The Dumb House (3 page)

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.

So it seems as if I remember one afternoon, not long after Mother died, I was driving home from Wales, when the thought came to me – how do we know the experiment would have ended as it did, in the silence of those children? There was no scientific account, and all the other stories of such ventures were badly documented or unreliable. For a while after Mother died, I was addicted to travel. I would make long journeys for no reason, usually stopping overnight in some village off the main route, some place I had never visited, that had no significance other than its position, or its name – Peas Pottage, Ready Token, Woodmancote. I would see a road sign, or glimpse a steeple in the distance, and I would turn off at the next junction. The villages were usually quiet when I arrived. Sometimes a girl would be sitting on a bench outside the post office, like a memorised image from a daydream, dark-haired, slender, faintly ethereal in her school blouse and pleated skirt. Or a boy would be playing football under a streetlamp. No matter how remote the place, no matter how unlike my own village, there was always an element of homecoming in these arrivals,
finding the church or the green in the gold light of the late afternoon, entering a child's landscape and finding its landmarks as if I had studied the maps for years. Often these strange villages seemed more familiar than my own. Sometimes I would stop in the square; sometimes I drove on till the road narrowed and disappeared into a barley field or a stand of alders. I would sleep in the car, if I could, then drive on the next morning.

There was no purpose in any of this. By moving from one place to the next, never speaking more than a few words to anyone, choosing my stops at random, eating and sleeping only when necessary, I managed to create an illusion of floating, of being detached from the human world – a casual visitor, not necessarily of the same species. I could say that this was the illusion I needed at the time, and I understand people who think that way, working things through, considering their motives and needs and making informed decisions. But it all seems too deliberate, put like that. I would rather imagine some force guiding me on a specific and inevitable course towards the Dumb House. I am not even sure if this force should be seen as external, or even if the question is relevant. All I know is that, during those weeks when I was on the road, I was changing. I was becoming capable of carrying out my plans, however vague they were at the time. Happiness, or fulfilment, or whatever else you choose to call it, seems to me to consist of a glimpse of the world as a patterned and limited whole. Or to put it more simply, order comes from without; it is not imposed, not forced. All I wanted was to accommodate that guiding energy, to let its undercurrent work, as if it were a shadow in my body, at a physical, nerve and bone level.

Things rarely happen by chance. That afternoon, on my drive home, I stopped at Silbury Hill to look at a new crop circle that had appeared in a field, directly to the south of the mound. It
was a clear day; the path to the hill was narrow, overgrown in places with tall grasses and wild geraniums. I walked around the base, looking for a gap in the fence where I could get through. Then, slowly, I climbed into a new region of wind and light. It was amazing how different it was up there: swifts wheeled and turned overhead; even before I had reached the halfway point, the world below had dwindled and flattened, like the country on a map – cattle and jackdaws wandering in the grass, the cars on the road small and distant. People were sitting in twos and threes on the summit, smoking and drinking orange juice or beer. Most were New-Age travellers, but some were ordinary passers-by, who had stopped on their way to somewhere else, intrigued by the possibility of a new intelligence. One man had driven that morning from Port Talbot. He started telling me his hypothesis about the circles, a mixture of chaos theory and arcane beliefs. The figure itself was intricate and mysterious – not a circle at all, but an elaborate design, like the pattern in old Celtic jewellery or rock carvings. At the head was a large, perfect ring, surmounted by a crescent shape, like the horns of a bull, or a pagan god; to the west, this form was joined by a fine straight line to another structure, composed of four identical circles in a round, and completed by a long, incurving tail. The travellers were calling it The Scorpion.

I was at ease there. I understood what those people wanted; they were tired of the world they had been obliged to accept, a world of facts and limits. They wanted something that was open to interpretation. Each one probably had his or her explanation of the circles, like the man from Port Talbot, but there were no certainties, there was always a space for mystery. That was probably the explanation for the fanciful or incomplete nature of their theories – it was a game they were playing, and part of the game was to avoid the factual, to flirt at the edges of the absurd.
While I was there, I felt there was nothing to stop me from getting into the car and driving away, back towards the west, moving from one crop disturbance to the next, pretending I was solving the mystery, growing into it, vanishing from the world I had inhabited all my life. I could have become someone else as easily as that; maybe I could even have become the person I had suspected all along, less clearly defined, but also less contained. I could make a game of my own life, like those people I had read about in magazines – the woman who disappears on her way home from work; the man who steps out one summer morning to buy a newspaper, or a loaf of bread, and never returns. He is an ordinary man, quite sane, no known problems – or nothing serious at least. He cannot have gone far, dressed as he is in a shirt and a pair of jeans; he only has five pounds in his pocket, but nobody ever sees him again.