The Dumb House Page 7

  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.

  I stood there for some time, bent slightly towards the mouse, trying to figure out how much it knew about what was happening, and whether it was aware of me. Most of all, I was waiting to see it die, to see what happened when the life seeped away; whether it was a gradual process, or if there was a moment when the animate thing became inanimate, when the light went out, as it were. It took a long time. It had probably been there for a while before I saw it; even so, it was still moving twenty minutes later, though by then there was a blankness in the eyes, a lack of awareness, that surprised me. I had imagined the body died first, then the mind faded away, glowing for a while like a cigarette butt as it burned out. Now it seemed that the mind was the first to go, and the body kept going, trying to hang on to something that wasn’t there any more.

  From that moment on, I lost interest in the road-kills and the dead birds I found in the woods. From that moment on, I wanted to study the living. There is something beautiful in the stillness of death, in its irreversibility. But, after a time, I wanted more than entry to a corpse. I wanted to open up the living creature, to see the heartbeat and how the blood worked; I wanted to act as witness and celebrant in a ceremony of some kind, to feel the pulse in the organs, to watch the life seep away in the eyes of my chosen subject. I believed there would be a moment when the spirit ebbed, and I wanted to know how that happened, how that moment looked. I wanted to see what it was like when the life dissolved, leaving nothing but inert matter.

  It was a natural progression to substitute the living for the dead. Mother never found out what I was doing, of course; I kept these experiments secret, performing them in the woods, or in one of the abandoned barns further along the road, where the old Baker farm had been. To begin with I wasn’t quite sure how to go about the dissections. I knew the mechanics, but I was shy of the live animals and birds I managed to capture. I had fair success with the home-made traps I had learned to build from a book on taxidermy in the public library. I would set them up in the strip of woodland behind the house, then revisit them later, perhaps the same evening, or early the next morning, when nobody else was about. Often they were empty, but now and again I found a mouse or a vole, scrambling about in the little box, trying frantically to escape. Sometimes the animal was dead. If it was a bird, it might have damaged itself, the wings spread and tattered, the feathers ruined. I only caught birds once or twice, and I let them go immediately. The idea of dissecting a bird revolted me.

  My first live dissection was a large mouse. The pleasure of opening it up, and knowing it was still alive, knowing the life was bleeding away through my fingers was almost overwhelming. I had studied methods of dissection in the library books: most concerned the opening of corpses for taxidermy, but one I had found in the biology section described in detail methods that could easily be adapted to living creatures: gross dissections, for larger animals, that could be performed with everyday kitchen knives; fine-scale dissections, for the removal or display of organs and glands, using mounted needles and fractured glass edges; and normal-scale dissections – involving everything from dogs to earthworms – which required scalpels, dissecting needles, forceps, blunt seekers and scissors – the kinds of tools that were easily found in a biology student’s dissecting kit. It was no trouble to get my father to buy me a set. A few days after I made my request, the postman presented me with an elegant wooden box, which contained all the instruments I needed, and more. They were so beautiful, I would take them out and handle them for the sheer pleasure of it.

  It took a great deal of practice to reach the point where I could open an animal and hold it a moment, before I felt its life seep away. Rabbits were best: they lasted longer, and they were easy to catch. As I worked, I experienced a higher form of grace, a plugging in to something, a connectedness, when the blood flowed back along the blade, seaming my fingers and palms, spilling out over the board and drying, the dark electricity bleeding away almost immediately, long before the organs darkened and congealed. Now I had it right, the meat parted cleanly from the bones, and there was something exciting in it all, like the shedding of a veil, an involuntary revelation. Pinned to the dissecting board, and drugged with spirits from my father’s drinks cabinet, the animal barely struggled. I was touched by the strange gravity of the flesh; I was drawn in by a dark attraction, an interplay between my turning wrist and whatever it was – spirit, life, élan vital – that was suspended there. Sometimes I managed to open a living body carefully enough to be able to see the heart beating, to see the lungs still full of air, to see the feeling in the eyes. It lasted only a short time, but it was a near-perfect moment. Later, when I was disposing of the body, I would bury the animal behind the outhouse and lay a stone on the grave, as a mark of respect. It had given me something it could never have understood; for a moment, I had looked into life itself, and I knew that, one day, I would discover its essence.

