The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘Leaving,’ he muttered. ‘Usually it hurts the ones that stay behind.’

  If there was any feeling of triumph in moving out, I don’t remember it. My life at the inn – the Hotel Spa, as it was now called – was lonely. Karl was eight years older than I was. He worked all through the day; in the evening he sat in the parlour with a beer. He rarely spoke to me and when he did, his voice had a kind of distance in it, as if I wasn’t family, but a stranger he felt he had to be civil to. Nights were the hardest, thinking Axel’s hand might reach across, wanting it so much, on my shoulder, in my hair, anywhere – and then remembering. I was eighteen and no one touched me any more. I’d get up before dawn and stand by the window, facing north; I’d watch the steam lift from the pool. Most mornings I was sick in the basin. It occurred to me that I might also be carrying Axel’s child. Then he’d have to marry me as well. I imagined two brides walking up the aisle in the village church. Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband? I do. I do. I saw my smile in the wardrobe mirror, and it was not a pleasant one. But my blood came halfway through the month, as usual. And anyway, I was losing weight, not gaining it. It got to the point where it didn’t matter whether Karl spoke to me or not. But I only had to think of Axel’s face in the field that morning, his face just before I hit him with the branch, and the anger rose in me until my hands shook so hard that I couldn’t dress. My anger wasn’t unlike my father’s – slow-burning, rarely visible, but almost impossible to put out.

  The day before the wedding I left the hotel early, walking along the road that led west out of the village. The leaves were red, and the high, baked grass of summer was beginning to soften with the frost. I passed Miss Poppel’s house. She was the only one of them I had any time for. She lived alone, with three stray cats and a car that had been painted an unusual shade of brown. When she drove down the street, all you could see was its huge, disappointed face and then, dimly, through the windscreen’s milky glass, her spectacles tilted upwards as she peered over the wheel and a headscarf which was actually a pair of old silk stockings. The front of her place was heaped with empty bottles and rusting engine parts the way all the Poppel family’s places were. With her, though, it was character, not squalor. She had chimes made out of door-hinges, each one the size of a man’s hand. She’d strung them together on a piece of wire and hung them from a withered crab-apple tree. They were so heavy, the wind didn’t move them much. But they did clang if a storm got up. I could sometimes hear them through the open window of my room at the hotel.

  I crossed the bridge, looking down between the wooden slats at the coating of pale-green scum on the water below. Beyond the bridge, the road ran uphill to the horizon, three kilometres away. I took the first turning on the left, a narrow track of mud and leaf-mould. I passed the plough that had been there for years, half-grown over now. There was a keen edge to the air that quickened my muscles as I walked, and I forgot for a moment that it was anger I was carrying.

  I saw the clearing ahead of me, the dun-coloured walls and black windows I knew so well. Instead of entering the house, I circled it, taking a path that struck off through the bracken-skirted trees just to the east. I parted brambles, then scrambled down a steep bank to the stream. There was the willow. And there, beneath it, was the flat place where we used to lie. I reached inside my coat and pulled out the folded manila envelope I’d taken from the hotel office. I began to strip one of the branches of its yellow leaves. When the envelope was full, I sealed it shut. I sat down on the bank and took out a pencil and wrote AXEL & EILEEN HEKMANN on the front, then I put the pencil away and laid the envelope beside me on the ground. I stared at the water for a long time. It ran as it had always run in the autumn, loud and purposeful, tumbling over the stones. You could sit there pretending that nothing had ever changed.

  The next day, after the ceremony, the Poppels held a party at their farm. While I was there, one of the men came up to me. He stuck his thumbs in his belt and gave me a slanting look.

  ‘How come you’re against the marriage?’

  It cost me a great effort to be polite, but it was someone’s wedding day and besides, I weighed it up and I decided that, in the end, politeness would be more insulting.

  ‘I’m not against it.’ I smiled. ‘Who said I was against it?’

  ‘I heard something.’

  ‘Rumours,’ I said.

