The Insult (48 page)

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.

‘Yes?’

‘There was someone here,’ I said. ‘Just now.’

‘So?’

‘He’s my son.’

‘That’s funny,’ the man said, ‘because he’s my son, too.’

I stared at him through the narrow gap. There was a cut on the bridge of his nose, the kind of cut Karl used to get when he drank too much and then fell over.

‘Could I come in, please?’

The man studied me for a few moments, then he closed the door. I was about to knock again when I heard him unlatch the chain. This time the door opened wide. The man bent slightly from the waist, and his right hand drifted away from his body. It was a gesture of welcome, but he was mocking me with it.

I walked past him. There were only two rooms. The first was a
kitchen. Under the window was a bath that had a wooden board on top of it. The floor was dark-green linoleum. My shoes stuck to it.

The second room wasn’t much larger than the first. There were three single beds in there, each bed pushed against a different wall. All the surfaces were covered with ashtrays, bottles, glasses. Someone had pinned a playing card to the fireplace – the Jack of Hearts. A man sprawled on one of the beds, his head and shoulders propped against the wall, a leather cap wedged on to his curly black hair. He wore a diamond stud in his left ear. Dirt had collected round it.

‘Who are you?’ I said.

The man yawned and looked out of the window. I heard his jawbone creak.

‘I think you’re the one who should be answering questions,’ said the man who’d let me in. He was standing beside me now. Light filtered through his visor, and the upper half of his face had a sickly green tint to it. He smelled of cheap deodorant.

‘I want to know what my son was doing here.’

‘He’s been coming here for a while now.’

I turned and looked at him.

‘Two years. Maybe three.’ The man unscrewed the top off a bottle and drank from it. ‘The first year he only came here twice. Then it got more regular.’

‘This place is filthy,’ I said.

‘That doesn’t bother Erik,’ the man said.

‘That’s right,’ said the man on the bed, still looking out of the window. ‘Erik doesn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Erik doesn’t even notice.’ He held his hand out for the bottle.

‘Erik’s not exactly clean himself,’ said the man with the visor.

‘Erik shits his pants.’ The man on the bed drank from the bottle, then he looked at the man who was standing just behind me. They both laughed.

‘Erik?’ I said.

‘That’s his name,’ said the man with the visor.

‘His name’s Mazey. His name’s always been Mazey, ever since he was born.’

There was a moment’s silence in the room.

‘Well, it’s Erik when he’s here,’ said the man with the visor.

‘And what’s your name?’ I asked him.

‘Not Erik.’

‘His name’s Ackal,’ said the man on the bed.

‘And that’s Moler,’ said the man with the visor. ‘M-O-L-E-R.’

They both laughed again.

I sat down on one of the beds. Suddenly I could have closed my eyes and slept. Even on that bare, stained mattress, among strangers.

‘You look like you could use a drink.’

The man in the visor gave me a glass and poured some of the clear liquid from his bottle into it.

‘What is it?’ I asked him.

‘Vodka.’

There were flies’ legs floating on the surface. They looked like Chinese writing. I drank half the vodka, wincing at the taste. Then I drank the rest. Was I called something different now? What was my name?

Edith? Is that you?

The man in the visor stood at the window, grey light beyond him. He told me how he’d found Erik sleeping on a park bench one morning. When he sat down next to Erik, Erik showed him a photograph. It wasn’t anyone he recognised. He thought Erik might be hungry so he took him back to his apartment. They’d lived in a different building then. He heated up some old tomato soup, with macaroni. Erik ate as if he hadn’t eaten in days. He stayed with them that night, and the next night, too, and then he left. He didn’t say goodbye or thank you. In fact, it was only after Erik had gone that they realised he hadn’t really spoken to them at all. They didn’t think they’d see him again. Well, at least he hadn’t stolen anything. But three months later, Erik was back.

They talked about him sometimes when he wasn’t there. They saw
that he had a different way of doing things to most people. He didn’t need words, for instance. That was fine. Time didn’t mean much to him either. If you gave Erik a clock, he’d sit with it for hours. He’d watch the second-hand go round. Or else he’d put it to his ear and listen to it, the way people used to listen to transistor radios. They could deal with that. They thought Erik needed a home, though. So they adopted him. The man with the visor, Ackal, picked up the bottle and drank from it. He’d adopted Erik legally, he said. He had the documents somewhere. He gestured at a battered metal filing cabinet in the corner of the room. The air moved glassily behind his hand. I thought I might pass out.

‘You can’t do that,’ I muttered.

‘I already did.’ He was almost gloating, his mouth all crooked.

‘But he’s my son. I’ve taken care of him since he was six months old.’ And then I said something I never in my life imagined I would say. Think, maybe. But not say. ‘He’s all I’ve got.’

I saw the two men exchange a glance.

‘If he’s really your son,’ the man in the visor said, ‘then how come the poor bastard was sleeping on a park bench all night, cold and hungry?’

‘He’s forty-three years old,’ I said. ‘What am I supposed to do? Tie him up in the yard?’

That silenced them.

Then I said, ‘I just never realised he’d go so far.’

All the time I’d been talking to Ackal, the other man, the one called Moler, had been staring at me lazily from his bed, lifting a hand every now and then to examine his fingernails or adjust his leather cap. Now he spoke to me.

‘Erik’s a man with a mission.’

I stared at him.

‘It’s something to do with the photograph,’ he said. ‘It’s of a girl. Seems like he’s looking for her. Sometimes we take the piss, saying she’s his girlfriend, but he doesn’t like it when we do that.’ He laughed. ‘He doesn’t like it, does he, Ackal?’

Suddenly I realised which photograph it was that he was talking about. I saw Mazey in the kitchen, with his hand curling and uncurling.
Where’s the baby?

‘I don’t know anything about that.’ I stood up. ‘I should be going.’