  I stayed at home for a long time. I didn’t know if Karen Olerud would report me to the police. I thought she might not have done, to avoid embarrassing questions as to why I was in her house, but I couldn’t know for sure. For weeks it felt as if time had stopped. The garden lay still and silent under a thick blanket of early snow, and the waiting made it worse, but nobody came and I was left alone. Everything was as it had always been: Mother’s room locked and still, a virtual presence behind the door; the library full of books; the rack in the hall festooned with her coats and scarves. It was something I did, as the seasons changed: in summer I put out her shawl and the light raincoats she would wear for gardening; at the end of October, I’d carry out her heavy winter coats and scarves, and I’d leave her gloves on the shelf in the hall, as if she were still there, and might need them. I knew she was gone, but that was no reason to forget her. It was one form of afterlife, at least, her life in my mind, her existence preserved in small rituals and gestures. It was the one thing of which I could be sure. That and the weather. It’s an odd thing, but I’ve always believed that the dead are somehow connected to the weather, as if they were the ones who made it snow, as if they were present, somehow, in those gusts of wind that blow in from the distance, seeking me out, like spirits trying to communicate.

  It was the wettest summer in years, during those last few months when Mother was dying. She seemed to enjoy the damp weather; it was as if it sealed her off from the rest of the world, as if the village was further away than ever. When the
rainfall was heavy and dark, we could barely see the end of the garden, much less the road and the fields beyond. Sometimes it rained all day and the quality of time changed: the secret life of the house was resumed, a slow life of sootfalls and woodlice and the possibility of ghosts on the stairs. Mother would ask me to prop her up in bed, and she would sit reading, sneaking glances at herself in the mirror when she thought I wasn’t looking – watching herself die, I suppose. I believe she found the process interesting, even as it horrified her to observe the transformation from the woman she had been into the grotesque shadow she was becoming. I could see her noticing the changes in her appearance, but I felt obliged to act as if she simply had a bad cold, and I would come and go all day, bringing her books, bringing her tea and lemon biscuits and trays of sandwiches that she left to dry and curl on the bedside table. During the last several weeks, I had to help her to the bathroom, where she would wash carefully, then return, in her silk gown, to sit at the dressing table, choosing her perfume, applying a little make-up, combing her hair. I had to be careful not to look at her in the mirror, not to see what she was seeing. It was another fiction we created together. If I looked her straight in the face, I was looking at the woman she still felt she was, underneath the illness, but if I looked at her through the mirror, I was seeing the woman she saw: that worn, pinched face, her sunken eyes, the blackness around her mouth. I felt guilty when she caught my eye, as if I had deliberately betrayed her. To distract her attention, I would talk about the garden; the flowers that were still out, the birds I had seen in the apple tree.

  I had never imagined Mother as a child till then. I had never thought about her as she was before she was married. The woman my father described in his stories seemed unreal to me, if only because Mother herself denied that woman’s existence. But now she was dying, I was curious. I would ask her questions and sometimes she would answer; she was happy to talk about her childhood, or reminisce about times we’d had together. But she never spoke about the early years of her marriage. Mostly, her conversation consisted of vague, random memories, out of sequence and incomplete, so I never really knew how true it was. Nothing she told me felt any different from what I remembered of my own childhood; it was all part of the same continuum, snow in the woods, a hard, spare whiteness, a poignant sense of home, of its lights and warmth as illusory, or at best, irredeemably local. It was all sealed in the past, a purely mental phenomenon. I think she felt that too, and it troubled her. Meanwhile the doctor came and went, prescribing new drugs, stopping in the hall to make conversation and ask how I was – without a word, he had been forbidden to discuss this illness with me, just as I had been silently forbidden to ask him questions, or to express concern. Nothing would have offended Mother more than to have us talking in whispers outside the bedroom door, feeling sorry for her, admiring her courage, or plotting to put her in a hospital. It was hard to believe she was dying: it was her body that was ill, and it showed – black circles formed around her eyes, and her skin smelled darkly sweet, with a hint of softness, as if there was nothing there, under the surface, as if she would have collapsed inwards if I had touched her. But that was physical. I couldn’t find it in my heart to believe her death would result in a complete annihilation; I think I accepted her body’s death from the beginning, but there was another part of me that believed her mind, or her spirit, or something else that could not be defined, would never really end. Years before, she had begun paring down her life: she had barely spoken to my father in the two or three years before he died; later, she had become even more still and remote, as if she were enclosed in ice, or glass. In a matter of weeks, she severed all her connections. The people who had come to the house when my father was alive, people who had been her friends as well as his, were excluded now. They took it well; I imagine they thought she needed to be alone with her grief. But the truth was, she did not grieve. If anything, she seemed relieved at my father’s sudden absence, as if it that was what she had been waiting for all her life. What she wanted was to be alone, to strip away everything that had accumulated over years of marriage and social life. By the time she became ill, she had condensed herself into an essence, and it seemed to me impossible that this essence could be lost.

