The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘Martin?’

  I jumped.

  ‘What are you doing, Martin?’

  I saw Nurse Janssen standing by the door to the roof.

  ‘Nothing,’ I called across to her. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  I straightened up and watched her walk towards me, the wind flattening her thin cotton nightgown against her belly and thighs. Was this another of her routines?

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry about me.’ She stepped up on to the parapet and stood beside me, looking out into the darkness.

  ‘Careful,’ I said. ‘It’s a long way down.’

  She laughed, though somewhat breathlessly.

  ‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘You could fall.’

  ‘And I suppose you couldn’t?’

  I turned to face her. The way she looked just then, I could have kissed her. Her eyes were so dark that I could only see the core of silver in the pupil. Her dark hair, which was usually pinned close to her head in a tight, sexless coil, now hung loose, touching her shoulders lightly, the way willow branches touch the ground. Her face, a little blurred, still held the memory of sleep. I wished I could ask her about the night she walked up to my bed and took off all her clothes. Did she do that kind of thing often? Or was it just for me? (For me, I hoped.) What was the pleasure she derived from it? I remembered how she smiled when I came; not gratified exactly, not merely amused either – a smile that was as enigmatic in its way as that moustache of Visser’s. I had so many questions, but each and every one of them was dangerous. Because they weren’t really questions at all. They were admissions. Confessions. They were keys turning in locks, nails in my coffin.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked her.

  ‘You know my name.’

  ‘Your Christian name, I mean.’

  ‘Maria.’

  I smiled. It suited her.

  ‘Do you think it’s wise,’ she said, ‘coming up here?’

  ‘Wise?’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’ I stepped down off the parapet and leaned on it. ‘It’s just, I’ve always been a private person. I don’t like crowds.’ The wind had dropped; I wondered how long it was till dawn. ‘It’s hard being on the ward sometimes. All that breathing, people talking in their sleep. I wanted some air.’ I looked up at her. ‘Are you going to report me?’

  She thought about it.

  ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘It can be our little secret.’

  I looked at her sharply. Did she suspect? No, I didn’t think so. She was just being light-hearted, conspiratorial.

  ‘Shall we go back?’ she said.

  I took her arm in the correct manner and let her lead me across the roof. I glanced at her as we approached the door.

  ‘You didn’t think I was going to jump, did you?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ I told her. ‘I know the doctor sometimes thinks I’m depressed, but I’m not. Really, I’m not.’

  I felt her squeeze my arm. I didn’t think she believed me, though. And how could I convince her without giving anything away? It must have been disturbing, now I thought about it, for her to see me standing on that narrow parapet some thirty metres above the ground.

  ‘I was only practising,’ I said. ‘You know, getting ready for the world outside.’

  ‘I just hope it’s ready for you,’ she said, and we both laughed at that, and passed through the doorway, back into the building.

  A Friday morning, ten o’clock. The moment had arrived. I could sense the autumn sun against my face as I moved down the clinic steps. There was hardly any warmth in it. It was October now, darkness eating into the day. My time of year.

  My cane touched concrete, concrete, then touched gravel. The driveway. And, beyond it, the future. Excitement crackled through the lower layers of my skin. I felt as though I was playing poker and I’d just been dealt a hand that was unbeatable.

  At the bottom of the steps, Maria greeted me. We’d grown used to one another, she and I; we’d spent so many hours together. I smiled past her shoulder, drew crisp air into my lungs.

  ‘The pine trees are smelling particularly good this morning.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Blom,’ she said, ‘I wish I’d never mentioned them.’

  At first it surprised me, this use of my last name. Then I understood. It was actually more intimate, conveying precisely what it appeared to deny; it was like pretending that the night she took her clothes off never happened. I was sure that she was smiling, too. With her arms folded, probably, and one of her feet, the left one, pointing away from her body. I’d often seen her stand like that.

  Visser stepped up and shook my hand. He was exhilarated by my progress, he told me, and full of confidence about my rehabilitation. He didn’t think he’d ever seen a recovery quite like it. I told him that I couldn’t have done it without him (not strictly true, of course, but I was building on that old feeling we had, of mutual congratulation and dependency). I thanked him profusely. There was nothing more to say.

