Rupert Thomson - The Insult

I didn’t answer. I didn’t even look round. I just kept walking down the stairs. And out through the front door, and back along the street. The weather had changed. The sky was a sandstone colour now, thin silver sunlight reaching through the clouds. I passed the shops with their metal grilles. I passed the tall apartment blocks. The city moved around me, whispering, like a conspiracy. I could imagine walking for days, and finding nothing familiar, recognising no one. I was astonished when I saw my neighbour’s car, astonished when the key I took out of my pocket opened the door. It shouldn’t have been that easy.

Driving home took thirteen hours. In the middle of the night I stopped at the edge of the road and slept for forty-five minutes. In my dream I was driving and Mazey was beside me, dozing. I saw his long nose, his slightly drooping upper lip, his blond hair falling across his forehead. There were no knives anywhere. I was happy.

When I woke up, my heart jumped. I was behind the wheel, exactly as I’d dreamed I was. It took me a while to realise that the car wasn’t moving and I wasn’t going to crash. I rolled the window down. Breathed the cold night air. Then I turned the key in the ignition and drove on. I was still tired, though. My eyes kept trying to close and when I forced them open it felt as if they were revolving in their sockets. All I could find on the radio was static — the noise trains make in tunnels. I had to smoke cigarettes to stay awake.

At dawn I stopped again. I slept for an hour. Waking, I saw a stork standing on one leg in the fast lane. For a moment I just stared at it. That it could be there, in that unlikely place, and look so unconcerned. But I didn’t want a car to run it down. I reached for the door handle, thinking I’d shout or clap my hands, do something that would scare it off. The sound of the door opening was enough. It lifted into the air, legs dangling like bits of a broken deck-chair. The first few wing-beats were ungainly, but by the time it cleared the trees, it had achieved a kind of grace.

A few kilometres south of the village I shifted on the seat and felt something in my coat pocket — a small glass, cold and faintly sticky. I held it up above the steering-wheel so I could look at it. It was the glass I’d drunk vodka from. I must have put it in my pocket without thinking. I could still see the room. It was pale-yellow, and there were beds in it. I could see the man with the diamond pellet in his ear. I could see the other man, too, the upper half of his face bathed in a deep green shadow. They were like someone else’s memories. But the vodka glass was proof of what had happened, it was evidence, and I wasn’t sure I wanted any. I felt as if the glass had been planted.

The next day Mazey came home. He walked in through the back door, as usual. He ran the cold tap, cupped a hand under it and bent his head. In that moment, standing in the kitchen and watching him drink, I realised I would never follow him again. There was nothing more I needed to know — in fact, maybe I already knew too much. I’d tried to guide him, keep him safe, but I’d reached the limits of my power, my influence. He’d invented a kind of freedom for himself.

I remembered the articles they ran in the paper all those years ago. WHO COULD DO SUCH A THING? I could never quite understand why nobody found out about him, why he was never caught. I thought I knew why now. It had to be something to do with the way his mind worked. There were reasons behind the things he did, but they weren’t reasons anyone else would think of. What was a reason for him would be madness for them. He lived in a different dimension. That difference was what protected him.

‘How are you, Mazey?’ I said to him.

Still bent over the sink, he looked at me sideways, the water splashing down into his hand and overflowing. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something else.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Just drink.’

She had talked almost continuously, for hours. As I listened to her, as I filled with unease, foreboding and even, in the end, with dread, she seemed, ironically, to grow accustomed to me, she began to feel comfortable, and her visits to the kitchen became more frequent, less disguised. She didn’t get drunk, though. She didn’t slur her words or lose her thread.

By the time we climbed the stairs, the birds were singing.

I spent the entire day in bed. Dreams of black lakes, crashed cars. People maimed, contorted, splashed with blood. Once, I saw Emerald Joe slumped in the corner of the room, his arms and legs all jumbled up, his jewelled tooth shining.

I was afraid to sleep, afraid to be awake. Each time I dozed, I woke again like someone who’d just touched an electric fence: bolt upright, soaked in sweat — my nerve-ends charred, my brain a grate containing nothing but a white-hot emptiness.

Then, towards evening, I washed and dressed. I was scrupulous. I invested every movement, every detail of the process, with my fullest concentration — from the first soaping of my face to the final lacing of a boot. It must have taken me an hour. Before I went downstairs I called Munck. I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was simply a way of clearing my mind, of breathing different air. I wanted someone to talk to — someone who wasn’t Edith Hekmann. Munck wasn’t his usual self, though. He seemed both guarded and inquisitive. I realised it had been at least two weeks since I’d spoken to him.

‘Where are you calling from?’ He had to shout; it was a bad line. ‘I’ve been trying to reach you. I tried the Kosminsky, but they told me you’d left. In the middle of the night.’

‘That’s true. I had to leave.’

‘It seems suspicious,’ Munck said, ‘in the circumstances.’

I laughed. ‘Not to me.’

His tone sharpened. ‘What can I tell my superiors?’

‘Tell them I’m out of town for a few days. Tell them it’s personal.’

Munck didn’t say anything.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That’s the best I can do.’

I promised to call him as soon as I returned. Then I put the phone down. I heard the clock strike seven in the hall below. I took a deep breath and began to make my way towards the staircase.

When I took my place at the table in the dining-room I was surprised to find myself alone. I asked Martha where Mrs Hekmann was.

‘I haven’t seen her,’ Martha said.

‘Is she ill?’

‘Not so far as I know.’

I thought she was probably still recovering. Not everyone was used to staying awake all night.

Martha put a plate of boiled beef and cabbage in front of me. I ate slowly, but I couldn’t finish it. I had no appetite. And anyway, the food tasted of nothing.

The pale-pink lampshade, the dismal paintings.

I shivered as a draught moved past my back.

While I was drinking my coffee, the door to the dining-room opened behind me. I heard shoes on the bare boards. It wasn’t Martha; she was busy in the kitchen.

‘Mrs Hekmann?’

There was no answer. I knew it was her, though. And then I remembered what she was. A murderer. A murderer. It seemed absurd, exaggerated. I didn’t know how to think about it. It was like trying to picture a million people, or describe the face of God. In my nervousness I knocked a fork off the table. As I was bending down to pick it up, her shoes moved past me, into the room. I heard a cork spring from a bottle. She’d opened it right in front of me. She’d abandoned all pretence.

‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked.

I stared at her. ‘Yes — thank you. That would be nice.’

What had induced this sudden change in her? I looked for some clue in her appearance, but there was nothing. She was wearing a calf-length skirt, a cardigan, a pair of sturdy shoes. I couldn’t read her face at all.