The Dumb House

by John Burnside

  On this occasion, however, we were polite and formal. We discussed the weather. Mrs Olerud served me tea, as she had on my first visit, apologising again that she had no milk, and asking if lemon would do. There was a ritual quality in everything she did, as if she had to perform every action exactly as she had always done. She served tea as if enacting a ceremony, as if she were Japanese; every movement was controlled, every word, no matter how trivial, seemed calculated. It was as if she was afraid of letting something slip, of giving something away. When it came time to fetch Jeremy, she managed to conceal her anxiety, and he was produced from upstairs, like an exhibit in a museum. As on my first visit, he was clean and well-dressed enough, but now he was sleepy, almost groggy, as if he had been drugged. He seemed not to recognise me, and showed no signs of the wildness I had seen in him before. I tried half-heartedly to attract his attention – I knew by now that he understood what I was saying – but he remained withdrawn and, after about ten minutes, his mother led him away. I was mystified. Mrs Olerud appeared to be entirely in control of her strange child, yet she could not quite hide her fear of him. I had seen evidence of a near-animal quality in his behaviour, but that could easily have been the result of loneliness or neglect, and it certainly wasn’t enough to explain her discomfort. Was she afraid the child would harm her in some way? Or was she afraid of what she might do to him?

  When she returned, we sat a while, making small talk. I was beguiled by her beauty, just as I was bored by our conversation. She asked about my interest in what she called ‘speech therapy’ and I explained as well as I could. Occasionally we lapsed into silence and I sat watching her, looking for any sign she might offer, that she remembered the events of the previous day. I knew she did, but she gave nothing away, and after what felt like a respectable time, I left. As before, she stopped me at the door; this time her suggestion that I visit her again was almost casual. I immediately agreed, and we set a date for the following week. I knew she understood that I would come before then, that I would not be able to stay away so long. There was a promise between us, even if nothing was said.

  This pattern established itself over the next several visits. On some days, I would arrive in the morning and find her in a kind of trance, wandering about the house in her floral-patterned gown, or lying on the sofa, as if waiting for me to find her there. Sometimes she had been drinking, but not always. Sometimes the child would be playing in the garden; often he was nowhere to be seen. I would knock at the front door, and she wouldn’t answer; then I would walk around the side of the house and go in through the kitchen, carrying whatever gift I had brought, a bunch of flowers, a box of chocolates, a bottle of wine. The first few times this happened, I tried talking to her, asking where Jeremy was, and if she was all right, but her only response was to wait, silently, while I loosened her belt and slipped back her dressing gown. Her eyes would be closed, but she wasn’t sleeping, and I was certain she was aware of everything that was happening.

  Her body was astonishing. She was always damp, very warm – as if feverish – yet she smelled sweet, and her skin was smooth to the touch, almost incredibly soft. When I kissed her, her mouth would be very wet. Sometimes I would have her on the sofa, in the sitting room, with the back door open and the child somewhere outside. I wondered what he understood, if he knew I was there, if he was watching. Sometimes I would force her on to the floor and take her violently – there was something in her passivity that demanded it – and it gave me pleasure then, to think that the boy might see. I would raise her legs and bend back her knees, so I could pin her down and drive into her. I did whatever I liked: she was always utterly compliant, lying with her face pressed to the floor, sometimes crying out or moaning softly, plaintive, and oddly childlike. Sometimes I had to go looking through the house before I found her. Once, she was lying face down on the bed, and she did not move or make a sound all the time I was there. It was like having sex with a corpse – yet I was certain she was aware of me, and of what I was doing. No matter how I found her, no matter what I did, she never spoke, except to utter those odd little sounds. When I was finished, I left her and went home without a word, with her smell on me, warm and sweet, like a mingling of honey and blood. Every time I went to her house I was excited: I wanted her so violently it was almost painful, and taking her was a mixture of pleasure and exquisite relief.

