The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  The car didn’t seem to want to move. I had to press down hard on the accelerator. After a few minutes I smelled burning. The handbrake was still on.

  I drove slowly, seeing double. Luckily, the roads were empty.

  Then, three kilometres from home, I misjudged a bend. I’d known it all my life, but it seemed sharper than usual that evening and before I could do anything the car was sliding sideways into a field. I got out. Water seeped in over the top of my shoes. I found a fence-post and wedged it underneath the wheels. But when I tried to reverse back on to the road, the wheels spun and the wood just fell apart. I looked around. The trees kept gliding away from me, away from me. The sky was made of dots – millions of tiny, busy dots. It didn’t seem very likely that anyone would come along. That was why I’d chosen the route in the first place. I was going to have to walk.

  The evening was cool and dry, no sign of any rain. Still. Three kilometres. I spat into the hedgerow, my saliva thick with alcohol. Something Karl said to my father on the day of the accident came back to me. When was the last time you noticed anything? The words spread through me and went on spreading, like something that had spilled out of a bottle. I had the sudden, uneasy feeling that Karl knew more than he was telling. He had asked me why I’d taken Axel’s child, but he already knew the answer. He just wanted me to admit it to him. He wanted to hear me say that it was out of love. A new love, but distilled from a much older one, and all the stronger for it. On the other hand, did it really matter if he knew? He was hardly going to go round telling people. But the secret was his, and he had to carry it. Perhaps that was the source of his disgust with me, the reason for his silence.

  At last I turned down the track that led to our house. There was a light mist rising in the hollow; the clearing looked mysterious. As I passed the barn, I called out to my father. He was putting the finishing touches to a miniature chest of drawers, which Dr Holbek would keep his poems in. I pushed too hard on the kitchen door and it crashed against the wall, dislodging something in the room. Kroner looked up from his evening paper.

  ‘I didn’t hear the car,’ he said.

  I had to laugh. ‘That’s because there wasn’t one.’

  ‘But you went out in it.’

  ‘It broke down. I left it in a field.’ I sank into a chair, exhausted suddenly.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ Kroner said.

  He was right. When I looked at him, his whole body kept jerking sideways. ‘Is Mazey back yet?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him.’

  The door opened and Karin walked into the room. She looked at me with eyes that seemed too big for her face.

  ‘Did you get my shoes?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. ‘They didn’t have your size.’

  The following spring, Karl moved his family away from the village altogether. He’d taken a job as a supermarket manager in an industrial town down south. At first Eva didn’t want to leave, but Karl quoted Revelation 3:8 – Behold I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name – and she went peacefully after that. They rented a small house in the suburbs. Yellow, with brown shutters. Eva sent us a picture later that year. It was the only time we heard from them, apart from a card at Christmas. In some ways, knowing what he knew, I was relieved to have him gone.

  They’d asked us to run the hotel for them, though as Karl had told me in the bar, there was nothing much to run. (A glance at the register confirmed this: only thirteen guests in the previous nine months.) It was mostly a question of living there, maintaining it. Kroner was overjoyed. At last we’d have some privacy, he said, some room. He also seemed to think it was romantic, moving into the place where ‘we first met and fell in love’, as he put it. He talked about ‘a brand-new start’. If what I’d wanted was a man with the ability to fool himself, I couldn’t have done better than Peter Kroner. Did he think I didn’t know about the cruelties that he’d inflicted on Mazey? Did he expect me to forget?

  The week before the move, he tried to persuade me to leave Mazey behind. He said Mazey would be happier out at the house. He could sit there whittling all day. No one would bother him. And he’d be company for my father. I stared at Kroner in disbelief. Crafty as ever, brazen, too: he was even using my own arguments against me. I wouldn’t hear of it, of course. Mazey was my son. He could visit his grandfather all he wanted, but he would live with us.

