The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  A breeze moved across my teeth. I must have been smiling.

  Back in the car Millie turned to look at me. ‘Trouble?’

  I shook my head. ‘Just drive me home, will you?’

  What did I think I was doing, going to look for her like that? She’d be in the lobby of the Kosminsky, smoking a cigarette with Arnold (Nina was the one person who might get someone like Arnold to loosen up and talk). Or else she’d have gone home to her mysterious apartment and there’d be one small light flashing on her machine – my message. What had I been thinking of? I sank lower in my seat, moulding my shoulderblades into the upholstery.

  I’d known her for three weeks. Three weeks since she appeared in that bar. Sat next to me, her elbow touching mine. Three weeks since that first kiss. Then we were in her car, we were driving …

  An old mansion in the suburbs. We lay on a sofa talking, smoking joints, while someone I’d never met fucked someone else in the kitchen (we heard a saucepan crash). The club she worked in, she was a waitress. Some nights there were shows – exotic dancing, talent contests, cabaret. She lived near the flower market. She was twenty-two.

  I remembered how I heard a clock chime five somewhere, how I got up and began to dress. I remembered that my jacket smelled of her perfume.

  She shifted in the bed behind me. ‘What time is it?’

  I told her.

  ‘Are you leaving?’

  ‘It’s easier now,’ I said, ‘while it’s still dark.’ She couldn’t have understood what I was saying, of course, but at least it had a kind of ambiguity. ‘Can I see you again?’ I asked her.

  ‘Something I should tell you,’ she murmured.

  ‘You’re married.’

  She didn’t laugh. ‘I’m seeing someone else –’

  There are people who unload their disappointments early. I stood in that bedroom, someone else’s bedroom. I stood quite still for a moment and told myself it didn’t make any difference. But there was an ache in my throat, as if I’d been crying.

  ‘Martin?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve been seeing him for a while.’

  ‘Can’t I see you as well?’

  ‘Maybe …’ She was asleep again before I’d finished dressing.

  But it was those four words of hers that I was thinking of as Millie drove me home: ‘I’m seeing someone else.

  I looked out of the window at the cold glare of the lights. The streets iced over, treacherous. It was strange. Though she kept saying that everything was temporary, unstable, she never seemed to want to bring things to an end. I had the feeling that maybe I could change her mind. There was room for hope. And this uncertainty produced a genuine erotic charge, a desperation, a kind of fever: each time we slept together could be the last. Sometimes I wondered if it was deliberate, simply her way of sustaining interest. Whose, though, hers or mine? (I didn’t think mine needed much sustaining.) I felt I was caught in a storm. I was clinging to a tree and waiting for the wind to drop. I had to cling so hard, my arms were numb. But I didn’t dare let go.

  The man outside the club, the bouncer. He had shoulders like the slopes of a volcano and diamond studs in both his ears.

  Or they could’ve been gold.

  It was warm in the back of the car. I dozed off. Straight into the dream and running. I feel my fingers loosen at the knuckles. I start to come apart.

  Then the driver’s shaking me. ‘Mr Blom? Mr Blom?’

  ‘OK,’ I mutter. ‘I’m awake.’

  I lean forwards. And, just for a moment, as I reach for the door, I’ve got no hands.

  It snowed that week. The powerlines were thick with it, the rooftops smooth and white. A hush to the traffic, people’s feet. I knew Nina had been home because there was a new message on her machine. No voice. Just a church bell tolling, then a beep. Was this the death of our relationship? Twice I put the phone down, trembling. The third time I left my name and number. I waited in my room till dawn. I didn’t eat. Outside, the snow kept coming down. You wouldn’t think the sky could hold so much of it. She never did call back.

  The hotel was different, too. Quieter. Even on the second floor. I hadn’t forgotten Arnold’s lecture, but I found myself ignoring it. Night after night I walked the corridors. I sat on the black vinyl sofa by the lift. I was waiting for something to happen. Anything. Once I saw a man in a silk dressing-gown putting his shoes outside his room. I wished him a good evening. He looked at me sideways, as if I might be dangerous, then withdrew without a word. Otherwise it was silent, deserted. Unrecognisable. I could only think that the police had exposed the operation, closed it down.