  ‘What about the yellow leaves?’ He altered the angle of his head. ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘In our family they mean something special.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘Didn’t he tell you?’

  ‘No,’ the Poppel man said, ‘he didn’t tell us.’ One of his brothers or cousins had joined him, wearing a brown suit and chewing on a blade of grass.

  ‘Well, ask him,’ I said.

  ‘So you’re not against the marriage?’

  I sighed. ‘No.’

  ‘You fancy a dance?’ said the man in the suit.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Excuse me.’

  I walked across the yard to where a boy was pouring home-made beer and I asked him for a glass of it. I could feel their eyes on me, like snails. I was glad I’d sent the leaves – especially as they were yellow, and yellow meant what it did …

  I looked across at the two men. I nodded, raised my glass.

  Then I drank.

  It was a Friday afternoon and I’d been working at the inn for almost exactly a year. I was sitting on the front porch, taking a short break before I started to prepare the evening meal. The warm weather had lasted longer than usual, and the trees were only now beginning to lose their foliage. My father wiped the sweat off his forehead as he walked up the road towards me, his trousers fluttering and flapping round his ankles. He looked like a man who was standing still in a high wind. I rose slowly to my feet. I’d been wondering when he would come.

  He stood at the bottom of the steps. ‘Axel took the truck at half-past seven this morning and I haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘Where was he going? The market?’ There was a market every Friday morning in a town a few kilometres to the north.

  ‘Yes. But it’s three o’clock now.’

  ‘Maybe he’s driving around. You know how that wife of his likes to drive around.’

  My father shook his head. ‘I told him to be back at midday. There was something he had to help me with.’

  I felt my heart begin to churn. ‘You think he broke down?’

  My father turned and stared into the trees on the other side of the road, one hand twitching against his leg as if his brain was in that hand and it was thinking.

  ‘Get Karl,’ he said.

  Karl had the use of an old four-seater that belonged to Eva’s parents. The two men climbed in the front, with Karl behind the wheel. I sat in the back. First we drove out to the Poppels’ place. The mother was in the yard, feeding her chickens. She stood below us, one arm circling a bowl of corn meal, the veins and tendons showing through her transparent skin.

  ‘I ain’t seen nobody all day.’

  Karl spun the car round, ran it fast across the ruts and potholes, back on to the road, the springs complaining loudly all the way.

  ‘I told you we should’ve fixed the truck,’ he muttered.

  My father just stared out through the windscreen. I noticed how his shoulders curved under his jacket.

  I thought of the time I’d met Axel in the village. I was buying candles for the restaurant. Eva said candles would create atmosphere. That’s what people want, she told me. Atmosphere. It must have been early spring because I could remember what my first words were.

  ‘I hear the baby’s born.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He scuffed his boots on the floor. ‘It’s a boy.’

  ‘I heard that, too.’ I paid Minkels for the candles and moved towards the door. ‘What are you naming it?’

  ‘Michael. I call him Mazey.’ He grinned quickly.

  ‘Mazey?’

  ‘I don’t know why. That’s
what I call him, though. It just feels right.’

  I nodded. ‘You got a place of your own yet?’

  ‘We’re getting one.’ He told me there was a small homestead out towards the lake. It didn’t have any water, but he knew where they could dig a well. There was some land that came with it. He might try farming. Sheep, most likely.

  I was staring at him, thinking of how I used to lay my head against his shoulder, thinking of the sweet, split-wood smell of him as morning sunlight spilled over the ridge, when suddenly I realised that I was still angry. It was like some huge sea-creature surfacing. It startled me. I’d forgotten it was there.

  ‘It couldn’t have gone on, you know,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You and me.’ He had dropped his voice down low. ‘We couldn’t have gone on like that.’

  ‘You don’t have to whisper,’ I said. ‘Minkels is deaf, remember? He won’t hear a thing.’