  Mazey was seventeen now, the same age Axel was when he died. He was taller than Axel, though, and longer-limbed. His mouth was wide. To people who didn’t know him, he might appear to be grinning – but if they looked him in the eyes they realised their mistake. He’d lost none of his restlessness: ‘I’m going out,’ he’d say (he always told me, and only me, beforehand; it was strange how certain fragments of normal behaviour had lodged in him), and then he’d put on his dun-coloured jacket and his cap, and he’d be gone for hours – days, sometimes. I tried not to worry. Now that he was grown, people in the village left him alone. They knew who he was and, more importantly, they remembered what he’d been, and there was a residue of wariness, if not fear, even after fifteen years. The streets he walked along emptied before him. The landscape cleared as he moved across it. Somehow I doubted that he noticed, though, and my heart went out to him in his ignorance. I was often curious about the time he spent away from me, but if I asked him where he’d been, his answers were usually gruff and one word long. Walking or, Around. In some ways, he was typical for his age: the secrecy, the awkwardness, the resistance to questioning – they were all part of adolescence. I was just his mother. I didn’t need to know.

  We’d been living at the hotel for about six months when a police van pulled up outside one afternoon. I was by myself that day; Kroner had taken Karin with him to the quarry, and Mazey had gone out two nights before and hadn’t returned. I opened the front door and stood on the porch. The policeman was already standing at the foot of the steps. I recognised him as the constable from the next village. He looked down into his hat, which he was holding in both hands, then squinted up at me. ‘Mrs Kroner?’

  I grunted. I no longer used the name.

  ‘It’s your son. He’s in hospital.’

  As we drove towards the town, he told me that Mazey had been found lying in a ditch. His right leg had been broken in two places. They thought he’d been knocked down by a car. It was hard to be sure, of course, because he wouldn’t talk to anyone.

  ‘He hardly ever talks,’ I said. ‘He’s backward.’

  ‘I know. They didn’t realise. They thought it was shock.’

  When we reached the hospital, I was taken to see the doctor. He wore half-moon glasses with thin gold rims. His lips were too dark, almost purple; it made me think of Felix, when we woke up on that winter morning and he was dead. The doctor explained that the double fracture had not, in itself, been too severe, though it had been complicated by the length of time that had elapsed before the leg received medical attention. It was possible the patient would walk with a limp for the rest of his life.

  ‘Are you in the habit of letting your son wander the countryside at night?’ He peered at me over his glasses. ‘You’re aware that he’s retarded?’

  ‘This wasn’t an accident,’ I said. ‘It was deliberate.’

  The doctor began to ask me something else, but I interrupted. ‘I’d like to see him now. Alone.’

  Lying in his ward, Mazey looked unshaven and exhausted. His leg was in plaster, all the way from the top of his thigh to his ankle, and it was being supported by a system of ropes and pulleys. I sat beside the bed and put my hand on his.

  ‘Are you all right, Mazey?’

  His eyes lifted, fixed on me.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt too much?’ I said.

  He shook his head, two tiny movements. Right, then left. Then still again. He was glad to see me. I could tell.

  I gripped his hand. ‘You’ll be out of here in no time,’ I said, ‘don
’t worry.’

  When I got back to the hotel, Kroner and Karin were eating supper at the kitchen table – just bread and cheese, a glass of milk. I knew they’d stopped talking as soon as they heard the front door open. You can always tell when people have just stopped talking: they seem to be acting suddenly – and they’re not actors so it doesn’t feel natural. I walked across the dark, empty dining-room and into the light of the kitchen. Kroner asked me where I’d been.

  ‘I’ve been with Mazey.’ I took off my coat and hung it behind the door. ‘Didn’t you hear what happened?’

  No, he hadn’t heard.

  ‘Someone knocked him down with a car. He was lying in a ditch for twenty-four hours with a broken leg.’ I was watching Kroner carefully now. ‘Do you know anything about it?’

  No, he didn’t. He was studying his sandwich, as if he couldn’t quite decide what angle to approach it from.

  ‘Look at me.’

  His eyes lifted to my face for a moment, then slid away. ‘I just told you, Edith. I don’t know anything about it. You tell me that there’s been some kind of accident. Well, it’s the first I heard of it. All right?’ He took a deep breath and blew the air out noisily. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  I stared at him. ‘You didn’t do it?’

