The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  I stared at the window. It had begun to rain.

  ‘I didn’t mean it,’ Kroner was saying. ‘He hit me, that’s all. Your brother.’

  ‘Let’s have a look at it.’

  He knelt on the floor and lifted his lip. He showed me the tooth.

  ‘It’s chipped,’ I told him, ‘nothing more. It’ll give you character.’

  He looked up at me and the way he looked then, just for a moment, even with the child crying and the rain crawling down the window, I knew why I’d allowed it all to happen.

  Winter lasted longer than usual that year, and even in April we had sleet driving almost horizontally across the land, the wind tearing out of the north-east and cutting through your clothes as if they weren’t there. One morning that month I came back from the village to find both Kroner and Mazey gone. They rarely went anywhere together; I couldn’t think where they might be. But the moment I noticed tyre tracks in the yard I guessed.

  It was afternoon before Kroner returned, and he returned alone. He was trying to keep his eyes steady as he stepped down out of the truck and saw me waiting outside the back door. He did a poor imitation of a man with right on his side.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I did it.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘The boy …’ He stood in the mud, one hand outstretched, as if the truth was self-evident.

  It was – but I wasn’t about to put it into words for him. I shifted his child higher in my arms. The inside of my head was scorched, charred; I couldn’t have spoken if I’d wanted to.

  ‘I thought we agreed,’ he said, taking one step towards me. And then, bristling, ‘I’ve done you a favour and that’s all the thanks I get?’

  I turned and ran into the barn and snatched a skinning knife down from the wall. Then out into the yard again, the child still in my arms.

  Kroner was standing where I’d left him, but all his righteousness, and all the indignation that had followed it, had fled. Just those small, square hands spread in the air and his chin at an angle, justifying. Like most men, he could be hypnotised by sudden, unexpected movement.

  My head was black inside, all black. I held the knife just below my jaw, which was the same height as Kroner’s heart.

  ‘Give me the keys to the truck.’

  His Adam’s apple plunged, then climbed again. ‘Not with the child here, Edith. Not with the –’

  ‘Give me the keys.’

  He reached into his pocket. Took the keys out, handed them to me. His eyes were still running backwards and forwards between the aimed blade and my face.

  I pushed the child at him and left.

  I drove the forty-five kilometres with the knife lying beside me on the seat. It was a cold day, with snow at the edges of the road. Everything was grey: the sky, the trees, the fields. I saw a fire burning in the land behind a house. I couldn’t believe how orange it was; it was the only real colour anywhere.

  Kroner had talked to me the week before, when Mazey and my father were asleep. I was tired that night; I couldn’t remember much of what he’d said. He never could say things straight out, anyway. He had to come at you round corners. The long and the short of it was, he’d tried to love the boy; he’d tried, and failed. I thought he should try harder.

  Kroner shook his head. ‘He doesn’t belong with us, not now we’ve got a child of our own.’

  ‘Where do you think he belongs? With the Poppels?’ I laughed scornfully.

  ‘We’ve got our own family now. It’s just not natural.’

  ‘Nobody said it was natural. It’s how it is, that’s all.’

  Kroner shook his head again. I hadn’t listened. I hadn’t understood. And so he’d been forced to act without me, on my behalf.

  That was the trouble with Kroner. He thought he was the clever one. He thought he could get his way. Well, we’d see about that. We’d see. I gripped the steering-wheel so hard, my hands ached for three days afterwards, as if I’d been strangling guinea fowl all afternoon, or scything grass.

  The institution was a big building, and it took me almost half an hour to find Mazey. He was in a long room on the second floor. It was something like a church in there, only the smell was different. They’d strapped him to a metal bed, with nothing underneath him but a dark-green rubber sheet. He was almost naked, just a gown on him that was unfastened at the sides, and it was cold in that room, so cold that my breath showed in the air like cigarette smoke. I didn’t bother unfastening the belts. I just worked the skinning knife under the leather and sawed until it frayed and snapped. First one wrist, then the other. Then his ankles. I put his clothes back on, and led him out of the room and down the stairs. There were three men in white overalls who stopped talking when they saw us. We walked right through them and they didn’t move. It was something in my eyes, maybe. Or maybe it was the knife that I was holding upright in my fist.

