Rupert Thomson - The Insult

‘If we wait here,’ he said, ‘the sun’ll come to us.’

I sat beside him. Stared at the water where it swirled around a root. The root arched out of the water and curved back down again in a kind of bow. If you looked at the root and its reflection both at once, as if they were joined, as if they were one completed thing, they made a shape that was exactly like a mouth.

The sun was above the ridge now, to our left, but it hadn’t touched us yet. We were still sitting in the shade.

‘You never kissed anyone, did you?’

I turned to look at him. His head was bent and he was scratching at the mud with a piece of stick he’d sharpened. ‘How do you know?’

‘I just know.’

He was still scratching at the mud. It wasn’t drawings he was doing, just lines that didn’t look like anything.

‘Maybe I did,’ I said.

‘Who with then?’ He looked sideways at me, his lip curling. Then he said the name of a boy who lived in the village.

I laughed in his face. I was like that sun bursting over the curve of the hill and landing on everything in the world at once and turning it a colour suddenly.

His head dipped again.

‘You didn’t do it yet,’ he muttered. ‘I know you didn’t.’

I was strong now. I could say anything I liked. Even the truth.

‘So what if I didn’t.’

His body went still. All of it. The hand with the whittled stick in it stopped moving. Even his head, which wasn’t moving anyway, seemed strangely motionless. It was as if he was listening to himself think.

‘So what,’ I said.

He lay back with his head against the willow’s trunk. He didn’t look at me. He looked up into the tree instead, its pale-yellow waterfall of leaves and branches.

‘Would you like to?’ he said, without moving.

There’s a way of holding on to a moment, of making it last almost indefinitely, but anything you do, you have to do it slowly, and in absolute silence, and you have to separate your mind from it, it’s not you who’s doing it, it’s someone else.

I placed my lips where his were and I pressed. I remember thinking of the school teacher, and the way she held that spongy pale-pink paper against a piece of writing to make it dry.

Then I leaned on one elbow, looking down at him.

He just lay there and smiled. I almost hated him in that moment. His light-brown hair falling forwards, his lazy mouth. A scattering of freckles across his nose.

‘Try it again,’ he said.

There was a bird awake somewhere near by. Its call was like a seesaw. Backwards and forwards, the call went. Backwards and forwards. It was then that I thought of Uncle Felix. I felt he was watching, even though I knew he was dead. If I looked round, he would be there, on the other side of the stream, with his knees drawn up against his chest and his walking-stick beside him. He’d be smiling.

‘What is it?’

But I didn’t look round. I looked into my brother’s eyes instead and saw the black parts widen suddenly. I seemed to be rushing down towards him.

I thought I’d startled him and so I said, ‘It’s nothing.’

Before I could move, he sat up. One of his hands was on my shoulder. Then he covered my mouth with his. I was inside him then. His face so close, it was blurred. I could taste his breath.

‘It’s your mouth that should be open,’ he said, ‘not your eyes.’

I did as he said.

We stayed kissing until the sun reached us. When I opened my eyes again, everything in the world was blue and we had shadows.

That was the morning Axel told me about the trees. He said we’d been born in a house that was made of the wrong wood. Unlucky wood, it was. The kind of wood that if you make railway sleepers out of it, the train crashes. Or if you turn it into matches, girls set fire to their dresses. Some trees were haunted at the core and if you used them to make a house, the haunting spread from the wood into the people, like a disease. Those trees were only good for burning, and even then you had to have your wits about you; a fire built out of that kind of wood might stubbornly refuse to burn, or else it might burn too well and greedily consume whole forests. Our father was a carpenter. He should have known. Which trees helped, which hindered.

‘And this one?’ I remember asking.

Axel looked up into the weeping willow. ‘You might think from its name that it’s sad. It isn’t, though.’

‘What is it then?’

‘It’s a pleasure tree. You don’t find them hardly ever. I’ve looked and looked and this one’s the only one I’ve found.’

‘A pleasure tree?’ I said. ‘What’s that mean?’

He looked across at me. ‘What do you think it means?’

We began to go further. The tree showed our hands new places. Always at dawn, with goats’ eyes watching as we left the house, and then that walk through wet grass to the stream. At dawn, with everybody still asleep.

Summer came. Our shadows followed us, grew longer.

One morning he undid his trousers and pulled down his pants and there was his thing, smooth as stripped wood, blond, too, like a kind of pine, and it grew in the sunlight, faster than any tree, faster than a plant, and it jumped, almost as if it was counting.

I took it in my fingers and it still felt smooth, softer than I’d imagined, it was strange, the softness of the skin and the hardness just beneath, and moving one against the other, and then I put it in my mouth and closed my eyes, and my eyelids burned as the sun lifted over the ridge, reached through the trees, another day.

‘Who else have you been learning from?’ I heard him say.

But because there was admiration in his voice, I didn’t need to answer.

There was a moment just before the juice from him was in my mouth, when I had already the taste of it: I could see his head on the ground, turned sideways, and his left eye narrowed, almost closed, the tip of an arrow drawn in charcoal, and his back arching away from the earth, just shoulderblades and buttocks touching, and as his body twisted, a hollow appeared between the raised muscles of his stomach and the bay where his hip-bone was, and his ribs pushed upwards through his soft, tea-coloured skin.

There never was someone more beautiful than that.

With his light-brown hair slipping down into his eyes, and his body, whippet-lean, and the stories he could tell, such stories, Axel Hekmann could have had any girl he wanted. I saw the way they looked at him — sideways, along their cheeks, or upwards, through their eyelashes, or even over their shoulders as they walked away from him. And yet he chose his sister. His plain sister. There had to be some kind of perversity in him. Maybe it was the sense of doing wrong — or else he somehow knew I’d go along with it. It was a question I never asked. I didn’t dare. There was the fear that I’d be opening his eyes to something he hadn’t seen, and that everything would then, quite suddenly, be over. And I couldn’t imagine that, it being over; I felt raw on the inside if I thought about it, as if I’d been scraped out with a spoon. But I couldn’t imagine the future either. Each time he reached out at night and touched me on my breasts or between my legs, we had my father and my brother lying in the same room with us, and my uncle watching, too, his hair smoothed down with lard and a postcard of an actress in his hand. Certain kinds of secrets, they’re quiet and dead; they can be kept. There are others, though, that are alive and growing, and have a tendency to reveal themselves.

Sometimes he was so rash, so obvious, I thought that what he really wanted was to be found out. There was the time he took my hand and put it inside his pants while we were riding in the back of the truck, with Karl and my father right in front of us, in the cab. If they’d turned round, looked through the narrow pane of glass, they would have seen. But he did it on my hand anyway and then laughed when I tried to work out what to do with it. I let the wind take it in the end and then I spat on my hand and wiped it on a piece of sacking, though I couldn’t get rid of that pale-green smell it had, sweet and salty at the same time, nothing like a girl’s. Another time we were in the grocery store and I was wandering between the shelves of outdoor things. I liked the smells — the green rubber waders, the orange leather work-gloves. He came up behind me and his breath was in my ear. I could feel his thing against my hip.