The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘I’ve got someone to drive me,’ I said, leaving a silence that seemed suspicious, loaded with unanswered questions.

  ‘And who’s that?’ he asked, as he was supposed to.

  I acted a little shy about it. ‘You remember that woman at the wedding –’

  ‘The one who stood you up?’

  ‘That’s her.’

  ‘And now she’s seen the error of her ways?’ Loots was shaking his head. ‘How do you do it, Blom?’

  ‘It’s only for tonight,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring it back first thing in the morning. Anyway, you won’t be needing it. You’ll be quite happy here – with Juliet.’

  I was grinning as I turned the key in the ignition.

  The first part was more difficult than I’d expected. It was the lights of other cars, their headlights as they came towards me: they literally blinded me for a moment. I had some problems with spacial relationships as well, though perhaps I was simply adjusting to a car that wasn’t mine. I turned out of Loots’ street, making for the Ring. I passed the blue neon sign of the Saskia Hotel, the Royal Gardens and the floodlit Doric columns of the National Philharmonic. I crossed the river west of the city centre. From the elevated road I could look down on the community housing of the 15th district: tower blocks and parked cars and meaningless areas of grass. Sometimes I thought I was driving too slowly. At other times I felt as though I was going to hit something or get pulled over. But nothing like that happened. In twenty minutes I was easing into the slow lane on the motorway and heading north.

  The bright lights were all behind me now. I stepped on the accelerator. If a car got too close, I tilted the rear-view mirror so it couldn’t dazzle me. The motorway climbed into the hills and darkened. People always claimed this stretch of road was dangerous – but what was dangerous for everybody else was safe for me. I relaxed my neck and shoulders, leaning back against the headrest, straightening my arms. My white cane and dark glasses were lying on the floor behind my seat. If I was stopped, I’d give the police a false name and address (though not the same as the ones I’d given Arnold). If they tracked me down, I’d deny all knowledge of the incident. I’d look shocked, incredulous. ‘I’m blind,’ I’d say. ‘How on earth could I be driving?’ I’d be staring past the policeman’s shoulder and I’d be smiling at nothing. My head would probably be wobbling, too. ‘I can’t drive,’ I’d say. ‘There must be some mistake.’

  The road was still climbing and I had to shift into third. There were patches of fog now. I felt as if someone was hurling rags at me; it made me want to duck. I took the next exit, a two-lane road that twisted eastwards through the hills. There wouldn’t be much traffic on it; I’d have it to myself. And it was then, as I saw the empty road ahead, the unbroken darkness on either side, that I had an inspiration. Obvious, really. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. Turn the headlights off. If only Visser could’ve seen me! With his earnest face and his Stalinesque moustache. My laughter filled the inside of the car.

  For a while I just drove, not thinking at all. What a relief it was to be out of the city – away from the wide, grey streets, away from the grime and the decay. I was in a trance, half-dreaming, when I saw a car swing round the bend, its lights full-beam. It was in the middle of the road and heading straight towards me. At the last minute it swerved, tyres shrieking. I watched its tail-lights yo-yo in the rear-view mirror. Shake a soft-drinks can and pull the ring. That’s some indication of how my heart felt then. I could only suppose the driver hadn’t seen me. Still, nothing had come of it.

  Not long afterwards a huge, veined leaf slapped on to the windscreen. I jumped, then grinned. I was wondering how they’d write that sound in Victor’s comic-books. SHLOK! maybe. Or WHAP! I stared at the leaf: a deformed hand, with five attempts at fingers. My dream was happening to leaves. There was a fizzing in my chest again. That narrow miss, and then the leaf. WHAP! I turned my wipers on and sent it skimming back into the night.

  Slowly my thoughts spread sideways.