  He sat beside me in the truck and watched the trees go by. His right hand opened and closed on his bare leg. He didn’t seem upset by what had happened. It had happened in the world where his body was, but his mind was somewhere else. There was a gap between the two that most people didn’t have: his body might be in pain, but his mind would be too far away to notice or remember. I asked him if he was hungry. He looked at me with eyes that were the same colour as the weather; he didn’t say anything, though. I stopped at a roadside café and bought him a sausage and some chips on a paper plate. He ate slowly, his head turned sideways, one finger on the window. Sometimes it hurt me just to look at him. There were things that were going to happen and I would never even know.

  He only spoke once during the drive, and that was when we passed a house that had a crab-apple tree in front of it. I thought I heard him murmur the word ‘singing’.

  I turned to him. ‘You mean chimes? The wind-chimes?’

  He didn’t answer. His head was resting against the seat, and his hands, closed into soft fists, were pressed against his thighs.

  ‘We’ll be home soon.’ I took one hand off the wheel and pushed his hair back from his forehead. ‘I wouldn’t leave you in a place like that. I wouldn’t leave you there.’

  It was dusk when we drove into the clearing. A light was on in the barn – my father, working late. He’d taken to spending most of his time in the barn since Kroner had moved in; he even had a bed out there. The house was in darkness. Just the kitchen window glowing, and the sky still pale above. Those yellow panes of glass looked welcoming, but a welcome was the last thing I expected. There was a man in that room, and three hours ago I’d held a knife to him.

  Kroner was sitting by the stove with a newspaper spread on his knees. He was pretending to read, but I knew he wasn’t taking in a single word. The baby was lying on a blanket on the table, crying.

  ‘Baby needs feeding,’ he said.

  Some of the fury that had carried me forty-five kilometres across the county still remained. I took Mazey by the shoulder and stood him in front of Kroner. At last Kroner looked up from the paper, his eyes jumping from my face to my hand and back again.

  ‘See that man?’ I was pointing at Kroner, but looking at Mazey.

  Mazey nodded.

  ‘That man is not your father,’ I said. ‘Do you understand?’

  According to Eva, Karl had started drinking two years after he’d got married and he’d been drinking ever since, so when I drove to the town one morning I wasn’t surprised to see his car parked outside a small bar near the railway crossing. What surprised me was what happened next. I was supposed to be buying shoes for Karin that day. Instead, I parked my car next to his and walked into the bar.

  It was a fine September day outside, but inside it could have been any time of year at all. Or any year. The air was half smoke, half dust. Men sat alone, their faces propped against their hands. High up, where the walls turned yellow, a deer’s head was mounted on a wooden shield. It had both its antlers, but only one of its glass eyes. Above the bar there was a faded poster of a girl in red shorts and a bi
kini top. She was advertising tyres. The door to the toilets was ajar and I could smell the disinfectant.

  I took the stool next to Karl’s. He didn’t notice me – or, if he did, he gave no sign of it. His glass was almost empty, its tall sides laced with froth. He must have drunk it fast. I bought him another and put it in front of him. I bought myself one, too. When he looked round, there was a slow, knowing smile on his face. I didn’t think he was pleased to see me particularly. I was simply somebody he recognised.

  ‘Nice place you found,’ I said.

  He grunted.

  I raised my glass. ‘Your health.’

  His shoulders shook once or twice, but if he was laughing, he kept the sound of it inside.