  I’d called on Visser about a month before and tried to explain what it was that I was experiencing. He listened to my description of the night in the gardens, my subsequent investigations. I admitted that I’d lied to him on a number of occasions. His eyebrows lifted. Lines appeared on his forehead, lines that echoed the venetian blinds behind him. When I finished, Visser didn’t speak. He had his elbows on the table. His chin rested on his hands. I heard air rushing downwards from his nostrils into his moustache. I thought of the way wind moves a field of grass.

  At last, he said, ‘I did warn you, didn’t I?’

  ‘You mean it’s some kind of hallucination?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ Visser shifted in his chair. ‘What you’re experiencing is a phase of denial. Temporary, I’m sure.’

  ‘But it’s so real, Doctor –’

  ‘You see? You’re denying your condition. You’re blind, Martin. You always will be.’

  ‘I really can make things out, though. Well, some things, anyway.’ I paused. ‘But only at night, of course.’

  ‘Only at night.’

  Visser allowed another silence to fill the room. Those silences of his were like people gazing at you with affection and shaking their heads. They were like gently mocking laughter. They were a bit like pity. And the lines were back, the ones that went with his venetian blinds.

  Only at night.

  Those silences were such fertile ground for reconsideration. If I’d had any doubts at that moment, they would have multiplied. But I didn’t. Have any doubts.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said.

  Looking back on that meeting with Visser, I thought that maybe I didn’t want him to understand. I wanted him to tell me that I was mistaken, deluded. Then I could go on secretly enjoying the power I had. It was as if, in attempting to explain it to him, I’d absolved myself of some of the responsibility.

  So when Visser shook my hand outside the clinic and said he’d never seen such a positive response to sudden vision loss, I couldn’t keep myself from grinning. I was grinning as I stepped into the waiting car. Grinning as it moved off down the drive and out through the gates. Still grinning as it passed the boy who stood there with one foot on the pedal of an ancient bicycle.

  By the time we arrived at Central Station, the weather had changed. Climbing the steps into the train I could feel mist against my face, the rust of winter on my tongue. I followed my driver through the carriage. My cane touched rubber, then metal. Then someone’s leg. I apologised.

  The driver found me a seat in a second-class compartment and lifted my case on to the luggage rack. I thanked him, said goodbye. He gripped my shoulder for a moment, then he was gone. I felt for the catch on the window, slid it open. I leaned out. There was that coalscuttle smell that stations always seem to have, a smell that’s poignant, associated as it is with separations, tears, the end of love.

  ‘Good luck, Mr Blom. Good luck.’

  It was the driver,
standing on the platform somewhere below. Thanking him again, I told him not to wait. I’d be fine, I said. The truth was, I was looking forward to being alone.

  I sat down. Through the window I heard the PA system crackle into life, something to do with platform four. Whoever the announcer was, he wasn’t in Smulders’ league: he didn’t have that imperturbable quality, the gift for making people feel that everything is running smoothly. The train lurched forwards, checked. A piece of luggage burst open on the floor. Five minutes passed; the train still hadn’t left the station. One of my fellow passengers began to grumble about the state of the railways. Slowly he gathered momentum, his theme expanding to include inflation, the decline in morals, political incompetence. I sat back in my seat. I was thoroughly enjoying myself; this was the kind of thing I’d missed.

  ‘What are you grinning about?’

  I wasn’t sure if it was me the man was talking to, not until another passenger, a woman, spoke up in my defence.

  ‘Leave him alone. He’s blind.’

  I looked at the place where the woman’s voice had come from.

  ‘I just got out of the clinic this morning,’ I told her. ‘It’s my first day of freedom.’

  The train lurched forwards once again, and this time it kept going, stumbling over sets of points, following a long curve to the south. I knew the route by heart. Out of the station, past the grim, brick backs of warehouses and apartment blocks. Across the river on a narrow, cantilevered bridge. Green water below. White birds rising from pale spits of sand. On the marshy east bank, one or two men fishing. The suburbs next. More apartment blocks, with flower boxes on their balconies. A few shops selling car parts, fridges, tiles. The TV mast up on the hill, its red eye only visible at night. Then out into the countryside. Villages so still, they seemed uninhabited. Ponds reflecting the inevitable clouds. Copses, ditches – fields of sugar beet. I drew some comfort from this journey, which I’d undertaken so many times before.

