The Dumb House (21 page)

Christmas had never been extravagantly observed in our house. Mother disliked sentimentality. My father would buy me several gifts and, on Christmas morning, he would present Mother with a single, discreetly-wrapped package, which she always set aside unopened. I never knew what it was. Generally, however, the whole occasion was over by breakfast-time. Normal order was restored; I put away the toys and books my father had bought me and Mother prepared a light lunch. We did not subscribe to turkey and funny hats, though my parents sometimes had guests on Boxing Day, for drinks, or supper. They always behaved discreetly, omitting any mention of the actual occasion from their conversation, as if they had simply happened over by chance, or on an ordinary invitation.

That year, it was different. We had a large tree, with lights and decorations, and I was perplexed to see Mother taking part, helping my father to dress the tree and hang up decorations, standing in the kitchen, making mince pies and angel cakes. The cat looked on, not quite certain if the occasion was a matter for fear, or for fascination. Though my father claimed he had brought the creature home for me, he was the only one who paid it any attention. He was the one who decided
it should be called Rusty, because of its odd colouring; he was the one who fed it and let it out from time to time, standing at the kitchen door to see that it did not stray too far, then going out and calling it in, when he felt it had been outside long enough. Mother had decided to pretend the creature did not exist: I was so convinced of her power that I imagined, for several days, that the animal would sense her rejection and slip away some afternoon, leaving my father at the door, calling out to an empty garden. Instead, Rusty made Mother the central focus of its existence: wherever she went it followed; whenever she appeared, it woke up and went to her, making soft mewing sounds. It must have cost Mother some effort of will to ignore it, but my father, who ought to have been jealous, was pleased.

‘Rusty likes you,' he would say, grinning at Mother, as if he had just solved a long-term problem, or discovered the answer to a question that had been troubling him for years. Mother wouldn't answer. She simply kept up the pretence that the cat did not exist, no matter what, even when it tried to jump into her lap, or when it attempted to rub against her legs, smearing her with its scent, making her a piece of its territory. For hours at a time, she would retire to the upstairs study, where the cat was not permitted. It didn't take long for me to understand that she felt the same sickness at the pit of her stomach, the same slight giddiness that I suffered, whenever the animal was close. For my father's sake, I didn't really want to hurt the cat, but in the end I had no choice. For Mother's sanity, and for my own, I had to do something.

When I returned to school, after that strange Christmas, I found a book about domestic animals in the library. Immediately, I turned to the entry on cats and began a careful study of the subject. I looked at the bone structure, I read about its capacity for night vision, but what I found most interesting, and
promising, was the fact that the sense of smell is integral to a cat's being. I read that every cat had small glands on its body which emitted a uniquely-scented oil, with which the animal would mark its territory, leaving its signature wherever it went. Thus every cat had its own scent, by which it recognised itself; it followed, then, that that scent was its very identity. I was fascinated. For animals, any sense of self they had was defined by something external, by the presence of their body oils on rocks and trees and patches of ground around a given territory. Take away the scent, I reasoned, and the animal was lost. Its own territory, even its body, would become alien and threatening.

The possibilities for experimentation were infinite. It would have been most interesting, for example, if I had been able to substitute one cat's scent glands for another's, and observe the results. I could imagine the animal's confusion, perhaps a kind of madness, as its sense of itself was dissipated – it be would like waking up in a new skin, with a different face, a different body. What would happen, I wondered, if a male's scent-glands were replaced by a female's? Would its behaviour change? It was just one of a number of fascinating questions, and I regretted the fact that such an experiment was beyond my capabilities. What I could do, however, was to try to mask Rusty's natural scent, to remove his sense of identity. That, in itself, would surely be a disorienting experience and it might possibly drive the animal away. I didn't really want to kill it, to begin with, at least. I was sure, if I could make it leave, someone else would find it and take it in. People are sentimental about cats and dogs, they treat them as they would treat other humans. Better, in fact. They love animals, because animals can be anything you want them to be. They cannot talk.

