The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘Actually, sir, now you mention it, there have been a few complaints –’

  ‘There. You see?’

  ‘About you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About you loitering.’

  ‘Loitering?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  ‘It’s probably an over-reaction.’ Arnold inhaled. Smoke poured upwards from his nostrils and his mouth. His whole head disappeared. ‘You’re blind. Blind people – well, you know. They frighten people.’

  ‘I suppose – yes, that’s true, but –’

  ‘I’d stick to your own floor in future. I mean, we don’t want to go round upsetting people, do we.’ He smiled suddenly, disarmingly, then he inhaled again.

  As I walked out into the rain I pondered Arnold’s attitude. There was only one conclusion I could draw: that part of the hotel was being used as a whorehouse – clandestine, certainly, quite possibly illegal too – with all the rooms, even the corridors, reserved for hookers and their clients. No wonder he wouldn’t admit to anything. He was probably being paid by the Kosminsky brothers to run the place. He probably got commission from the girls. After all, there had to be a reason why the hotel had such a dubious reputation. In retrospect, it had been naive of me to mention it to him.

  That night, as I sat in Leon’s, watching the football on TV and waiting for my pig’s heart goulash, I suddenly thought of a name for the second floor. It could be a name known only to a privileged few (though I could also see it in slow-flashing, scarlet neon). THE LOVE STOREY. Should I suggest it to Arnold, who could pass it on to the brothers for me? No, maybe not. To pretend I knew nothing of their operation might be wiser. They weren’t the kind of men who welcomed interference. If they thought you were poking your nose into their business, they’d probably pay someone to cut it off.

  Towards one o’clock in the morning the door opened and the draught carried an unmistakable hint of fish. Gregory sank heavily into the chair beside me. He’d spent most of his night off on the second floor. He hadn’t seen a thing.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. Not a thing.’

  ‘There’s people fucking all over the place,’ I said. ‘There’s couples, there’s threesomes. There’s people sucking shoes –’

  ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘It’s a brothel, Gregory. Haven’t you noticed?’

  He began to stammer. ‘Well, of course, sometimes –’

  ‘You haven’t noticed,’ I said, ‘have you.’

  ‘Well, no,’ he muttered, ‘not –’

  ‘You must be blind.’

  History could be happening outside his window and he wouldn’t know about it. He’d be too busy wondering what was for supper, which soap-opera to watch. I should never have mentioned it to him. I looked at his hair plastered to his forehead in a frieze of unintelligible hieroglyphics. I looked at his jutting lower lip, his hands fumbling on the table-top. Now I’d upset him. And we were supposed to be friends.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Smoke,’ I said wearily. ‘I probably made the whole thing up.’

  ‘You did?’ He chuckled to himself. ‘Sometimes I can’t figure you out, Blom.’

  Sometimes!

  One further development, regarding the suspected involvement of the Kosminsky brothers. It was two nights later. I was in the hotel lift, going up. I’d pressed 8, but the lift stopped on 2. Nobody got in. As I reached out to press 8 again, a door directly opposite the lift swung open. The sight of one of the brothers emerging from a room full of laughing, half-naked girls at three-fifteen in the morning confirmed all my previous suspicions.

  I was late for the wedding. It wasn’t my fault. If they’d started at a sensible time, I would have been there – but one-thirty in the afternoon? The house was out in the suburbs, too, not far from the bleak square where the trams turn round. One dismal street after another, all of them identical. I don’t know how long it took me, but it was dark when I arrived. I would have been even later if an old woman hadn’t insisted on walking me right to the door.

  It wasn’t unlike the place where my grandparents used to live: small and grey, with a patch of grass for a front garden, a glass-house at the side and a wrought-iron fence that had been painted pale-green. The latch clinked as I opened the gate. The front door was just a few steps along a concrete path. I could hear music coming from somewhere. So there was dancing. If the old woman hadn’t been watching me, I might have left there and then. Instead, I had to knock.

  ‘Blom!’ Gregory embraced me. Fish mingled uneasily with beer. ‘We thought you weren’t coming.’