  So. I was a suspect now. I could see how Munck (or Munck’s colleagues) might have arrived at that conclusion. I’d been the last person to see Nina alive. Add to that, I’d tried to make a run for it in the hotel (after registering under a false name). And I’d behaved suspiciously when called upon to identify her car. I even had a motive. It was an old motive, one of the oldest there was, but it was good enough. She’d told me she was leaving me. She’d said it was over. Jealousy, resentment, wounded pride – that was all it took. The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. Once, when I was working in the bookshop, I’d picked up something on aircraft technology. I’d only read a few pages, but one passage had always stuck in my mind – a description of the computer targeting system in certain fighter planes. The target appeared on a screen, with four white lines round it. The white lines formed a square known as ‘the kill box’. Whatever lay inside the square could be destroyed by the aircraft’s missiles. That I was thinking of it now was no coincidence. It didn’t necessarily have to do with being annihilated. It was simply the idea that you could be targeted by forces that were beyond your control. Nina had disappeared and I was thought to be responsible.

  I was up in the hills. Up in the hills and heading east. I’d opened the window and cold air was rushing through the car. In the rear-view mirror I saw papers rise up off the back seat like a flock of ghostly birds. They whirled about, they jostled one another. A big brown envelope dipped past my shoulder and flew out into the night. I watched it shrink in the darkness behind the car; I hoped it wasn’t anything important. I took a deep breath and breathed out slowly. The air was so fresh. It had an aromatic edge to it. I wasn’t sure if it was fir trees releasing resin or some herb that happened to be growing wild.

  Nina had disappeared.

  I pulled the car off the road. I shifted into neutral, put the handbrake on, switched off the engine. Behind me I heard the papers settle. Buttoning my coat, I opened the door and got out.

  There was the city, far below. A loose collection of lights, milky and blurred, as if seen through frosted glass. Over to my right, the motorway – one long illuminated line, bright as the past that I’d forgotten. My new life was the gloom on either side of it, the darkness between roads. I could sense a headache forming, the amorphous shape of it – a pressure. I emptied two pills on to my hand and swallowed them.

  Nina.

  I was the one she’d left. I should’ve been the only one who was missing her. But suddenly there were dozens of us, all missing her in different ways: Karin Salenko, Jan Salenko, Greersen, Detectives Munck and Slatnick, Robert Kolan …

  Christmas had been difficult for me. I stayed up late most nights and went for walks around the frozen lake, thinking of Nina. Once, on New Year’s Eve, I ventured out across the ice, my footsteps echoing as if in some great hall. A fine, powdery snow blew towards me, thin snaking lines of it, reminding me of electricity, or the way light moves on the surface of a swimming-pool. I would never see her again, yet images of her rose constantly before my eyes. In motel rooms, in cafés, in her car. Our dinner at the Metropole. Or the first night, in that mansion near the woods … I had to put her behind me, I knew that. My life would go on without her. Still, I thought it might be easier if I pretended she no longer existed.

  To some extent, I must have succeeded. Because, when Munck came to me in January and told me that she’d disappeared, I wanted to say, I know. I made it happen. Like a magician. Of course, he was talking about disappearance at another level. A level that was, to me at least, irrelevant. As far as I was concerned, she couldn’t disappear any more than she already had. It’s the same as someone telling you that someone you used to know has died. Since you were no longer actively aware of their existence, from your point of view they might as well have been dead all along; you might even see their death as a form of overkill. Earlier in the evening Munck had said, They’re saying you could’ve done it. I was being blamed for something that had happened in anothe
r dimension. He might as well have told me that I’d killed a ghost. It was abstract, esoteric. Tautological.

  I was floating now, the codeine dreaming in my blood. Slowly I turned away from the view. I noticed a car parked on the other side of the road. Its lights were dimmed.

  Curious, I walked towards it. I thought I could see someone inside, a shape behind the wheel. But as I walked towards the car, it started to reverse.

  ‘Who are you?’ I called out.

  It was moving backwards, silently, its lights still dimmed. I was already too far away from it to make out who the driver was.

  I began to shout. ‘Visser? Is that you?’

  I was running now, but I couldn’t keep up.

  ‘Visser?’ I was shouting. ‘What do you want?’