  That was the way it began, the two of us just sitting there. The silence was my father’s silence: you didn’t open your mouth until you had something to say – and even then, sometimes, you didn’t. But when an hour had gone and I still hadn’t left, when I ordered more drinks instead of leaving (using the money set aside for Karin’s shoes), he began to talk. It was mostly to himself, though I must’ve been the trigger for it. He was at his wits’ end. There was a business to run, the family as well, and all Eva did was sit in that fucking rock-pool and read from the Apocalypse. Recently she’d started claiming that their guests were agents of the devil, sent to lead her into temptation. Sometimes she told them the hotel was full. Or else she hid bowls of sulphur water underneath their beds, and the smell was so terrible, they always left the next morning. She already smelled bad enough herself. Like hell, in fact. He’d stood it for years, but he didn’t know how much longer he could last. He couldn’t even bring himself to touch her any more. It was hard to believe he’d had two children by her.

  ‘Are you going to leave her?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. It’s Tom and Anna …’

  I nodded.

  ‘Sometimes I try and wait it out,’ he said. ‘Mostly that’s what I do. It’ll get better, that’s what I’m thinking. But it doesn’t. And if anyone tries to talk to me about it –’ He broke off, shook his head. ‘Like that time I hit your husband.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘That time he came to see me. I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have hit him.’

  ‘Ah, fuck it,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I drank some beer. When Karl looked at me, I shrugged and said, ‘He’s a coward.’

  I wasn’t only thinking about the way he drove Mazey to the institution when I wasn’t looking. It was everything that had happened since. At first he tried to separate Mazey from the family by legal means. He wouldn’t allow Mazey to use his name. Mazey was a Hekmann, he said, not a Kroner, and he had a piece of paper from the lawyer’s office to prove it.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘In that case, I’m a Hekmann, too.’

  From that time on I used my maiden name, even though we were still married and living in the same house. Even though I didn’t have a piece of paper from the lawyer’s office. But for Kroner that was just the beginning. He wanted Mazey gone, and practised untold cruelties behind my back, hoping to drive him away. He was sly, as always. He hurt Mazey in ways that made it look as if the boy had done it himself. The bruises, the lacerations, the burns – they could have been accidents. Once, Mazey came home smelling of urine and I thought he must have wet himself – he did that sometimes – but I could smell it on his face and hair, and I became suspicious. I couldn’t prove anything, though. Later I heard rumours that Kroner and a couple of his men from the quarry had chained Mazey to a fence and then they all undid their trousers and pissed on him. That kind of treatment didn’t work with Mazey. He knew no other life – why would it make him leave? Added to which, he didn’t understand things that other people took for granted. If you put him in front of a television it was quite possible that he’d use it as a mirror. Kroner never understood that. Someone told me that Kroner had taken Mazey to the bridge one time and pointed out along the road and said, ‘Get out of here. Go on, get.’ Mazey just stared at Kroner’s finger, the way a cat might, and then followed him home.

  I nodded to myself. ‘A coward’s all he is. And what you were saying about Eva, well, the same goes for Kroner.’

  Karl looked at me across the rim of his glass, but I didn’t want to talk about my husband any more. There were nights when I could feel he was ready and he tried to put it into me, but it had been a long time since I wanted him – in fact, maybe I never had. His white belly lowered over me, his flesh so soft I lost my fingers in it. The way his skin flushed in a wide red collar round his neck. I only had to think of Axel lying by the stream before the sun came up, the colour of his skin in the morning light, the clean wood smell of it …

  And anyway, I knew what his game was, as surely as if he’d been wearing a stocking over his head and carrying a sawn-off shot-gun. He’d stolen from my body once, and I wasn’t about to let that happen again. I still dreamed about the roses sometimes, all twenty-six of them, and I always woke up feeling sick.

  ‘No one in our family knows how to marry,’ Karl said.

  ‘Maybe Felix got it right,’ I said. ‘He didn’t even try.’

  Suddenly I looked at Karl, my brother, and I smiled. I’d just realised. This was the first time we had ever talked.

  But there was a moment, later, when everything spread out sideways like melted glass, and Karl turned to me and said, ‘You know, I never did like you very much.’

  At first I laughed, treating it as a joke, but his face didn’t change. And suddenly I wasn’t drunk any more. Something like that, it sobers you from one moment to the next. In a way, though, I’d known it was coming. By sitting on the empty stool, I’d asked for it. The truth behind those years of silence.

