Rupert Thomson - The Insult

That was her name.

I couldn’t believe my luck. Hers was not a perfect beauty — she had a slight swelling on her upper lip, where she had run into an open window once, and there was a small right-angled scar on the bridge of her nose — but it was close; and that closeness made it better than perfect. Heads had turned when we left the bar.

‘Are you tired?’ she said.

‘No, not at all.’ I told her how I lived — going to bed at dawn, getting up in the afternoon.

‘I do that, too.’ She lit a cigarette, then talked with it in her mouth. ‘I work in a club. It’s south of here. The Elite.’ Her chin lifted as she took the cigarette from between her lips and blew the smoke into the top corner of the car. I watched the street-lights edge her throat in orange. ‘What were you doing in that place?’

‘Waiting for someone.’

‘Not me?’

I smiled. ‘No, not you. Though it feels like that now.’

We were driving through the north-west suburbs of the city. Out there all the houses stand in gardens the size of parks, and the streets are silent, narrow, sinuous. Through the window I could see a field sloping upwards to a solid bank of trees. We were almost in the country. She was taking me to see a friend of hers whose parents were away on holiday.

‘She’ll be awake,’ Nina said. ‘She’s always awake.’

But when we walked in and Nina called her name, there was no reply.

‘The door was open. She must be here somewhere.’

Nina took my hand and led me through the house, a huge old place that smelled of the oil they used for heating it. There were double-doors between the rooms, and walls hung with tapestries, and stuffed animals with eyes that looked real (I stared at the otter in the hallway and it stared back, hostile, wary). There were mirrors two metres tall, with frames that seemed to have spent a century under the sea (I watched the two of us, shadows moving past the glass). There were fireplaces with gargoyle faces carved into the marble. At last we heard something. Nina said it was coming from the kitchen. A rhythmic creaking that was unmistakable. I thought I could hear Nina’s friend too. The clicking sound she was making in the back of her throat was like the ticking of a bicycle wheel when the bicycle’s been thrown down but the wheel’s still turning.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘She’s definitely awake.’

We decided not to go to bed, not yet. Maybe those two people in the kitchen had wrongfooted us. We crept back to the drawing-room instead and poured ourselves some drinks.

‘Do you smoke?’ she asked me.

‘Sometimes.’

She rolled a joint and we smoked it on the sofa, her head against my shoulder. She told me what she thought when she first saw me. She said I was like ice, the way my eyes just kind of slid over the top of everything. Her included.

‘I didn’t notice you,’ I said. ‘I mean, not right away.’

‘And then you did?’

‘Your elbow. It was touching mine.’

‘I had to do something.’

Can I kiss you?

I heard a siren in the distance. The sudden urgency seemed exaggerated, lonely, even pitiful, in the deep silence that surrounded it.

Later, as we climbed the stairs, she told me it excited her, knowing that I couldn’t see. She said it was better.

‘Better?’ I didn’t understand.

‘Men can be so brutal,’ she said. ‘Looking at your tits or your ankles, telling you what’s wrong with them.’

‘They wouldn’t say that to you,’ I said, ‘not the way you look.’

‘I’m not good-looking. I never was.’

‘You must be joking,’ I said. And then, ‘You are to me.’

She laughed softly.

‘Martin,’ she said.

It was dark in the bedroom. I watched her lift her blouse over her head. Her face was hidden temporarily; her stomach muscles hollowed, stretched. I undressed quickly. My clothes fell to the floor. Then she was pushing me gently back on to the bed. I watched her lower her body on to mine, her nipples touching me first — my thighs, my hips, my ribs. Her lips touching me next. We rolled over. I ran my tongue down the centre of her, through the sudden growth of hair, to where the skin delicately parted, to where it started tasting different. I saw the damp trail that I had left behind on her, and thought for a moment of my father. It was a strange time to be thinking of him.

‘What is it?’ she murmured.

‘Nothing.’

She was looking at me over her breasts, her eyes half-closed. She had a triumphant expression on her face, almost greedy, as if we were playing a game and she was winning. Her breathing shortened and accelerated. ‘I think I’m turning into a man,’ she said.

I looked up at her again.

‘My clitoris,’ she said. ‘I get erections.’

It wasn’t an exaggeration. There was such wetness when she came, the sheet beneath that part of her was soaked.

All night I lay beside her while she slept. I watched her turn over, brush her face with the back of her hand. I saw how she gathered the corner of a blanket in one fist and brought it up below her chin. I listened to her murmur, lick her lips. Sometimes I thought I was imagining it all, and I had to reach out and touch some part of her, her shoulder or her hair.

When I heard the clock downstairs strike five I left the bed. She woke up, but quickly fell asleep again. After I’d dressed I wrote the name of my hotel and the number of my room on a piece of paper. I thought for a moment, then, underneath, I wrote, Ice melts. I put the note on the pillow next to her.

Outside, it was almost light. The air was so cold, I could feel the shape of my lungs when I breathed in. There was frost at the edge of the road and each blade of grass seemed brittle, as if a white rust had attacked it.

I was in the north of the city, out near the woods.

When I woke up the next day, the phone was ringing. I reached for it so fast, I almost knocked it over.

‘Martin? You awake?’

My heart dipped. It wasn’t her.

‘Martin? Are you there?’

‘Loots,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

He was ringing because tonight was his night off and he was just wondering if I’d like to come to supper. He thought we could eat late, maybe at around eleven. Nothing fancy — just fried chicken, some potato salad …

‘That sounds wonderful,’ I told him.

There was no tram to where he lived, he said, but he would be happy to pick me up. I felt ungrateful suddenly, ashamed that I’d been disappointed to hear his voice, especially in the face of all this generosity.

At eleven o’clock that night I was standing on the steps outside the hotel. I’d only been waiting a few minutes when a car pulled up. ‘Martin?’

Loots was wearing a leather coat and heavy work-boots, but his shoulders still bounced as he walked towards me.

‘Tell you one thing,’ he said, as he walked me to the car, ‘I’m not drinking any more of that plum brandy. I was sick as a dog.’

‘Me too,’ I said. Not because it was true, but because I liked him and I wanted us to have things in common.

Loots lived in the 9th district, an old working-class neighbourhood no more than a ten-minute drive from the hotel. On the way over, he asked me if I’d heard about Gregory. I said I hadn’t. Apparently they’d found him the morning after the wedding party with his head in one room and his feet in another. He was lying face-down on the carpet like a dead man — Petra had suggested drawing a chalk line around him — and when they turned him over, he had the carpet’s pattern printed on his cheek.

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

Loots laughed. ‘Right.’

His apartment was at the top of a tall house. There was no lift, and the stairs were steep and narrow. He advised me to go carefully. People were always breaking their legs, he said, and that was people who could see. On the fifth-floor landing he edged past me and unlocked the door. Once inside, he showed me round. The rooms were small, with slanting ceilings, skylights in the bedroom and the lounge, and floors that sloped. A corridor ran the length of the apartment, front to back. This was where he threw his knives. The wall at the far end was covered with brown cork tiles, and on the tiles he’d drawn the figure of a woman. I admired his handiwork. I felt the smoothness of the tiles where the woman was, then I felt the knife-holes that surrounded her. Loots led me back to the kitchen and began to prepare the meal.