  Afterwards, though, I would feel slightly disgusted, as if I had been exposed to some kind of contamination, as if I had deliberately allowed myself to be sullied. There were days when I was angry with her, for being so powerless, so available; yet on the other days, when she would be fully-dressed, formal, almost excessively polite, pretending nothing had ever happened between us, I wanted to pull her to the floor and take her by force. I might have had her the day before, there might still be bruises under her clothes, but she acknowledged nothing. We would sit in the living room, drinking tea, then she would fetch Jeremy, and I would offer him little gifts, to win his trust, to break through his suspicion, though by now I was only going through the motions. The child accepted the bribes, but he gave no sign that he recognised the giver. Mrs Olerud – I always called her Mrs Olerud, never Karen, though I knew that was her name – would encourage him, trying to make him open up, as if I were a doctor, or an expert of some kind, come to administer a cure. If anything, this assistance was counterproductive: Jeremy seemed to regard her with as much suspicion as he showed me. He was never badly behaved. He came when he was called, and stood stock-still while I talked to him; he ate the sweets I brought him, one after another, though with no sign of pleasure. He wasn’t really there; perhaps he was nothing more than the alert animal he seemed, at home in the wet undergrowth of the garden, like some wolf child. He was fascinating to watch, in his state of limbo, utterly incommunicado, but I knew, no matter what I did, I would never understand him. I kept going back, but not to see him. I wanted those mornings when Karen Olerud was lost in her trance, naked under her dressing gown, waiting for me, or for some imagined other, whose place I was assuming, briefly, without acknowledgement.

  Certain rules were understood. As soon as I had finished with her, I knew I had to go. I would dress quickly and leave the way I had come, without a backward glance. I knew I should not talk to her, as if she were a sleepwalker who must not be wakened. I could do anything I wanted, as long as I did not talk. I also knew that it was part of her game that I must never speak about or show any sign of remembering what happened between us on the trance days. It was a ghost life she had. I was using her, but she was also using me. It was her privilege to invent the rules: they were in place before I even arrived on the scene. I simply followed them. I might have been taking part in a ritual she had evolved with her husband, or some other man she had known; I might have been fulfilling a fantasy she had built up, over years of isolation. At the time, I didn’t care. In spite of everything, in spite of the moments of self-disgust I felt, when I drove home with her smell on me, I wanted her.

  One afternoon, I found her naked on her bed. She had been drinking; she did not move when I lay down beside her; she did not respond when I began moving inside her, and I became more and more excited. Her passivity enraged me at such moments. I was convinced she knew I was there, and I was trying to provoke her, to make her acknowledge me, but nothing I did made any difference – she lay still, silent, motionless.

  Finally I must have fallen asleep beside her, though only for a matter of minutes. When I woke I was aware of a sensation, something like a memory, though it was a memory I couldn’t place: a mingling of warmth and scent and a faint biscuity smell, a feeling of utter detachment, as if nothing could ever matter: nothing that had ever happened, nothing that was happening now, nothing that might happen in the future. But it was more than that. The sensation I was experiencing was more than the sum of its parts. I looked at Karen Olerud and I felt a surge of violence and desire. I wanted to possess her, once and for all; I wanted to split her body open and suck out her essence;
I wanted to drink her, to assume her. She lay with her arms by her side and her legs apart, like a doll that someone had dropped there, as if she couldn’t have moved of her own volition. She seemed to be asleep now. I moved over to her, and slipped my hand between her legs. She was still wet. I raised the hand to my face and sniffed; the smell was so sweet, so unlike any other, and I was certain, if I could have peeled away the surface she would smell like that inside, everywhere I touched and tasted. I parted her legs and moved inside her. I wanted to have sex with her one last time, then, as I was coming, I would cover her face with the pillow and hold it down, feeling her struggle for life then give up and fade away, while I moved inside her. I felt certain that, if I did so, something would be released, something I could take into myself.

  She was still sleeping. As I raised the pillow, she stirred and turned her head; at the same time, I became aware of a noise, like someone banging softly and repetitively somewhere in the house. It was a moment before I came to my senses. I wanted to go on moving, to finish what I had started, but I was afraid Mrs Olerud would wake up, or Jeremy would come running into the room and find us. I hadn’t seen him earlier, when I’d sneaked in through the back door. I had assumed he was outside, playing in the garden, crouched under a shrub or crawling through the weeds along the fence, hunting for mice. Now he must have come inside. The bedroom door was still open – perhaps he had climbed the stairs and seen us, naked on his mother’s bed. Perhaps he had hurt himself and was trying to attract attention, lying in the hallway with both legs broken, banging his hand against the baluster.