  My parents only came to see me once while I was in the clinic. (This was understandable; they lived some distance from the capital, and my father had a heart condition.) It was just a pity I was unconscious the whole time. In the months since their visit we’d talked on the phone and our conversations had been civil, at times even affectionate, if rather unspecific: the word ‘blindness’, for example, had never been mentioned. However, Visser still thought it best that I convalesce at home. I’d be in a place I knew, among people who cared for me. And as he pointed out, against any objections I might raise, I’d already dismissed the only other candidate – namely, Claudia. But I didn’t object. I’d been longing for freedom, freedom on any terms, so I eagerly embraced the idea.

  As soon as I stepped down on to the station platform I knew the whole thing was a mistake. By then it was dusk, and I watched my parents appear in front of me like a Polaroid developing. There was a hollow, histrionic feel to my mother’s embrace that I found unbearable (I felt sure she’d been reading self-help manuals: How to Care for Your Disabled Son, In Three Easy Stages, or Be a Popular and Successful Mother of an Invalid). As for my father, he scuffed his feet, smiling foolishly into the cheap fur collar of his coat. I knew what it was. The dark glasses, the white stick. I’d become extreme, theatrical, embarrassing – a travesty of something they hadn’t even been comfortable with in the first place.

  When we got home, I pleaded exhaustion. The journey, the excitement. I thought I should go upstairs, lie down for an hour. I couldn’t help noticing that they seemed relieved.

  That night we ate together in the dining-room. Flowers stood in a vase on the table and tall white candles burned in silver candelabras. My mother was wearing the necklace she always wore when she attended banquets or the theatre.

  ‘What’s the occasion?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Martin.’ Her voice was rich with mock reproach. ‘Let’s drink a toast to your return.’

  Reaching for my wineglass, I knocked it over. Deliberately.

  My mother rushed out to the kitchen for a cloth. My father gripped the arms of his chair like someone in an aeroplane expecting turbulence. I pretended not to notice the wine sliding towards me. I let it cascade on to my trousers, my eyes staring off into the corner of the room.

  My mother had cooked some of my favourite dishes – a soup of white beans, braised lamb, marrow from the kitchen garden – and my father had selected a good bottle from his cellar, yet I had no sense of ease or familiarity. My father kept darting glances at me, surreptitious, sidelong glances, as if he was frightened I might catch him looking (which I did, of course). My mother plucked at her ropes of emeralds and pearls with insistent but strangely absent-minded fingers and gave me looks that were worthy of our country’s most famous tragic actress. We talked about the weather, local politics, distant relations. My father entertained us with a story we must have heard at least half a dozen times before (the day a pig got into the post office and ate all the pay cheques). There was a tension in the air, as though, at any moment, somebody might burst through the french windows with a machine-gun and riddle us with bullets.

  Then, during dessert, my mother broached the subject I’d been dreading.

  ‘How’s Claudia?’

  I raised my napkin to my mouth, dabbed once and let it drop into my lap. I leaned back in my chair. ‘Didn’t she tell you?’

  ‘Tell us what?’

  ‘We’ve split up.’

  My mother let out a contemptuous sound. ‘To be honest, it doesn’t surprise me. She’s a pretty girl, of course, but I never thought she had quite what it takes. I always thought there was something missing somehow. Backbone, I suppose. And now, at the first sign of difficulty, well –’

  This was my mother all over. She used to dote on Claudia (both my parents did). She used to say that Claudia would make the perfect wife – not just a wife either, but an example, too. Throughout my twenties I had drifted from job to job, never really settling, and my mother considered Claudia a good influence in that respect. Maybe, at last, I would start thinking in terms of a career. It was all Claudia, Claudia, Claudia. But my mother could never resist an opportunity to feel let down by somebody. I always thought – that was classic. There was nothing she relished more than being able to claim she’d known all along that something would go wrong, nothing she relished more than being dreadfully, dreadfully disappointed. I stifled a smile. It was almost enough to make me want to marry Claudia after all. I found myself in the highly amusing position of having to defend the girl.

  ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘you don’t understand. Claudia’s blameless. She offered to live with me, look after me. Nothing would’ve made her happier. I was the one who said no. It was me who ended it.’

  ‘But why?’ Something about the way my father lurched forwards, over the table, reminded me of a cow. That numb weight, that clumsiness.

  I tried to explain it to him. ‘Everything’s changed,’ I said. ‘Everything. Don’t you see that? It’s like when someone close to you dies. It draws a line through your life. Nothing’s the same after that. The choices I made,’ and I hesitated for a moment, ‘the choices I made before I was shot no longer apply.’

  A kind of shiver went through the room; even the heavy velvet curtains seemed to shift.

  ‘Of course, you won’t be working for a while,’ my father hurried on, glancing anxiously at my mother, ‘not in your condition.’

  I lost patience suddenly.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I could always sell matches.’

  My mother stood up. But then she didn’t seem to know why she was standing. People look like that if they walk in their sleep and wake up in the middle. They’re not quite where they thought they’d be. There has to be a moment of adjustment. At last she fell back on habit and began to clear the table. My father mentioned that the news would be starting soon. I wasn’t sure which of us he was talking to. Perhaps, like Smulders, he was simply saying something that he always said, regardless.

  We drank our
coffee in the next room, watching television. The economy was in trouble again. Two children had been murdered. There was severe flooding in the north-west. I wondered if I’d been on the news when I was shot. Probably not. They like you to be famous. Or else you have to be a child, preferably under the age of ten. GIRL, 12, MURDERED – that sounds all right. But BABY MURDERED sounds much better.

  ‘More coffee, Martin?’ my father said.

  I rested my head against the back of the sofa and closed my eyes.

  I stayed awake that night and slept for most of the next day. I didn’t appear downstairs until just after five in the afternoon. My parents thought I’d been avoiding them. That wasn’t the reason for my behaviour, of course – it was simply one of the side-effects – but there was no persuading them of this and, in truth, I didn’t really try. The mood in the house was awkward for the whole of that first week. I was still having dreams, too, dreams where my body came apart. I would wake up in the bed I’d slept in as a child, muddled, panic-stricken, sweating. I would hear my parents whispering about me in the room below.

  Towards midnight, when they were asleep, I would go out for a walk. We lived on the outskirts of the town. At the end of our street there was a wooden stile and then just fields; in the distance the ground lifted to a ridge which was dense with firs and pines. I kept to the roads. I saw few people, even fewer cars. It was very quiet. I passed front gardens – waves of autumn roses breaking over fences, metal gates with rising-sun designs built into the wrought-iron. Not far from our house there was a restaurant that was open late. I used to go there when I was sixteen or seventeen. It had coloured light bulbs in the garden and a sign that said RESTAURANT – DANCING. I sometimes dropped in for a coffee or a schnapps. The place had changed hands recently and I didn’t know the new owner. If he’d heard about me, he didn’t let on; he just served me drinks and made the usual small talk. I appreciated that.

  When I got home, the silence deepened. I spent hours at the window, watching the railway line that ran behind the house. Trains appeared from the left, one strip of yellow light, and slanted diagonally across the land towards me. At the last moment they seemed to speed up and, like some legend’s sword of gold, plunged into the bank of trees that stood next to the cemetery. Though it was the same every time, I never tired of it. It reminded me of Smulders. And, by association, of Maria Janssen as well. There were no such consolations here. I’d never imagined that I might miss the clinic, but, sitting by the window, I would often think back to the night of the strip-tease. Claudia would never have done anything like that for me. She would have been too embarrassed, too ashamed. No, I couldn’t. Or, I’d feel silly. Then, later, I don’t satisfy you, do I? And my reply: a weary, Yes. Yes, you do. I was almost relieved when my mother woke me one morning with the news that Visser was on the phone. I took the call upstairs, in my parents’ bedroom. He told me that he wanted to visit me the next day, if that was convenient. I asked him if we could meet outside somewhere, and mentioned the restaurant. He thought that was a good idea.