A few days later, when my father was away on business, I set the experiment in motion. It was a crude affair. I mixed
up a cocktail of Mother's perfumes in an old pump-action rose sprayer, then lured Rusty into the shed. The cat wasn't suspicious: I had never given it cause to be wary of me, and it was relatively easy to lead it inside and lock the door behind us. I made it think I wanted to play, waving a length of cotton around in front of its nose; then, when I had its confidence, I trailed the cotton into a wooden box, where Mother usually kept plant pots, and eventually managed to trap the animal inside, by covering the box with a large garden sieve and weighting it down. Rusty made no serious attempt to escape; it must have imagined this was part of the game. As I started to administer the spray, it began to panic, but there was no escaping the box, and I had plenty of time to douse it thoroughly with the alien scent. I sprayed it several times, trying to cover the whole body, to mask the creature from itself utterly. It occurred to me that, without its scent, a cat might imagine it was invisible. It would be like the experience a human might have, if he looked into a mirror and saw no reflection.

Finally I stepped back, let the sieve fall, and opened the door. The cat scrambled quickly out of the box and fled out into the garden. I had tried to be careful not to spray near the eyes or the mouth, and I was reasonably sure I hadn't caused any real injury; nevertheless, as soon as it was outside, it began to cry horribly. It sounded like a child crying, as if, somewhere behind that flat, whiskered face, there was a human soul, trapped in the mind and body of an animal. I had read how some peoples believe that souls pass from one form to another after death, how a man could become a dog, or a rabbit, or a horse, depending on the actions of his life, his sins and errors, the moments of kindness and betrayal, the loves and fears he had endured – and maybe it was true, maybe there was a soul trapped in that cat's body, something more or less human, yet diminished in
some way, a form that was somehow degraded, part-instinct, part-consciousness. Maybe that was another reason why some people wanted animals around them; maybe they saw traces of people like themselves in those dumb, appealing eyes. Maybe that was what my father had seen in Rusty. He had caught a glimpse of himself in this pitiful form, and he had reached out to give comfort – to the animal, to himself, to everything that was weak and needy. The idea disgusted me. There is nothing worse, nothing more distasteful than pity. Rusty had wandered away into the far corner of the garden, and was now standing by the pear tree. It was still crying softly to itself, and the sound irritated and enraged me. I shouted at it to stop, but that made no difference. Then, after two or three minutes had passed, and it still had not stopped, I went back into the shed and fetched a spade. The cat didn't try to escape. I hit it once, then I struck several more times – I can't remember how many – till I knew it was dead. I hadn't planned to harm it, but for that one moment, I had no choice; I had to expunge that scrap of living misery, to destroy its pitiful soul. There was something about it that made me sick to the stomach. Even if it had run away, even if I had never seen it again, I couldn't bear to think of its continued existence.

Now that same sickness had returned with the twins. There was something about them that transcended the gap between human and animal. They seemed to exist in both states at once, plugged into a current of instinct and blood-knowledge, communicating through song, each enjoying the other's warmth and scent, as an animal might, with the same creature subtlety. In one sense, they weren't human. They were aware of things that I could not detect; they lived on a different plane. I couldn't even guess at the nature of their world. I had already decided that I would never be able to decipher their songs. Perhaps they
were meaningless; perhaps their meaning was so different from what I would think of as meaning, that it could hardly be seen as meaning at all. Yet they seemed to know me: even when they had ignored me, during those first months, they must have been watching me all along. That night I woke and found them at my bedroom door, gazing at me in silence, I was aware of a new self-assurance, a contained malevolence that gave them real, animal pleasure. And, suddenly, I understood that I was afraid of them. It was fear that caused the sensation in the pit of my stomach, fear that made me dizzy, just as it was fear that had sickened me when my father brought Rusty home. I can see, now, that it was quite irrational, but after that night, I was always afraid the twins would attack me in some unexpected way, just as I had been afraid that my father's cat might, at any time and without provocation, steal into my bed and sink its teeth into my throat.

