The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  I looked around. I couldn’t see anyone. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I’ve seen him before, though.’

  I looked up at the roof, moving my feet inside my shoes to warm them up. She was still clinging to my arm.

  ‘Will you walk me to my car?’ she said.

  I said I would.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  We left the station by the main exit and turned right, into a side street. Our breath speech-bubbled up into the air. It was very cold.

  ‘So you’re not coming away for Christmas?’ I said.

  ‘Coming away? Where to?’

  I reminded her about the house by the lake.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ she said, ‘do you?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘There’s too much going on. I need some time.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

  The wind rose. Snow blew sideways across the street, vicious as ground glass. I thought I could hear footsteps on the pavement behind me, but when I glanced over my shoulder there was no one there. I nodded to myself, remembering the clinic corridors at night.

  ‘He’s still there,’ Nina said. ‘He’s following us.’

  ‘Where’s your car?’ I said.

  We had to cross the street. I tucked my chin into my collar. My feet felt as if they were made of something different to the rest of me.

  ‘Is that where you live?’ she said. ‘The Kosminsky?’

  I nodded.

  ‘That’s the place you wanted to show me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you show me now?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ I said, ‘do you?’

  She’d parked right outside the hotel. I left her by her car. Just walked away, towards the steps.

  ‘Martin?’ she called out.

  For a moment I couldn’t move. Her voice had that power over me, the power a dream has, to lock muscles, making it impossible to run. I didn’t look round. Instead, I hunted through my pockets for my room-key. It was a charade. I didn’t have the key on me. I’d left it in a pigeon-hole behind reception.

  ‘Martin?’ she called again, more urgently this time.

  But I had reached the doors, and they were beginning to revolve.

  I was inside the building when I heard the car door slam. The engine spluttering, the crunch of gears. And then a sound that was like a seagull’s cry: Nina’s tyres spinning as she took the corner. It wasn’t her fault. It was the new road surface they’d put down. It happened to everyone.

  Friday came. I was in my room, watching a carol concert on TV, when the phone rang. It was Loots calling from downstairs, in the lobby. I closed my suitcase, put on my coat and left the room. Loots was standing outside the lift when the doors slid open.

  ‘Where’s Nina?’ he said.

  ‘I forgot to tell you. She can’t come.’

  There was a sudden switch in the expression on his face: eagerness to disappointment. ‘What’s wrong? Is she sick?’

  ‘No, she’s not sick.’ We passed reception. ‘Well, Happy Christmas, Arnold.’

  ‘It’s Victor, actually. But thanks, anyway.’

  I shook my head. I could’ve sworn it was Arnold I was looking at. Maybe it was just that Victor had taken up smoking.

  ‘If she’s not sick,’ Loots said, ‘what is it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later.’

  I followed him out of the hotel and down the steps, and climbed into the back of the car. He introduced me to his girlfriend, Helga. We shook hands. Loots pulled out into the evening traffic.

  As we turned right at a set of lights, I thought I saw Dr Visser on the pavement. If it wasn’t Visser, it was a man of the same height and build, with a similar moustache. I sank down in my seat, below the level of the window. Probably he was just doing last-minute Christmas shopping. In fact, I was sure I’d seen some packages under his arm. Or maybe it wasn’t even him. A narrow escape if it was, though. Very narrow.

  ‘Martin?’ Loots said. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine.’ I sat up straight again. ‘I just dropped something, that’s all.’

  I settled back. It felt good to be getting out of the city for a few days. I’d been thinking of staying behind, in the hope that Nina might call, but then I’d decided against it. I’d done the right thing. If she called now, I wouldn’t be there. She wouldn’t know where I was either, and she’d have no way of finding out. I drew some comfort from this small, imagined revenge. More to the point, if she didn’t call, I wouldn’t be sitting there, depressed.

