The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  It was almost dark when I arrived the following afternoon. I bought myself a beer and took a seat by the window. The place was empty except for an old man who was wearing one of the green hats that used to be traditional in our part of the country.

  I’d been sitting there for twenty minutes when Visser came up behind me. He held my elbow for a moment.

  ‘Martin,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

  He ordered tea, with lemon.

  I was surprised he’d come so far and told him so, but he assured me it had been no trouble; he’d been in the area in any case, for a conference.

  ‘Though it is a weakness of mine,’ he admitted, sipping his tea. ‘I can’t seem to let go of my patients,’ and he paused, ‘especially the difficult ones.’

  This was one of his rare attempts at humour. I dutifully chuckled.

  We discussed my parents for a while and I conveyed a much greater degree of understanding than there actually was. He interrupted me. According to my mother, he said, I was sleeping during the day. Every day. I didn’t deny it. Having known they’d go behind my back, I was prepared.

  ‘Since I can’t see the sun,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t make much difference to me. And anyway, I prefer nights. They’re more peaceful.’ I smiled faintly. ‘I had this conversation with Nurse Janssen once.’

  ‘You’re not hiding, then? This isn’t another version of the broom cupboard?’

  I laughed. ‘Well, maybe a little.’

  He liked the honesty of that.

  I asked him, as casually as possible, how long a convalescence was supposed to last.

  He fingered his moustache. ‘That depends on you. Your progress and so forth.’

  ‘So if I feel ready to strike out on my own –’

  ‘It’s a little early for that,’ he said, ‘don’t you think? After all, you’ve only been home a week.’

  ‘I know, I know. But still –’

  I’d come a long way, I told him, since I’d been given my cane six months before. I recalled for him my first, tentative attempts at walking, the feeling that the ground was opening in front of me, the sudden sense of an abyss. I was convinced that if I took one step I would fall. And because I didn’t know how far there was to fall, it would be like falling for ever. Like the game that children play with cracks in paving stones. I used to long to lie down on the floor and somehow wrap my arms around it and hold on.

  ‘It seems so long ago.’ I shook my head at the memory.

  With Nurse Janssen’s help – and his help, too, of course – I’d learned to employ my remaining senses to overcome my fear, to orient myself. And then there was old Kukowski, with his talk of tactile clocks and sonic spectacles. Touch, taste, hearing, smell – they all played a part; it was a vision that had to be worked on, practised – earned. Though I wasn’t looking at Visser, I could sense him nodding. I was happy with my speech so far. The exaggerations seemed just right, as did the gratitude. Surely it would not be long, I went on, before I was ready for a challenge, before I wanted to explore my condition – its true limits, its possibilities. After all, I couldn’t spend my whole life locked in darkened rooms!

  Visser responded with one of his famous silences. He was delighted with my attitude, he said at last; it never failed to impress him. My optimism could only serve me well – provided, he added, with what I took to be a warning glance, provided I didn’t once again lose touch with reality.

  Once again? What did he mean, once again?

  I’d always had the feeling, talking to Visser, that reality was something there was only one of. As if it was in some way responsive to testing, as if it could be proved to be constant in all its particulars and identical for everybody. When I had that feeling, I always thought of his moustache. I could hardly restrain myself, at times like that, from reaching out and giving it a good tweak. I’d find my hand wandering out into the air, and I’d have to rein it in. Make it pull at my earlobe instead, or probe my temple.

  At last we rose from our table and walked out into the cool evening. Fog had drifted across the town; the light around the street-lamps was soft and round, the density of candy-floss. Across the road from the café was a wooded area. I suggested a stroll. To my surprise, Visser agreed.

  We walked in silence for a while, pine needles snapping beneath our feet. Light flashed through the gloom in a flat, blue arc: a jay.

  Still looking into the distance, I said, ‘Sometimes I have the feeling that there’s something you’re not telling me.’

  ‘Really? What kind of thing?’ He turned to me, smiling.

  ‘I don’t know. Something to do with me.’

  ‘If you don’t mind me saying, Martin, that’s a typical reaction.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘You’re reacting to not being able to see. You feel excluded. It’s only to be expected.’

  Typical Visser, more like. Any question I asked, he always sidestepped or deflected it; he always turned it into a symptom of my condition. The substance of the question could be ignored. What he focused on was the fact that I’d asked it. I never got a straight answer. All I got were dull extrapolations from his diagnosis.

  ‘Can I drive you back?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  As we approached his car, he turned to me again. ‘If you want me to tell you something,’ he said, ‘in my opinion, you’re moving too fast. You’re being a little too optimistic.’ He reached into his coat pocket for the keys. ‘However, I don’t suppose it can hurt. Not so long as you’re prepared for disappointments. Not so long as you’re prepared to fail …’

  Standing beside him, with one hand resting on my blind-man’s cane, I laughed good-humouredly. ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘I’m prepared for that.’

  Fail? I thought. I’m not going to fail.

