The Dumb House (20 page)

Looking back at my notes, I see now that I was becoming delirious. The solitude was wearing me down – that and the constant singing, and the suspicion I had, from time to time, that I was being observed. I had no good reason for this feeling, yet I felt it, and even recorded it in my observations, as if it had some relevance to the course of the experiment. It was around this time, in fact, that my notes ran wild: they were highly personal in places, sometimes absurdly metaphysical, occasionally maudlin. One entry, made towards the end, runs as follows.

I know now that what matters is what we choose to consider. All of life is a process of selection: we filter out the irrelevant details in order to come at a truth of sorts, which is no more valid than another possible truth, except in the fact that we selected it, as opposed to something else – and language is the instrument of that process. What matters is not just the story that is told, to ourselves and others, but the way the story is told, the words we select to convey, and to solidify, our vision. Standing in the kitchen tonight, as darkness fell, I saw that I could think of Mother, dying in her white bed, or I could have thought of Lillian's small, bewildered cries of pain and fear, as I guided her away into death. I could think of the twins in their unassailable world. I could ask myself what
choices they are making, what world it is they are constructing. Or I could Fill a glass with water and he amazed by the very fact of surface tension, amazed by the very existence of things in liquid form. I could walk outside into the garden and look up at the sky. It doesn't matter who I am, or what I have done. I am nothing other than a mind in space, noticing each detail then moving on, noticing then forgetting, looking then moving on. This is all there is: a vast, endless stream of random events – stars, thoughts, spiders, rain, buildings, children, money, lava, blood, sex, pain. Each mind makes what it can of the data but no one can say what sense is. No one can say, with conviction, that one thing is entirely true, while another is false. It doesn't work that way. When I stop like this, when I stand still and see it all streaming towards me, my own mind empties. The order is coming from somewhere else, and I don't know what it is. At times like this, language is meaningless. People talk about God, or time, or the great unified field theory, but these are nonsense words. If I allow myself to experience the world fully, I can see that there are no descriptions. Is this what the twins know? Is this why they see, and forgive, me?

It was the hottest summer in years. I barely slept; when I did, I had strange or violent dreams that woke me suddenly in the dark and left me uneasy. I felt close to fever. The twins seemed not to notice the heat: now that they were old enough, I would risk taking them outside with me on some evenings, carrying them one at a time into the garden and letting them play around at my feet while I watered the beds. As long as they were together, being outside seemed to encourage their physical development. In the basement room, they had never got past crawling, in the narrow confines of their pen. Occasionally, B had managed to stand, tottering on her feet a moment before she collapsed into
a sitting position again, with a small thud. Out in the garden, they developed by leaps and bounds. I suppose, given the right environment, they were only too ready to make up for lost time. I made no effort to help them: I didn't teach them to walk, they simply helped one another. It was as if they had both had a bright idea, at exactly the same moment, and had worked out the mechanics of the thing for themselves. I was always amazed at how well they did, as soon as they put their minds to something. It was as if their wills were united, as if they had become one. In the end, that was the cause of their downfall. They got a sense of their own power, and I had to cut them down.

One night they broke free. I still have no idea of what happened. I was asleep in my room, having one of those feverish dreams that seemed to mean so little when I woke and analysed them, yet left me feeling uncomfortable and anxious, in a way most nightmares would not. In this dream, I was walking along a country lane, in the middle of summer. The dream was filled with the same oppressive bright heat that filled the waking day: the road was narrow and dark, tall banks of hogweed and nettles grew up around me on either side and I could feel something moving along beside me in the undergrowth. I could feel it, I could even hear it breathing, but I couldn't see it. I kept trying to make it out in the dark foliage, but whenever I stopped, it vanished, there was no sound, no movement, only the still beds of weeds, sticky with honeydew and cuckoo-spit. Then, finally, I caught a glimpse of it, out of the corner of my eye. It was utterly hideous: an immense damp-haired creature, with a dark, piglike face, and it seemed ready to attack.

