The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  Towards five in the morning I told him I ought to be going. He insisted on running me back to the hotel. I followed him down the narrow stairs and out on to the street. There was no sunrise, only a low sky and a drizzle falling; I pulled my jacket collar up and walked quickly to the car. Since the insertion of the plate, I no longer liked the idea of rain on my head. Maybe I was afraid I wouldn’t feel it when it landed. Maybe I was afraid I’d rust.

  ‘Are you all right to drive?’ I asked Loots. I didn’t want him losing his licence on my account.

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘You think it would be better if you drove?’ Laughing, he pulled out into the traffic. The first set of lights we reached, he turned to me. ‘By the way,’ he said. ‘How did it go the other night?’

  ‘How did what go?’

  ‘With that girl. You know. The one from the wedding.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ I smiled. ‘She didn’t turn up.’

  ‘Really? I’m sorry.’

  I didn’t say anything. I was still smiling, though.

  ‘You don’t seem too upset,’ Loots said.

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  Loots was staring at me. I could feel it, even without looking. Somebody behind us began to pound on their horn.

  ‘Loots,’ I said, ‘I think the lights have changed.’

  Four days had passed and still I hadn’t heard from her. I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone on my knee. I was aware of my heart beating; it felt too close to the surface. When we were in the drawing-room of that mansion, stoned, she’d made me say her number over and over, until I had it memorised. She wouldn’t have done that, would she, if she hadn’t wanted me to call?

  I dialled the number and then leaned back against the wall. It was a machine. Her voice, though. The usual phrases. Sorry there’s no one here. Please leave your name and number. I’ll get back to you. I left my name and the number of my room at the hotel, then hung up. I waited a few moments so the machine could re-set itself and called again. I just wanted to listen to her voice. This time I didn’t leave a message.

  She called twelve hours later, as I was preparing for bed. My window was open. Eight floors below the first tram of the day was pulling into Central Station – the sound of a knife being held against a grindstone. She said she couldn’t talk for long. It was loud where she was. Music, voices. Glasses. I could only just hear her.

  ‘Did you get my note?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I got it. I couldn’t read it, though.’

  ‘Really? How come?’

  ‘I don’t know. It looked like you wrote something and then you wrote something else on top of it.’

  Strange. I could remember writing the name of the hotel and my room number on one line. Then, below it, on a second line, the message.

  ‘What did it say?’ she asked me.

  I told her.

  ‘That’s nice. I like that.’

  ‘Can I see you again, Nina?’ The sound of her name on my tongue was unfamiliar, exotic – awkward, too, in a way. As if I’d been designed to say names, but not hers.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘We could meet tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘After I finish work.’ She gave me the address of a bar. ‘I get out earlier tomorrow. I should be there by two.’

  There was a man at her table when I arrived. He was just leaving. I didn’t get much of an impression of him: a baseball jacket, long blond hair parted in the middle – pretty nondescript. I sat down opposite her.

  ‘You look good,’ I said.

  She leaned over the table and kissed me on the mouth. ‘How would you know?’

  I laughed. She was so easy with the idea of my blindness. She didn’t adjust or patronise. She never said the things that other people said: It must be difficult or I’m so sorry. She just accepted it, as part of me. She even seemed to appreciate it, the way you might appreciate any physical attribute – the smell of someone’s hair, the shape of their hands.

  ‘There was somebody here,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘Robert Kolan. He comes from this old aristocratic family. He’s one of my closest friends.’

  They’d lived in the same house when they were students, she said. That was how they’d met. He always looked after her if she was tired or depressed or ill. He’d do anything for her.

  ‘He’d kill someone for me if I asked him to.’

  I didn’t think she was boasting. It was just a simple statement of fact. If anything, she talked about this friend of hers, this Robert, with a kind of awe. As though she found it hard to believe that someone could devote themselves to her like that.

  The waitress asked us what we were having. Nina ordered a cognac. I thought about it, then I ordered one as well.

  ‘So,’ Nina said, ‘what do you want to do?’

  She seemed different from the first night, more distracted, edgier.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ I said.

  I took a package out of my pocket and handed it to her.

  ‘It’s soft,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Open it.’

  The tissue paper quickly came apart in her hands.

  ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘A scarf?’

  ‘It’s a blindfold.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘It’s for when we’re in bed,’ I said. ‘So we can be the same.’ I realised I was deceiving her. Somehow it didn’t feel wrong, though.

  Our cognacs arrived. She picked hers up and drank some.

  ‘Do you like it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s great.’ She leaned over, kissed me again. ‘Maybe we can try it out tonight.’

  ‘Is your car here?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. It’s outside.’

  I drained my glass. ‘Let’s drive somewhere.’

  We drove east, through the city. She talked about her car – what make it was, where she’d got it from, how many times she’d crashed in it. It was old and pretty beaten-up, but she loved it. The crack in the back window, for instance. That was one of the reasons she’d bought the car; she thought it looked just like some gangster’s bullet hole. She had a mascot, too – a plastic doll, which hung from the rear-view mirror. I reached up, touched the doll. I hadn’t noticed it the first night. My eyes must have been too occupied with her.