  One evening not long afterwards I walked out into the garden. It had been raining when I woke up and water was still dripping from the trees. I turned and stared up at the house. Walls of pale-yellow shingles and a low slate roof. Shutters painted green. A terrace with a grape arbour to shield you from the sun. Nothing had changed in years. Even my sister’s room on the top floor. I could see her ballet slippers in the window, shrimp-coloured, their plump toes crossed like fingers. A pointless exercise. There was no luck in our family; there never had been. I thought of her room with its pop-star posters and its shelves of sporting trophies and awards. A museum to her golden childhood. Anyone would think she was dead. I looked round quickly. I hadn’t meant to laugh out loud.

  I heard the french windows open behind me. My father joined me on the lawn. ‘Bit damp out.’ He stood there in his sheepskin coat, peering intently at the sky, half-smiling. I was sure that he’d been sent outside by my mother, to talk to me. He had the look of someone who had drawn the short straw.

  He was a slow man, my father. Life was something he’d entered into reluctantly and withdrew from whenever possible. It came as no surprise to most people to discover that his hobby was collecting snails – though hobby was probably too weak a word for it: it was more of a passion, an obsession. When he worked at the post office, for example, he used to keep a photograph of his favourite snail on the desk in front of him (of his wife and family, there was no sign). The snails lived in a shed at the bottom of the garden. Their cages were fish tanks, which he’d bought second-hand and then converted. He’d built the environments himself: first a layer of sand, then one of earth and, lastly, various assorted pieces of bark, broken flower-pot and moss. Each cage had a pane of glass fitted over the top of it and weighed down with a stone to stop the snails escaping. He kept a notebook which was filled with observations about their ages, their distinguishing features, even the composition of their faeces. He gave them bizarre names, the kind of names that would have suited racehorses – Bronze Mantle, Lightning, Columella Girl. I remember asking him once if the names were supposed to be ironic. He gave me a blank look. He claimed they referred to individual characteristics.

  ‘Lightning, th
ough?’ I said.

  He led me to a cage and then bent down and pointed at the snail in the corner. ‘See that flash,’ he said, ‘just there, below the suture …’

  Do people really take on the appearance or character of their pets? Or do they choose a particular pet because they feel a kinship with it? I’ve never been sure. Either way, it was certainly true that there had been a narrowing of the difference between my father and his snails over the years, especially since he’d retired. He was constantly, as they say, retreating into his shell. He’d started eating the same food as they did, too. Most of it was fit for human consumption – potatoes, apples, carrots, etc. – but, over the weekend, I’d caught him in the kitchen after midnight, cramming leaves into his mouth. Not lettuce, though. Not spinach. Sycamore. And now, as we moved off down the garden, I noticed that he no longer picked his feet up when he walked. He didn’t walk at all, in fact; he shuffled. I looked over my shoulder and it wasn’t footsteps that I saw but one long, suspiciously continuous and slightly silver trail.

  ‘I know how difficult it must be for you,’ he said.

  I turned and stared at him.

  ‘Visser talked to us about it. How you believe you can see sometimes. How you can’t accept what’s happened …’

  I shook my head. How could Visser do that? It was the last thing I needed, my parents pretending that they understood.

  ‘You know, he’s a good man, Visser. One of the best in his field.’ My father’s tone of voice was guarded, wary, as if Visser was actually a criminal, but a criminal he was defending, a criminal who might be capable of going straight.

  ‘He’s clever,’ was all I was prepared to say.

  ‘He’s done a lot for you.’

  We walked as far as the fence at the top of the garden. On the other side was a field. Everything was grey or brown or yellow, dulled by the rain. The brown horse that was standing there looked camouflaged, almost invisible. My father bent down to pluck a weed out of the flowerbed.

  ‘It’s a good clinic they’ve got up there,’ he said. ‘Excellent facilities, very up to date …’

  I thought of the broken windows, the paint peeling off the ceiling, the narrow metal beds. I thought of the interminable corridors, the old linoleum. The chill.

  ‘It was the best place for someone with your injuries. Everybody said so.’

  He’d seen the place. Only once, admittedly, but he’d seen it. Obviously his faculties were going. Going, gone. All he was left with was the desperate stubbornness of old age. How long, I wondered, did the average snail live?

  ‘I just wanted you to know. I just wanted to say that we did the best for you that we could …’

  The space my father occupied was shrinking, tightening around him. Everything he said now mattered to him because there were so few words left. Let him believe what he wanted to believe. Let him be. It astonished me that I could be so charitable.

  I walked several paces, my cane scanning the wet grass.

  ‘How’s Peristome?’ I said. ‘And Streak, how’s Streak?’

  The taxi dropped me by a public phone-box at one end of the shopping precinct. I waited until it had turned the corner, then I walked back along the main road that led east out of the town. The tarmac shone like black glass with the recent rain; trees boiled overhead. I remember a neon sign outside a bar and how it seemed to flicker on and off. I thought it was a faulty connection; the damp must have got into it. But then, when I was closer, I realised it was just a low branch dipping, blown sideways, so it kept covering the sign. Cars rushed past like gusts of wind. Once, a man stopped and offered me a lift, but I told him I didn’t have far to go. It took me two hours to reach the station.