  ‘Edie –’

  ‘I hope the property works out.’ I laughed my father’s laugh, one hollow sound and then nothing, because I already knew what I was going to do. I didn’t know how yet, but I knew what.

  I walked out of the shop. I heard the bell jangle above the door as he came after me. I turned to face him. His hair seemed to have darkened at the roots. He stood there.

  ‘Don’t you remember what I told you in the field?’ I said.

  He shook his head, but not because he didn’t remember. He looked out into the street. It was a still, grey day. There was nothing to look at. He shook his head again. Then, with his face lowered, and a smile on it, he turned and walked away. Just for a moment the street was not dust and a stray dog and two parked cars, but grass, the coarse grass of the field, and a path was visible, but only to us, and the stream was at the end of it, over a stile and through a copse, and I was following him down …

  ‘Which way would he have gone?’ Karl said.

  I glanced out of the window. We were at a fork in the road. The town where the market was held lay directly ahead of us, but so did the lake. If we turned left, we had to double back along a road that circled the shore. If we turned right, the road climbed up on to the hills that bordered the lake on its south-east side. My father was looking one way then the other, trying to gauge which was the more likely.

  ‘We’d better try them both,’ he said eventually.

  Karl had been staring at him, waiting for an answer. Now he faced the windscreen again and muttered something that I didn’t hear.

  ‘Left’s quicker,’ I said, ‘if he was in a hurry.’

  It was a road with no markings, scarcely wide enough for two cars. On the right and way below, the lake. You could only see bits of it between the trees, smooth as something planed, though I’d seen it in a gale once, with slabs of water lifting clear and flying through the air like houses in a tornado. Some days it was blue, others it was black. That afternoon it was green – the deep, dark green of marrow skin. To the left the ground climbed steeply through beeches that had been there for two hundred years. We drove slowly, heads turning from one side to the other, but we didn’t see the truck. We rounded the south-western corner of the lake, and the trees thinned and the ground levelled out. We stopped at a crossroads.

  ‘So much for that,’ Karl said. ‘Now what?’

  My father said we should drive on into the town.

  By the time we reached the market square, it was almost deserted. Traders were packing the last of their goods into the backs of vans. Nobody knew anything. We tried the bars. There was one man who remembered a young couple with a baby. It was because of the baby, he said; his first was due in a month’s time. He thought he’d seen them leave in a dark-red truck.

  ‘When was that?’ Karl said.

  ‘Eleven. Maybe twelve.’

  Karl looked at my father, but he didn’t say anything.

  We headed north, out of the town. The road took us through farm country, then it veered east and began to climb up to a ridge. This was the second route. To the left you could see the bare brow of the hill, all outcrops of rock and windswept grass. On the right, there was a long drop to the lake below – a steep scree-slope which plunged into the water at an angle of seventy-five degrees and kept on going.

  There was no sign of the truck.

  When we arrived at the fork again, Karl stopped the car in the banked-up leaves at the side of the road and left the engine idling. He sat there, staring through the windscreen.

  It was after six o’clock and the sun had almost gone; what was left of it was pink and raw, like part of a skinned animal. We’d been looking for almost three hours. It seemed hopeless. But, without meaning to, I spoke: ‘I think we should try the first route again.’ The two men didn’t say anything, but I could hear their reluctance, their exasperation. ‘I’ll walk it if I have to,’ I added.

  Karl was motionless for a moment longer, then he shifted into gear and pulled back on to the road.

  We’d only been driving along the lake for a few minutes when I saw it. I shouted at Karl to stop the car, then I opened the door and jumped out. We were on a bend. The road swung left, away from the lake, though it was still just visible about thirty metres below. I ran back to the tree, crouched down. There. A piece of bark had been torn away at bumper-height and the blond wood under it was smeared with plum-coloured paint. I’d only missed it the first time because I’d been looking for the wrong thing. I began to make my way down the slope towards the lake. The ground was so steep, it was hard not to lose control and fall headlong.

