The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  Praise for The Insult

  ‘A subtle and disorientating novel … On one level a thriller, the novel is also a meditation on imagination, isolation, and the way we build up a picture of reality. A strange and outstanding book’ Sunday Times

  ‘Rupert Thomson conjures up an unforgettable world – like our own but oddly dream-like – where mystery and metaphysics meet under the guidance of a dazzling narrative gift’ Boyd Tonkin, Independent

  ‘How can people say that fiction is in a bad way when stuff like this is being written?’ Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

  ‘An endlessly inventive, brilliant novel’ Time Out

  ‘Thomson is one of our finest exponents of the psychological thriller … here is a world ruled by helpless paranoia and the shadowy recesses of the mind’ Arena

  ‘One of the strangest novels I have read in a long time … I was knocked out by this novel … A huge talent’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘We are in the dark side of the brain – full of grief and a deliciously strange comedy. I’ve never read anything like it’ Michael Ondaatje

  ‘Thomson’s prose maintains a high tension between fragile polished ironies and Brando-esque spunkiness. The Insult is the most irresistible of his books’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Maddening, frightening, and admirable in its ability to resist trite catharsis, The Insult reads like an unholy collaboration of Oliver Sacks and Edgar Alan Poe’ Time Out New York

  ‘Echoing the psychological confusion of Kafka’s The Trial, Thomson’s odyssey into the depths of an isolated existence is absorbing and inspired’ Elle

  ‘Contemporary, original, inventive … new readers of Thomson’s work should be prepared to have all their senses extended’ The Australian

  ‘An astonishing exploration into the blurred hinterland where fiction meets fantasy … Crisply precise and extravagantly daring … The Insult is an extraordinary achievement’ Sunday Telegraph

  THE INSULT

  RUPERT THOMSON

  This book is for Dick and Marcia Wertime,

  and for Michael Karbelnikoff,

  Wolfgang Lackinger and Calvin Mitchell

  ‘As the city grows bigger, it seems that people re-evolve, lose touch with their bodies, becoming disembodied almost, living only through their brains …’

  – Shinya Tsukamoto

  ‘I am afraid. One has to take action against fear, once one has it.’

  – Rainer Maria Rilke

  ‘… it is difficult to recover from illness precisely because we are unaware of it.’

  – Seneca

  Contents

  Nightlife

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Carving Babies

  Chapter 1

  Silver Skin

  Chapter 1

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Nightlife

  Chapter 1

  ‘You’ve been shot.’

  I heard someone say it. I wouldn’t have known otherwise; I wouldn’t have realised. All I could remember was four tomatoes – three of them motionless, one still rolling. And a black shape, too. A shape that had a curve to it.

  I’ve been shot.

  Sirens circled me like ghosts.

  I slipped away, the feeling of having fallen from a plane, of falling through dark air, and the plane flying on without me …

  Each time I woke up, it was night.

  Then voices spoke to me, out of nothing. Voices told me the rest. You’d been shopping, they said. You were in a supermarket car-park when it happened. It was a Thursday evening. You were walking towards your vehicle when you were fired upon, a single shot. The bullet took a horizontal path through the occipital cortex. One millimetre lower and you would’ve died instantaneously. You suffered no damage to adjacent structures; however, you have lost your vision and that loss is permanent. There were no witnesses to the shooting.

  I lay in bed, my neck supported by a padded brace. My head had a strange deadness to it, as if it was an arm and I’d slept on it.

  My mouth tasted of flowers.

  The voices told me I was in a clinic in the northern suburbs. They told me how much time had passed, and how it had been spent: brain-scans, neuro-surgery, post-traumatic amnesia. They told me that my parents had visited. My fiancée, too. None of what they said surprised me. I could smell bandages and, behind the smell of bandages, methylated spirits, linoleum, dried blood. I imagined, for some reason, that the lino was pale-green with streaks of white in it, like certain kinds of soap or marble. It seemed to me that several people were positioned around my bed, though only one of them was speaking. I turned my face in his direction.

  ‘Something I didn’t understand. Occipital something.’

  The same voice answered. ‘Occipital cortex. It’s located at the back of the head, the very base of the brain. It’s responsible for visual interpretation. In your case, the damage is bilateral: both lobes are affected.’

  ‘You said the loss of vision is permanent …’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘So there’s no chance of recovery?’

  ‘None.’ The voice paused. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Somebody placed a hand on my shoulder. I wasn’t sure which one of them it was – the man who’d been talking to me or one of the others. I couldn’t have said what it communicated. Pity, maybe. Consolation. It reminded me of the feelings I’d had about churches when I was young. How I’d imagined an angel’s touch might be.

  I found that my eyes had filled with water.

  Bits fly off me as I run.

  The place is always the same. It’s a city street, though not one I recognise. Sunlight everywhere. The buildings blaze with it.

  I can see myself running. The bits flying off me. Two ribs, an ear. One of my arms. Some teeth. They come loose, drop silently away. It’s like the way things happen in space. I watch a finger leave my hand, spin backwards through the bright gold air behind me. Soon there’s just the running left.

