The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  By the time I ordered my fourth beer I was past caring. I drank it down in two savage gulps and ordered a fifth immediately.

  Someone sat down on the stool I’d been saving for her. Well, she wasn’t going to be using it. She wouldn’t be coming now, and that was probably just as well. I couldn’t even remember what she looked like. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to leave, though. It wasn’t twelve o’clock yet, and, anyway, I didn’t feel like going to Leon’s. I went to Leon’s every night. So there I was, five drinks inside me, sitting at the bar.

  I couldn’t have said exactly when I noticed the girl sitting on the stool beside me. Midnight, maybe. Maybe later. It seemed to me that she’d been sitting there for some time. Not saying anything. Just sitting there, like me. Her elbow touching mine. But I wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone. Not any more. I’d been stood up. Whatever dream I’d had, it was in pieces. The girl was still there, though, even after I’d registered all that.

  ‘Have you got a light?’ she said.

  I found a lighter in my pocket. She cupped her hand round the back of mine and guided it towards her cigarette.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She inhaled, drank from her drink, then blew the smoke out. She was still sitting there. Dark-brown hair, with gold in it. Dark eyelashes.

  ‘Can I kiss you?’ she said.

  I stared at her. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.

  She leaned closer. ‘I’d like to kiss you.’

  And before I could say anything, one of her hands reached up and rested on my shoulder, then her lips touched mine.

  That girl from the wedding. Inge. Her small mouth. That tremor in her voice. You don’t have to. She was actually, now I thought about it, pretty ugly. Repulsive even. Old, too. Thirty-five, at least. What had I ever seen in her? There was a kind of revenge in the way I kissed the girl who was sitting next to me, a vehemence that tasted sweet. And after that, another kiss. Longer this time. And suddenly all thoughts of revenge had lifted and there was only disbelief. That this girl, who was beautiful, had kissed me. That this was happening at all.

  ‘There’s something I should tell you,’ I said.

  She pulled back. ‘You’re married.’

  I smiled at her. ‘No, not that.’

  ‘It’s some disease then.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You don’t like girls.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything else.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m blind.’

  She laughed. ‘I knew that.’

  I wondered how.

  ‘That white stick of yours,’ she said. ‘Kind of gives you away, doesn’t it.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind.’

  The city was deserted. It must have been late.

  Wide streets, silver tramlines bending off into the distance. A cold wind blowing.

  Spiral staircases rose into the air, built out of newspaper, sweet-wrappers, empty bags of crisps. And sometimes there was a van parked on a street-corner with a flap open in the side of it. One fluorescent light. A man in a white jacket selling sausages, chips with mayonnaise, soft drinks.

  Then just houses with dark windows, leaves on the pavement. The moon high up in the branches of a tree.

  Nina, I whispered to myself. Nina.

  That was her name.

  I couldn’t believe my luck. Hers was not a perfect beauty – she had a slight swelling on her upper lip, where she had run into an open window once, and there was a small right-angled scar on the bridge of her nose – but it was close; and that closeness made it better than perfect. Heads had turned when we left the bar.

  ‘Are you tired?’ she said.

  ‘No, not at all.’ I told her how I lived – going to bed at dawn, getting up in the afternoon.

  ‘I do that, too.’ She lit a cigarette, then talked with it in her mouth. ‘I work in a club. It’s south of here. The Elite.’ Her chin lifted as she took the cigarette from between her lips and blew the smoke into the top corner of the car. I watched the street-lights edge her throat in orange. ‘What were you doing in that place?’

  ‘Waiting for someone.’

  ‘Not me?’

  I smiled. ‘No, not you. Though it feels like that now.’

  We were driving through the north-west suburbs of the city. Out there all the houses stand in gardens the size of parks, and the streets are silent, narrow, sinuous. Through the window I could see a field sloping upwards to a solid bank of trees. We were almost in the country. She was taking me to see a friend of hers whose parents were away on holiday.