  ‘Her name’s Doris,’ Nina said. ‘She’s got the best tits in the city.’

  ‘Second-best,’ I said.

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you could see her nipples. They’ve got red lights in them.’ Nina was grinning.

  Suddenly she turned off the road and stopped the car.

  ‘Let’s do it here.’

  I looked round. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Nowhere. Just a car-park.’

  She moved closer to me and we kissed. Then she reached down. Her hand found my zip and opened it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the dark curve of a wheel.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to?’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  I told her about the shooting, how it had happened. Then I told her the rest: the months I’d spent in the clinic, the operations, the convalescence. I described the exact path of the bullet. I said the difference between life and death was one millimetre. She was nodding, her dark eyes moving between the empty car-park and my face. I could tell she liked this kind of talk. There was a danger, though. I wanted to tell her everything: the miracle in the gardens, Smulders naked, Nurse Janssen stripping – everything. I felt she might believe me, too. I had a thought that was treacherous and yet seductive: secrets become more powerful if you dilute them just a little.

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said.

  She started the car, turned on the radio. Then we were driving again. She lit a cigarette. The smoke from it flowered against the windscreen.

  ‘Am I the first person you’ve slept with since it happened?’ she asked me after a while.

  I looked at her, but she was watching the road.

>   ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t take responsibility for you. You know that, don’t you.’

  ‘Yes, I know that. I’m not asking you to.’ I rested one hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry.’

  I turned and stared out of the window. The streets were still foreign to me. Unlit buildings. Wire-mesh fences and abandoned cars. It could have been anywhere.

  ‘Where are we?’ I said. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘There’s a motel about five kilometres from here.’ She crushed her cigarette out in the ashtray and slid the ashtray back into its socket with the heel of her hand. ‘It’s called Motel Cherry.’ She laughed. ‘Do you like motels?’

  Motel Cherry was a drab one-storey place, with rows of net-curtained rooms laid out along a strip of tarmac. On one side was a twenty-four-hour restaurant. Long-distance lorry-drivers hunched over cups of coffee. Cooks stood about in soiled white aprons, biting their nails. On the other side, there was a petrol station: ELF or DERV or ERG – the usual prehistoric brand-name. Between the tarmac and the road I could see a line of newly planted trees; they looked starved and grey, unreal.

  We walked into reception. The man behind the desk reminded me of my father. The same sense of a life that could not be changed or redefined, a life that had to be endured. I thought of calling my father, but I knew it would only bring grief to the surface. It was like longing for a cigarette: the moment you had it lit, you wondered why you’d wanted it so much.

  Almost the first thing Nina said when we were in the room was, ‘I don’t want you to get used to this.’

  I looked at the orange bedspread and the yellow walls. ‘You’re right. Next time we should spend a bit more. Go somewhere nice.’

  She came up behind me, put her arms around me. She’d taken off her shirt and I could feel her breasts flattening against my back. ‘You know what I mean, Martin.’

  I turned and kissed her. I could hear voices through the wall. A man and a woman talking. I thought I heard the word divorce. I began to undo Nina’s jeans, but she pushed away from me.

  ‘First I want to do something.’ She took my arm and led me to a chair by the window. ‘Sit there, would you?’ She moved back towards the bed.

  ‘I’d prefer it if the lights were out,’ I said.

  ‘Like people in the suburbs?’

  I smiled. ‘Is that how they do it?’

  ‘Of course.’ Nina walked to the door and switched the light off, then crossed the room again and climbed on to the bed. ‘Is that better?’

  I nodded. ‘Much better.’

  I could see her in great detail now; I could even see the tiny golden hairs glinting on her thighs as she eased her jeans down to her ankles. She kneeled among the blankets, facing away from me, her hair falling to the top edge of her shoulderblades. I noticed how her body tapered to her waist, two straight lines converging, then curved outwards suddenly below it. She leaned sideways, supporting herself on one hand while the other reached between her legs. She bent over, her face pressed into the pillow. With two fingers, she pushed her g-string to one side and parted the dark lips beneath it. Her breath caught, as if somebody had startled her.

  She rolled, almost toppled, slowly on to her back. Her chin resting on her chest, she watched her left hand drift limp-wristed from one breast to the other, hovering above each nipple in turn, then dipping down to it, the way a humming-bird drinks from a flower.

  ‘Do you know what I’m doing?’

  It was hard for her to keep her voice level. Perhaps that was part of it.

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘You don’t know,’ she said, ‘do you.’

  She seemed to favour her right breast, and the touching became rhythmical, repetitive, semi-circular. Her other hand was still hidden between her legs; the arm looked amputated at the wrist.

  As she reached her first orgasm, there was a kind of fluttering on the surface of her skin, then her whole body shuddered, as though she was cold suddenly, and her back arched and lifted clear of the bed. Her head was turned towards me, her mouth half-open. She came twice more in that position, watching the man who was sitting on the chair by the window, a man who couldn’t see what she was doing – or so she thought – and yet he was in the room with her, he was close to her, almost close enough to touch. Exhausted, she let her head tip backwards, over the edge of the bed. Her breasts falling softly in opposite directions, the neat pincushion of her pubic hair pushed high above her hip-bones. Her thighs, at a slight angle to each other. Her knees bent, her ankles still loosely bound by the g-string she’d only half-kicked off.

