The Dumb House

by John Burnside

  It was a bright, snowlit day, warm in the sun, icy in the shadows. I took the path through Trinity churchyard: there was no sign of Jimmy or his friends. I stopped a while and walked between the headstones, brushing packed ice from the holly shrubs and watching it fall. I remembered how glad I was, as a child, when winter came, when the air was crisp and the puddles froze along our lane. I felt just as I had then, and I realised I was happier than I had ever been since Mother died. My body felt solid and real, like something made of glass or metal. I felt having Lillian in the house had something to do with that sensation of well-being, of total physical integrity, and I wanted to buy her something special.

  There is such a simple and clean pleasure in shopping for inessentials: you decide what you want, from amongst marvellous hordes of possible alternatives, then you pay for it. Nothing is out of reach, nothing exists that cannot be possessed. Then, when the purchase is complete, the object feels strange, exotic, almost uncalled for. It’s such an innocent and perfect pleasure, this moment of possession. Some objects are more pleasing than others – things made of glass, for example, things made of silk, or polished wood, whatever is metallic or mineral, anything that relates to water. Best of all are the old-fashioned butchers, or fishmongers, where you can buy whole rabbits or pheasants, or carry home a heavy, bright salmon, fresh from the sea, the light still glittering in its eyes. Or pet shops, with their glass cases full of angelfish or darts; their warm, dark cages, packed tight with the stink of guinea pigs; their blue-green terraria, where snakes and lizards try desperately to blend in with the decor.

  I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary till I was making my way back to the car. I had returned through the churchyard: once again, there was no sign of the vagrants amidst the darkening shrubs, or on the bench by the far gate. I might not have noticed anything at all, if I hadn’t caught sight of a flicker in the hedge, just as I reached the car park. When I looked back, I saw it was only a blackbird, but immediately, I was aware of someone watching. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from; it was a general sensation, like the feeling you have as a child, when the teacher in school tells you God is watching. There was no evidence of anyone being there: the grounds were still, and silent. Yet I was certain I was being observed by someone, or something. I stood still, and waited. The sensation lasted no more than a few seconds, maybe half a minute; then the blackbird flew noisily from out of a shrub, a shower of snowflakes flickered from the hedge where it disappeared, and the feeling passed. A moment later, I was telling myself that the whole thing had been an illusion, a trick of the air. Yet still I felt uneasy, and I didn’t relax altogether until I had reached the exit road, where the new snow shone on the hedges and the fields looked empty and wide, like fields in a Dutch landscape, where nothing will ever move or change again.

  Someone had been there while I was gone. A trail of freshlooking tracks led from the lane to the front of the garage. When I got out of the car to open up, I found a small pool of viscous greenish liquid by the door, as if someone had maybe tried to pour oil, or some other substance, into the lock. I tried the door. It was still secure, and undamaged. I looked back along the lane – uselessly, of course, since whoever had done this was long gone. I had passed nobody on the road, but whoever it was could easily have made his way through the woods, or across the fields. Obviously, Jimmy had found out where I lived; he must have guessed Lillian was still there – perhaps he had even seen her through the windows. Who knew how long he had been watching us, formulating whatever plan he had for his revenge? And how soon before he moved? I could not rely on his cowardice forever and the thought passed through my mind that perhaps he had enlisted someone else, one of his friends from the pub, to help him. That would have explained my feeling of being watched in the churchyard. If anyone had been there, he couldn’t have been the person who had tried to break the lock of the garage, not unless he had a car, or some other means of transport. I was pretty certain Jimmy didn’t have a car, which meant, logically, that he had an accomplice. I decided that I must confront him, as quickly as possible. It had to end. Now, for the first time, I had something to lose, and I was determined to defend it, at any cost.