  ‘She’ll be awake,’ Nina said. ‘She’s always awake.’

  But when we walked in and Nina called her name, there was no reply.

  ‘The door was open. She must be here somewhere.’

  Nina took my hand and led me through the house, a huge old place that smelled of the oil they used for heating it. There were double-doors between the rooms, and walls hung with tapestries, and stuffed animals with eyes that looked real (I stared at the otter in the hallway and it stared back, hostile, wary). There were mirrors two metres tall, with frames that seemed to have spent a century under the sea (I watched the two of us, shadows moving past the glass). There were fireplaces with gargoyle faces carved into the marble. At last we heard something. Nina said it was coming from the kitchen. A rhythmic creaking that was unmistakable. I thought I could hear Nina’s friend too. The clicking sound she was making in the back of her throat was like the ticking of a bicycle wheel when the bicycle’s been thrown down but the wheel’s still turning.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘She’s definitely awake.’

  We decided not to go to bed, not yet. Maybe those two people in the kitchen had wrongfooted us. We crept back to the drawing-room instead and poured ourselves some drinks.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ she asked me.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  She rolled a joint and we smoked it on the sofa, her head against my shoulder. She told me what she thought when she first saw me. She said I was like ice, the way my eyes just kind of slid over the top of everything. Her included.

  ‘I didn’t notice you,’ I said. ‘I mean, not right away.’

  ‘And then you did?’

  ‘Your elbow. It was touching mine.’

  ‘I had to do something.’

  Can I kiss you?

  I heard a siren in the distance. The sudden urgency seemed exaggerated, lonely, even pitiful, in the deep silence that surrounded it.

  Later, as we climbed the stairs, she told me it excited her, knowing that I couldn’t see. She said it was better.

  ‘Better?’ I didn’t understand.

  ‘Men can be so brutal,’ she said. ‘Looking at your tits or your ankles, telling you what’s wrong with them.’

  ‘They wouldn’t say that to you,’ I said, ‘not the way you look.’

  ‘I’m not good-looking. I never was.’

  ‘You must be joking,’ I said. And then, ‘You are to me.’

  She laughed softly.

  ‘Martin,’ she said.

  It was dark in the bedroom. I watched her lift her blouse over her head. Her face was hidden temporarily; her stomach muscles hollowed, stretched. I undressed quickly. My clothes fell to the floor. Then she was pushing me gently back on to the bed. I watched her lower her body on to mine, her nipples touching me first – my thighs, my hips, my ribs. Her lips touching me next. We rolled over. I ran my tongue down the centre of her, through the sudden growth of hair, to where the skin delicately parted, to where it started tasting different. I saw the damp trail that I had left behind on her, and thought for a moment of my father. It was a strange time to be thinking of him.

  ‘What is it?’ she murmured.

  ‘Nothing.’

  She was looking at me over her breasts, her eyes half-closed. She had a triumphant expression on her face, alm
ost greedy, as if we were playing a game and she was winning. Her breathing shortened and accelerated. ‘I think I’m turning into a man,’ she said.

  I looked up at her again.

  ‘My clitoris,’ she said. ‘I get erections.’

  It wasn’t an exaggeration. There was such wetness when she came, the sheet beneath that part of her was soaked.

  All night I lay beside her while she slept. I watched her turn over, brush her face with the back of her hand. I saw how she gathered the corner of a blanket in one fist and brought it up below her chin. I listened to her murmur, lick her lips. Sometimes I thought I was imagining it all, and I had to reach out and touch some part of her, her shoulder or her hair.

  When I heard the clock downstairs strike five I left the bed. She woke up, but quickly fell asleep again. After I’d dressed I wrote the name of my hotel and the number of my room on a piece of paper. I thought for a moment, then, underneath, I wrote, Ice melts. I put the note on the pillow next to her.

  Outside, it was almost light. The air was so cold, I could feel the shape of my lungs when I breathed in. There was frost at the edge of the road and each blade of grass seemed brittle, as if a white rust had attacked it.