  I walked the streets in sub-zero temperatures. I felt I was part of something that was decaying. During the day there was the illusion of purpose – activity, movement, noise – but it was just the obscene bustle of maggots on a corpse. At night the truth revealed itself. The wind could be heard on the avenues and in the squares. The buildings with their blank façades. People sleeping in tram shelters, cardboard boxes, alleyways. People drunk and bleeding. I stood in front of a travel agent’s window. The posters looked surreal at four o’clock in the morning: sunshine, laughter, turquoise water – some lunatic’s hallucinations. But everybody fell for it.

  Towards the end of that week I returned from Leon’s to find Victor taping a notice on to the lift.

  ‘It’s out of order,’ he said.

  ‘What? Again?’

  ‘They’re going to fix it tomorrow. Arnold said.’

  ‘They’re always fixing it. But it’s always broken.’

  ‘I know, I know. But what can I say? This isn’t the Metropole.’

  I began to climb the stairs. When I reached the second floor I instinctively glanced in both directions. And there, in her crisp white uniform and her starched white hat, was Nurse Maria Janssen.

  I stared at her in disbelief.

  She began to walk towards me, smiling. Her eyes were looking into mine. Her hands reached out to me. I could almost hear her voice. Outside your window there are three beautiful trees …

  But then, as she came nearer, I realised it wasn’t Maria Janssen at all. This woman was older. She must have been standing under the light. That was the only possible explanation. The light in the corridor had deceived me.

  ‘I saw you,’ the woman said. ‘The other night.’

  Now she was closer she reminded me a little of Gregory’s ex-wife, Hedi: the peroxide hair, the drinker’s skin. Certainly she looked nothing like Maria.

  ‘You were lost,’ she was saying, ‘don’t you remember? I should have helped you, but I didn’t. I don’t know why …’

  I could smell vermouth, I thought. Stale tobacco, too, and soiled underclothes. My stomach heaved. Why was the woman talking to me? Was she mad?

  ‘What’s wrong, dear?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered. ‘I thought you were someone else.’

  I turned away from her and suddenly I was falling. I saw the banister rotating past me like a stick flung to a dog. I ended up at the bottom of a flight of stairs. I wasn’t sure exactly how it had happened. I must’ve turned too quickly, lost my footing. I’d have to be more careful in future. Look where I was going.

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  Oh God. The woman was still there, somewhere above me. She was wearing slippers that were like my mother’s – brown leather with a pattern of embossed gold flowers, and black fur trimming round the ankles.

  ‘I’m fine.’ My elbow hurt. My left leg as well. But it was only bruising.

  ‘Are you sure?’ She was peering down at me in that way I hated. ‘If you come to my room,’ she said, ‘I’ll bandage it for you.’

  What? Bandage what? I wished I could bandage her. I’d start with her mouth. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘All I want is to be left alone. All right?’

  ‘Oh.’ She straightened up. ‘I was only trying –’

  ‘I said, leave me alone.’

  ‘But –’

  Some people never g
et the message, do they?

  ‘Will you just PISS OFF!’

  At last she shook her head of brittle hair and climbed back up the stairs. I watched her fat hips glumly oscillate. A few moments later I heard the click of a door closing further down the hall. I stood up shakily and leaned against the wall. That backside of hers, when she turned in the confined space of the stairs! It reminded me of a cat in a litter tray. What was she doing on the second floor? Some old whore, I supposed. Must have been pensioned off by the Kosminsky brothers. Given a cheap room in recognition of her years of faithful service.

  Maybe I’d been wrong to shout at her. I couldn’t help it, though. I was angry with myself for having been so careless. For having panicked like that.

  For having lost control.