  Besides, it was Christmas. Most people left the city. I thought back to a holiday weekend one summer when I was twenty-two or – three. I had stayed in my apartment, thinking that I would learn the city’s secrets, thinking that, if it was empty, it would be more likely to reveal something of itself to me. I could still remember the streets – sunlit, yet grey, somehow, and utterly deserted. And that dusty colour, that emptiness, had crept into my blood. I could remember lying on a single bed under an open window. Sometimes a car drove by. There were smells of rotten fruit and chip-fat; there was the smell of the canal. The phone didn’t ring at all. One night I slept for more than thirteen hours. And then, at last, the people returned. They were tanned and easy in themselves, full of entertaining stories. I found that I had nothing to say. I couldn’t even seem to make my loneliness sound funny; every time I cracked a joke about it, I felt as if I was about to cry. An eternity had passed. What had I done?

  ‘Are you warm enough?’ Loots called out.

  I told him I was fine. Just fine.

  I listened to Loots and Helga discussing junctions, exits, distances – which route would be the best to take. Though much of what they said was practical, desultory even, I couldn’t help but feel envious. Their voices were like the gentlest kind of acid: all thoughts of revenge on Nina quietly dissolved in it. I just wished that she was sitting next to me, her head against my shoulder, as we travelled towards the cabin by the lake. Her face as the motorway lights washed over it. Her voice dreamily describing clouds, the sky …

  ‘Martin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The police are here. They’d like to speak to you.’

  The police? Heat rushed to my titanium plate and coalesced. I had to sit down on the edge of my bed. I could feel cold air reaching through a gap in the window, but I was sweating.

  They’re on to me.

  ‘Martin? Are you there?’

  I asked Victor what it was about. He couldn’t tell me. They wanted to come up to my room, though. They wanted to speak to me. That wasn’t convenient at all, I said. I’d been sleeping; I’d have to put some clothes on.

  ‘How long will you be?’ Victor asked.

  ‘Ten minutes. No, wait. Fifteen.’

  As soon as I put the phone down, I cursed myself. Fifteen minutes? It wasn’t enough. I had to think. They were on to me. Had my parents reported me missing – or was it Visser, acting out of some notion of responsibility? That TV appearance, I really regretted it now. I’d reminded people of my existence when all I wanted was to be overlooked, ignored, forgotten. I’d reminded people that they were worried about me.

  There was no time to pack a case. I took the plastic bin-liner out of the waste-paper basket and emptied it on to the floor. I tipped a drawerful of socks and underwear into the bag, together with my suit, my medical supplies and my tactile clock, then I put on my dark glasses and picked up my white cane. I opened the door and peered out. No one in the corridor. I locked my room. I was hurrying towards the fire stairs when somebody called my name. Too slow, too slow. My father’s snail blood. If only I had one side to me, like The Invisible Man. If only I could’ve vanished, just by turning round. The voice was a policeman’s voice. There were two of them. I could hear them walking down the corridor towards me.

  ‘Well, well. This is a coincidence.�
��

  I wasn’t sure what the policeman meant by that. His voice did sound familiar, though. It was a soft voice. A softness that was comfortable, almost soporific.

  ‘It’s Detective Munck. I came to see you at the clinic.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, turning round. ‘The pears.’ I shook hands with him and we exchanged a smile.

  ‘You remember my partner, Slatnick?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  This was the first time I’d set eyes on Slatnick. He was chewing gum again (he had knots of muscle in his cheeks, he’d chewed so much of it). His forehead sloped backwards, the same angle as a snow plough. He seemed older than Munck, and less intelligent.

  He stepped forwards. ‘You were going the wrong way.’ His nostrils were unusually wide and round, and they were aimed at me, like a shot-gun. ‘The wrong way,’ he said, ‘for the lift.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘You were heading for the fire exit.’

  ‘I’m always getting lost in here,’ I said. ‘It’s a big hotel. Confusing.’

  ‘What’s in the bag?’

  ‘The bag? Nothing. Laundry.’

