Rupert Thomson: The Insult

‘Thank you, Detective.’

I listened to the two men walk away, their footsteps mingling with those of other visitors. One of them sounded like a diver, the soles of his shoes slapping down like flippers on the floor …

Absolute blindness is rare. There’s usually some suggestion of movement, some sense of light and shade. Not in my case. What I ‘saw’ was without texture or definition: it was constant, depthless and impenetrable. Sometimes I thought: Your eyes are closed. Open them. But they were already open. Wide open, seeing nothing. I could look straight into the sun and my pupils would contract, but I wouldn’t know it was the sun that I was looking at. Or I could put my head inside a cardboard box. Same thing. There were no gradations in the blankness, no fluctuations of any kind. It was what depression would look like, I thought, if you had to externalise it.

Miss Janssen spent part of every morning at my bedside. It was her job to motivate me, though I found most of her efforts infantile and embarrassing. Take the rubber balls, for instance. She told me to hold one in each hand. I was supposed to ‘squeeze and then relax, squeeze and then relax’.

‘What’s it for?’ I asked.

‘You’d be surprised,’ she said, ‘how quickly muscles atrophy.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes, it is. If you don’t exercise, they just wither away.’

‘Well, in that case,’ I said, ‘there’s one muscle we definitely shouldn’t overlook.’

She brought the session to an abrupt end.

The next morning she was back again, as usual. She made no reference to what I’d said the day before. In what was intended as a gesture of repentance, I asked her for the rubber balls. I lay there, one in each hand, squeezing and relaxing. I behaved. And, since her voice was all there was, I began to listen to it. Not the words in themselves, but the sound of the words. I tried to work out how old she was, what she did in her spare time, whether she was happy. There were moments when I thought I could picture her, the way you picture strangers on the phone, just from their voices: I saw the colour of her eyes, the shape of her mouth. It was like what happened when the dream I had was over: the gradual assembly of a physical presence. Some mornings I found that I could only see her breasts. Her voice seemed to be telling me that they were large. The curve from the rib-cage to the nipple, for example. That fullness, that wonderful convexity. Not unlike a fruit bowl. But I could never sustain it. Sooner or later the picture always broke up, fell apart, dissolved. And, anyway, they weren’t her breasts. They were just breasts. They could have been anybody’s.

I tried the same thing with the man in the next bed. His name was Smulders. He used to work for the national railways, first as a signalman and, later, as a station announcer. Then he got cataracts in both eyes. They’d operated during the summer, but the results had been disappointing. I asked him the obvious question, just to start him talking: ‘Can you see anything at all?’

‘Sometimes I see dancing girls. They move across in front of me, legs kicking, like they’re on a stage.’ Smulders took a breath. His lungs bubbled.

He must be a smoker, I thought. Forty a day, non-filter. The tips of two of his fingers appeared, stained yellow by the nicotine.

‘Anything else?’ I said.

‘Dogs.’

‘Dogs? What kind of dogs?’

‘Poodles. With ribbons and bows all over them.’

‘No trains?’

‘Once.’ Smulders chuckled. ‘It was the 6.23, I think. Packed, it was.’

He talked on, about his work, his colleagues, his passion for all things connected with the railways; he talked for hours. But nothing came. Nothing except a pair of black spectacles, their lenses stained the same colour as the fingertips. Then I realised that they belonged to a friend of my father’s, a man who used to work at the post office, in Sorting. I couldn’t seem to picture Smulders at all. Somehow his breathing got in the way, like frosted glass.

These were, in any case, minor entertainments, scant moments of distraction. There were days, whole days, when I lay in bed without moving. Almost without thinking. The TV cackled and muttered, the way a caged bird might. Meals came and went on metal trolleys — hot, damp smells that were lurid, rotten, curiously tropical. My head felt as if it had been wrapped in cloth, layer upon layer of it. I often had to fight for breath. Once I tried to tear the covering from my face, but all I found beneath my fingernails was skin.

My skin.

There was no covering, of course.

Nurse Janssen sat with me each morning, her voice in the air beside me. It was still a kind of seed, yet I could grow nothing from it, no comfort, no desire. I’d lost all my wit, my ingenuity.

‘How’s your face?’ she asked me.

‘You tell me.’

‘It’s looking much better. How does it feel?’

‘Feels all right.’

‘You know, there are three trees outside your window,’ she said, ‘three beautiful trees. They’re pines.’

If this was an attempt at consolation, it was misconceived, hopelessly naive. I stared straight ahead. ‘Pines, you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can smell them.’

‘It’s a beautiful smell, isn’t it?’

I scowled. ‘If you like toilet cleaner.’

Later that day I picked up one of my rubber balls and threw it into the blankness in front of me. Now that was beautiful, the silence of the ball travelling through the air, an unseen arc, and then the splintering of glass. I hadn’t realised there might be a window there. I saw the impact as a flower blooming, from tight green bud to petals in less than a second. It was like those programmes on TV where they speed a natural process up.

The next morning Visser put me on a course of medication. I took the drug in liquid form. It was acrid, syrupy in texture, but I didn’t make any fuss. I drank it down and then lay back, waiting for the effect.

What happens is this:

The world shrinks. The world’s a ball of dust. It rolls silently along the bottom of a wall, meaningless and round. You watch it go. You don’t have to think about it any more. It’s got nothing to do with you, nothing whatsoever.

You’d wave goodbye to it if you could lift your arm.

Not long after I surfaced from the anaesthetic, Visser visited me. He told me that he had replaced the missing bone with a piece of precision-engineered titanium. The fit was perfect; he’d checked it with a CT scan. There had been no complications, nor was there any trace of infection — at least not so far. The entire operation had taken less than four hours. The way he described it, he made my head sound like some kind of jigsaw, and there was a note of genuine pride in his voice, as if it had been clever of him to finish it.

‘In short,’ I said, rather drily, ‘it was a success.’

I heard his lips part on his teeth. ‘Oh yes. Most certainly. How do you feel?’

‘Not bad.’ I paused. ‘It’s a strange idea, though, a piece of metal in your head —’

‘No stranger than a hip replacement,’ he said.

I didn’t agree. The point was, it was in my head. That’s what made it squeamish.

But Visser would have none of it. ‘You might experience some numbness where the cut nerves are,’ he went on cheerfully, ‘but there shouldn’t be too much discomfort. You’ll be up and about in no time.’

He was right about that. Within a week I’d recovered from the surgery and I was embarking on my rehabilitation. Every afternoon I was taken to the Mobility Training Centre, a special room in the east wing. It was laid out like a surreal, random version of the world outside. There were flights of stairs that stopped in mid-air. There were arbitrary brick walls — some knee-high, others reaching to the ceiling. There were kerbstones, but no roads. This was Dr Kukowski’s domain. Kukowski had a patient, almost weary manner, and his skin smelled of vinegar. I sometimes speculated on the effect his work might have on him. I could imagine him pausing halfway up the stairs at home, for example, unwilling to go further. Or stepping off the pavement into the path of an oncoming car because he had completely forgotten about the possibility of traffic.