  I watched the car withdraw into the darkness further down the hill. I stood on the road, uncertain what to do. A crack opened in my skull. White light poured in, bounced from one curved piece of bone to another. Gasping, I bent down. I clutched my head between my hands. My cane dropped away without a sound.

  I tried to count the seconds – one … two … three … four …

  Then I could see again. That codeine, it was dying on me. Or maybe I’d taken too much of it.

  Walking back to Loots’ car, I didn’t look behind me once. I didn’t even listen for tyres on the road below, an engine firing in the distance.

  But there was a fear.

  The fear that, any moment now, I’d feel a gentle nudging at my legs and that, when I glanced over my shoulder, the car would be behind me, right behind me, its front bumper touching the back of my knees and no one at the wheel.

  I parked Loots’ car outside his apartment and dropped his keys through the letterbox in an envelope. When he rang me later that day I still hadn’t been to bed.

  ‘You sound upset,’ he said.

  I told him I was fine, just tired. There was a deadened area inside my head, like the shape a hare leaves in the grass where it’s been sleeping.

  ‘How did it go last night?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘She didn’t show up, did she?’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘I thought so.’

  I asked him what he meant by that.

  ‘My car,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t look as if it’s moved.’

  I stood outside the building where Robert Kolan lived and looked both ways. Rain dripped from the trees on to the paving-stones below. The street was empty. As I paid the taxi-driver, I thought I saw a man in a herring-bone overcoat standing on the corner, but it must have been an illusion, the moon shining through bare branches, a chance pattern of light and shadow.

  I’d called Kolan earlier to arrange a meeting. I had to talk to somebody about what Munck had said, and Loots and Gregory were no use to me; they’d just sympathise. I wanted somebody who knew Nina, and Kolan seemed the obvious, almost the only, choice. But when I called him, his first question was: ‘How did you get my number?’

  I tried Munck’s theory on him. ‘There are intelligent life-forms out in space,’ I said, ‘and they’re watching you right now.’

  ‘Don’t give me that shit. I asked you a question.’

  I grinned into the phone. ‘What are you so nervous about?’

  ‘I’m hanging up –’

  ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute.’ Kolan’s paranoia didn’t bother me; I’d already prepared an answer. ‘Nina gave it to me once,’ I said. ‘She made me memorise it, in case of an emergency. She told me I had to call you first.’

  He seemed satisfied with that. (I’d known he would be; it addressed his vanity.) And once that awkwardness was dispensed with, he agreed to see me.

  It was an old house, with tall trees in front of it which resembled the trees outside the clinic. Pieces of plaster and roof-tile had fallen into the garden and a sun-dial lay under a bush, its markings cloaked in moss. Kolan had told me there was a flight of stone steps on the right-hand side of the house. His apartment was at the top. Though it was three in the morning, I could hear music. He was still awake.

  I found a door at the top of the steps and knocked on it. I had to knock four times before it opened. Kolan stood there, holding a cigarette. ‘I thought you were the police again.’

  ‘They’ve been here then?’

  He looked past me, into the darkness. ‘You’d better come in.’

  The lighting was low in his apartment and there was a stick of incense burning. I watched Kolan as he sat on the threadbare carpet and began to roll a joint.

  ‘Was it Munck?’ I asked him.

  ‘They didn’t tell me their names.’

  ‘They always tell you their names.’

  ‘In that case, I forgot.’

  He trickled grass into a cigarette paper that was already filled with a thin roll of tobacco.

  ‘The police,’ I said. ‘Did one of them chew gum?’

  ‘Christ, you’re as bad as they are.’

  I sat down on a chair by the window. His music reminded me of the music they play when something unpleasant’s about to happen. You hear it in airports and mental homes. You hear it at the dentist as well. Sometimes you hear it as you lift out of an anaesthetic.

  ‘They told you about the car,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘They’re saying she might’ve been killed.’ I paused. ‘They think I might’ve done it.’

  He licked the narrow strip of glue on the cigarette paper and stuck it down, then he ran his finger and thumb along the length of it several times, making sure it was sealed. There was a kind of fussy expertise about the way he built his joints. He should’ve been exhibiting at country fairs, along with the basket-weavers and the ceramicists.