  As I dressed, the noise stopped. I walked to the far end of the landing, the child’s door was open, but the room was empty. Then, after a moment, the banging began again, a little louder than before. It was coming from downstairs, from the kitchen. I hurried down.

  Jeremy was sitting on the floor, surrounded by food – sliced bread, bright puddles of orange juice, cuts of meat oozing water and thin blood. The fridge was open; it appeared that he had just sat down and pulled out everything he could reach, scattering it around him, rolling bottles across the floor, letting the cartons burst as they fell. It was warm, and the fridge had already begun to defrost; I could see fish on a willow-pattern plate, in a pool of rimy water, splashes of yoghurt, trickles of thaw on the bottles and jars. Now he was banging a tub of margarine on the wet lino, splashing milk and fruit juice and meltwater all over his face and clothes.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said.

  He looked up at me. His face was a blur of grease and blood, and I realised he had been eating raw food off the floor, gouging out handfuls of butter and meat from their containers, lapping up the spilt milk.

  ‘You were hungry,’ I said, more to myself than to him.

  He made a soft snuffling noise, and pointed at the midden on the floor. He looked like an animal. Once again, I was struck by the thought that he didn’t belong in a house. He should have been kept out of doors, digging for grubs and worms in the shrubbery, sucking the matter out of birds’ eggs. At the very least, he should have been kept in a pen, in one of those wire runs for rabbits and chickens.

  I watched, as he lowered his face and began lapping up orange juice from a puddle on the lino, and it occurred to me, then, that the boy was acting: he knew exactly what he was doing, and he was doing it for effect, just as his mother knew what she was doing, when she sat naked in her bedroom, swigging gin and waiting for me to arrive. Now, all of a sudden, I was tired of these games. I was tired of the child, and of his comatose mother; I was tired of the ornaments, the silver frames, the floral dressing gown. I was tired of the whole affair. I turned to go and that was when I saw the knife, the smallest glimmer at the edge of my vision, an apparition of silver through the litter of broken eggs and bloodstains. The boy almost caught me with it, slashing at my leg with a sudden, neat swing of the arm. I managed to twist away and turn, as he came again, reaching out, snatching his hand in mid-air, more by luck than by judgement. For a moment I looked at his face in surprise; I expected a signal of some kind, a flicker at least of anger or hatred, but there was nothing. I held on to his hand as I twisted the knife loose and let it fall. The child’s face was empty: there was nothing there, no fear in his eyes, just as there had been no anger. He simply gazed at me, coldly, and I knew his attempt to cut me had been a deliberate, calculated act. I held him tightly, locking his forearm in my fist.

  I remembered all the times he had stood watching me, while I talked to him, or offered him sweets; watching me, like some animal from the woods, puzzled by the very fact of my existence. I realised then that he had been watching me all along: even when I hadn’t seen him, he’d been there. He must have felt betrayed when he’d seen his mother pull me down on to the sofa, when he’d seen us disappear into her room. He must have listened to her little cries and whimpers and wondered what I was doing to her, and now he was trying to take his revenge. He hadn’t lost his head for a moment; he had worked out a plan of sorts and set a trap for me. I smiled.

  ‘You’re quite clever, really,’ I said. ‘You’re not as stupid as you pretend.’

  He watched me. I think I saw a flicker of contempt then, as if he had guessed what I was going to do before I even knew myself. If he had, he still wasn’t afraid: he kept his eyes fixed on my face as I took his thumb in my left hand and, with an effort I found quite exhilarating, twisted it back and felt it snap.

  His face showed the pain, but he made no sound. He didn’t cry out, he didn’t even struggle, he only whimpered a little, towards the end, as I broke each finger in turn, gripping his arm tightly and holding him up as he began to slump, his face white as death, his eyes glazed, his legs giving way beneath him, as if he were suffering from vertigo. When I had finished I let him fall, and he lay still in the puddles of orange juice and egg yolk. I believe he must have fainted. I stood over him, listening: there was no sound from upstairs, no sound except his breathing. For a moment I was dizzy with the sheer immediacy of it all – the sweet-sickly smell, the boy’s gold hair, his broken fingers, the thought of the woman upstairs, still sleeping, warm and damp and vulnerable. The thought passed through my head that I might go back up and finish what I had begun, but I pulled myself together and left, slipping out the back way as always, moving invisibly through the garden and out into the gathering darkness.

