The Dumb House by John Burnside

best, but I was careful to get the odd question wrong, to seem foolish on occasion, to let the others laugh at me from time to time. I thought I was being smart, but now I see that it was so easy to behave that well because I felt nothing but contempt for most of my classmates.
    The one exception was a boy in my class called Alexander. He was locked into a shell of isolation: because he was deaf, his speech seemed odd and amusing to the other children. All the teachers treated him with a special, condescending kindness,which he obviously hated. I made some efforts to become his friend, with almost no success. He regarded everyone with suspicion. Sometimes I would see him, out in the fields, standing with his head thrown back, staring up into the sky, as if he could see something there that nobody else could detect. I wondered what it was like to live like that. I had imagined that deaf people were locked into a calm and steady silence, but when I looked it up in a book, I discovered there was noise inside their heads, monotonous and ugly, like the space between channels on the radio. I wanted to ask Alexander how he thought: if he could see the words, instead of hearing them, whether he thought in words at all, or whether there were long gaps in his mind, when absence took over. I know, for certain, that he was looking for something. He would find telegraph poles and stand with his arms wrapped around them, his chest and face pressed to the wood, as if he could feel or hear something, coursing through the wires. Maybe he could. If I could have had a friend in school, it would have been him. If I could have asked one question, I would have asked Alexander what it was like to be how he was, but I imagine he would have found it impossible to answer.
    Mostly, I was alone. At lunch-time, I would sit in the library with my favourite book. I remember it clearly, even now: it was called
The Junior Dictionary Illustrated.
The cover showed a girl lying on the grass in summer, reading, and an ideal schoolmaster handing a book to an ideal boy, while another girl stood by, holding her own book like a pet or a baby. The first page bore the legend ‘
We Live in a World of Words’
, and showed a variety of objects in boxes, with captions for their names, and the country in which the names had originated:
bantam
and
tattoo
, from the South Seas;
rose
and
mutton
from France,
bungalow
and
jungle
from India,
marmalade
and
cobra
from Portugal. I loved thatbook. I loved its pictures of rhododendrons and rabbits, and perfect children skating on perfect ice rinks. I loved its simple definitions, the sense it gave that everything could be classified and explained, and I took what it said at face value: we live in a world of words, things exist because of language, and language could as easily change things as keep them fixed in place.
    Mother drove me to school in the mornings. In that school no one else travelled by car, and it set me apart from the others to glide by, and have them see me, sitting in the front alongside a woman who was always expensively dressed and utterly remote. Every now and then she took it into her head to offer a lift to some child who took her fancy, which only made things more awkward. After school, I insisted on walking home by myself. It was nearly three miles, but the road was straight and there was little traffic. It ran out of the village past the houses, skirted a row of allotments, then passed a farm. The farm always seemed deserted: I remember the yard, and a grey metal hopper blotted with rust, tilted over a hedge like a shipwreck. Sometimes a herd of muddy, black-haired cattle stood by the fence, watching me pass; sometimes a dog ran to the gate and barked, but mostly the yard was empty, a pile of logs against the barn, an old tractor marooned in a pool of weeds, rusted remains of farm machinery propped against the walls, like the remnants of a forgotten civilisation.
    In winter it would be almost dark by