Rupert Thomson - The Insult

I turned left out of the hotel. The traffic had thinned out, even on the main road. The night was cool and windless. And suddenly, as I stood on the pavement, I was back in the car-park and it was happening again. I felt a wide space open up behind me. Someone was there, someone I couldn’t identify. The assailant? I started to walk away, but I stumbled, tripped. Someone was standing over me. The same someone? How was I to know? Are you all right? I couldn’t answer for a moment. I was lying on the ground, that dark curve arching over me — it had to be the wheel of a parked car — and I could see the tomatoes I’d just bought, three of them, anyway, motionless and red and shiny. There was still somebody standing over me. They pressed something into my hand. Your cane. You dropped your cane. The fourth tomato where was it? And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it rolling silently away from me. Do you need any help? There was a look of concern on the person’s face that mirrored that of people in the clinic. I sat up. Smiled. Dusted my left sleeve, even though it didn’t need it. You have to do normal things or they don’t go away. You have to reassure them. Or they just stand there staring at you, as if you’re a car-crash, or pornography.

Back in my room I filled a glass with cold water from the tap. I sat on the edge of my bed and sipped the water. I could explain everything. I carried the memory of the shooting inside me; the shock of it still travelled in my blood. And if that memory was affecting me now, it was probably because I was alone for the first time, truly alone. My nervousness was only to be expected; it was rational, in fact, perfectly understandable and would ease with time. I thought of calling Visser. I even reached for the phone. But then his words came back to me and that soapstone voice of his was with me in the room. So long as you’re prepared to fail. There was nothing he could tell me now. Our realities no longer overlapped. And besides, I didn’t want him knowing where I was. I stood up. I placed the plastic chair in front of the mirror and then I sat on it, my feet propped on the fridge door. I sat there for more than an hour. I calmed myself by staring at my face.

The next day I took the lift to the ground floor as soon as darkness fell. The same youth was in reception, reading the same comic-book.

‘I need an ironmonger’s,’ I said.

This time he looked up, his eyes dazed by the KA-THUNK and POW of mighty fists. ‘Did you find the restaurant OK, sir?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

I told him to call me Martin. His name was Victor.

‘Ironmonger’s,’ he said, half to himself. He thought there was one nearby, just west of the hotel.

I walked out on to the street and stood for a moment under the torn black canopy, then set off along the pavement. This time there was no panic, no hesitation. In fifteen minutes I was there, the door jangling as I entered. Tall plastic flip-top bins hung from the ceiling, twisting slowly on their ropes.

I couldn’t see the shopkeeper to begin with. Then he rose up from behind a cash-register that somebody had lined with Astroturf.

‘Can I help you?’

I looked up at the slowly twisting bins. ‘There been some kind of lynching here?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘It’s all right.’ Not everybody has a sense of humour. ‘I need a can of black paint.’

‘Black paint, eh? What’s it for?’

His eyes fidgeted behind a pair of spectacles. They could’ve been reptiles, the way they were kept behind glass like that. They could’ve been poisonous. Also, somehow, there seemed to be more than two of them.

‘If you don’t tell me what it’s for,’ he said, ‘I won’t know what kind of paint to recommend.’

‘It’s for glass.’

‘Glass?’ In his surprise, he gave the word more push. His breath had a bitter smell. Like saucepans.

‘I want to paint my windows,’ I said.

The shopkeeper gripped his chin with his forefinger and tucked his thumb underneath. ‘For a darkroom, is it? No, it’s obvious you’re not a photographer —’

I interrupted him. ‘What’s your name?’

‘My name? Sprankel. Walter Sprankel. Why?’ He was stammering suddenly, which pleased me.

I leaned on the counter. Something cracked beneath my elbow, but I pretended not to notice. ‘Sprankel,’ I said, ‘are you going to sell me any paint or not?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course.’ He reached behind him and a can appeared in his hand.

‘That wasn’t so difficult, was it?’

‘No.’ He was still holding the can. ‘It’s oil-based. Ideal for metal, plastic — and for glass.’ He wrapped it up. ‘Is there something else I can do for you?’

‘I’d better have a paintbrush.’

‘Certainly. Anything else?’

‘A strip of felt one metre long. Preferably black, though brown would do. And some nails. Let’s say two dozen.’ I lifted a warning finger. ‘And no guessing what they’re for, Sprankel. All right?’

Just before dawn I had the dream again, only this time it wasn’t me who was running down the sunlit street, it was Smulders. I looked on with a kind of disbelief. Smulders running — what a sight! Each stride he took, his body reverberated. And before the reverberation had time to die down, he took another stride. The reverberations merged, one into the next, a kind of crosshatching of the flesh. Some sections moved quite independently of others; or sometimes they collided, rebounded, collided once again. His armpit hair streamed horizontally behind him. Then bits started flying off. Sausage fingers, sausage toes. An earlobe the size of a dried apricot. One meaty arm, a tree-trunk of an ankle. I almost felt sorry for the road. I watched his tiny penis flee the threat posed by his overhanging belly. His scrotum, sheepish, followed it. Soon he was gone. Nothing left except a kind of after-image: fat air, thin air — one moving through the other. Essence of Smulders. I woke up smiling. It was a comic version of the dream, the dream mocking itself. I lay in bed, wondering if what I was seeing was the beginning of a new phase. Maybe the fear was burning off at last. Maybe the worst was over.

I sat up in bed. My smile widened as I saw the result of my night’s work. The window next to me was black. The window in the bathroom, too. Three coats, just to be on the safe side. Strips of felt lined the edges of the windows and the bottom of the door. What I was trying to create was absolute, one hundred per cent darkness. In a city this wasn’t easy. It surprised me how much light there was, and light seemed to breed light. It was like a headline I saw in the paper once: WOMAN MAKES SELF PREGNANT. I was close now, though; I was really close. The room was dark as a coffin with the lid screwed down. I could see every detail, even the dead insects on the floor, even the dust. When the maid came in to clean, which wasn’t often in a place like the Kosminsky, she’d have to use a torch. I decided to pay her extra for her trouble.

On the same street as the Kosminsky was an all-night restaurant called Leon’s. You walked in through a rickety glass-and-metal door, parting a curtain that was lined with vinyl to keep out the draughts. Once beyond the curtain you were hit by the smell of sweat and soup and cigarettes. Upstairs, there was a billiard hall. The restaurant lay to your left. It had yellow tiled walls and square Formica tables, and the windows always ran with condensation. On the ceiling, several white fluorescent tubes (I sometimes found Leon’s a bit bright, but it was so close to the hotel, so convenient, that I was prepared to sacrifice a small percentage of my vision). You paid the woman at the cash-register and she gave you a receipt. It was self-service. There was a TV in the top corner of the room, its screen angled downwards, like some modern bird of prey. You ate with your eyes fixed on it, one arm curled protectively around your plate. Leon’s clientele? Pretty much as you’d expect. Night-porters, taxi-drivers, hookers with their pimps. Junkies, divorcees. Insomniacs. These people were my people. Daylight? They could take it or leave it; it didn’t do them any favours (in fact, in some cases, it did them a definite disservice). I quickly became a regular at Leon’s. I always took a table by the wall and sat with my back to it (I imagined the Kosminsky brothers did the same — though for different reasons). I was in the restaurant every night, at midnight, to eat my lunch. Usually I ordered fried steak with onion rings (Leon cooked it just the way I liked it: juices seeping out of the meat, the onions slightly blackened). Or sometimes I had boiled beef.