  I got home just after sunrise. I had been driving around for hours; now the light was like silt on the walls, building up then shifting softly, forming slowly then crumbling away. The garden was still, but I could smell urine at the edge of the lawn, where a fox had come in through a gap in the wall. The shadows were deep, black and substantial, like blankets stacked under the pear trees and cotoneasters; the sun was already bright, but these dark patches would stay for hours, like trapdoors into a night that would never wholly dissolve, some limbo that was cold and damp and incomprehensible. I opened the back door and paused as something fluttered away – only a leaf, and not what it might have been, not the ghost I hoped for every time I returned. I passed on through the hall and into the kitchen, looking for a sign of that otherlife the house contained whenever I was away, but all I found was the table spotted with crumbs and the cups and plates stacked on the draining board, just as I’d left them. Sometimes, coming home in the early morning like this, I’d imagine things had altered while I was absent: a knife on the bread board that I didn’t remember leaving out, a book face down on the table, a cup brimming with tea and dishwater in the sink. The evidence I wanted didn’t need to be too elaborate or detailed. I could have constructed an entire afterlife from a half-moon of lemon rind or a small blister of jam on the tablecloth. It would have taken so little to convince me that Mother was still in the house; that, even if I could never see her, she resumed possession of this space when I was gone, fingering the spines of her favourite books in the library, or sitting in the conservatory, drinking tea in the dawn light, the way she’d always done when she couldn’t sleep. In spite of her death, in
spite of the fact that I can never find evidence of her continued presence, Mother is still the only person who is completely real for me. In life she had been bound to the fabric of the house, wearing into it, taking on the same colours and textures, like those prints on the walls and the curtains she’d hung years before as a young bride, fading imperceptibly in the sunlight, becoming subtler, assuming an evenness of tone, a homogeneous quality.

  I made a pot of coffee. I couldn’t eat, and I felt anxious, as if there was something I’d missed, something important that I’d failed to take into account. I was trying to work out what it was, to pin it down – I was sure it had something to do with the boy – but instead of finding an answer, I kept returning to an image I had, something to do with a mouse, something to do with the kitchen, the early morning, the first sunlight. It took a while for the memory to form, then it became clear, though I couldn’t see the connection with what had just happened. It had been years ago, when I was about eight or nine. It was just after breakfast; I must have been ill, or maybe it was just one of those days when Mother decided I didn’t need to go to school, that she would set me some work herself. She had taken my things away and I was trying to read. I liked to sit at the dining room table to study, rather than the big desk in the library, where I couldn’t see the garden. The books Mother gave me were difficult: she always set me tasks that were too advanced for my age, partly because she overestimated my ability, partly because she felt I needed to be pushed and challenged in order to grow. It was typical of her tangential generosity, this refusal to believe that I might be stumped and give up, and she was often right: no matter how difficult it was, I usually learned something new. It was a good feeling, sometimes, sitting at the wide table, bent to my studies, half-aware of something that began to materialise in the room whenever my attention was focused elsewhere, a form composed of scent and shadows, a presence I came to expect, created from the smells of cake and upholstery, from the spices on the kitchen shelves and the faint must of aspergillus in the books that had stood on the library shelves for years. This familiar of the house was elusive and mysterious, even a little sinister in the way it waited till everyone was occupied before it emerged, half-formed, into the light. As soon as I looked up, it would disappear, explaining itself away as it went. I would keep my head down, and try to become half-aware of it, without giving it my full attention, the way you try to look at something at the edge of your vision, knowing it will vanish if you focus. I liked knowing it was there. I liked having a secret and I liked the way it changed everything, how it revealed new details in the books I was reading: the skeletal diagrams of birds’ wings and lizards, the names of polyhedrons and angles and the ages of geological time combined to form a vague text-book mass, part-algebra, part-taxonomy, that loomed in my dreams whenever I fell asleep in the chair then woke again, only minutes later.