Rupert Thomson - The Insult

‘About half an hour.’ She paused. ‘You sat right next to me. It was uncanny.’

‘You were already here, you mean?’

‘Yes. I was early.’

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

‘I was watching you pretending to read the paper. You even got it the right way up.’

I could smell her perfume. It didn’t belong there. Perfume, ancient paper, dust: it felt wrong as a combination.

‘I didn’t make it to your place,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I noticed.’

She didn’t say anything.

‘That was five days ago,’ I said. ‘You didn’t call.’ I hesitated. ‘I was worried about you.’

She still didn’t say anything.

‘I went to the club —’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘They told me.’

I ran my hand along the edge of the table. It was rounded, worn. I stared at where my hand was, but I couldn’t see anything. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. I should be in bed. Away from all this. As far away as possible.

‘Did you hear the message?’ she said. ‘On my machine?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘It was for you.’

‘It sounded like a funeral.’

‘You told me about your name once, how it was like a bell. Don’t you remember?’

I was looking up into the corner of the room. Where the corner of the room would be if I could see it.

She sighed. ‘Why are you being like this?’

‘Like what?’

‘This isn’t going anywhere,’ she said.

I almost said, What isn’t?

‘This conversation,’ she said, ‘is not going anywhere.’

‘I love you, Nina.’ I just blurted it out.

She eased down off the table. I heard something metal touch the radiator. A belt? A ring? I didn’t even know what she was wearing.

‘I love you,’ I said.

Then it was silent.

‘There’s a man down there,’ she said. ‘He’s got a tattoo on his neck. A spider’s web.’ She paused. ‘Only you can’t see it.’ She paused again. ‘Because it’s daytime.’

‘Nina—’

‘Reach out,’ she said. ‘Your left hand.’

I reached out slowly through air that seemed to thicken, to resist the passage of my fingers. Slowly through the air, so any contact would be gentle, soft as the contact between capsules when they link or separate in space.

I felt the heat of her skin before the skin itself. She took a quick breath, then she seemed to hold it. My hand didn’t know where it had landed. Her bare skin — but where? It moved one way, then the other. Identified a curve. Moved further over. At last the tiny hairs explained it. Her thigh.

She was wearing almost nothing. Had she arrived like that? If not, I couldn’t imagine how she’d taken off her clothes without me hearing.

My hand moved softly inwards, upwards. I felt her body arch and stiffen against the point where I was touching her.

‘I don’t think you should leave me,’ I said.

‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Why’s that?’

‘It’s too exciting.’

‘Really? Who for?’ She could hardly talk.

‘You.’

‘And not for you?’

She was leaning back against the radiator. I imagined the ridges on the metal printing a row of vertical lines across her buttocks and her upper thighs. As if that part of her was in jail.

‘I mean, who else could you do this with?’ I said.

She moved against my hand. She didn’t answer.

‘Is there anyone else you could do this with?’

‘What are you telling me?’ she murmured. ‘You’re the only blind man in the city?’

‘How many do you know?’

Her breath rushed fast and soft across her bottom lip.

‘How many?’ I said.

Her inner thigh began to tremble. That shallow trough, that channel in the muscle. Trembling.

‘I bet you don’t know any others.’

Her whole body shuddered. I pulled her towards me.

‘Not even one.’

Loots called me late that afternoon. As soon as I picked up the phone he started talking. He’d had some news. There was a man on the eastern border who claimed to have seen someone disappear right in front of his eyes.

‘Another hoax?’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ Loots said, ‘but I’m going out there anyway. Do you want to come?’

An hour and a half later we were on the motorway, heading east. For the first sixty kilometres you drive through thick pine forest. There are silver birches in the foreground, a tinge of red to their dead foliage, but it’s the pines you notice, massing behind the metallic speckled trunks, deep and darkest-green — impenetrable. The road feels blinkered. Most of the traffic was coming towards us, bound for the city. Loots leaned over the steering-wheel, his eyes narrowed against the dazzle of their headlights.

There was a dusting of snow along the hard shoulder and in the grass verges, but on the road itself the snow had melted, and the surface was glassy and wet. Each time a car passed, it reminded me of the library. Each car that passed was someone asking us to be quiet.

‘Did I tell you about the house?’ Loots said.

I looked at him. ‘What house?’

Someone had offered him a house for Christmas. It was more of a cabin, really — a log-cabin. It stood on the shore of a small lake, all on its own. He was taking his girlfriend down there. Maybe I could come along as well, he said, with Nina.

‘Then I’ll get to meet her at last.’

In his voice there was a trace of something rueful, a kind of fatalism, as though what he was hoping for was unlikely, if not impossible. Nina, I thought. That was Nina. I watched the telegraph poles flash past. Black trees unreeled on both sides of the car. I felt like a thirsty man who’d drunk something with too much sugar in it. I felt unquenched.

‘I didn’t know you had a girlfriend,’ I said.

‘Her name’s Helga. She works at the factory. I told you I was in Sponge Cakes?’

I nodded.

‘Well, she’s next door. In Chocolate Éclairs.’

I asked him what she was like.

‘Gorgeous,’ he said. ‘Half the men in Jam are after her.’

In two hours we had reached the place. It was a run-down farmhouse, three kilometres from the nearest town. We sat in the kitchen — a bleak and cheerless room, its whitewash stained floral yellow by the damp. There were tools leaning against the walls, and the wood stove in the corner had burned down far too low. I could smell dogs, mildew, washing. The man offered us a schnapps, which we both accepted. Cold from the drive, I drank mine down in one.

‘I never saw nothing like it before.’ The man’s hands fumbled the top back on to the bottle. He had the kind of hands that look as if they don’t feel anything, that look numb.

Loots asked him what it was exactly that he saw.

‘I were inside the shop and he were outside of it, just, you know, peering in the window, see if something took his fancy. He were an ordinary-looking bloke — or so I thought until he disappeared.’ The man wiped his nose on the side of his forefinger, which was rough as pumice-stone, and reached for the schnapps. He poured us both another glass. ‘I don’t mean he disappeared into a crowd or nothing. There weren’t no crowd around him. Weren’t nobody near him at all. He just disappeared.’ The man wiped his nose again. ‘Short bloke, he was. Ginger hair.’

We drove into the town. The shopping precinct was deserted except for a couple of youths sharing a cigarette by the fountain. A weekday night in the provinces, rain tumbling through the dull orange light of the street-lamps. We stood outside the shop where it had happened. In the window there were power-tools, lawn-mowers, rolls of wire-mesh fencing. We trawled the damp air for the missing man. But there was only the scrape of waste-paper on concrete and the crackle of archaic neon. The next time I looked round, we were alone in the place. Even the two youths had gone home.