  You might think it would stop then, but it doesn’t. I keep running, even though I don’t have any legs. Even though the body’s gone, the elbows too, the lungs.

  It’s hard to describe. It’s like one kind of air passing through another. It’s not a bad feeling. The flesh has gone. There’s only the spirit left.

  I wake up sweating …

  The man who had talked to me before was sitting by my bed. This time he was alone.

  ‘My name’s Visser. Bruno Visser.’

  ‘What do you look like?’ I said.

  ‘An understandable question.’ He mentioned light-brown hair, pale-blue eyes. He was fairly tall, he said. Then he told me he was my neuro-surgeon, as if he thought that detail might complete the picture.

  ‘And what about me?’ I said. ‘What do I look like?’

  He paused, his silence awkward – or perhaps just curious, intrigued.

  ‘I mean, am I disfigured?’ I asked him. ‘Would I recognise myself?’

  ‘There’s only one disfigurement, as you put it, and it’s not really apparent.’ He explained that I’d lost a small section of bone on the left side of my cranium, shattered by the stranger’s bullet as it exited. The normal procedure was to wait until the tissues healed, and then to fit a titanium plate. It was a fairly simple operation, he assured me. There would be a scar, of course, but the hair would grow back over it. Nobody would know.

  He continued, more earnest now (he had moved his chair closer to the bed, his voice was lower). I shouldn’t underestimate the task that lay ahead, he said. When someone loses their vision suddenly, at least three stages can usually be distinguished. First there’s shock, a numbness that may last for weeks – the body’s own protective anaesth
esia. Then depression sets in. This stage could last longer. Months. Years even. Hopelessness, self-pity, suicidal thoughts – I had to be ready, he said, for any or all of these. Finally, when I’d finished mourning my loss of vision, there was the gradual rehabilitation: the development of a new personality, with different capacities, different potential.

  ‘And now for the bad news,’ I said.

  ‘At this clinic, Martin,’ Visser said, ‘we don’t believe you should be under any illusions about your condition.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much danger of that.’

  There was a silence. ‘Perhaps you should get some rest.’ His chair creaked twice. He was gone.

  I wake sweating, wait for my heart to settle. It always takes a while, after the dream, for my hands to join the smooth, glossy stumps of my wrists. For my body to piece itself together.

  This is what must have happened after I was shot. I mean, that must have been the first time it happened. Only then it would have taken longer. Hours, probably. Maybe days. And there were parts of me that didn’t reappear, of course. One small section of my skull, measuring, according to Visser, 2.75 cm. by 1.93 cm. My eyesight, too. That never came back either.

  I lie here with my neck supported by the brace. I move my fingers against the coarse wool of the blanket that covers me. I move my feet against the undersheet. There will come a time, I think to myself, when this won’t happen. When I don’t wake up in a hospital bed – or any other bed, for that matter. When disintegration’s pull can no longer be resisted. When the bits of my body continue to fly outwards, like the universe itself.

  Visser returned. I knew him by his footsteps – or, to be more accurate, his shoes. They’d been repaired with metal, those steel crescents that prevent heels or toes from wearing out. I turned my head towards him. He wanted to explain something to me – I sensed his need – but he wasn’t sure how to begin.

  At last he leaned forwards, his clothes releasing a faint odour of carbolic. ‘NPL,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘No perception of light. I’ll give you a demonstration.’ He reached into a trouser or a jacket pocket. ‘I’m holding a torch. Now, can you tell me, is it on?’

  I stared hard, but I had no awareness of a torch. I wasn’t aware of anything.

  ‘Is it off,’ Visser said, ‘or on?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘And yet your pupils still contract.’ The torch clicked. ‘What’s interesting about cortical blindness is that it’s absolute. Your eyes still see, they still respond to light. It’s just that what they’re seeing is not being recorded in the brain.’ He shifted in his chair. ‘Imagine a TV. A TV receives electromagnetic waves from a transmitter and it reconverts those waves into visual images. If the TV’s faulty, the electromagnetic waves are not converted. Unfortunately, that’s where the analogy ends. Unlike a TV, the occipital cortex cannot be replaced, or even repaired. We simply don’t have the technology as yet. Do you understand?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘It’s perhaps for this reason – the fact that the retina, the optic nerves and the anterior visual pathways are all still functioning as normal – that people who suffer from cortical blindness often believe, despite proof to the contrary, that they can see. This is a condition known as Anton’s Syndrome. Rare, admittedly, but it exists.’

  I didn’t know what he meant by proof to the contrary.

  ‘Oh, falling downstairs,’ he said, ‘bumping into furniture – that kind of thing.’ Visser’s tone was light, almost playful, and yet I wasn’t offended. I saw what he was describing – it was slapstick, it was farce: policemen walking into lampposts, fat women slipping on banana-skins – and I, too, was entertained.

  ‘You might also experience visual hallucinations,’ Visser went on, ‘flashes of light and so forth. It’s quite common in cases like yours, where there has been a severe insult to the brain –’

  ‘I think I know what you’re trying to say, Doctor.’

  Visser was silent, waiting.