  ‘No.’

  The lights in the kitchen flickered, but stayed on.

  ‘Is he dead?’ Karin asked.

  She lifted her glass of milk to her mouth with both hands and drank from it. Nine years old, with dark-blue eyes and brown hair curling down on to her shoulders. She felt less like mine than ever.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s not dead.’

  ‘Old Miss Poppel’s dead. She –’

  ‘We’re not talking about Old Miss Poppel.’

  Kroner put his sandwich down, only half-eaten. ‘There’s no need to shout at her.’

  I went over to the sink, ran the tap and rinsed my hands in the warm water. I noticed my reflection in the window.

  ‘So you don’t know anything?’ I said, with my back to the room. ‘It’s not another of your little games?’

  I heard Kroner’s chair scrape backwards and saw his reflection rise behind my own.

  ‘Karin,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time you went to bed.’

  I stared at my face, then at his. Then I stared into the blackness that was beyond us both. There’s no such thing as an accident, I whispered to myself. There’s no such thing.

  One night, when the moon was almost full and Kroner was asleep, I crept into Karin’s room and woke her up. I put my mouth close to her ear. Told her to get dressed.

  ‘Is it an adventure?’ she asked me.

  I nodded. ‘It’s a secret, too.’

  I took her by the hand and led her down the stairs. Standing in the passageway outside the dining-room, I could hear Kroner snoring in his bed one floor above. I opened the side door and we walked out into the gravel car-park. Then down the steps, towards the pool. Karin was wide awake now, and too filled with wonder at being out at night to say a word. We moved past the fir trees at the back of the hotel, over some rocks and along a narrow path, into the shadow of the woods. It was half an hour to the main road. I looked at Karin, walking beside me. ‘You’re not tired, are you?’

  She shook her head. ‘Where are we going?’

  I smiled mysteriously. ‘You’ll see.’ In my right hand I had a bucket and every time it swung, the moon broke into a thousand pieces.

  I’d spent the afternoon smashing empty beer bottles and pickle jars behind the shed where the pool equipment and the gardening tools were kept. Everyone was out except for Mazey, who was upstairs, listening to his chimes. (Miss Poppel had been as good as her word: The wind-chimes that hang from the crab-apple tree in my front garden, I hereby bequeath to Mazey Hekmann.) Even if he heard me, though, it didn’t matter. He was hardly going to tell anyone.

  When we reached the main road, we crouched down in a shallow ditch. ‘This is the place,’ I whispered.

  Karin looked at me. It wasn’t anywhere she knew.

  I showed her how the road sloped upwards, dipped, sloped upwards once again, then curved to the left and vanished behind some trees.

  ‘From here we can see them coming.’

  ‘Who?’ she said. ‘Who’s coming?’ Her eyes had widened. Maybe she thought it was Holy Jesus, or the Three Wise Men. Christmas was only a few weeks off.

  But I didn’t answer. I put one finger to my lips and watched the road. Minutes passed. Then I touched her shoulder, pointed to the west. There was a beam of light in the distance. At first it looked like a triangle, long and golden, lying on its side. But as the car came accelerating round the bend, the triangle turned into circles, two circles, also gold. They were so bright that we had shadows, even though the car was still at least a kilometre away. I tipped the bucket, shook some broken glass on to my hand. I waited until the car was hidden in the dip, then stood up and threw the glass across the road. I ducked down again, one hand braced on my knee.

  It was almost frightening – the size of it, the speed, the sudden noise. I saw glass glitter underneath its tyres. But nothing happened. The car hurtled over it and on. Its tail-lights were snuffed out. It was gone.

  ‘Church-goers,’ I muttered.

  I reached for the bucket, and looked round at Karin. She was kneeling beside me, biting her bottom lip.

  ‘Now it’s your turn.’

  I shook the bucket as if it was a game and she could choose any piece she wanted and maybe win a prize. She hesitated, though. The trees above us shifted in the wind.

  ‘Don’t you love your brother?’ I whispered.