  He took me over to the bride and groom and introduced us. His daughter’s name was Petra. She looked like Gregory, only she had hair. Her husband’s name was Rolf. I offered them my congratulations.

  ‘We’re so glad you could come,’ Petra said. ‘We’ve heard all about you.’

  How lonely I was, presumably. How terribly alone.

  ‘And look,’ Gregory said, ‘here’s Loots.’

  I didn’t recognise him at first, without his glittering, star-encrusted jersey and his bicycle. I saw a thin young man with reddish hair, his shoulders high and stiff inside his shirt as he bounced across the room towards me. His heels hardly seemed to touch the ground.

  ‘I’ve seen you before.’ Loots mentioned a street that ran parallel to the Kosminsky.

  ‘I feel the same way,’ I said, and smiled mysteriously.

  Gregory laughed and put an arm around my shoulders. ‘He’s quite a character, is Blom.’

  We drank chilled vodka from thimble glasses. A toast to the newly-weds, then down in one. Another toast, to happiness this time. And then another. Friendship. I wanted to question Loots about his acrobatics, but he’d already moved across the room to where the music was. I watched him dancing with the bride. He had a rather formal style, very correct, almost quaint. Their arms – his left, her right – curved up into the air like handles on a jug, their joined hands floating high above their heads.

  I met the bride’s mother, Gregory’s ex-wife. She was drinking cheap champagne.

  ‘No, I didn’t throw him out,’ she was telling me. ‘He left.’

  She had a hoarse, serrated voice; it seemed to come from further back in her throat than most people’s. The skin beneath her eyes had broken up into a mass of tiny diamonds – the powdery, reptile skin that alcoholics sometimes have. Her name was Hedi.

  ‘You may think you’re blind,’ she said, pressing up against me, ‘but you’re not half as blind as Gregory …’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I was going with Harold for a year before Gregory suspected anything. Harold’s over there. We’re married now.’ She wrapped her hand around my wrist. ‘I hope I didn’t offend you.’

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I’ve come across adultery before.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. I mean about you not being blind.’

  ‘You’re a very perceptive woman,’ I said, and winked at her.

  I was smiling. I’d just remembered what I liked about weddings. It wasn’t the sight of ‘the happy couple’. It wasn’t meandering speeches. Or alcohol. Or cake. It wasn’t love. It was because there was always somebody who started dragging skeletons out of the cupboard. Clatter, clatter, clatter, right into the middle of the room. There was always somebody like Hedi.

  It was the first social occasion of my new life and maybe that explains why I got drunk so fast. I kept bumping into people and having to apologise. At one point I was even seeing double (imagine Visser’s face if I told him that!). Then Gregory appeared beside me. He had someone with him.

  ‘This is Inge,’ he said, breathing loudly through his mouth. ‘Inge wants to dance with you.’

  I looked at her. She was like one of those girls you see on the tram, her nose too long and not quite straight, her mouth too small, her eyes too mournful, one of those girls who sits down by the window and takes off her gloves, which are always pale-grey wool, and star
ts reading a textbook, mathematics, probably, or social science, one hand reaching up to fluff the hair above her forehead.

  ‘I told you, Gregory,’ I said. ‘I don’t dance.’

  ‘But it’s a special day. How can you say no?’

  I sighed.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ the girl said in a quiet voice.

  And so we danced. A slow number, mawkish, just guitars and an accordion. The natural scent that rose off her skin made me think of fruit, somehow – of apple blossom. My hand felt too large against the small of her back, too hot. My right knee was trembling. Loots swung past my shoulder, his eyebrows halfway between his hairline and the bridge of his nose, the smile on his lips serene, professional.

  I spoke into the air beside Inge’s ear. ‘Did someone put you up to this?’

  She laughed.

  ‘It was Gregory,’ I said, ‘wasn’t it.’

  ‘Nobody put me up to it. I wanted to.’

  ‘Dance?’ I said. ‘With a blind man?’

  She shook her head. ‘The truth’s more embarrassing than that.’