  ‘You weren’t trying to make a run for it, then?’

  ‘A blind man? Making a run for it?’

  Munck seemed to enjoy my last remark, though he faced away from Slatnick, sending his smile back down the corridor.

  ‘And anyway,’ I went on, ‘what would I be running from?’

  Munck took me gently by the upper arm. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’

  I suggested the cocktail bar on the first floor.

  As we descended in the lift Munck asked after my health. My responses were polite, but distracted. I still didn’t know what they wanted. And Slatnick was standing right behind me; I could feel the air being fired from the twin barrels of his nose into the back of my neck, into my hair.

  The bar was empty, as usual. A dark, cramped room with mustard-yellow curtains, it smelled of stale cigarette smoke and the liquid soap they use for washing glasses. Munck showed the bartender his police ID and asked him not to disturb us. We sat in a corner booth. Munck put a folder on the table, opened it and leaned forwards, one hand placed on top of the other.

  ‘You know, I’ve got this theory,’ he said.

  I waited.

  ‘It’s to do with free-floating anxiety,’ he said. ‘Nervous breakdowns, too. Paranoia. It’s why they happen.’

  ‘Not the aliens again,’ Slatnick grumbled.

  Munck silenced his colleague with a look. ‘It’s my belief,’ he said, ‘that there are intelligent life-forms living on the moon.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘Do you think I’m mad?’ he said.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Slatnick thinks I’m mad.’

  ‘Life-forms,’ I said. ‘On the moon.’

  ‘They’re very advanced,’ he said. ‘They’re beyond anything we can imagine. And they’re watching us right now, the same way we watch ants –’

  ‘How come the astronauts didn’t notice them?’

  ‘What? A couple of bouncing men in big white suits?’

  Slatnick sniggered.

  ‘All they did was pick up stones,’ Munck said, ‘like children. And that’s what we are, by comparison. Children.’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ I said.

  ‘They’re sophisticated. They’re where we’ll be in a millennium – if we last that long.’

  ‘So they’re watching us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which explains why we feel paranoid sometimes?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Munck paused. ‘You, though. You’ve got a reason of your own.’

  There was a long silence, which I didn’t understand.

  ‘You mean, because I was shot?’ I said eventually.

  The two policemen stared at me.

  ‘Is that what this is about?’ I said.

  ‘No.’ Slatnick popped his chewing-gum. ‘It’s nothing to do with that.’

  ‘It’s just a routine enquiry.’ Munck consulted one of his sheets of paper. ‘It concerns a Miss Salenko. Miss Nina Salenko.’

  ‘What about her?’ My heart had lurched at the mention of her name. Or was it simply that I’d been expecting something else?

  ‘She’s disappeared,’ Slatnick said.

  I almost laughed. ‘What? Again?’

  Another silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Munck said. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  Now that it seemed I wasn’t the subject of the investigation, I became quite talkative. I told the two policemen that she was always disappearing. I mentioned the evening that she was supposed to meet me downstairs in the lobby. How she never arrived. And how she didn’t call either, not for five days.

  ‘Were you a friend of hers?’ Munck asked.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I was.’

  ‘A close friend, would you say?’

  ‘It depends what you mean by close.’

  ‘Did you know her,’ and he cleared his throat, ‘intimately?’

  Slatnick stopped chewing for a moment and looked at me sideways, across his right shoulder.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We slept together a few times. I wouldn’t say I knew her very well. We only met two months ago.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘It was a Tuesday night. About ten days before Christmas.’

  ‘Did she seem upset?’

  ‘No, not especially.’ I wanted to tell him that I was the one who was upset, but I checked myself. Now was not the time – as Munck himself might have said.

  ‘She didn’t say she was going anywhere?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘And you can’t think of a reason why she might have wanted to leave the city?’

  ‘No.’