A moment later, everything had changed. I was standing in the hall of my own house, but the furniture and pictures I had known all my life had been replaced with ugly knick-knacks and
bric-a-brac, of the sort found in junk shops. It was perfectly still, a clear summer's day. I could smell the flowers in the garden, I could see the sunlight flickering on the polished floor. I walked to the foot of the stairs and stood listening. Upstairs, someone was crying, a woman, or perhaps a child – I couldn't be sure – and, suddenly, I was afraid. I ran outside, back into the light, and began walking away from the house as quickly as I could. But I had only walked a few yards when I heard someone calling my name and, when I turned back, I saw a woman running towards me, with a letter in her outstretched hand. I could tell from her face that the letter contained bad news and I wanted to call out, to make her stop, but when I opened my mouth, no sound came. As the woman came closer, I saw that her face was a blank, there were no features, no eyes, no mouth, only a mask of white skin.

I woke in the dark. The room was still, but someone else was there. I could feel it; I had that sense of being watched. I sat up quickly and fumbled for the bedside light.

It was the twins. They were standing in the doorway, eight feet away, in their night clothes, bolt upright, as if standing to attention, or perhaps just trying to stay balanced. I had no idea how long they had been there, or how they had escaped from the basement. I was certain I had locked their door before coming upstairs; but there they were, standing side by side, watching me intently. When I switched on the lamp, they didn't flinch: it was as if they could see as well in the light as the darkness. It was some time before I noticed that they were soaking wet, as if they had just come in from a rainstorm. They seemed very sure of themselves; they did not resemble toddlers at all. They were more like wild animals, silken and wet and attuned to the night, and there was something about them, some latent power, that froze me. I think for a moment I half-expected
them to attack, but they did not move; they simply stood in the doorway, staring.

It was a difficult moment. I was aware of the fact that I had been dreaming, that I might have talked or cried out in my sleep. What if they had done this before, if they had come to my room and spied on me, then left without my knowing? I hadn't found the basement door open, or even unlocked, but in all the time they had been there, I might have left it open without even realising it. If I had made that mistake, I could easily have made any number of others. The one thing that was established, beyond doubt, was that I had allowed them to escape on this one occasion. Where one error is found, you are bound to assume others have gone unnoticed. If they had heard me speak, if they had heard something other than the abstractions on the language tapes, the experiment was finally ruined, and I still had an idea that something could still be salvaged from this experiment. I was conscious of the fact that I had almost cried out, involuntarily, a moment before, when I had caught sight of them standing there, watching me in the dark. I needed to know what they had seen and heard, most of all, I needed to know how they had come to be standing there, soaking wet, on a warm summer's night. I was horrified by the thought that they might have made their way out into the world somehow, where they would have been discovered. I had a picture of them, in my mind, wandering unsteadily along the road, in the summer moonlight. Yet what troubled me the most was something I hadn't really registered at first, something that felt like a false memory, and I might have been mistaken but, later, when I recalled switching on the lamp and seeing them there, I was certain that, for the first time ever, in my presence at least, they were smiling.

* * *

With the benefit of hindsight, I see that it was at that point, with that mistake, that the experiment with the twins ended. I couldn't trust myself any longer; I couldn't make even the most basic of assumptions. From that day on, whenever I went out, I would worry that I had left the door unlocked and, at that very moment, they were clambering up from the basement, or stumbling out into the light of day, making instinctively for the gate that led to the road. It was absurd, I knew, but whenever I left the house, I would leave the car running in the drive and go back to check, to see if everything was secure. At first it was just the door I checked; then I would stop to be sure I could see them both, safely locked up inside. Then I began to check the whole house: gas, water taps, electrical points. I had fantasies of fire breaking out while I was gone. A kettle had been left on, it had shorted, the fire had begun in the kitchen and swept through the house – it was only a matter of luck that a passer-by had spotted the flames and called the fire brigade who had, in turn, rescued the twins. I had fantasies of flood. At one point, I started going back two or three times to be absolutely certain. Once, in the supermarket, I left my trolley in the frozen food aisle and drove home in the rain, because I was convinced I had left the key to the basement room in the door. When I returned, my trolley was gone.

