Rupert Thomson - The Insult

There came a time when the hotel’s fortunes began to change for the better. Eva was convinced it was because she’d taken the gilt box down from above the door and ceremonially burned the contents, but the fact was, our national economy was booming and the new prosperity could be felt, even in the more remote corners of the country. We had guests most nights. They weren’t the actors and statesmen of half a century before. They were ordinary people who wanted to escape for a weekend: pensioners, businessmen, romantic couples. Over the years, as Karl had started drinking heavily, first at home, then in the nearby town, Eva had come to rely on me. By the time I was twenty-four, I was practically running the place. I worked hard, with only a part-time cook and a chambermaid to help me. I saw less of my father, less of Mazey. It was a condition of my employment, in any case, that Mazey be left at home. As a baby he’d been no trouble, but things were different now that he was five. ‘It’s those eyes of his,’ Eva would say, shivering dramatically. ‘They put people off.’

It was true. Mazey was tall for his age, with pale-blond hair that fell across his forehead, just the way his father’s used to, but if you looked him in the eye you could see that something wasn’t right. He seemed to be looking through the world, rather than at it. For him, the world was like a pane of glass. You couldn’t guess what lay beyond the glass, though. Sometimes people stood in front of him and his gaze seemed to be saying, You’re not there. You don’t exist. They felt like ghosts all of a sudden. He even did it to me now and then. There were times when I felt that his eyes had stopped just behind my eyes, inside my mind, and that they were reading what was written there, a story I had never told, a secret nobody had guessed — the truth. And then I’d have to remind myself of what he was: a simpleton, an idiot, a fool — with only me to care for him, only me to trust. Only one truth counted any more, and that was this: we would never cause each other harm.

While at work I left Mazey with my father. Mazey’s silent staring didn’t disturb my father in the least. If anything, it suited him; he’d never been one to use words when silence would do just as well. He thought Mazey needed something to occupy him, though. Hunting through a drawer of odds and ends, he found an old pen-knife with a dark, bone handle and three blades of differing sizes. He gave it to the boy, began to teach him how to whittle. Mazey caught on quickly — so quickly, in fact, that my father claimed his own carpentering skills had skipped a generation; he saw himself in Mazey, which made the task of looking after him much easier, more of a pleasure. Mazey had a natural talent, he said, and it was a shame he was simple because he could have been a fine craftsman. What Mazey actually produced were strange, smooth shapes that didn’t look like anything, but somehow this seemed right: he was carving what was in his mind. And he would be absorbed for hours, sitting on the ground with that old blunt knife and a few off-cuts from whatever piece of furniture his grandfather happened to be working on. In those days I finished late at the hotel. Walking along the track towards our house, I’d see the stubborn bulk of it, down in the hollow, the whole place in darkness. The only light would be coming from the barn, and as I crossed the yard I’d see the two of them still bent over bits of wood, their figures shadowy, seeming to sway inside the dirty yellow tent of light shed by the hurricane lamp that hung from a beam above their heads.

Something else Mazey did was go off on his own. He’d touch his grandfather on the shoulder or pull at his sleeve, and he’d point away from the house, into the trees. Then he’d be gone. Once, when he was four, I found him on the road that led into the village. Four years old and he was halfway to the bridge! At first it worried me. But as the years went by, I got used to it; that curiosity or restlessness, it was part of his character. By the time he was six or seven, he would often be gone for the entire day. At nightfall he’d walk in through the kitchen door and, dragging a chair over to the sink, he’d climb up on to it and drink from the cold tap. So far as I could tell, he kept out of the village — almost as if he remembered how it had turned against him once.

The closest he would go was Miss Poppel’s place, which was on the edge of the village, across the road from the hotel. It was her front garden that attracted him. It had grown since I was a child. A jungle of broken machinery and appliances: vacuum-cleaners, bits of tractors, bicycle-wheels, refrigerators, ovens, ploughs. Salenko, the local mechanic, donated car-parts, the same way a butcher might give you free bones if you had a dog. She was especially fond of exhaust-pipes, which made excellent wind-chimes, she said. She must have had at least a dozen sets of wind-chimes hanging up outside her house. There were the exhaust-pipes, of course, but there were also hub caps, tin cans, even bottles (strictly for light summer breezes). Mazey’s favourite was the one that had been there the longest, the one made out of door-hinges. Though it took a strong wind to stir them into sound, he was just as happy sitting beneath the crab-apple tree and watching them twist silently on their lengths of copper wire. He could sit there for hours. And Miss Poppel would bring him a glass of fresh goat’s milk or a slice of something she had baked that day. She had promised him that the wind-chimes would be his when she was dead. She was going to mention them specifically in her will.

When I passed Miss Poppel’s house after work, Mazey would often appear from behind some rusting piece of metal and we’d walk home together. I’d tell him what kind of day I’d had; I’d tell him stories, too, like how much Uncle Karl had drunk, or how long Aunt Eva had stayed in the sulphur water. It was like talking to myself, really, because he never said anything; I couldn’t even be sure that he was listening.

On one such evening, when he was six or seven, I happened to mention the chimes. Gusts of wind had been rattling the doors and windows of the hotel all afternoon; I hadn’t heard the chimes myself, but I’d imagined Mazey in Miss Poppel’s garden, entranced. As usual, though, I left no room for him to speak. I’d already started telling him how Eva’s cigarettes had blown into the pool, so I almost missed it.

‘They were singing.’

I stopped in my tracks. Mazey walked on a few steps and then turned round and looked at me.

‘Did you say something?’ I said.

‘They were singing.’

I began to laugh out loud, right there in the middle of the road. He didn’t seem to understand what all the fuss was about. In his head, perhaps, he’d been talking for years.

That night, after I’d put Mazey to bed, I told my father what had happened. My father was cleaning his pipe, chipping at the inside of the bowl with a knife and tapping the scrapings on to the top of the stove. He listened to me, but didn’t stop what he was doing. He waited until I’d finished, then he spoke.

‘I never heard him say anything.’

‘I didn’t either,’ I said, ‘not until today.’

My father was silent for a while, packing tobacco into his pipe. He tamped the tobacco down, then held a lit match above it and bent the flame by sucking hard on the stem of the pipe. When he’d got the smoke moving in clouds towards the ceiling he looked at me. ‘Maybe it’s only you he’ll talk to.’

Towards the end of the month I saw some evidence of this. I passed Miss Poppel’s house on my way home, but there was no sign of Mazey. I thought nothing of it; he wasn’t there every day and, anyway, I was later than usual that evening. But just before I reached the bridge, I heard chanting coming from a field on my right.