Rupert Thomson - The Insult

My Uncle Felix bore no resemblance to my father, not in his build nor in his nature. He was altogether more excitable, more harmless, too — a frothy man with a left eye that winked without him meaning it to and a smell to his skin like sour milk. He never married, though he considered himself a ladies’ man. I loved to watch him getting ready for a dance. He would stand in front of the tin mirror in the kitchen, legs apart and slightly bent, flattening his wild hair with lard. Then he’d step back, turn one cheek to the mirror, then the other, and he’d shoot air through the gaps in his teeth, a kind of whistle that was like a rocket going off. He always wore his Sunday trousers, which were wide at the thigh, but much wider by the time they reached his ankles. The turn-ups were so roomy, we used to hide things in there — dead frogs, cigar stubs, empty sardine tins — knowing he’d discover them later, in the middle of a waltz, perhaps, or even, though I couldn’t quite imagine it, an embrace. The next morning he’d come after us with a belt, the buckle coiled around his fist, the rest of it licking at the air. A threat was all it was. We didn’t have to run too fast to stay out of his way; his right leg had been withered by polio when he was a boy. That was also the reason that he never worked much, relying on my father and Karl to bring in the money while he stayed at home and split wood, or swept the floors, or boiled bones for soup.

Once, when it was autumn and my brothers were gone for the day, helping my father with a job, Uncle Felix took me walking through the forest to a spring he knew. It was historical, the water. Centuries old. You could tell by looking at the rock, which was stained a strange red colour, as if tea had been drunk from it. Some famous theatre actresses had bathed there naked once. Or were they ballerinas? He couldn’t remember now. It was difficult for him to climb down the steep steps with his bad leg, but he seemed determined. There was a place that was his favourite, out of sight of the footpath and screened by trees. He told me I should bathe there. If I bathed, I’d grow into a woman. I’d be beautiful.

I wasn’t sure.

‘It smells bad,’ I said, wrinkling my nose.

He grinned. ‘So does medicine,’ he said, ‘but it makes you better, doesn’t it.’

I looked at him, sitting on a shoulder of rock, with his knees drawn up tight against his chest and his walking-stick beside him.

‘Don’t you want to bathe?’ I said.

He stuck his lips out and shook his head. ‘It’s too late for me.’

‘Didn’t you do it when you were young?’

He smiled, but didn’t answer. He told me to hurry or else the sun would drop behind the hill and I’d catch cold. I took off all my clothes and handed them to him. He placed them next to his walking-stick in a neat pile. I walked over the rock, part of it red, as he’d promised it would be, part still white and crystalline. I stepped down into the pool, which was only knee-deep, and stood under the rush of sulphur water. It crashed on to my shoulders, exploded, sprayed out sideways. And all the time Uncle Felix was sitting above me, where it was dry, just watching me and smiling.

It didn’t seem unnatural to me at the time, but later, when I thought about it, it gave me a strange feeling. Whenever I was naked, I’d look round, expecting him to be there, staring at me. I’d be alone and yet I’d feel as if I wasn’t. Even years afterwards, when he was dead.

I could never tell anyone about it — not even Axel, during the time when I was closest to him. It wasn’t because it was a secret (Uncle Felix didn’t ever use the word). It was because it was too delicate a thing to find words for. If I told it to someone else, they’d turn it into something far more obvious; they’d turn it into something that it wasn’t.

He never actually touched me, you see. He just watched.

There’s love and everybody talks about it, but not all of us come close to it — or, if we do, it’s not in the expected way.

What Uncle Felix said about becoming a woman, becoming beautiful, it didn’t mean much to me. In our house we were all treated the same. I was still being passed off as a boy, even when I was twelve or thirteen. It was easier for everyone to pretend that I was just like them rather than to start thinking about what I was really like. I understood that, somehow. I understood that it might also make life easier for me. I kept my hair cut short. I swore, and spat, and kicked at stones and car tyres and empty cans. I shared my brothers’ clothes — Axel’s usually, or Karl’s when he grew out of them. My body seemed to play along. My blood, for instance: it came late, as if worried it might upset things. I didn’t learn grace or guile or any of the tricks girls played with make-up; there wasn’t anyone to learn it from. Not that they were coarse men particularly; they behaved the way they’d behave in a bar or any other place where there were men together and no women. If I’d been pretty, with a soft, red mouth and honey curls, maybe it would’ve been different. Maybe they would’ve put me up high like something holy, trod silently around me with faces raised in fear and awe. But the most that anyone ever said of me was, She’s got something, and that was Uncle Felix. I didn’t know what he meant by that either. If I look at the only photograph of me that still exists — I’m at a country fair, aged nine — I can see that my spine had a certain straightness to it and there was something steady in my eyes. Maybe that’s what he meant. Or maybe it was just that he’d seen me naked one September, under that hot, rust-coloured water.

The first time I put on a dress, nobody knew where to look. They all seemed to lose something, all at the same time. Their eyes searched the rafters, the fireplace, the gloom beneath the kitchen table. Or ran along the mantelpiece, the skirting-board. Or just rested on their boots. Uncle Felix had bought it for me off a van that came through the village every Tuesday, creaking under the weight of household goods and new clothes wrapped in cellophane. It was harvest festival, a dance at the church hall, and I sat with my back against the wall all night. I couldn’t even down a few glasses, the way I might have done at home — I was a girl, and girls couldn’t be seen to drink, at least not in public. My green-and-purple dress was too new; it wouldn’t lie against my skin, but stuck out as stiffly as washing when it freezes on the line in winter. I watched my uncle crawl past me like a crab, some toothless woman nailed to him by the hands and feet. From a distance there seemed to be a monstrous creature loose in the room. My head ached with the music, a bow pitching on the strings of a violin like a ship’s deck in a storm. I began to feel sick. Nobody paid me any heed. I saw Karl with a brown bottle upside-down in his mouth, his Adam’s apple jumping as he drained it dry. I sat there so long, my legs grew into the floor. If anyone had come to me then, it would’ve been too late. I’d have shaken my head, my brushed-out hair catching on the foolish lace collar of my dress, my body made of the same wood as the walls, the chairs, the door.

They were all drunk on the way home, boasting about how they’d danced with this one, then with that one, and the moon rolled among the bare branches of the trees like the woman I’d seen outside the hall, falling from one man’s arms into another’s. The truck lurched and swayed on the dirt track, and my uncle hit his head on the window, and when he touched his fingers to the place, they came away black, as if they’d been dipped in ink.

‘I’m hurt,’ he cried, ‘I’m hurt,’ but he was laughing.

It was Karl driving, his eyes splayed on his face, his hands bouncing on the wheel, he couldn’t seem to get a grip on it, and all the others shouting, their voices loud against the hard curve of the roof, lifted by the alcohol.