The Dumb House (8 page)

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.

Maybe I had drifted off that morning, then started awake, not quite sure of where I was. All I remember is turning slightly and seeing the mouse – no form to begin with, only a slight, spastic motion at the edge of vision, the kind of small, almost involuntary movement that immediately captures your attention. It was as if the mouse had betrayed itself by its very desire for secrecy. I slid down from the chair and walked over to where it lay on its side, twitching and gazing up at me – its body was caught in the poison, the movements were quite automatic, quite involuntary. Only its eyes were alive. Mother had explained how such poisons worked: they destroyed the internal organs, and it took some time for the animal to die, as the liver broke down in a series of haemorrhages. The poison was designed that way, to provoke internal bleeding, and avoid mess. As I stooped, peering down at the thing, I was struck by the knowledge that, in spite of its pain, in spite of its near-paralysis, the mouse had not given up, it seemed unable to accept that death was inevitable. When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they knew they were dying, and accepted it, almost gracefully. Now I saw that this wasn't so at all: they crept into corners in the hope of surviving, they only knew they were weakened and exposed, easy prey, and their instinct was to find a hidden place and try to outlive whatever it was they were suffering. It had been a mistake to imagine they wanted to be alone, to die in peace. Animals have no knowledge of death: for them, death is the unexpected end of life, something they resist by instinct, for no good reason. In that sense, their existence has an almost mechanical quality.