  Her eyes looked into mine.

  ‘Your brother, Mazey. Don’t you love him?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Come on, then. Cup those hands of yours.’

  I trickled glass out of the bucket. Her hands were so small, even when they were joined together. I hoped it would be enough.

  ‘Careful,’ I said. ‘Don’t cut yourself.’

  No sooner had I set the bucket down than I heard the sound of an engine again. It came and went in the silence, the way mosquitoes do. Headlights were searching the darkness on the bend. I waited until they disappeared, then took Karin’s arm.

  ‘Now, girl. Do it now.’

  I watched her step out into the road, lightly, almost on tiptoe, as though she was afraid the surface might give way beneath her. She stood still for a moment, then she flung both hands upwards into the air. She might have been releasing something she had caught – an insect, or a butterfly. The glass bounced prettily. But it held her there too long. She’d forgotten all about the car. And now the headlights were rising above the level of the road and bearing down on her, two circles merging into one fierce glare. I reached out, seized her arm and pulled her down into the ditch.

  The car howled past us. The hot diesel blast of it.

  I heard a tyre blow. As I lifted my head, I saw the car swerve. Then it was rolling, the metal spitting sparks. It hit a tree, bounced off it, turned over half a dozen times. Then it was lying motionless, on its side, two hundred metres down the road.

  I stood up. Kicking most of the glass into the ditch, I walked towards the car. One of the headlights pointed into the undergrowth, as if it was trying to show us something. I could smell burnt rubber. Nothing was moving.

  Two people were inside. The man wore a suit and a pale hat. His mouth was open. One of his teeth had a green jewel in it; the rest were glistening with blood. There was a woman, too, but she was harder to make out. She was beneath the man, all folded up in what was now the bottom of the car. One of her shoes had fallen off and I could see her stockinged foot, the underside of it. She had high arches. I thought she might be a dancer.

  ‘Trying to kill my son,’ I said.

  I took Karin’s hand and looked down through the windscreen at the ungainly tangle of their bodies.

  ‘Murderers,’ I said.

  Two days later, at the breakfa
st table, I read a report of the accident in the local paper. The two occupants of the car were named as J. Swanzy, also known as Emerald Joe, on account of the gemstone he wore in his front tooth, and his companion, Kamilla Esztergom, the singer. Both were killed outright. Police were calling it a case of reckless driving, since the levels of alcohol in the blood of both the deceased had been well in excess of the legal limit.

  I touched the names with the tip of my finger. Emerald Joe. Kamilla (the singer!). Had they been talking when the car hit that patch of glass? And, if so, what about? What had their lives been like? I couldn’t even begin to imagine. I’d never met people who wore emeralds in their teeth. They reminded me of the stories Felix used to tell. I thought of Mazey, who would walk with a limp until he was dead. Mazey in the ditch, alone, in pain. I brought my eyes back into focus. Only then did I see the misprint: instead of reckless, they’d written wreckless. What had happened had happened – but, at the same time, somehow, it had not. All the accounts were balanced, all grudges cancelled out.

  One year I took Mazey to the lake. I wanted to show him the place where I had found him, and I was also curious to see it again for myself. There was nowhere to park on that particular bend in the road, so we drove past it, leaving the car on a farm-track half a kilometre further on, then walked back. Mazey had recovered full use of his leg. From time to time he would reach down and touch it, just above the knee, and there was a slight unevenness to his walk. You wouldn’t have called it a limp, though.

  ‘Your leg’s mended pretty well,’ I said, ‘hasn’t it?’

  He looked at the leg. I did, too. We looked up again, both at the same time, which made me smile.

  ‘That doctor,’ I said. ‘He was just trying to frighten me.’

  I had the sudden feeling I weighed nothing. I could have floated up into the trees.

  Nothing had changed on the road, not in twenty years. As I walked along, I had a thought. What if time wasn’t a straight line at all? What if it was more like the wire on a telephone, with loops in it? You seemed to be going forwards, but actually you were going round and back on yourself. There were moments in your life that were far apart, but, at the same time, they almost coincided.