  ‘Oh? And what is the truth?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  A feeling went through me, a feeling I’d forgotten. Like thick liquid being poured into a void. When the dance was over, I told her I needed a drink.

  ‘Me too,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll get you one.’

  I made my way across the room to the trestle table in the corner, where I found Gregory easing the top off another bottle of beer.

  ‘Was that so bad?’ he said.

  ‘Not so bad, no.’

  ‘I think you’re in with a chance there.’ He gave my upper arm a squeeze.

  I shook myself free.

  ‘You’re impossible, Blom.’ He was slurring now: impossible and Blom were one word. ‘You’re bloody impossible.’

  Dawn could not be far away. These days I could feel it coming; that first streak of red or purple in the east, I’d know it was there even before I looked. And then an electric milk-float passing. Birds in the trees. My vision was beginning to weaken. Very gradual, it was, that fade to grey. Gradual, but determined. Irreversible.

  The party was almost over. Most people had gone home. Loots and I were still up, though. We were sitting in the kitchen with a bottle of Gregory’s ex-wife’s home-made plum brandy. A sticky, sweet drink that had a kick to it. A foot inside a velvet boot.

  I’d last seen Gregory sprawled on the stairs.

  ‘First I lose my wife,’ he said, ‘then I lose my daughter –’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘that’s true.’

  ‘You’re no help, Blom. You’re no bloody help.’

  I’d left him there, his bald head propped against the banisters, his fingers fastened round a glass.

  I’d already told Loots I was thinking of going home and he’d said so, too, more than once, but neither of us had moved. Loots was dreaming at the end of the table, his sharp chin plunged into his hand. A fading image. In daylight it would take me hours to get back to the hotel. Somehow I no longer cared. This was the moment I’d been waiting for.

  ‘You know you used to work in a circus?’

  His face turned slowly on his palm. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Gregory.’

  ‘He’s such a blabbermouth.’

  I sipped my brandy. ‘I just wondered. What did you do exactly?’

  ‘I’ll give you a clue,’ he said. And then he said, ‘Listen.’

  Ah yes, I thought. Here’s somebody who understands. It wasn’t just that he was using the kind of language someone blind could respond to. It was the timing of it. It felt as if he knew my vision had just failed and he was playing with it. Uncanny.

  I heard him stand up and unzip his jacket. Then I heard a kind of singing sound as one … two … three … four … five … six metal things, I thought they must be knives, yes, knives, slid out of their individual sheaths into the air.

  ‘You were a cook,’ I said.

  Loots began to laugh.

  ‘A cook,’ he said. ‘I love it.’

  He took me by the arm and led me out through the back door. It was cold suddenly. We crossed a yard, our feet catching in torn streamers, sending paper cups in giddy half-circles. My heart was beating fast. I felt like a child who’d got into a stranger’s car. I asked him where we were going.

  ‘It’s another clue,’ he said.

  We were walking on grass. I heard the wings of geese carving through the damp air overhead. The house was quiet behind us. I wondered what Gregory would think if he happened to glance out of an upstairs window, glass in hand and yawning blearily.

  Loots stopped. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Perfect.’

  We had to climb a fence. Loots made a step out of his hands for me. I put my foot on it and clambered over. Then dropped down, my feet sinking into spongy grass. Loots landed beside me, breathing through his mouth.

  ‘All right?’

  I nodded. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘The next-door neighbour’s garden.’

  We walked a few paces, then he pushed me up against a wall.

  ‘Stand there.’

  The wall was made of wood. Maybe it wasn’t a wall. Another fence, then. No, I could feel where it ended. A shed of some kind. The side wall of a shed.

  Six knives. The side wall of a shed.

  ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I think I know.’

  ‘Stand there,’ Loots called out, ‘and don’t move.’

  ‘But I know –’

  Loots was chuckling, some distance off.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ he said. ‘You won’t even see them comin –’

  The g was cut off by the whistle of the first knife through the air and the thud a split-second later as it stuck into the wood next to my ear.

  The other five followed, at two-second intervals. I dug my fingernails into the crack between two boards and held on, grateful that it was light and I couldn’t see the blurred blades come hurtling towards me.