  Later that night, after bathing my injuries, I sat in front of the TV. At about three in the morning, the phone rang. There was only one person it could be. I picked up the receiver.

  ‘Martin?’ She sounded breathless, as though she’d been running.

  ‘Nina,’ I said. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m at work. I can’t talk.’ She wanted to meet me, but it had to be on neutral ground, somewhere public. Before I could ask her why, she said, ‘I was thinking of the city library. Tomorrow. Two in the afternoon.’

  ‘I never go out in the day. You know that.’

  ‘Just this once. For me.’

  I wouldn’t be able to see her. And I’d have that blankness to contend with, blankness I usually slept through. But the last few days had been hard on me. Empty, too. If this was all she was prepared to offer me, I had no choice. It was a measure of my desperation.

  ‘Where in the library?’ I said.

  She had it all worked out. ‘There’s a reading room on the first floor. Rare Books and Manuscripts. In there.’

  The next day the streets were icy, and my left knee was stiff and swollen. I allowed an hour and a half for what would normally have been a twenty-minute walk. I was still late. I tapped my way up the library steps at two-fifteen and in through the revolving doors. Once there, I had to ask someone to guide me to the information desk.

  ‘Is it Braille you’re looking for?’ the information officer said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Rare Books.’

  He escorted me across the foyer to the lift, then travelled with me to the first floor. He had trouble with his sinuses. All kinds of snorts and snuffles. We turned left out of the lift and walked thirty paces. He held a door open for me and I passed through it.

  ‘Rare Books,’ he said.

  I thanked him.

  I knew he was watching me, waiting to see what I was going to do. I didn’t do anything. I just stood there, both hands resting on my cane, as if savouring the air, or just thinking. In my experience blind people are often viewed as mentally deficient, and it amused me to play on this misapprehension. I listened to his footsteps as he walked away, hesitant at first, because he was looking back at me over his shoulder, but becoming more rapid, more definite, as he decided to leave me to my own devices.

  I used my white cane to explore. There were twenty-eight rows of metal shelves, with narrow aisles between them. The rows of shelves were bisected by a wide central aisle. I could smell dust and old paper, and the two smells seemed related, part of the same family. At the far end of the room was a reading area, with tables, chairs and lamps. I found an empty place and sat down. Not wishing to attract attention, I took off my dark glasses and opened a newspaper. Trust Nina to be even later than I was.

  The minutes passed. I turned to the next page of my paper. A man coughed. The doors at the far end of the room swung open – but it was only someone with a trolley. The trolley had hard rubber wheels. For a moment I was back in the clinic.

  Then something touched me on the shoulder.

  ‘Come with me,’ Nina whispered.

  I followed her into one of the narrow aisles. There was a small table at the end of it, by the wall. She sat me on a chair. For a moment I thought the sun had come out; I could feel it against my back, the warmth of it. Then I realised it was just a radiator. It was the heat coming off a radiator that I could feel.

  ‘This is difficult,’ I said.

  Something creaked. The table. It was Nina, leaning against it. I had no way of telling what kind of mood she was in.

  ‘Have you been here long?’ I asked her.

  ‘About half an hour.’ She paused. ‘You sat right next to me. It was uncanny.’

  ‘You were already here, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. I was early.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘I was watching you pretending to read the paper. You even got it the right way up.’

  I could smell her perfume. It didn’t belong there. Perfume, ancient paper, dust: it felt wrong as a combination.

  ‘I didn’t make it to your place,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘That was five days ago,’ I said. ‘You didn’t call.’ I hesitated. ‘I was worried about you.’

  She still didn’t say anything.

  ‘I went to the club –’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘They told me.’

  I ran my hand along the edge of the table. It was rounded, worn. I stared at where my hand was, but I couldn’t see anything. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. I should be in bed. Away from all this. As far away as possible.

  ‘Did you hear the message?’ she said. ‘On my machine?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘It was for you.’

  ‘It sounded like a funeral.’

  ‘You told me about your name once, how it was like a bell. Don’t you remember?’

