Rupert Thomson - The Insult

‘No, I didn’t throw him out,’ she was telling me. ‘He left.’

She had a hoarse, serrated voice; it seemed to come from further back in her throat than most people’s. The skin beneath her eyes had broken up into a mass of tiny diamonds — the powdery, reptile skin that alcoholics sometimes have. Her name was Hedi.

‘You may think you’re blind,’ she said, pressing up against me, ‘but you’re not half as blind as Gregory …’

‘No?’

‘I was going with Harold for a year before Gregory suspected anything. Harold’s over there. We’re married now.’ She wrapped her hand around my wrist. ‘I hope I didn’t offend you.’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I’ve come across adultery before.’

‘I don’t mean that. I mean about you not being blind.’

‘You’re a very perceptive woman,’ I said, and winked at her.

I was smiling. I’d just remembered what I liked about weddings. It wasn’t the sight of ‘the happy couple’. It wasn’t meandering speeches. Or alcohol. Or cake. It wasn’t love. It was because there was always somebody who started dragging skeletons out of the cupboard. Clatter, clatter, clatter, right into the middle of the room. There was always somebody like Hedi.

It was the first social occasion of my new life and maybe that explains why I got drunk so fast. I kept bumping into people and having to apologise. At one point I was even seeing double (imagine Visser’s face if I told him that!). Then Gregory appeared beside me. He had someone with him.

‘This is Inge,’ he said, breathing loudly through his mouth. ‘Inge wants to dance with you.’

I looked at her. She was like one of those girls you see on the tram, her nose too long and not quite straight, her mouth too small, her eyes too mournful, one of those girls who sits down by the window and takes off her gloves, which are always pale-grey wool, and starts reading a textbook, mathematics, probably, or social science, one hand reaching up to fluff the hair above her forehead.

‘I told you, Gregory,’ I said. ‘I don’t dance.’

‘But it’s a special day. How can you say no?’

I sighed.

‘You don’t have to,’ the girl said in a quiet voice.

And so we danced. A slow number, mawkish, just guitars and an accordion. The natural scent that rose off her skin made me think of fruit, somehow — of apple blossom. My hand felt too large against the small of her back, too hot. My right knee was trembling. Loots swung past my shoulder, his eyebrows halfway between his hairline and the bridge of his nose, the smile on his lips serene, professional.

I spoke into the air beside Inge’s ear. ‘Did someone put you up to this?’

She laughed.

‘It was Gregory,’ I said, ‘wasn’t it.’

‘Nobody put me up to it. I wanted to.’

‘Dance?’ I said. ‘With a blind man?’

She shook her head. ‘The truth’s more embarrassing than that.’

‘Oh? And what is the truth?’

‘Can’t you guess?’

A feeling went through me, a feeling I’d forgotten. Like thick liquid being poured into a void. When the dance was over, I told her I needed a drink.

‘Me too,’ she said.

‘I’ll get you one.’

I made my way across the room to the trestle table in the corner, where I found Gregory easing the top off another bottle of beer.

‘Was that so bad?’ he said.

‘Not so bad, no.’

‘I think you’re in with a chance there.’ He gave my upper arm a squeeze.

I shook myself free.

‘You’re impossible, Blom.’ He was slurring now: impossible and Blom were one word. ‘You’re bloody impossible.’

Dawn could not be far away. These days I could feel it coming; that first streak of red or purple in the east, I’d know it was there even before I looked. And then an electric milk-float passing. Birds in the trees. My vision was beginning to weaken. Very gradual, it was, that fade to grey. Gradual, but determined. Irreversible.

The party was almost over. Most people had gone home. Loots and I were still up, though. We were sitting in the kitchen with a bottle of Gregory’s ex-wife’s home-made plum brandy. A sticky, sweet drink that had a kick to it. A foot inside a velvet boot.

I’d last seen Gregory sprawled on the stairs.

‘First I lose my wife,’ he said, ‘then I lose my daughter —’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘that’s true.’

‘You’re no help, Blom. You’re no bloody help.’

I’d left him there, his bald head propped against the banisters, his fingers fastened round a glass.

I’d already told Loots I was thinking of going home and he’d said so, too, more than once, but neither of us had moved. Loots was dreaming at the end of the table, his sharp chin plunged into his hand. A fading image. In daylight it would take me hours to get back to the hotel. Somehow I no longer cared. This was the moment I’d been waiting for.

‘You know you used to work in a circus?’

His face turned slowly on his palm. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Gregory.’

‘He’s such a blabbermouth.’

I sipped my brandy. ‘I just wondered. What did you do exactly?’

‘I’ll give you a clue,’ he said. And then he said, ‘Listen.’

Ah yes, I thought. Here’s somebody who understands. It wasn’t just that he was using the kind of language someone blind could respond to. It was the timing of it. It felt as if he knew my vision had just failed and he was playing with it. Uncanny.

I heard him stand up and unzip his jacket. Then I heard a kind of singing sound as one … two … three … four … five … six metal things, I thought they must be knives, yes, knives, slid out of their individual sheaths into the air.

‘You were a cook,’ I said.

Loots began to laugh.

‘A cook,’ he said. ‘I love it.’

He took me by the arm and led me out through the back door. It was cold suddenly. We crossed a yard, our feet catching in torn streamers, sending paper cups in giddy half-circles. My heart was beating fast. I felt like a child who’d got into a stranger’s car. I asked him where we were going.

‘It’s another clue,’ he said.

We were walking on grass. I heard the wings of geese carving through the damp air overhead. The house was quiet behind us. I wondered what Gregory would think if he happened to glance out of an upstairs window, glass in hand and yawning blearily.

Loots stopped. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Perfect.’

We had to climb a fence. Loots made a step out of his hands for me. I put my foot on it and clambered over. Then dropped down, my feet sinking into spongy grass. Loots landed beside me, breathing through his mouth.

‘All right?’

I nodded. ‘Where are we?’

‘The next-door neighbour’s garden.’

We walked a few paces, then he pushed me up against a wall.

‘Stand there.’

The wall was made of wood. Maybe it wasn’t a wall. Another fence, then. No, I could feel where it ended. A shed of some kind. The side wall of a shed.

Six knives. The side wall of a shed.

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I think I know.’

‘Stand there,’ Loots called out, ‘and don’t move.’

‘But I know —’

Loots was chuckling, some distance off.

‘It’s perfect,’ he said. ‘You won’t even see them comin —’

The g was cut off by the whistle of the first knife through the air and the thud a split-second later as it stuck into the wood next to my ear.

The other five followed, at two-second intervals. I dug my fingernails into the crack between two boards and held on, grateful that it was light and I couldn’t see the blurred blades come hurtling towards me.

‘Hey!’

‘Who’s that?’ I said.

‘It’s an old guy,’ Loots said. ‘He looks angry.’