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘Who’s that?’ I said.

  ‘It’s an old guy,’ Loots said. ‘He looks angry.’

  I grinned. ‘It’s probably the next-door neighbour.’

  ‘That’s right, it’s the next-door neighbour,’ the next-door neighbour said, ‘and the next-door neighbour wants to know what the fuck six knives are doing stuck in the side wall of his garden shed.’

  Loots tried to explain that he used to work in a circus and that he was just demonstrating the art of knife-throwing to a friend.

  The next-door neighbour interrupted him. ‘First I’m kept awake half the night, some wedding, now there’s a fucking circus in my garden. Go demonstrate in your own garden, for Christ’s sake.’ He blew some air out of his mouth. ‘Jesus.’

  Loots retrieved his knives, then led me towards the fence.

  ‘And don’t fucking break my fence,’ the next-door neighbour shouted after us, ‘all right?’

  We didn’t start laughing until we dropped down on the other side. Then we couldn’t stop. Every time Loots said, ‘It’s probably the next-door neighbour,’ we started again. My stomach ached with it.

  ‘Were you really a knife-thrower?’ I asked him.

  ‘Well, I trained as one,’ he said, ‘but they never actually let me loose on anyone.’

  The two of us laughing, but more quietly now. Sitting on a damp lawn, with our backs against the fence. Dawn in the suburbs.

  At last we walked back towards the house. There was something I was still curious about, though, and now seemed as good a time as any. I turned to Loots.

  ‘Do you do any tricks with bicycles?’

  ‘Bicycles?’ He sounded baffled. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ I said casually. ‘Handstands, juggling – that kind of thing.’

  ‘No, I don’t know anything about that.’

  I smiled to myself. Obviously he didn’t want to talk about his bicycle trick. He was probably still perfecting it
. I decided not to press him. Loots was a man of many talents, and some of them were hidden. If anyone understood the value of secrecy, it was me. The fact that he also had secrets didn’t frustrate or discourage me at all; if anything, it lifted him higher in my estimation.

  We travelled back into the city together. The tram was empty to begin with, then it filled. The people getting on hadn’t been awake for long. They talked in murmurs, if they talked at all; they were still carrying their last night’s sleep with them. I heard the stamp of tickets being punched in the machine. The wheels grinding on the rails. The whiplash of electric cables overhead. Loots fell asleep beside me, his cheekbone knocking against my shoulder. I opened the window and cool foggy air flowed in. November.

  Just before my stop, I reached into my pocket to check that my key was there. My hand closed round a piece of paper. I lifted it to my nose. The scent of apple blossom still lingered.

  Inge had suggested that I choose the place. Somewhere you’re comfortable with, she said. Somewhere you know. While it was thoughtful of her, it wasn’t easy. All the places I knew – or rather, used to know – I couldn’t go to any more. I could only think of the Bar Sultan, which was in a small street on the east side of the railway station. Gregory had taken me there one night.

  We’d agreed to meet at nine o’clock. I was there at three minutes past. I couldn’t see her, though, so I took a stool at the bar and ordered a beer. It was a long, narrow place. Dark wood, framed photographs of local football teams (the owner used to keep goal for the city), and a juke-box and a pool table in the back. I wondered what would happen when she arrived. I didn’t think we’d dance again; there was nobody to blackmail me into it this time and, besides, the music wasn’t suitable. Maybe we’d talk. I didn’t have much to say that anyone would believe, but I was curious about her. I knew so little. I drank my beer and when it was gone there was still no sign of her. I ordered another.

  It’s all right to be on your first drink when you’re waiting for somebody, or on your second, that’s all right, too. But if you’re on your third, it starts to feel like something’s wrong. I asked the bartender what the time was. Ten-thirty-five, he said. Inge was an hour and a half late. My neck ached from looking round whenever the door swung open. My head ached as well. I’d been looking forward to the moment when the crowd parted to reveal her, like something at the centre of a flower. I’d been looking forward to it, and now it wasn’t going to happen.