It was an absurd situation. It wasn't only that I was concerned the twins might escape. The fact was, their very existence had begun to affect me in all kinds of ways. It's hard to believe, now, that I was afraid of them, but I was. Whenever I went down to the basement, I felt sick and dizzy, as if I had been poisoned, or I was suffering from an allergy of some kind. I only had to look at the twins, playing together in their pen, to feel a wave of revulsion sweep through my whole body. It was a familiar sensation. I had experienced it before, I knew, and I racked my
memory to remember when. Finally, I recalled the day my father found the cat and brought it home, without a word of warning. It was something I would never have expected from him. The small, rather ugly creature he carried into the hall wasn't even a kitten, it was just a youngish cat he'd picked up from a refuge, one of those cat protection places, where lost and misbegotten creatures end up, like the souls in limbo, waiting to be redeemed. I remember him now, standing in the doorway, with the cat in his arms; he hadn't even asked for a box, or a cage, he must have just selected it, more or less at random, then picked it up and carried it away.

It was almost Christmas. He had been sitting around in the kitchen for days, waiting for snow and listening to the songs on the radio – ‘White Christmas', ‘Winter Wonderland' – the sort of sentimental nonsense Mother couldn't stand. I can see, looking back, that he must have been going through a crisis of some kind: he appeared more distant and unreal to me than ever, and I vaguely remember an impression I had that he was thinking something through, trying to come to a meaningful conclusion. He kept drifting into the downstairs study, where Mother and I would be sitting, reading, or talking quietly; he would stand at the window and look out for long minutes at a time, then he would say that he wished it would snow. I couldn't see what difference snow would make, one way or another, but it was evident that it mattered to him. He must have said it a dozen times or more. Maybe he was trying to remember something from his childhood, and he thought snow would help. Most of the time, Mother ignored this performance but, for a while at least, I was a little intrigued.

Finally, a few days before Christmas, he went out early in the day, and came home around tea-time with a thin, red and white cat. He made a pretence of giving it to me; he said it would do
me good to have a pet to make friends with and look after. I stood watching, in utter disbelief, as he released the scrawny, grimy-looking animal into the clean, perfect space of our front hall. Then I turned to Mother. I was certain she would forbid him to keep the cat in the house but, to my surprise, she simply walked slowly upstairs to her own study, without uttering a word. My father seemed not to notice; he took off his coat and led the cat through to the kitchen, where he found a bowl – a bowl for humans, something Mother might have used – and setting it down on the floor, filled it with milk. The cat inched forward cautiously, sniffed at the edge of the bowl, then turned away and began exploring the kitchen, rubbing itself up against every surface, leaving its mark, making our house its own.

‘I suppose he doesn't want his milk,' my father said, looking at me kindly, assuming my interest, including me against my will.

‘I suppose not,' I said, as dryly as I could manage. I couldn't understand why Mother hadn't acted. Two words from her, and the cat would have been gone.

‘I've got some food in the car,' my father said. ‘I'll fetch it.'

He stood a moment, gazing at me. He seemed to expect me to participate, to stroke the cat, or pay it some kind of attention, or perhaps volunteer to feed it. I didn't say anything. He went back outside, without his coat, and returned a moment later, with a cardboard box full of tinned cat food. He opened one tin, fetched another bowl, then took a fork from the drawer and half-filled the bowl with the dark, foul-smelling meat. When he set the meal on the floor, the cat ran to it immediately and began to feed. That was when I began to feel ill. It started with a knot in my stomach, then dizziness, and I experienced that same sense of personal invasion that comes when you have a stomach bug, or a severe cold. Something from outside –
something animal – enters and takes control, depriving your body of its natural autonomy. I was being forced into the most distasteful intimacy. It was evident that my father wanted me to like the cat, that any sign of revulsion on my part would be a rejection, not of the animal, but of him. Yet the longer I stood there, in the warm kitchen, watching this scrawny, somehow parasitic creature eating from Mother's crockery, the longer I was exposed to the smell, to the sounds it made in feeding, the worse I felt, and I knew, immediately, that I had to do something to protect myself, and Mother, from the consequences of my father's folly.