Rupert Thomson - The Insult

When I lifted my head and peered through the bottom half of the windscreen, I saw Mazey hoisting himself up into the tanker’s cab. Over in the cafeteria the driver was just finishing his meal. He wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist, then put on a dark-blue wool hat. I had the feeling he was going to be driving through the night.

I was right. It was two-thirty in the morning before he stopped again, this time in a rest-area. There were no facilities; it was just a section of unmarked road that curved off the motorway and joined it again two hundred metres further on. I parked beyond the tanker, at the far end of the curve, and adjusted my wing-mirror so I could see the tanker from where I was sitting. The drizzle had eased. A rain-mist now. Tiny particles of water drifting in the dark air, floating rather than falling. I got out of the car to stretch my legs. There wasn’t much traffic any more, but if something did go past, it made a sound like someone drawing curtains.

I climbed a grass bank behind the car, and then I walked along the top of it, through some newly planted saplings, until I could look down into the oil tanker’s cab. The driver was still sitting at the wheel. His head was leaning against the window and his eyes were closed. At first I thought he was asleep. But then his mouth opened and his chest swelled; as if he’d just breathed in. It was only then that I saw Mazey. He had his back to me and his head was on the driver’s lap. I could only see his hair, the collar of his shirt and his right elbow. I took a step backwards, turned away. I was thinking of Axel as I stumbled among the saplings. Thinking of the branches of the willow tree, the stream flowing beneath us, his tea-coloured summer skin. It had poisoned us, the pleasure we had taken in each other. It had poisoned all the earth around us, all the air. It had poisoned most of the lives that came after us. They never knew the source of it. They never knew it came from that one tree, on that first morning. Before anybody woke. When I reached my car I suddenly doubled over and vomited a frothy yellow liquid on to the ground. I couldn’t think what I’d eaten to produce such a colour. Trembling, I got into the front seat. I wanted to wash my mouth out. All I could find was a bottle of distilled water, which my neighbour used for topping up the battery.

I hardly slept that night. Every time a lorry started up, my eyes snapped open and I wiped the condensation off the window and looked into the wing-mirror. But the silver tanker never moved. Not until eight in the morning, when the door on the driver’s side slammed shut. The tall fat man spat twice, then turned and climbed the grass bank. He stood among the saplings for a while, just looking out across the landscape, before unbuttoning his trousers. His urine smoked in the cold morning air.

At ten o’clock Mazey was dropped at another service station on the motorway. He stood shivering among the petrol pumps, his hands in his pockets. I watched the tanker pull away without him. I was glad to see the back of it. But because I’d followed it for so many hours, I went on seeing it long after it was gone: a silver disc with banks of tail-lights under it, black mud flaps, giant tyres. I watched Mazey walk from car to car, bending down to speak to each driver, as if he was selling something. Though I was cold, a kind of heat rose through me as it occurred to me that maybe that was exactly what he was doing. The money in his pockets — how else had he got hold of it?

It took him another two lifts to complete his journey. It was a wet day, rain angling across the motorway, but I was grateful for the weather: the cars Mazey travelled in drove slowly, and I was even less likely to be noticed. The last car was a pale-green saloon, which put him down on the outskirts of the city, not far from the main bus terminal. He stood on the pavement for a moment, his mouth set in a straight line as he looked around him. Then he began to walk. I parked, making a note of the name of the street, then followed him on foot. The temperature had dropped into single figures; fog cloaked the tops of the buildings. Mazey walked the same way he walked when he was in the village, as though unaware of his surroundings, as though people were ghosts. His shoulders were drawn in towards his chest and his fists were pushed right to the bottom of his pockets. He only had a thin coat to cover him. It was one of Kroner’s coats — too short in the arm, threadbare, too, not even waterproof. His shoes were worn down at the heels so they tilted sideways and inwards; they moved sloppily on his feet, like moored boats. I saw him as someone who didn’t know him, and it shamed me that I hadn’t clothed him better.

The rain slackened off. Finally it stopped altogether. Mazey was examining the buildings now. We were nearing his destination. I didn’t like the area. The streets were wide and derelict. The apartment blocks were many storeys high, their windows curtained with rags or sheets of newspaper or plain brown cardboard. The shops had all been fortified with metal grilles. They sold newspapers, chewing-gum, cigarettes. Fruit that was almost rotten. Fridges and televisions that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Miss Poppel’s front lawn. There was a bar on almost every corner. They had metal grilles as well. I didn’t see too many people — just tramps, drunks, old women with dogs. Mazey began to fit. His threadbare coat, his worn-down shoes. Is this where he belongs? I wondered. At the end of an alleyway I saw the slick grey surface of a canal.

He stopped in front of a building, looked up, then he pushed through the door and vanished inside. I crossed the road towards it. Through the cracked glass panel in the door I could see a hallway, a row of brown metal letter-boxes along one wall, a narrow flight of stairs. I opened the door, let it swing shut behind me. Then I stood there, listening. I heard Mazey’s footsteps somewhere above me. I heard him knock on a door. I climbed the stairs quickly, then stopped again and listened. He knocked again. I couldn’t see him, but it sounded as though he was on the floor above. The door opened and I heard a voice that wasn’t his. The door closed. I climbed to the next floor. There were only four doors on the landing and I put my ear to each one of them in turn. When I’d worked out which apartment he had entered, I climbed one more flight of stairs and then I sat down on a step and waited.

The building was quiet. Just somebody scraping the bottom of a saucepan with a spoon. And one half of an argument — the woman’s voice. I was sitting by a window. I could see rooftops, factory smoke. And, in the distance, a strip of dull green, which was where the city ended. I hadn’t realised I was so high up. The street must have been built on a hill.

Flies nuzzling the chalky glass.

It was always Axel that I saw, with his eyes narrowed against the sunlight, and the stream running below us, and I couldn’t believe the beauty of those moments forty years before had led to this. A staircase in a dismal, run-down building. A street whose name I didn’t even know. What did I have in mind? I no longer knew.

More than an hour passed.

The door to the apartment opened and, looking down between the metal banisters, I saw the top of Mazey’s head. He was leaving. He was alone. I heard his footsteps fade, the front door shut. From my window I could see him walking back along the street.

After sitting still for so long, it was an effort to move. My knees were cold and stiff; I had to rub the life back into them. At last I stood up. I went back down the stairs and knocked on the apartment door.

A man’s voice called out. ‘Erik? Is that you?’

I knocked again.

The door opened, on a chain. I saw a man who could have been my age. He wore a green sun-visor and his grey hair was cropped close to his head.