  ‘I just never did.’ He was still looking at me with his three-day growth of beard and his sudden, drunken clarity. ‘Know why?’

  ‘You’re going to tell me, aren’t you.’

  ‘Oh yeah. I’m going to tell you.’ He turned on his stool so eagerly, so clumsily, I had to smile.

  ‘You smile,’ he said. ‘But underneath, you’re not smiling.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said. ‘And what am I doing,’ I said, ‘underneath?’

  ‘You never let anything out, do you. You fucking never,’ and his hand closed in a tight fist as he fought to explain himself, ‘you never give anything away.’

  I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake by walking into the bar. I wished I’d driven right past it. The shoe shop seemed a far better place to be.

  ‘Maybe that’s why you look the way you do,’ he said.

  I asked him what he meant.

  ‘Our mother, she was beautiful. That’s why she left –’

  ‘You remember that?’

  ‘Karin’s got something of her, in a way. But you –’ He looked down at the bar and shook his head. ‘Me, all right, I get drunk,’ he said, ‘I make a fool of myself, I knock people down, sometimes I spend a couple of nights in prison cooling off – but I’m not dangerous.’ He leaned closer to me, one finger lifted, pointing. ‘It’s you. You’re the one who’s dangerous.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘People are terrified.’

  But what he was saying tied a string around my heart and pulled it tight. I’d always wondered if anyone knew. If anyone had guessed.

  ‘I’m right, aren’t I. Aren’t I.’

  I was hoping he’d drink enough to forget what he’d said. At the same time I knew it came from deep down, years back. Being drunk was not the source of it. That was just a way of gaining access. And besides, I’d never believed what people said about being so drunk they couldn’t remember anything. Still, I bought him another beer. Just in case it was true.

  ‘You don’t hit anyone or go to prison,’ Karl said. ‘You just sit there, behind those spectacles of yours, and you could kill us all, one by one, and you wouldn’t feel a thing.’ He reached out for my glasses, but I swayed back on my stool. ‘Ah,’ and he waved a hand past my face, disgusted now, and dr
ank.

  I lit a cigarette.

  ‘You’d do it, wouldn’t you,’ he muttered. ‘Maybe you did it already. Maybe you already killed someone.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘See? You’re doing it right now. That’s it, right there. The look I’m talking about.’ And he pointed right into my face with a finger that drew unsteady circles, like the shapes flies make in the air. ‘Like who?’ he said, imitating me. ‘Like who?’

  I pushed his hand away so hard, he almost fell backwards off his stool. He was right. I could’ve killed him. Right there and then. The anger bursting through me like the rush of hot pus from an abscess.

  ‘I got to you.’ He sat there, chuckling. ‘You might as well admit it. I got to you.’

  ‘Yeah, Karl,’ I said. ‘You got to me.’

  You stupid son of a bitch.

  It was all bluff. Curiosity and bluff. He was no threat to me at all. No threat to anyone. I used the mirror behind the bar to look at him. His damp face, the lids of his eyes inflamed.

  ‘Karl,’ I said, ‘you’re so fucking drunk, I could pour you into a bottle and put a cork on it.’

  ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you.’

  ‘Anything,’ I said, ‘to shut you up.’

  I ordered a whisky, to clean the taste of beer from my mouth. I stared at the girl on the poster. I found myself wondering what my mother had looked like. No one had ever told me. I’d never even seen a photograph. That could be her, for all I knew, in those red shorts. It was six o’clock and the bar was beginning to fill up with men from the nearby building site. I would have to be going.

  As I climbed down off the stool, Karl took hold of my sleeve. ‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Axel’s boy. Why’d you do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Why’d you take him in?’

  I shook myself free. ‘I’m tired of your questions, Karl. I’m going home.’

  ‘Home?’ He stared into the forest of green and brown bottles on the shelf above the bar. ‘Yeah, there’s always that.’

  Outside, it was dark. The street-lights bounced. I’d thought the fresh air would clear my head. It only made things worse. Now I had to drive.