  ‘You’re trying to say that I shouldn’t fall into the trap of believing I can still see.’

  ‘Well, yes. Precisely.’

  He sounded so surprised, so pleased with me, that I couldn’t help feeling proud of myself. In fact, I had the feeling that the pride was mutual, that we were, to some as yet unknown extent, dependent on each other.

  Once or twice a year, when I was young, my parents would put me on a train to the city. My grandparents met me at the other end. From the station we caught a tram out to their small house in the suburbs (in my memory it’s always the same ride, through streets that are sunlit, tree-lined, deadened by the heat, and my grandmother always offers me a pear, picked from a tree on their allotment). I usually stayed for two weeks, and was always sad when it was time to go.

  Not far from where they lived was a big house that stood in a private park. I would ride there on my grandfather’s bicycle, slow down as I passed the gates. Standing on the pedals, I’d turn in an unsteady circle, unwilling to stop, but wanting a second glimpse. There was a driveway leading up to the house between two rows of trees. On winter evenings their branches, black and gleaming, seemed to hoard the gold windows in their fingers. In spring, white blossoms lay scattered on the gravel, each petal curved and pale, eyelid-shaped. Otherwise there was nothing much to see. The house itself was a kilometre away, at least, a faÇade of dark bricks in the distance. Green drainpipes. Chimneys.

  When I asked my grandparents about it, they told me it was a sanatorium. That means people who are sick, they said. I was never sure if they meant mad or just ill, and they were dead now, my grandparents; the last time I looked for the sanatorium, I was told it had been pulled down. If I’d been called upon to explain my fascination I don’t know what I would have said. It wasn’t so much what I saw as what I might see. Part of you recognises a potential. Thinking about it now, I found a cruel irony in it. It occurred to me that, if the boy on the bicycle had looked hard enough, if he’d looked really hard, he might have seen the man he would eventually become.

  More than twenty years had passed since then, but just for a moment, lying in my bed in the clinic, I’m that boy again, turning circles on his grandfather’s bicycle. And, looking up, I notice a man moving down the gravel drive towards me. I drop one foot to the ground and stand there, watching. The man’s eyes are bandaged and yet he’s walking in a straight line, as though he can see. And when he reaches the gates he stops and looks at me, right through the bandages, right between the black wrought-iron bars.

  ‘Martin?’ he says. ‘Is that you?’

  My hands tighten on the handlebars.

  ‘It’s you,’ he says, ‘isn’t it.’

  I start pedalling. There’s a hill luckily, it’s steep, the wind roars in my ears. But even when I’m back with my grandparents and everything’s normal again, I can’t be sure that I won’t turn round and see him walk towards me through the house.

  Knowing me, despite the bandages.

  Knowing my name.

  ‘Mr Blom?’

  It was the nurse, Miss Janssen. She had two detectives with her. One of them, Slatnick, was making noises, strange little squeaks and splashes, which I finally identified as the sound of someone chewing gum. The other man’s name was Munck. Munck did most of the talking. His voice was easy to listen to, almost soporific. I wanted to tell him he was in the wrong job; with a voice like that, he should have been a hypnotist.

  He was shocked, he said – they both were – by what had happened. He could only express the deepest sympathy for me in my predicament. If there was anything that they could do …

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  Munck talked on. The last ten years had seen a proliferation of firearms in the city. Incidents of the type it had been my misfortune to be involved in had increased a hundredfold. Random violence, seemingly senseless crimes. He had his theories, of course, but now was not the time. He paused. Wind rushed in the trees
outside. A window further down the ward blew open; I felt cold air search the room. Munck leaned closer in his chair. The reason they’d come, he said, was to hear my version of the event.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t have a version.’

  ‘You don’t remember anything?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Did you see anything at all?’

  I smiled. ‘Tomatoes.’

  Slatnick stopped chewing for a moment.

  ‘They must’ve spilled out of my bag,’ I said. ‘I suppose I was going to make a salad that night.’

  ‘I see.’ I heard Munck stand up and start to pace about. ‘Where do you work, Mr Blom?’

  ‘A bookshop.’ I mentioned the name of it.

  ‘I know the place. I’m often in there myself.’ Munck walked to the end of the bed. ‘Do you have any enemies?’

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘It sounds dramatic, I know,’ Munck said, ‘but we have to ask.’

  ‘None that I can think of.’

  ‘You have no idea who might’ve shot at you?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  Slatnick spoke next. ‘Am I correct in assuming therefore that you would not be able to identify your assailant?’

  I stared in his direction. What is it about policemen?

  ‘Slatnick,’ Munck said, ‘I think the answer’s yes.’

  ‘Yes?’ Slatnick hadn’t understood.

  ‘Yes, you’d be correct in that assumption.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Mr Blom,’ Munck said. ‘I have to say that, in this case, it seems unlikely that justice will be done. All that remains is for us to wish you a speedy recovery. Once again, if there’s anything we can do –’

  ‘Thank you, Detective.’

  I listened to the two men walk away, their footsteps mingling with those of other visitors. One of them sounded like a diver, the soles of his shoes slapping down like flippers on the floor …