  I followed the trail of damaged trees, some creaking, as if they were still recovering from what had happened, some scratched or gouged, some split wide open. I saw Eileen Poppel first. She must have been hurled through the windscreen, hurled clean through. You wouldn’t have thought a little thing like that would have weighed enough to break the glass. She lay at the foot of a tree, her arms spread over the roots, her face in profile, like someone worshipping the earth. Her cheek and her forehead were ribboned, crazed with blood. At last they seemed appropriate, those eyes of hers, which had always looked as though someone’s thumbs were pressing at them from the inside. I ran on down the slope.

  I found the truck with its radiator grille dipped in the lake, like a cow drinking, its headlamps staring gloomily into the silent, dark-green water. I could see my brother in the cab, his chin resting on his chest. I called his name softly, but he didn’t move. It was then that I noticed the smell of sulphur. I dropped to my knees, put my fingers in the water, tasted it.

  I stood up. It didn’t feel as if my feet were quite in contact with the ground. I walked to the door of the truck. My brother seemed thinner. I knew what it was. The steering-wheel had pushed his ribs up against his spine, and the organs had been forced sideways. His face was unmarked, though, and there was no blood on him at all. I wondered when his skin would turn yellow, when his eyes would narrow. I knew he wouldn’t want to look like a foreigner in the land that he was going to. I could imagine him on the battlements already, watching me from halfway across the world, watching me as I stood beside him.

  I was aware of everything around me, trees and sky and ground, and I was at the centre of it, and I knew then that it was right, what I had done. I took a deep breath and let it out, and then I heard the two men come trampling through the leaves towards me, and I heard something else, too, not a cry exactly, but a voice, a small voice, and I looked down into the cab and saw the child, not more than six months old, my brother’s child. The wooden drawer he always travelled in was on the floor next to the gear lever and he was lying on his back in it, staring upwards through the shattered windscreen at the trees. He was holding his arms away from his body, moving the inside of his wrists against the air.

  ‘– I told you it needed work.’

  ‘I only looked at it a few days ago. I didn’t notice anything –’

  ‘You didn’t notice anything. When was the last time you noticed anything?’

  I rocke
d the baby in the crook of my elbow. He made no sound. He just stared up into my face the same way he’d stared up into the trees.

  ‘There, Mazey,’ I whispered. ‘There.’

  Five days later I stood beside the grave.

  The weather had changed. A cold October wind pulled at the blanket I’d wrapped Mazey in. I folded it more tightly around him. I’d lost a brother and inherited a son. I was nineteen years old.

  All I could think of was what I’d said after we found the bodies. In the car, on the way back to the village, I was the only one who’d spoken.

  ‘That stupid son of a bitch,’ I said. ‘He never could drive.’ Then I burst into tears.

  I cried for hours. Most of it was sheer frustration. If only he’d listened to me, none of this would’ve happened. If only he’d thought for once. It was nobody’s fault but his. He’d chosen it.

  So there I stood, on that cold October day.

  My father had built the box, as he’d built Felix’s seven years before. It took him longer than usual. One evening, shortly after the accident, I walked out to the house. I found him on the back porch, staring into the darkness. I asked him how it was coming, but he didn’t answer. I went and looked in the barn and saw the box lying on trestles, less than half-built. I wondered if he was using the right wood. Axel had said there were different kinds, but he’d never taught me how to tell them apart. Returning to the porch, I took the chair next to my father’s. From where he was sitting he could see the truck, parked next to the goat shed on the far side of the clearing. There were people in the village who thought he should’ve sold it for scrap, but he insisted on keeping it. For parts, he said. It wasn’t morbid, it was practical, and he wouldn’t be persuaded otherwise. I had no idea what he was staring at. Maybe it was the truck. Or maybe it was the small pond glimmering beyond it, among the trees. Or maybe it was nothing. I didn’t know what he was thinking – I’d never known – and he wasn’t about to tell me either. I sat beside him for an hour and we were silent the whole time. When he finally spoke to me, I was almost asleep.