Rupert Thomson - The Insult

Four days had passed and still I hadn’t heard from her. I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone on my knee. I was aware of my heart beating; it felt too close to the surface. When we were in the drawing-room of that mansion, stoned, she’d made me say her number over and over, until I had it memorised. She wouldn’t have done that, would she, if she hadn’t wanted me to call?

I dialled the number and then leaned back against the wall. It was a machine. Her voice, though. The usual phrases. Sorry there’s no one here. Please leave your name and number. I’ll get back to you. I left my name and the number of my room at the hotel, then hung up. I waited a few moments so the machine could re-set itself and called again. I just wanted to listen to her voice. This time I didn’t leave a message.

She called twelve hours later, as I was preparing for bed. My window was open. Eight floors below the first tram of the day was pulling into Central Station — the sound of a knife being held against a grindstone. She said she couldn’t talk for long. It was loud where she was. Music, voices. Glasses. I could only just hear her.

‘Did you get my note?’ I said.

‘Yeah, I got it. I couldn’t read it, though.’

‘Really? How come?’

‘I don’t know. It looked like you wrote something and then you wrote something else on top of it.’

Strange. I could remember writing the name of the hotel and my room number on one line. Then, below it, on a second line, the message.

‘What did it say?’ she asked me.

I told her.

‘That’s nice. I like that.’

‘Can I see you again, Nina?’ The sound of her name on my tongue was unfamiliar, exotic — awkward, too, in a way. As if I’d been designed to say names, but not hers.

‘Sure.’

‘When?’

‘We could meet tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘After I finish work.’ She gave me the address of a bar. ‘I get out earlier tomorrow. I should be there by two.’

There was a man at her table when I arrived. He was just leaving. I didn’t get much of an impression of him: a baseball jacket, long blond hair parted in the middle — pretty nondescript. I sat down opposite her.

‘You look good,’ I said.

She leaned over the table and kissed me on the mouth. ‘How would you know?’

I laughed. She was so easy with the idea of my blindness. She didn’t adjust or patronise. She never said the things that other people said: It must be difficult or I’m so sorry. She just accepted it, as part of me. She even seemed to appreciate it, the way you might appreciate any physical attribute — the smell of someone’s hair, the shape of their hands.

‘There was somebody here,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘Robert Kolan. He comes from this old aristocratic family. He’s one of my closest friends.’

They’d lived in the same house when they were students, she said. That was how they’d met. He always looked after her if she was tired or depressed or ill. He’d do anything for her.

‘He’d kill someone for me if I asked him to.’

I didn’t think she was boasting. It was just a simple statement of fact. If anything, she talked about this friend of hers, this Robert, with a kind of awe. As though she found it hard to believe that someone could devote themselves to her like that.

The waitress asked us what we were having. Nina ordered a cognac. I thought about it, then I ordered one as well.

‘So,’ Nina said, ‘what do you want to do?’

She seemed different from the first night, more distracted, edgier.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ I said.

I took a package out of my pocket and handed it to her.

‘It’s soft,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

‘Open it.’

The tissue paper quickly came apart in her hands.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘A scarf?’

‘It’s a blindfold.’

She didn’t say anything.

‘It’s for when we’re in bed,’ I said. ‘So we can be the same.’ I realised I was deceiving her. Somehow it didn’t feel wrong, though.

Our cognacs arrived. She picked hers up and drank some.

‘Do you like it?’ I asked.

‘It’s great.’ She leaned over, kissed me again. ‘Maybe we can try it out tonight.’

‘Is your car here?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. It’s outside.’

I drained my glass. ‘Let’s drive somewhere.’

We drove east, through the city. She talked about her car — what make it was, where she’d got it from, how many times she’d crashed in it. It was old and pretty beaten-up, but she loved it. The crack in the back window, for instance. That was one of the reasons she’d bought the car; she thought it looked just like some gangster’s bullet hole. She had a mascot, too — a plastic doll, which hung from the rear-view mirror. I reached up, touched the doll. I hadn’t noticed it the first night. My eyes must have been too occupied with her.

‘Her name’s Doris,’ Nina said. ‘She’s got the best tits in the city.’

‘Second-best,’ I said.

‘You wouldn’t say that if you could see her nipples. They’ve got red lights in them.’ Nina was grinning.

Suddenly she turned off the road and stopped the car.

‘Let’s do it here.’

I looked round. ‘Where are we?’

‘Nowhere. Just a car-park.’

She moved closer to me and we kissed. Then she reached down. Her hand found my zip and opened it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the dark curve of a wheel.

‘What’s wrong?’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to?’

‘It’s not that.’

I told her about the shooting, how it had happened. Then I told her the rest: the months I’d spent in the clinic, the operations, the convalescence. I described the exact path of the bullet. I said the difference between life and death was one millimetre. She was nodding, her dark eyes moving between the empty car-park and my face. I could tell she liked this kind of talk. There was a danger, though. I wanted to tell her everything: the miracle in the gardens, Smulders naked, Nurse Janssen stripping — everything. I felt she might believe me, too. I had a thought that was treacherous and yet seductive: secrets become more powerful if you dilute them just a little.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said.

She started the car, turned on the radio. Then we were driving again. She lit a cigarette. The smoke from it flowered against the windscreen.

‘Am I the first person you’ve slept with since it happened?’ she asked me after a while.

I looked at her, but she was watching the road.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I can’t take responsibility for you. You know that, don’t you.’

‘Yes, I know that. I’m not asking you to.’ I rested one hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry.’

I turned and stared out of the window. The streets were still foreign to me. Unlit buildings. Wire-mesh fences and abandoned cars. It could have been anywhere.

‘Where are we?’ I said. ‘Where are we going?’

‘There’s a motel about five kilometres from here.’ She crushed her cigarette out in the ashtray and slid the ashtray back into its socket with the heel of her hand. ‘It’s called Motel Cherry.’ She laughed. ‘Do you like motels?’

Motel Cherry was a drab one-storey place, with rows of net-curtained rooms laid out along a strip of tarmac. On one side was a twenty-four-hour restaurant. Long-distance lorry-drivers hunched over cups of coffee. Cooks stood about in soiled white aprons, biting their nails. On the other side, there was a petrol station: ELF or DERV or ERG — the usual prehistoric brand-name. Between the tarmac and the road I could see a line of newly planted trees; they looked starved and grey, unreal.

We walked into reception. The man behind the desk reminded me of my father. The same sense of a life that could not be changed or redefined, a life that had to be endured. I thought of calling my father, but I knew it would only bring grief to the surface. It was like longing for a cigarette: the moment you had it lit, you wondered why you’d wanted it so much.