Free The Dumb House by John Burnside

might see. I would raise her legs and bend back her knees, so I could pin her down and drive into her. I did whatever I liked: she was always utterly compliant, lying with her face pressed to the floor, sometimes crying out or moaning softly, plaintive, and oddly childlike. Sometimes I had to go looking through the house before I found her. Once, she was lying face down on the bed, and she did not move or make a sound all the time I was there. It was like having sex with a corpse – yet I was certain she was aware of me, and of what I was doing. No matter how I found her, no matter what I did, she never spoke, except to utter those odd little sounds. When I was finished, I left her and went home without a word, with her smell on me, warm and sweet, like a mingling of honey and blood. Every time I went to her house I was excited: I wanted her so violently it was almost painful, and taking her was a mixture of pleasure and exquisite relief.
    Afterwards, though, I would feel slightly disgusted, as if I had been exposed to some kind of contamination, as if I had deliberately allowed myself to be sullied. There were days when I was angry with her, for being so powerless, so available; yet on the other days, when she would be fully-dressed, formal,almost excessively polite, pretending nothing had ever happened between us, I wanted to pull her to the floor and take her by force. I might have had her the day before, there might still be bruises under her clothes, but she acknowledged nothing. We would sit in the living room, drinking tea, then she would fetch Jeremy, and I would offer him little gifts, to win his trust, to break through his suspicion, though by now I was only going through the motions. The child accepted the bribes, but he gave no sign that he recognised the giver. Mrs Olerud – I always called her Mrs Olerud, never Karen, though I knew that was her name – would encourage him, trying to make him open up, as if I were a doctor, or an expert of some kind, come to administer a cure. If anything, this assistance was counterproductive: Jeremy seemed to regard her with as much suspicion as he showed me. He was never badly behaved. He came when he was called, and stood stock-still while I talked to him; he ate the sweets I brought him, one after another, though with no sign of pleasure. He wasn’t really there; perhaps he was nothing more than the alert animal he seemed, at home in the wet undergrowth of the garden, like some wolf child. He was fascinating to watch, in his state of limbo, utterly incommunicado, but I knew, no matter what I did, I would never understand him. I kept going back, but not to see him. I wanted those mornings when Karen Olerud was lost in her trance, naked under her dressing gown, waiting for me, or for some imagined other, whose place I was assuming, briefly, without acknowledgement.
    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 aboutor 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;