It was too hot to sleep. I had lain awake for over two hours, under a single white sheet: the heat had made me a little feverish, every time I moved, the entire surface of my skin rippled with tiny shivers and waves of sensation. I kept imagining I could hear the twins, deep in the basement, singing to one another, or climbing the stairs quietly, making for my bed. Finally, I went down and fixed myself a cold drink; then I walked from room to room, peering into each moonlit space as if it were somewhere entirely new, a stranger's house where I had woken up by chance. As long as I was moving, I heard nothing but the chinking of ice in my glass, a sound like tiny bells wrapped in the faint lapping of water; but every time I stopped, every time I paused to listen, I tuned in, once more, to an endless current of creaks and shifts, and that distant music which, the more I tried to convince myself it wasn't there, the more I strained to hear
it. I descended the basement stairs in the dark and stood at the door. I could see nothing through the grille. I switched on the microphone system. The twins were asleep: their breathing was soft and regular, and they were so attuned, each to the other, that it might have been one child sleeping in that dark pen. I think I was a little jealous of them then. Together, they were more individual than I would ever be. Even though they were totally dependent on one another, or perhaps because they were, they defined one another perfectly: for each of them, the world was filtered through the other's eyes. There could be no sensation that was not tinged by their feelings for one another. I had been sure of that ever since I'd heard them laughing together. They were complicit. Maybe that was the reason for their singing – they weren't conversing, as such, they were simply performing a ritual of confirmation, a celebration of their combined existence. The complicity that existed between them suggested a world that I was incapable of experiencing, and some of the pleasure of being in that world, part of their private joy, was predicated upon my exclusion. It was as if I was the one who could not speak; as if, for me, the world was nothing more than a jumble of meaningless and disquieting sensations – and it came to me, then, that I was the one who had been placed in the Dumb House.

After that, I was ill for several days. At some point, I fell asleep in a chair, and sat drifting between the day's long heat and some distant winter of the mind, a journey through dark woods fuzzed with snow and strange, miniature towns, like the towns in naive paintings, all iced bridges and steeples and people skating on the rivers. I had some idea in my head, something to do with parallel lines, and how they meet at infinity. It was as if I was trying to formulate an idea, some hypothesis that would explain the very order of the world, how it was inherent in all things, yet was
essentially inexpressible, or transparent to common sense, like the finer points of mathematics. I suppose I was suffering from a kind of fever. Yet, somewhere in my mind, these wanderings seemed part of the experiment to me, a vital stage, as vital as the records I kept, or the hypotheses I had formed.

When I woke, the room was buzzing with flies. I had been asleep a long time, perhaps days: the lamp was still lit, the dust burning slightly, and I caught a trace of a faint fleshy smell, like the smell of a hospital sick room. No doubt the flies had been drawn to the light, sensing an escape then finding only another room, another set of walls, another puzzling window to beat against. My fever was going now, but my throat and mouth were very dry, as if I had swallowed sand, and I still felt disoriented. I had the sensation of having been wrenched out of my body, of only just finding a way back. For a few seconds, I had the strong impression that I had just seen myself from the outside, a man sitting in a chair, like a character in a film – and I didn't know who it was I was looking at. The image stayed in my mind a moment, still vivid, still real, then it faded. Yet, even for that short time, I was aware of something else, aware of myself, listening for the twins, before I even remembered their existence. That was when I realised fully that they were responsible for my fever, they were the ones who had made me ill, that night, when they came to my room. It was wholly illogical, but I was sure, in that moment, that they had willed my sickness. I could still see their eyes watching me, their silence held; I could feel their complicity against me, utterly malevolent and vengeful. There was no question that their development had been unnaturally rapid over the last two or three months. As they grew, their minds were becoming stronger, more united and I knew, if I did not break their power, they would become too powerful to contain.