  When I bought my ticket I disguised myself, replacing my white cane and my dark glasses with one of my father’s gardening hats and a pair of his half-moon spectacles. I didn’t want anyone in the station to remember seeing a blind man board the 9.03. I wanted my trail to go cold outside that phone-box, on that anonymous street-corner.

  I chose the compartment that seemed the most dimly lit (one of the bulbs must have blown) and sat down by the window. Everything was blurred, of course; I hadn’t realised his eyesight was quite so bad. No wonder I hadn’t been able to find the right platform. After a while I had to take the glasses off. Alone in the compartment, I leaned back in my seat and peered at the photographs of national beauty spots which hung on the wall below the luggage-rack: woodland, river valleys, lakes. I wasn’t sure how I felt. It was a mixture. Relieved, elated, edgy.

  That afternoon I’d been for a drink in a place I used to go sometimes when I went home at weekends; they knew me there. I walked in through the door just after sunset and ordered a whisky and a beer. Suddenly it was as though all the voices and sounds in the bar had been poured into a jar and then a lid had been put on it. Everybody turned round. They were staring at me, and they all had the same look on their faces. I felt as if I was in a western. As if I was a stranger in town and I’d done what I’d just done: walked into a bar and ordered a drink. I spoke again, into the silence: ‘A whisky and a beer, please.’

  At last Andreas, the owner’s son, responded. ‘I heard about the accident.’

  ‘It wasn’t an accident, Andreas. They did it on purpose.’

  This was meant to be a joke, but nobody laughed.

  ‘I mean, the gun didn’t go off by mistake,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t someone who just happened to have a gun and their finger slipped or something and the gun went off. What happened was, they pointed the gun at me and then they fired.’

  It wasn’t getting any funnier.

  And suddenly I knew what I had to do. I had to move away from everyone I’d ever met. Find somewhere different to live. I had to disappear. I knocked my whisky back and chased it with the beer. It couldn’t be that difficult. All I had to do was leave and not tell anyone where I was going. Who were my friends? Robert, Daphne, Hermann, Paul. Max and Irene. Oh yes, and Patrice. Was that all? There were a few people from the bookstore, too, of course. The boss, Mr Schlamm. Iris, who I’d had a thing about. Another Robert. They’d sent flowers to the clinic. Cards as well. They’d done their bit. Most people were busy, or lazy. I knew what they’d think. He’ll get in touch sooner or later. When he’s ready. That suited me. Now I’d drawn up a list, I realised there weren’t too many of them, anyway. It was a relief to me that I wasn’t more popular. There was less likelihood of an uncomfortable coincidence. If I did run into someone on the street, someone I knew, I’d just pretend I hadn’t seen them. Nothing personal. I simply wanted to start again, with no awkwardness and no comparisons – no past. I wanted my life to begin with the shooting, as though that stranger’s bullet had given birth to me, as though the pain I felt in that split-second was the pain of a baby being catapulted from the womb.

  When I returned from the bar, my parents were in the drawing-room. My father offered me a schnapps, which I accepted. I chose the moment to inform them of my decision.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ I said. ‘Tonight, probably.’

  I pressed my face to the cold glass as the train rushed north through endless fields of beet. I remembered something Visser had said about rebuilding the relationship between myself and my parents. It would take time, he said. We would have to be patient with one another. He was sure that, in the end, some kind of harmony could be achieved.

  But there were things he didn’t understand about my parents, things I hadn’t told him. My sister had died as a result of misdiagnosed appendicitis when she was twelve. I couldn’t honestly remember her at all – I was five at the time – but everybody said she was a bright, fun-loving girl without a care in the world. Her name was Gabriela. I wasn’t like her – never had been – and I’d always had the feeling that, if my parents had been forced to choose between us, if they could have said which one of us they were prepared to lose, it would have been me, not her. Yet I was the one they were left with. And this knowledge, this frustration, was something they couldn’
t quite shake off. On my first evening home, it was my reference to the death of someone close that had so upset my mother. I also thought that what had happened to me in some way reminded my parents of what had happened to Gabriela. Their grief rebounded between the two terrible events; it had grown with time, rather than diminishing, as grief usually does. I doubted this was something they’d get over. Even our family name had a morbid, rather lugubrious ring to it. Blam would have been a gunshot (quite appropriate, actually), but Blom was a tolling bell, that gloomy m reverberating: Blommm … Blommm … Blommm … Blommm …

  Yes, Visser was wrong.

  I peered at the bleak, unyielding landscape. My parents would be sitting at the kitchen table, eating a supper of cold meat, pickles, soda bread. Upstairs, in Gabriela’s room, the ice-skating trophies, ballet certificates, pictures of pop-stars who were also, mostly, dead. She would have been thirty-six next month.

  Both my parents cried when I left. My mother first, her weeping so violent that I thought her body wouldn’t stand it. My father later, just before the taxi came – silent, almost sacrificial tears. I didn’t tell them where I was going. I didn’t promise to write or phone either. There was nothing heartless about this; it was as much for their comfort and well-being as for mine. Though the more I thought about it, the more I realised my plan demanded it. I now saw my visit for what it was. Not a convalescence, not a reunion at all, but a leavetaking – a goodbye.