  During the illness, we developed a routine. I would bring flowers in from the garden; I would set pitchers of iced water by the bed, bowls of fruit, each day’s selection of the books I thought she might want. I would rise early, take her breakfast up, help her to wash, then clear away her things while she put on her make-up. I understood that I had to be very businesslike in the mornings. The process had to vary as little as possible, otherwise the illness might have forced us into awkward moments of physical intimacy that we would both have found quite unbearable. We talked a good deal while all this was going on: we played games with one another, making puns, telling lies, referring to ourselves in the third person, anything to create a space, to resist the force that was pushing us together. Still, I had to be quick. Mother was always a very fastidious person – that was the quality I most admired in her – and I knew what torture it was for her, to be handled, even by me, to be washed, to be physical. I would leave her for an hour or so before lunch – our days were structured around meal-times, though neither of us ate very much – then I would carry trays up for us both and I’d sit opposite her, at the dressing table, remembering the times I had sat there as a child, watching her get dressed, admiring her perfumes. In those days we had played a different game with the mirror: the people in the glass were strangers, and we would talk to them, across one another, like conspirators, flirting with them lightly, the way married people sometimes flirt with strangers at a party, testing themselves, always keeping one eye on their real partners. I missed that time, but I never tried to revive it: the mirror was dangerous ground now, and we worked around its silvery field, as if it were some trap, waiting for us in the corner of the room.

  As the summer advanced, we spent all our time in that one space. I began to feel we were being laced together by the sticky-sweet fabric of death that had begun to form. Our conversations, our carefully measured gestures and movements had become seamless. There was no longer any telling us apart. At night, when I went back to my own room, I could still feel her there, in the darkness, and the world outside was suspended, silent, like a closed cinema. By the end, I was afraid of becoming too accustomed to our mingled warmth and smell, of waking at exactly the same moment she woke, knowing what she wanted, of hearing her voice, even before she spoke. It was as if the cocoon that was being spun around her for some absurd and elaborate transformation had accidentally included me. There was even a complicity with the process in the house itself: objects became part of the event, the Chinese bowls in the hall, the books in the library, the boxes of glass and tinsel in the attic, the cutlery in the kitchen drawers – everything seemed brighter and heavier, more fixed, like pieces in a game of chess or the instruments of an arcane ritual. When I was alone, preparing meals or passing the time while she slept, I felt part of a process that had become irreversible. It felt as if I were being sealed up with her, that we were being laid down, like fossils, compressed under centuries of water and silt, compressed and simplified, reduced to our basic forms.

  For some weeks, she deteriorated quietly. We continued as well as we were able, ignoring what we could. One afternoon I left her sleeping and went for a walk in the woods. I hadn’t been out of the house in days and the fresh air was an exquisite and guilty pleasure. I didn’t go far; I would never be more than a half-mile’s walk from the house. It was a warm day, and I followed an old route, stopping in some of the places where we’d made our most interesting finds. I couldn’t have been gone for more than an hour, but when I returned, the downstairs study was a mess: there was a broken bowl on the floor, several books had been pulled from their shelves, one of the candlesticks on the mantelpiece had fallen into the hearth. I thought someone had come in, and I ran upstairs to see if Mother was all right. She was lying on the
floor next to the bed, clutching a book; when I went to lift her, there was an odd biscuity smell on her dressing gown. She was asleep, or unconscious. I got her on to the bed and covered her up. Her face was damp; her body smelled sweet and floury still but underneath there was a current of something else, the kind of warm smell you get in a pet shop or a zoo, a subtle mingling of egg and spoor. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant, but it bothered me, and I felt it was a sign of something, the first indication of a new state of being, an eventual transformation.

  She slept a long time and when she woke she looked much worse. All of a sudden, death was fully present in the room and it couldn’t be ignored any longer. Until that moment, I had failed to register what was going on. I had imagined her changing, becoming someone new, or exchanging presence for some subtler state, but from that day on the smell of death became stronger, till it filled the room, tainting the water in her jug, bleeding into the sheets. I brought fresh flowers every morning: all the petals had fallen by the middle of the afternoon. From now on, too, she was in visible pain. For the first time, in utter bewilderment, I considered killing her. I had read about mercy killings and I did not want to be found wanting, if that was what she required. I watched her closely for any sign of an appeal; it would have taken no more than a word or a gesture for me to have placed a pillow over her face and held it down till she stopped breathing. But she gave no signal. Some part of her, I am sure, was appalled at the way her body kept on living, unable to let go, like all those animals I had watched as a child, her eyes fixed on something beyond me, something I could not see.