  ‘I’ve even got a motive,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘She was leaving me. I didn’t want her to.’

  ‘Do you smoke?’

  ‘No.’ I reached into my pocket for my bottle of pain-killers. I tipped two pills on to my hand and knocked them back.

  ‘What’s that you’re taking?’

  ‘Codeine. For my head.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ His joint crackled as he drew on it. He must’ve missed some of the seeds. ‘Her frame of mind,’ he said. ‘I’ve been doing some thinking about it.’

  Something had been worrying her. He had the feeling that was why she’d asked him over on Tuesday night. And she’d made a date to see him on the Wednesday, too. He often sat in her apartment while she talked. He never said much. What happened was, she’d launch into a kind of monologue. But he had to be there, otherwise she couldn’t do it. Sometimes there were drugs as well, to help the process. He’d score for her. There was someone in the 15th district, out near the cemetery. He could get them anything they wanted.

  ‘She won’t do it herself. Thinks it’s squalid.’ Kolan’s voice pinched as he held the smoke inside his lungs. ‘If I’d seen her Wednesday night, that’s what would’ve happened.’

  ‘You’ve no idea what it was?’

  He studied the roach. Then he brought it to his lips, inhaled three times quickly, dropped it on to a saucer. ‘I was thinking about her being worried,’ he said, ‘and it reminded me of something else.’

  She’d called him a couple of weeks back. She’d had a strange experience. A man had walked up to her on the street and he’d shown her a picture of herself. She didn’t know the man. She’d never seen him before. He was a complete stranger. But it was definitely a picture of her. It unsettled her. Maybe she’d been living the wrong way, she said. She couldn’t explain it. It was just a feeling. But things had to change. A different job, a different apartment. Maybe even a different country.

  ‘She told me I could come too.’

  Kolan smiled absent-mindedly. Then he started to roll another joint. He had to keep scraping his hair back behind his ears, otherwise it fell over his face and he couldn’t see what he was doing.

  ‘Maybe that’s what she did,’ he said. ‘Maybe she j
ust left and decided not to take me after all. Or she just forgot.’ The smile was still there – absent-minded, self-deprecating. ‘Keys in a car, it’s like clothes on a beach, you know what I mean? It’s a smokescreen. It’s the kind of thing she’d do.’

  I thought about it for a while. I remembered what she’d said on the street that night, just before I turned away from her. There’s too much going on. I need some time. Then I remembered what had happened just before that.

  ‘What is it?’ Kolan said.

  ‘It’s something she said that night. I forgot all about it.’ A chill spread across my shoulderblades. It was in my hair as well, at the back. ‘She said there was someone staring at her. Following her. She said she’d seen him before.’ I looked at Kolan. ‘You think it was the same man?’

  ‘Don’t know. Could be.’

  ‘This man she told you about,’ I said. ‘She didn’t know him, but he had a picture of her.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What kind of picture was it?’

  ‘It was a photograph.’

  ‘How did he get hold of it?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Kolan stood up and walked over to the stereo. ‘She wasn’t really interested in the guy with the picture. Not in itself, anyway. It was what they meant, that’s what interested her. She saw it as a sign, an omen.’ Once he’d changed the music, he sat down again. He was holding his new joint between his fingers and looking at it. ‘Or maybe she saw it as a warning.’

  ‘Did she tell you what he looked like?’

  ‘You’re not listening, man. She wasn’t interested.’ He lit the joint and took his first hit off it, then he lay back on a pile of cushions. ‘She said there was something weird about him. The way he looked at her or something.’

  When I got back to the hotel I called Munck. He didn’t answer. Well, perhaps that wasn’t so surprising, at five-thirty in the morning. I tried again just after sunrise. This time he was there, yawning into the phone. I told him what had happened at the railway station.

  ‘She seemed afraid suddenly,’ I said. ‘She asked me to walk her to her car.’ I paused. ‘I thought it might be important.’