  I remembered standing at the bottom of the hotel steps and hunting through my pockets for an imaginary key. Her calling out. Martin? The sudden shriek of tyres as she pulled away. That was the last time. I’d tried to phone her since New Year, but she was never there.

  ‘What about her car?’ I said.

  ‘She had a car?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I don’t think we knew that.’ Munck glanced through the papers in his folder. ‘No, there’s no mention of a car.’

  I described the car for him as best I could: the make, the colour – the naked woman dangling from the rear-view mirror.

  ‘A naked woman?’ Slatnick’s mouth had fallen open.

  ‘A doll. One of those little plastic ones.’ I smiled. ‘She called it Doris.’

  Munck took up the questioning again. ‘Did she like driving?’

  I remembered that Munck was fond of habits, but I didn’t want to mention the motels so I generalised. I told him that she loved driving. She was always driving places, often in the middle of the night. She was impulsive, some might say reckless.

  ‘In which case,’ Munck said cautiously, as if he was trying the flavour of a new idea on his tongue, ‘this might all be a fuss about nothing.’ He paused. He didn’t seem to like the way the idea tasted. ‘It was her mother who reported her missing. Do you know Mrs Salenko?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve never met her?’

  I shook my head. ‘Never.’

  ‘Attractive woman,’ Munck said. ‘Still young. She’s a croupier.’ He paused again. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think that’ll be all. For the time being, at least.’ He straightened the papers in his folder. ‘Oh, one last thing. You registered under a false name …’

  I had to admire his technique. That quizzical smile of his told me the positioning of the question was deliberate, thought-out: he’d waited until the interview was over and I was off my guard.

  I returned his smile. I tried to explain how the shooting had affected me. I told him that the life I used to live was dead. I was living a new life now, as a blind person. I’d adopted the false name because I thought it might help me to adjust. If I had a different name, I’d f
eel different. That was the logic. It was a symbol of my determination to leave the past behind, to begin again.

  Though pleased with my improvisation, I was aware that what I was saying sounded suspicious, guilty even, and I wasn’t sure how the two policemen took it. Munck, at least, seemed satisfied. He shuffled his papers once more and then stood up.

  ‘May I ask you something?’ I said.

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘You were on Miss Salenko’s answering-machine,’ he said. ‘Well, you left the name of the hotel and the number of your room.’

  ‘You didn’t know it was me, though?’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘It must’ve been quite a surprise.’

  ‘Yes.’ Munck smiled. ‘Yes, it was.’

  We passed through the door of the bar and out into the corridor. The two policemen thanked me for my assistance. I wished them luck.

  ‘If you hear anything,’ I said, ‘will you let me know?’

  ‘Of course,’ Munck said.

  I took the stairs back to my room. I was thinking about Nina’s address book. Without it, Munck’s investigations might be hampered, but I couldn’t bring myself to hand it over. Not yet, anyway. Was I obstructing justice, I wondered, by holding on to it?

  When I reached the fifth floor I put my bag of clothes down and leaned on the windowsill. I didn’t know what I felt, exactly. On the one hand, there was relief: nobody was after me. On the other, Munck knew where I lived. And Slatnick.

  And then there was Nina, missing …

  I was looking out over the side street where she’d parked her car that night. It was dimly lit, deserted – two transit vans, a stack of oil-drums, some wooden pallets. Then I saw him, in silhouette against the sky. He was on his bicycle, as usual, only this time he was riding through the air, and uphill, too, from the curved, wrought-iron roof of the railway station to the clock tower of a nearby church. He was at least twenty metres above the ground, and yet he seemed nonchalant, one hand on the handlebars, the other in his pocket. There had to be a line strung between the two buildings, but I couldn’t make it out. I thought of calling to him, then decided against it. He probably wouldn’t hear me anyway; he’d be concentrating, in a kind of trance. As I resumed my climb I could’ve sworn I heard him whistling. Loots, I thought to myself. The Great Loots. And I too began to whistle.