Rupert Thomson - The Insult

‘If only we could go there,’ I murmured.

His face didn’t alter; he didn’t seem remotely affected by what I’d said. I thought it was probably because he’d taken himself there so many times already, with his knowledge of the place, with his own descriptions. He’d already been.

After that, I was always asking him to describe the place to me so I could be there with him. He never tired of it. Sometimes what he told me could have come from an encyclopaedia — how to avoid altitude sickness, what the local music sounded like, why certain flowers could grow high up. Other times he gave me impressions that were arbitrary and vague, like memories. I asked him how he knew about it. He’d seen some pictures once, he said. They were in a magazine that somebody had left at the inn. When he looked for the magazine again, though, it was gone. It didn’t matter, really; he could still remember it. He found some other magazines from the same series, but there was nothing in them that interested him much.

One morning I asked him what the name of the country was. It was strange I hadn’t thought of asking him before. He said he didn’t know. I watched him as he stared up into the branches of the willow tree.

‘The highest mountain in the world,’ he said, ‘what’s it called?’

‘Mount Everest.’

He nodded. ‘It was somewhere near there.’

It was hot, July or August, with a white sky that hurt to look at, and I came up out of the garden with vegetables for that evening’s meal. From the barn I heard my father sawing and I thought of Uncle Felix and the night he died, but the breathing of the saw was out, not in — out as it cut down into the wood, in as it drew back, out as it cut down again. I stopped in the doorway. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw my father bent over the sawhorse, his right arm moving like one of those rods that drive the wheels on a train. I noticed a square frame behind him, low on the floor, and a wide half-moon of blond wood propped up against the wall.

‘Is that a bed you’re making?’

‘Yes, it’s a bed.’ He didn’t pause in his work; his sweat dropped on to the pine and darkened it.

‘It’s for the inn, I suppose.’ My father had been hired to build some furniture — wardrobes for the bedrooms, chairs and tables for a restaurant. Karl and Eva had taken his advice. They were trying to make something of the place.

‘Didn’t you hear yet?’

‘Hear what?’

‘We’re losing Axel.’

I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

My father stopped sawing, straightened up. ‘He’s fixing to get married. This bed’s for the wedding night.’ He ran one hand carefully over the headboard, and his long teeth showed.

‘Married?’ I said. ‘Who to?’

‘The Poppel girl. I thought you knew.’

The white sky beat against my neck. Standing on the line between the darkness of the barn and the brilliance outside, I felt caught between two worlds, adrift suddenly, abandoned. I knew Axel had been seeing Eileen Poppel and, though I sometimes wondered why, I certainly never thought it would come to anything. The Poppel family — scrap-dealers from across the valley. And Eileen, their only daughter. Not exactly what you’d call a catch, though, with her mouth too small and her wrists that you could snap in your hands like kindling, if you’d a mind, and that pale-blue vein wriggling through the thin skin at the edge of her left eye. She looked like, if you shouted at her, she’d just lie down and die. I could feel the white sky burning, burning. Married? Certainly I never suspected it would come to that.

‘At least there’ll be some help for you around the place.’ My father spoke to me from the world he belonged to, a dark world, steeped in wood-chips, sweat, and resin.

‘You mean they’re going to live here?’ I stared at him.

‘Only till they get a place of their own.’

I walked back into the glare below the house. Five shrivelled heads of beetroot nodded in my hand. I wanted to start running, but I didn’t know which way to go. I wanted to burst into flame. Instead, I stood at the kitchen sink with a knife against my thumb and the cold tap dripping, and I skinned the beetroots and sliced their wet, violet flesh on to a plate.

The next morning Axel woke me at the usual time. I followed him out of the house, across the clearing. It wasn’t light yet; the goats shuffled in their pen. Past the shed, along the footpath, down into the field.

Then, halfway across, I stopped. I just stopped and watched him walk away from me. His feet rising, falling, rising. He thought I was still behind him. He didn’t realise. The stupidity of those feet of his.

‘I’m not coming,’ I called out.

He looked over his shoulder. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Is it true you’re getting married?’

He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, it’s true.’

‘Why?’

‘She’s going to have a baby.’

‘So what?’

‘It’s my baby.’ He began to walk towards me, not looking at me. Looking at the grass.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Stay there.’

He kept walking until I could see the freckles on his face.

‘One last time,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Edie.’ He grasped my wrist and tried to pull me towards him. My arm was horizontal in the air, but my feet hadn’t moved. ‘One last time.’

‘Didn’t you hear me?’ I shouted. ‘I said no.’

He held on to my wrist with both hands. Then, at last, he let it go. My arm returned to me, like a boat cast loose on dark water.

‘Three days ago,’ I said. ‘That was the last time.’

His face brightened suddenly. ‘You’re jealous.’

In one flowing, almost circular movement I picked up a fallen branch and swung it at his head. He caught the blow on his forearm. It still hurt, though.

‘You’re dead,’ I said.

‘What?’ Holding his forearm, he stared at me. ‘What did you say?’

‘You heard me.’

I threw the branch down in the grass and walked away from him. After a while I looked round. I was surprised how small he was. There was half a field between us and a wind getting up, clouds blowing southwards. If I spoke now, he would hear me.

‘It was your choice,’ I said.

One night I hacked the marriage bed to pieces with my father’s axe. I woke up and lay quite still — shocked, fearful, regretting what I’d done. I put a coat over my nightshirt and crept out to the barn. How was I going to explain it? My father would be furious. All that work.

But when I saw the bed standing on its four legs in the moonlight, not finished yet, but whole, somehow, and beautiful, I changed my mind. I wished I’d done it after all. I stood there, undecided. The axe I’d used in the dream was hanging on the wall; its newly polished steel seemed to beckon me. The axe began to speak. Edith. Take me down. Do it. I turned and ran out of the barn. Ran straight into my father who had heard a noise and come out with his gun.

‘What are you doing up?’

‘The bed — I wanted to make sure it was all right.’

He gave me a look of bewilderment as I moved past him, back into the house.

For most of that week I didn’t talk and no one talked to me. I was out in the vegetable garden every day, planting for the spring. Carrots, I put in. Potatoes, too, and radishes. The wind brought squalls with it. I laboured on as the rain came down, soaked to the skin and shivering. In the barn behind me, the bed took shape, its headboard carved with the names of the bride and groom, and round the names there was fruit — apples and wild figs and grapes — and over them, a canopy of leaves. Axel was hardly there, except to sleep. Either he was working with my father, repairing storm damage, or he was over at the Poppels’ place, a muddle of shacks on a side road, half an hour’s walk from where we lived. I still couldn’t understand it. The Poppel men were a bunch of good-for-nothings, drunks. They passed you in their cart sometimes, horse teeth in their heads and startled, bloodshot eyes, and nothing on the back except some bedsprings, maybe, and a punctured tyre. But that was where he went, to drink with them and play cards and lie down on something with that pale girl.