  I drove to Weston several more times before I found him. For a while, I thought he really had left, that I had imagined the whole thing, or misinterpreted signs that were, after all, more than a little ambiguous. I decided, if I didn’t find him, that I would give up my search after a week, and wait to see what happened next. Even if I wasn’t mistaken, he might have had no more in mind than making his presence felt, by these trivial and childish practical jokes. Not that I was prepared to tolerate that for any length of time. I wasn’t prepared to take any risks.

  As it happened, I encountered him on the fourth day, on my way back to the car. It was evening, and the churchyard was deserted. As soon as I saw him, I decided the only solution was immediate and decisive action. People like Jimmy are unpredictable: a little too much to drink, an argument with one of his cronies, and he might decide to take things further. I wasn’t about to let my plans be jeopardised by a vagrant.

  He was sitting in his usual place, on the bench at the far end of the churchyard, next to the gate. He was dressed in what looked like new clothes – a clean white shirt and jeans, a nylon jacket, a pair of brown leather shoes. He was newly-washed and clean-shaven, his hair combed to one side, with a pronounced centre parting. It made him look like a schoolboy. He saw me coming, but he made no attempt to get away. There was a bottle of cider on the seat beside him, and a plastic bag at his feet that looked like it might contain another bottle. He seemed drunk. Perhaps that had made him confident. He looked at me with feigned calm, and tried to seem unafraid. He seemed to be alone.

  ‘You’re still here,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a free country,’ he replied, bitterly.

  ‘I thought you’d have moved on somewhere,’ I persisted.

  ‘I’m waiting for somebody,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘A friend.’ He was trying to sound laconic.

  ‘Your accomplice?’

  He looked up, in surprise, then he turned away. He seemed not to understand what I meant, yet his manner disturbed me. After the first few seconds, he seemed more resigned than confident, as if he had determined to see things through, no matter what. There was no obvious threat in his voice, but the look in his eyes was unmistakable. It was the look of a man who had the taste of real power, perhaps for the first time in his life – not the power that came from bullying a confused girl, or one of his half-crazed companions, but the power that comes of knowing, of seeing through another man, and deciding to find him inferior. He had erased all doubt from his mind: he was certain he had caught a glimpse of my soul in all its ugliness, and the pleasure of knowing that I was just as bad as him was something he was trying hard to contain. He wanted it to last. He would go to any lengths to keep this shred of power; he had no way of knowing that whatever he had guessed about me was wrong. For my part, I was intrigued to know what he imagined I had done with Lillian. I was already sure that he knew I had her.

  ‘How can you be sure your friend will come?’ I asked.

  ‘She’ll come,’ he answered quietly. ‘She always does.’

  I nodded. He was talking about Lillian, not an accomplice, and I think he really believed she would come back to him.

  ‘Have you been waiting long?’

  ‘A while. Not long.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like she’s coming. Maybe she’s left you.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  I smiled.

  ‘I know so.’

  He looked at me with contempt. I was surprised – it seemed genuine.

  ‘She’ll be back,’ he said.

  I was touched. I could tell how much it mattered to him, how much he needed her He needed his power over her, that power of knowing there was someone in the world that he could control. It filled a gap in the very fabric of his being.
He had grown so used to it, it was a piece of himself, the spine of his identity.

  ‘Not this time,’ I answered softly.

  ‘Then something’s happened to her.’ He looked up at me accusingly. ‘I’ll have the police on you.’

  I laughed.

  ‘Why would the police listen to you?’ I said.

  He shook his head. For a moment I thought he was going to cry.

  ‘Maybe you have her now,’ he said, at last. ‘But she’ll come back soon enough. All she wants from you is your money.’

  I let him see that I was feeling sorry for him. There is no triumph quite like pity. The brave face he had been putting on had just crumbled before my eyes, and he felt it. A wave of helpless anger swept through him and he stood up.

  ‘You don’t know her,’ he said. He gestured towards the bushes by the fence. ‘I used to take her in there. I used to share her with my friends. You know? We used to go in there and fuck her senseless.’

  He waved me away in sudden, desperate defiance.

  ‘I know you. You’re all the same,’ he said. ‘I know all about you. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to. I’ll have the police on you, you understand?’