  I was in the north of the city, out near the woods.

  When I woke up the next day, the phone was ringing. I reached for it so fast, I almost knocked it over.

  ‘Martin? You awake?’

  My heart dipped. It wasn’t her.

  ‘Martin? Are you there?’

  ‘Loots,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  He was ringing because tonight was his night off and he was just wondering if I’d like to come to supper. He thought we could eat late, maybe at around eleven. Nothing fancy – just fried chicken, some potato salad …

  ‘That sounds wonderful,’ I told him.

  There was no tram to where he lived, he said, but he would be happy to pick me up. I felt ungrateful suddenly, ashamed that I’d been disappointed to hear his voice, especially in the face of all this generosity.

  At eleven o’clock that night I was standing on the steps outside the hotel. I’d only been waiting a few minutes when a car pulled up. ‘Martin?’

  Loots was wearing a leather coat and heavy work-boots, but his shoulders still bounced as he walked towards me.

  ‘Tell you one thing,’ he said, as he walked me to the car, ‘I’m not drinking any more of that plum brandy. I was sick as a dog.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said. Not because it was true, but because I liked him and I wanted us to have things in common.

  Loots lived in the 9th district, an old working-class neighbourhood no more than a ten-minute drive from the hotel. On the way over, he asked me if I’d heard about Gregory. I said I hadn’t. Apparently they’d found him the morning after the wedding party with his head in one room and his feet in another. He was lying face-down on the carpet like a dead man – Petra had suggested drawing a chalk line around him – and when they turned him over, he had the carpet’s pattern printed on his cheek.

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

  Loots laughed. ‘Right.’

  His apartment was at the top of a tall house. There was no lift, and the stairs were steep and narrow. He advised me to go carefully. People were always breaking their legs, he said, and that was people who could see. On the fifth-floor landing he edged past me and unlocked the door. Once inside, he showed me round. The rooms were small, with slanting ceilings, skylights in the bedroom and the lounge, and floors that sloped. A corridor ran the length of the apartment, front to back. This was where he threw his knives. The wall at the far end was covered with brown cork tiles, and on the tiles he’d drawn the figure of a woman. I admired his handiwork. I felt the smoothness of the tiles where the woman was, then I felt the knife-holes that surrounded her. Loots led me back to the kitchen and began to prepare the meal.

  ‘So if they didn’t actually allow you to throw knives at the circus,’ I said, ‘what were you doing there?’ I was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking beer, while Loots fried some chicken breasts.

  ‘It was just a labouring job,’ he said.

  He had to pitch tents, set up rows of seating, clean out cages. It was manual work, hard and tedious; if it hadn’t been for The Great Miguel, he wouldn’t have lasted.

  ‘The Great Miguel?’ I said.

  The Great Miguel was the circus knife-thrower, Loots told me. For his performance he wore a red-and-white-striped blanket, a straw sombrero and a pair of knee-high boots with spurs. He whirled around the ring, flashing his eyes and shouting words like ‘Caramba!’. Cleo, his assistant, appeared behind him, striking defiant poses against a painted backdrop of cows’ skulls and cactuses. She wore a tasselled leather bikini, which was very popular with the crowds. She wore huge false eyelashes, too. And then came the moment when The Great Miguel closed in on her, eyes still flashing, and surrounded her with knives, machetes, even tomahawks. Cleo was The Great Miguel’s second wife and it was testament to The Great Love she felt for him that she had asked to act as his assistant. He’d killed his previous wife, a knife severing the artery beneath her arm. The blood had drenched a party of children from the local school. She was dead in four minutes.