  At last she called me to her. I stood up and walked over.

  ‘You didn’t mind, did you?’ she said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Now I’m going to do something for you.’ Smiling, she handed me the blindfold I had given her. ‘Tie this over my eyes, would you?’

  Later, when she was in the bathroom, I lay on my stomach with my cheek resting on my arm. What had she said? Something about not getting used to this. I listened to the rush of cars on the motorway. You could almost believe you were in the country, with a river running just outside the window.

  Towards the end of that week I invited Nina to the Hotel Metropole for dinner. It wasn’t the food or the service that you went there for (they were both mediocre); it was the setting. You entered through a baroque archway laden with gilt from the previous century and draped in swathes of scarlet velvet. The room itself was painted cream and gold. Two storeys high, it had rows of windows looking down on it from other parts of the hotel. There was a stage on one side, with a dance-floor in front of it. The waitresses were always middle-aged, for some reason; they wore white, ruffled blouses and maroon skirts.

  I was apprehensive walking in – I’d eaten there before, with friends – but no one recognised me, no one called my name. Once we were seated at our table, I relaxed. I looked around and nodded. It was all as I remembered it.

  ‘That’s odd,’ Nina said.

  I smiled. ‘What?’

  ‘Everyone’s cigarette smoke’s blowing in the same direction.’

  I told her that the draughts were famous. Part of the experience, in fact. One Easter my parents took me to the Metropole for lunch. There was such a draught that day, my mother’s hair lifted off her shoulders and flew horizontally in the air behind her; she looked as if she was riding in a speedboat or an open car. (I was exaggerating, but only slightly.) Another time a friend of mine sat too close to the door. He didn’t notice anything at first. But, gradually, as the evening wore on, he lost all feeling in one side of his body. After the meal he had to be carried out of the hotel, like a footballer who’s just pulled a hamstring.

  Nina was laughing. I took a small box out of my pocket and slid it across the tablecloth towards her.

  ‘What’s this?’ she said.

  ‘It’s a present.’

  ‘You’re always giving me things.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Just something small.’

  It was a silver-plated cigarette-lighter that used to belong to my father. I’d had it engraved: FROM M TO N – LOVE IS BLIND (a bit obvious, perhaps, but anyway). She looked down at it and shook her head. Light caught the gold in her dark-brown hair.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ she said. And then, a few moments later, ‘You shouldn’t give me things.’

  A band played while we ate. The saxophonist was slope-shouldered, shifty-eyed. His gaze kept sliding sideways and lingering on Nina. And no wonder. She was more beautiful than ever – her hair loosely pinned, a long black dress clinging to her body, a smile lurking at the corners of her mouth as if she’d just thought of something illicit.

  The main course arrived. My roast pork with plums smelled like a piece of old carpet. Tasted like it, too. The keyboard-player sneezed eight times during one song. Nobody danced. Another vintage night at the Metropole.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so cold,’ Nina said. ‘Well, maybe on
ce.’

  ‘When was that?’ I asked her.

  She told me that when she was seventeen she’d had an affair with a married man. They had flown to a city in the south together. He was on a business trip, and they’d stayed in a luxury hotel. But something she said had upset the man. He’d thrown her out. She had no money and no coat. It was February.

  She found herself standing next to a park. Snow had fallen early that morning and the streets were still soft with it. Cars came creeping up behind her. You could hardly hear them. If you wanted to make the sound, she said, you had to take a piece of cardboard – an empty cereal packet or the back of a letter-writing pad – and you had to hold it close to your ear and tear it very slowly. That was cars on snow. There was a fairground in the park, she remembered, but it was shut for the winter. There was a Big Wheel. Freezing fog hid the top of it. She stood on the road, clutching her ribs in both hands. She had no idea what to do.

  A car went by, more stealthy than the rest. Its wheels fat, its white exhaust fumes flapping. Some foreign make. It slowed down, pulled up just beyond her. She ran towards it. The window on the passenger side slid down. She stooped, that position you see whores in – a figure seven; she could feel the tendons taut in the back of her thighs. The man looked warm, though – that was all she could think of. She stood there looking in at him, his round glasses and his overcoat, the sound system playing opera, the seats of pale leather, and she thought how warm he looked. He was foreign, like the car, but he spoke to her in her own language.

  ‘How much?’

  She said the first amount that came to mind. He didn’t understand her. She had to draw the number on the outside of his windscreen, in mirror-writing. She didn’t know whether it was a little or a lot; she didn’t have any idea of the prices. He looked at the number and smiled faintly. Reaching across, he unlocked the door and pushed it open.

  ‘Your coffee.’ A waitress had appeared at our table. Late forties, with a moustache. As she set the coffee down in front of me, it slopped over, spilled into the saucer. She shrugged her shoulders, walked away.