  He lurched away, forgetting his bottle, and made for the gate. I went after him. Even then, I think, I only wanted to finish the business I had come to settle, to frighten him off so he would stop coming to the house. If I had planned what happened next, I might never have gone through with it. I would have considered the risks. I would have weighed up the pros and cons, and I would probably have decided against it. In truth, I believe he brought the whole thing on himself. There was something in the way he backed away that only provoked me to follow.

  By the time I caught up, he was standing at the top of the back steps to the church. I reached towards him, trying to make him stop, but I must have stumbled and pushed him, so that he fell backwards, teetering and flailing as he crashed heavily to the ground, taken completely by surprise. There was an expression on his face – a kind of sadness, as if he felt deceived, as if there had been an agreement between us that I had wilfully broken. Maybe it was that look that decided me, maybe it was just a special form of logic that made me kick him as he tried to get up, then kick again, first in the face and head and then, repeatedly, in the back and stomach. I have no memory of how many times I struck, all I remember is the exaltation that surged through my body as my feet hit home, finding the cheekbones, the ribs, the soft plates of his groin. It was as if something had unfurled along my spine, a wave of power, unwinding in my body like a spring. He twisted away; he even tried to defend himself at first, but after a while I was free to aim my blows, smashing into the jaw and the teeth, finding the bridge of the nose, bursting the lips and the soft meat around the eyes, pummelling at the spine till I felt something shift and founder. He stopped moving – or rather, he only moved when I kicked him, turning with the blows like a bundle of rags. It was surprising how quickly the substance leaked out of him. By that time, some of the excitement had ebbed, but I kept going – calm now, systematic in a way I would never have imagined possible. It was as if this was something I had always wanted to do, as if I had never understood the reality of flesh and bone till that moment. I had imagined it structured and tidy, like the bodies in those illustrations by Vesalius, but this was nothing like that. Now, with a series of well-directed kicks, something snapped or shattered and the body at my feet changed into something new, more chaotic, less divinely-ordered. The calm I had attained by then was cold and clinical: it was fascinating to watch his body turn into meat. His eyes and mouth were unrecognisable blurs; oddly, one ear appeared to be partly-severed, and his head lolled to one side, like the head of a broken doll. At the same time, he seemed so relaxed.

  I was tired. Now that the first rush of adrenaline had ended, I could feel the energy bleeding away. I stopped kicking. I knew Jimmy was still alive – I could hear him breathing, a thick, gurgling sound as if the blood had run into his mouth and throat. I looked around. There was no one in sight, yet I felt I was being watched, all of a sudden. It was quite dark by then. The lamp in the alley had come on, a pale orange that made the blood seem dark and flat around the fallen man. I looked down. My clothes were spattered with blood, but in that light it might have been oil, or dirt. Nobody seeing me would have known what had happened. A second wave of energy ran through me – a slow warmth, not a rush like before, but a wave, a gradual movement that filled my whole body. I was aware of a profound pleasure, but it was not altogether mine, it was abstract somehow, as if it came from everything around me, from the shrubs and the light and the dark blue of the sky. The world was so massive, so mysterious. I remembered a game I had played with myself as a child. Standing like this, under an orange streetlamp, I would look at my clothes and wonder what colour they really were – were they grey and blue, as they seemed in the daylight, or were they really, for that moment at least, this other colour they appeared to be under the light? The absurdity of this memory struck me immediately, and I almost laughed out loud.

  I looked at Jimmy. He seemed small and empty, and I felt sorry for him again. He had never really understood anything that had happened to him. Even he had probably seen that his need for Lillian was pitiful, the craven attachment of a desperate man to whatever drifts his way. He had been on shifting ground all his life. Everything he had ever said was bravado.