  Loots had heard this story late one night as he sat in a roadside restaurant with The Great Miguel. They were drinking schnapps together, just the two of them. The Great Miguel talked a lot about superstition that night. He talked about the third knife, which was the one that had killed Agnes, his first wife. He would never throw a third knife again, he said. He didn’t trust the number three any more. He would never take a room on the third floor of a hotel, for instance. If he was driving a car, he always went straight from second gear into fourth. The Holy Trinity was something he couldn’t even begin to contemplate. At last Loots understood why The Great Miguel always threw his first two knives, but dropped the third, point down, into the sawdust at his feet, before continuing. He’d always assumed it was showmanship. Now he realised that there was tragedy in that dropped knife, and that it wasn’t just fear either, but an act of remembrance, a kind of homage.

  That same night The Great Miguel talked to Loots of passing on his craft. He drank too much, he said; his control was going. He held his right hand level in the air and showed Loots how the fingers trembled. ‘No good,’ he said. ‘No damn good.’ He drained the bottle that was in front of him and threw it past Loots’ shoulder. Loots couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. There was a huge plate-glass window behind him; he’d noticed it on the way in. He braced himself for the explosion, glass smashing glass. But, strangely, there was only silence. He turned round. The window was there, but someone had opened it. It was three or four seconds before he heard the bottle land, a faint sound on the road somewhere below.

  Ordering another bottle, The Great Miguel went into a kind of rhapsody. He told Loots that he wanted to teach him the rhythm of the knife. The movement of a knife across the air was like a piece of music. That was what he said. You felt a bad knife the moment it left your hand. It had no rhythm to it. It didn’t sing. You should almost be able to score the air the knife passed through. Loots listened, fascinated. His only worry was, The Great Miguel was drunk; by morning he would have forgotten all his promises. But he didn’t. Loots was still paid to pitch tents and clean cages. Whenever he had free time, though, he watched The Great Miguel practising and studied his technique.

  Loots paused for a moment, then he sighed. ‘It was Cleo who spoiled it all.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I’d been with the circus about a year,’ he said.

  Then, early one morning, he was woken by a loud thud close to his head. Another thud. Then a gap. Then another. At first, still half-asleep, he thought somebody was knocking on his door. ‘Who is it?’ he called out. There was no reply, but the thuds kept coming. One after the other, at two-second intervals, against the side wall of his caravan. He remembered the gap after t
he second thud and thought: The Great Miguel. The Great Miguel was throwing knives at his caravan at six o’clock in the morning. But why? Several times he called out The Great Miguel’s name – which, actually, was Erik – but still nobody answered.

  At last he climbed out of bed and opened the door. He was just in time to see his mentor trudge away through the early morning mist, stoop-shouldered, still dressed in his striped blanket and his knee-high boots from the night before. Frowning, Loots walked round to the side of his caravan. There were thirty-six knives in all, not counting the one that stood upright in the ground, and between them they spelt a single word:

  It turned out that Cleo had become jealous of the attention The Great Miguel was lavishing on him. She’d told her husband that Loots had stolen money from their caravan. Some jewellery, too.

  ‘So they fired you.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Loots nodded gloomily.

  ‘But there wasn’t any proof, was there?’

  ‘There didn’t need to be. I was just some kid they’d taken on to put up tents. He was The Great Miguel.’

  ‘Erik,’ I said, and gave Loots a wry smile.

  Loots was silent for a moment. ‘I’m not a thief, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know that.’

  Later, when we’d moved into the living-room and we were drinking coffee, I thought about The Great Miguel and how his story paralleled my own. There are some things that happen and then everything that happens afterwards is different. I wasn’t thinking of forks in the road, small deviations. I was thinking of sudden change, extreme and violent. The third knife. A bullet fired from an unknown gun. I began to tell Loots about it, though it was difficult. I kept starting sentences I couldn’t finish. I couldn’t mention what kind of vision I had, and yet my story seemed empty without it, pointless and depressing; I didn’t see how he could possibly be interested. I dredged up a few old anecdotes – Smulders talking in his sleep, Nurse Janssen’s rubber balls – but even then I had to be careful. I wanted him to laugh, not feel pity for me.