choose and it could not have been otherwise: the choice is destiny. It was there all along, but any alternative you might have considered is an absurd diversion, because it is in your nature to make one choice rather than another. That is identity. To speak of freedom or destiny is absurd because it suggests there is something outside yourself, directing your life, where really it is of the essence: identity, the craftwork of the soul.