  I bent over the body and peered into Jimmy’s face. It was cold now, and I was pretty certain he would die if I left him there, in his light clothes. On the other hand, someone might find him. The only logical thing to do was to finish him off-there was no other choice. If he was found, and managed to report what had happened, he might put the experiment in jeopardy. I reached into my pocket for a weapon and found it empty. The Stanley knife must have fallen out somewhere, yet I was sure it had been there when I left the house.

  I looked around. I was not quite sure what I wanted – a stick, a piece of rope – I wasn’t thinking straight. My eyes lit on the plastic bag under the bench. It was still there, where he had left it; when I looked inside, I found what I instantly understood was the answer to my problem and I was strangely grateful, as if he had provided the solution deliberately. The bag contained a full bottle of supermarket whisky – not the cider I had imagined – a packet of cigarettes and a box of Swan matches. Everything I needed was there. I dragged Jimmy into the shadow of the bushes near the fence, then poured the whisky over his face and chest. I emptied the whole bottle, making sure as much as possible coated his face and shirt, then I struck a match and tossed it on to the body. It caught fire with a sudden rush, a bluish flame that turned to red immediately. Jimmy moved, as if he wanted to stand up, but it only lasted a moment, before he fell back, wrapped in a sheath of fire.

  I backed away. I was surprised by the heat, and how easily he had caught fire. The shirt was burning, it was some kind of synthetic, and that was what I smelled at first. Then, within moments, something else broke through – a sickening aroma of burning skin and hair, nothing like what I would have imagined. The face blistered and seared in the flames, the hair fizzled away, and I knew, before I left him, that there was no way he could have survived.

  It was finished. It was a little unpleasant, at the end, when he was burning, but I soon put it behind me and walked away as casually as I could. The thought that someone was watching from somewhere occurred to me again, but instead of bothering me, it made me feel even more detached, as if what I had done was sanctioned by that invisible witness. I remembered a story Mother had told me, about an Antarctic expedition – how the men had imagined that someone was walking alongside them, but when they turned to look at him, he disappeared. The explorers had said that this phenomenon had never made them uneasy; they had even felt comforted by it, when they ran into difficulties. That was how my secret accomplice felt to me – an elusive companion whose presence was eerie but, at the same time, oddly reassuring.

  It was that beautiful time of
night when the air is fresh and the stars begin to show in the dome of the sky. The houses on Cuthbert Street were lit. I had an image of the people inside, sitting down to supper in their warm rooms, made quiet by the time of day and the season. I imagined them behind their curtains, diffident with one another, careful of things, aware of their own precious transience. I knew they were there, but I still felt alone in the world; it was as if they existed in a parallel space, like my unseen companion. I might have been invisible at that moment, running my hands through a wet hedge to rinse off the blood and dirt, stopping again under each streetlamp, to look at the blood on my shoes and clothes. I was sure it could easily have been taken for oil. Not that it mattered. I knew nobody would see me.

  At the end of the street, near the car park, a large house stood detached from the others, in its own grounds. It was a Georgian house – it had been painted pink, and was half-obscured by a hedge of chamaecyparis. Someone inside was listening to music; I recognised the piece, and I stopped to listen. The singer was Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, and I felt a wave of emotion, a mixture of joy and regret, a sense of the beauty and transience of the world. I knew I was being sentimental, but that did not detract from the poignancy of the moment. I pushed open the wrought-iron gate and stepped into the garden to listen. The front garden was paved, like a courtyard, but it contained a number of large containers of evergreen shrubs, camellias and rhododendrons, tensed with bud, wrapped in a cold film of frost. There was a square stone pool on one side, surrounded by coloured flagstones. It was filled with thirty or more Japanese carp, far too many for the size of the pool, crowded together like opium smokers, golden and red, their plump bodies hanging in the water, almost motionless. I stood there, in a stranger’s garden, gazing at them. They seemed to me utterly amazing: miraculous, absurd presences, suspended in the black water. I wondered what would happen to them when the really hard frosts came, when the water froze and they lay helpless, in their sleeves of ice, or pressed to the hard bed of the pool, unable to disappear into the mud.