The Insult (42 page)

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 drank.

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.

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.