  I was looking up into the corner of the room. Where the corner of the room would be if I could see it.

  She sighed. ‘Why are you being like this?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘This isn’t going anywhere,’ she said.

  I almost said, What isn’t?

  ‘This conversation,’ she said, ‘is not going anywhere.’

  ‘I love you, Nina.’ I just blurted it out.

  She eased down off the table. I heard something metal touch the radiator. A belt? A ring? I didn’t even know what she was wearing.

  ‘I love you,’ I said.

  Then it was silent.

  ‘There’s a man down there,’ she said. ‘He’s got a tattoo on his neck. A spider’s web.’ She paused. ‘Only you can’t see it.’ She paused again. ‘Because it’s daytime.’

  ‘Nina–’

  ‘Reach out,’ she said. ‘Your left hand.’

  I reached out slowly through air that seemed to thicken, to resist the passage of my fingers. Slowly through the air, so any contact would be gentle, soft as the contact between capsules when they link or separate in space.

  I felt the heat of her skin before the skin itself. She took a quick breath, then she seemed to hold it. My hand didn’t know where it had landed. Her bare skin – but where? It moved one way, then the other. Identified a curve. Moved further over. At last the tiny hairs explained it. Her thigh.

  She was wearing almost nothing. Had she arrived like that? If not, I couldn’t imagine how she’d taken off her clothes without me hearing.

  My hand moved softly inwards, upwards. I felt her body arch and stiffen against the point where I was touching her.

  ‘I don’t think you should leave me,’ I said.

  ‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘It’s too exciting.’

  ‘Really? Who for?’ She could hardly talk.

  ‘You.’

  ‘And not for you?’

  She was leaning back against the radiator. I imagined the ridges on the metal printing a row of vertical lines across her buttocks and her upper thighs. As if that part of her was in jail.

  ‘I mean, who else could you do this with?’ I said.

  She moved against my hand. She didn’t
answer.

  ‘Is there anyone else you could do this with?’

  ‘What are you telling me?’ she murmured. ‘You’re the only blind man in the city?’

  ‘How many do you know?’

  Her breath rushed fast and soft across her bottom lip.

  ‘How many?’ I said.

  Her inner thigh began to tremble. That shallow trough, that channel in the muscle. Trembling.

  ‘I bet you don’t know any others.’

  Her whole body shuddered. I pulled her towards me.

  ‘Not even one.’

  Loots called me late that afternoon. As soon as I picked up the phone he started talking. He’d had some news. There was a man on the eastern border who claimed to have seen someone disappear right in front of his eyes.

  ‘Another hoax?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Loots said, ‘but I’m going out there anyway. Do you want to come?’

  An hour and a half later we were on the motorway, heading east. For the first sixty kilometres you drive through thick pine forest. There are silver birches in the foreground, a tinge of red to their dead foliage, but it’s the pines you notice, massing behind the metallic speckled trunks, deep and darkest-green – impenetrable. The road feels blinkered. Most of the traffic was coming towards us, bound for the city. Loots leaned over the steering-wheel, his eyes narrowed against the dazzle of their headlights.

  There was a dusting of snow along the hard shoulder and in the grass verges, but on the road itself the snow had melted, and the surface was glassy and wet. Each time a car passed, it reminded me of the library. Each car that passed was someone asking us to be quiet.

  ‘Did I tell you about the house?’ Loots said.

  I looked at him. ‘What house?’

  Someone had offered him a house for Christmas. It was more of a cabin, really – a log-cabin. It stood on the shore of a small lake, all on its own. He was taking his girlfriend down there. Maybe I could come along as well, he said, with Nina.

  ‘Then I’ll get to meet her at last.’

  In his voice there was a trace of something rueful, a kind of fatalism, as though what he was hoping for was unlikely, if not impossible. Nina, I thought. That was Nina. I watched the telegraph poles flash past. Black trees unreeled on both sides of the car. I felt like a thirsty man who’d drunk something with too much sugar in it. I felt unquenched.