Rupert Thomson - The Insult

At last we rose from our table and walked out into the cool evening. Fog had drifted across the town; the light around the street-lamps was soft and round, the density of candy-floss. Across the road from the café was a wooded area. I suggested a stroll. To my surprise, Visser agreed.

We walked in silence for a while, pine needles snapping beneath our feet. Light flashed through the gloom in a flat, blue arc: a jay.

Still looking into the distance, I said, ‘Sometimes I have the feeling that there’s something you’re not telling me.’

‘Really? What kind of thing?’ He turned to me, smiling.

‘I don’t know. Something to do with me.’

‘If you don’t mind me saying, Martin, that’s a typical reaction.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘You’re reacting to not being able to see. You feel excluded. It’s only to be expected.’

Typical Visser, more like. Any question I asked, he always sidestepped or deflected it; he always turned it into a symptom of my condition. The substance of the question could be ignored. What he focused on was the fact that I’d asked it. I never got a straight answer. All I got were dull extrapolations from his diagnosis.

‘Can I drive you back?’ he said.

I nodded.

As we approached his car, he turned to me again. ‘If you want me to tell you something,’ he said, ‘in my opinion, you’re moving too fast. You’re being a little too optimistic.’ He reached into his coat pocket for the keys. ‘However, I don’t suppose it can hurt. Not so long as you’re prepared for disappointments. Not so long as you’re prepared to fail …’

Standing beside him, with one hand resting on my blind-man’s cane, I laughed good-humouredly. ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘I’m prepared for that.’

Fail? I thought. I’m not going to fail.

One evening not long afterwards I walked out into the garden. It had been raining when I woke up and water was still dripping from the trees. I turned and stared up at the house. Walls of pale-yellow shingles and a low slate roof. Shutters painted green. A terrace with a grape arbour to shield you from the sun. Nothing had changed in years. Even my sister’s room on the top floor. I could see her ballet slippers in the window, shrimp-coloured, their plump toes crossed like fingers. A pointless exercise. There was no luck in our family; there never had been. I thought of her room with its pop-star posters and its shelves of sporting trophies and awards. A museum to her golden childhood. Anyone would think she was dead. I looked round quickly. I hadn’t meant to laugh out loud.

I heard the french windows open behind me. My father joined me on the lawn. ‘Bit damp out.’ He stood there in his sheepskin coat, peering intently at the sky, half-smiling. I was sure that he’d been sent outside by my mother, to talk to me. He had the look of someone who had drawn the short straw.

He was a slow man, my father. Life was something he’d entered into reluctantly and withdrew from whenever possible. It came as no surprise to most people to discover that his hobby was collecting snails — though hobby was probably too weak a word for it: it was more of a passion, an obsession. When he worked at the post office, for example, he used to keep a photograph of his favourite snail on the desk in front of him (of his wife and family, there was no sign). The snails lived in a shed at the bottom of the garden. Their cages were fish tanks, which he’d bought second-hand and then converted. He’d built the environments himself: first a layer of sand, then one of earth and, lastly, various assorted pieces of bark, broken flower-pot and moss. Each cage had a pane of glass fitted over the top of it and weighed down with a stone to stop the snails escaping. He kept a notebook which was filled with observations about their ages, their distinguishing features, even the composition of their faeces. He gave them bizarre names, the kind of names that would have suited racehorses — Bronze Mantle, Lightning, Columella Girl. I remember asking him once if the names were supposed to be ironic. He gave me a blank look. He claimed they referred to individual characteristics.

‘Lightning, though?’ I said.

He led me to a cage and then bent down and pointed at the snail in the corner. ‘See that flash,’ he said, ‘just there, below the suture …’

Do people really take on the appearance or character of their pets? Or do they choose a particular pet because they feel a kinship with it? I’ve never been sure. Either way, it was certainly true that there had been a narrowing of the difference between my father and his snails over the years, especially since he’d retired. He was constantly, as they say, retreating into his shell. He’d started eating the same food as they did, too. Most of it was fit for human consumption — potatoes, apples, carrots, etc. — but, over the weekend, I’d caught him in the kitchen after midnight, cramming leaves into his mouth. Not lettuce, though. Not spinach. Sycamore. And now, as we moved off down the garden, I noticed that he no longer picked his feet up when he walked. He didn’t walk at all, in fact; he shuffled. I looked over my shoulder and it wasn’t footsteps that I saw but one long, suspiciously continuous and slightly silver trail.

‘I know how difficult it must be for you,’ he said.

I turned and stared at him.

‘Visser talked to us about it. How you believe you can see sometimes. How you can’t accept what’s happened …’

I shook my head. How could Visser do that? It was the last thing I needed, my parents pretending that they understood.

‘You know, he’s a good man, Visser. One of the best in his field.’ My father’s tone of voice was guarded, wary, as if Visser was actually a criminal, but a criminal he was defending, a criminal who might be capable of going straight.

‘He’s clever,’ was all I was prepared to say.

‘He’s done a lot for you.’

We walked as far as the fence at the top of the garden. On the other side was a field. Everything was grey or brown or yellow, dulled by the rain. The brown horse that was standing there looked camouflaged, almost invisible. My father bent down to pluck a weed out of the flowerbed.

‘It’s a good clinic they’ve got up there,’ he said. ‘Excellent facilities, very up to date …’

I thought of the broken windows, the paint peeling off the ceiling, the narrow metal beds. I thought of the interminable corridors, the old linoleum. The chill.

‘It was the best place for someone with your injuries. Everybody said so.’

He’d seen the place. Only once, admittedly, but he’d seen it. Obviously his faculties were going. Going, gone. All he was left with was the desperate stubbornness of old age. How long, I wondered, did the average snail live?

‘I just wanted you to know. I just wanted to say that we did the best for you that we could …’

The space my father occupied was shrinking, tightening around him. Everything he said now mattered to him because there were so few words left. Let him believe what he wanted to believe. Let him be. It astonished me that I could be so charitable.

I walked several paces, my cane scanning the wet grass.

‘How’s Peristome?’ I said. ‘And Streak, how’s Streak?’

The taxi dropped me by a public phone-box at one end of the shopping precinct. I waited until it had turned the corner, then I walked back along the main road that led east out of the town. The tarmac shone like black glass with the recent rain; trees boiled overhead. I remember a neon sign outside a bar and how it seemed to flicker on and off. I thought it was a faulty connection; the damp must have got into it. But then, when I was closer, I realised it was just a low branch dipping, blown sideways, so it kept covering the sign. Cars rushed past like gusts of wind. Once, a man stopped and offered me a lift, but I told him I didn’t have far to go. It took me two hours to reach the station.