Rupert Thomson - The Insult

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I liked the poster.’

One light laugh, and the hand withdrew. He was gone.

Then I heard Loots’ footsteps. He was whistling. The car keys tingled on his palm.

‘Did you see him, Loots?’ I called out.

‘Who?’

‘The Invisible Man.’

‘You’re joking. He was here?’

I talked all the way back to the capital. I’d formed a theory; it was based on that one phrase: used to be. The Invisible Man was tired of being different, special. Tired of living up to expectations. He wasn’t interested in being THE INVISIBLE MAN! He wanted to be ordinary, with no exclamation mark after his name — invisible in the way that normal people are. So that was what he’d done. Become invisible, with a small i. Or, more appropriately, visible. With an ordinary v. You could be sitting next to him on a bus or a train, in a restaurant or bar, at home on the sofa, you could be sitting next to him right now and there’d be nothing invisible about him, nothing invisible at all. That was what had happened, I was sure of it. And that, I told Loots, was what he should say to Anton when he saw him again.

The city seemed to welcome us as we drove in — green lights all the way and rockets exploding in the bright, snow-heavy sky above the Metropole. We’d done the impossible. We’d found The Invisible Man. I wanted to tell everyone I met. I suddenly wished I had more friends. Well, at least there was Gregory. I dropped in at Leon’s and there he was in his donkey jacket, white hair rising off his head like steam, his shiny hands wrapped round a cup of coffee.

‘I haven’t seen you for ages,’ he said. ‘Where’ve you been?’ His head was lowered, bull-like, and he was glowering at me through a kind of undergrowth: his eyebrows.

‘Smoke,’ I said, ‘you won’t believe what happened.’

I told him the story of the last twenty-four hours. As I reached the end I saw that he’d forgiven me. I bought him a dessert, just to make sure: Leon’s famous blackcurrant jelly, with a dome of whipped cream the size of the Kremlin.

When I unlocked the door of my room just after two o’clock, the phone was ringing. I snatched it up.

‘Blom.’

Never had my name sounded less gloomy. The m hummed happily, like bees in summer.

‘It’s me.’

Nina!

‘I have to see you, Martin. Right away.’

What she was saying seemed to prove the theory I had about her, that there was always room for hope. I’d already decided Greersen didn’t mean anything to her. It had been a whim, an aberration (she probably regretted it now). There was no reason why I couldn’t go on seeing her. Who knows, maybe we could even get married. It would have to be a night wedding, of course. I’d invite Gregory, Victor, Leon. I’d invite The Invisible Man, too. Loots could dance with Nina in that quaint, old-fashioned style of his.

‘Will you meet me somewhere?’ she was saying.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Where?’

She told me she’d drive over. There was an all-night café-bar inside the train station. She’d see me there in twenty minutes.

I put the phone down. Half an hour later I walked into the café. Nina had taken a booth at the back, near the toilets and the cigarette machine.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said. ‘Have you been here long?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘not long.’

She was wearing a fake-fur jacket and a beret, and no lipstick. All I could think about was kissing her. The waitress came and stood beside our table. I ordered coffee and a pastry.

Nina waited until the waitress had gone. ‘You don’t like pastry.’

‘I’m celebrating,’ I said.

‘What are you celebrating?’

‘We found The Invisible Man. Me and Loots.’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘I talked to him, Nina. I actually shook his hand.’

‘That’s great.’ But she put nothing of herself into the words. They were hollow, empty. Insincere. I felt my good mood being gradually dismantled.

‘What did you want to see me about?’ I asked her.

She touched her beer mat, just the corner of it, with one finger.

‘It must have been important,’ I said, ‘for you to drive all the way over here at this time of night.’

‘It is important.’

My coffee arrived.

‘I don’t love you,’ she said.

‘Who do you love? Greersen?’ I stared at her in disbelief.

She didn’t answer. She lit a cigarette, then started turning her beer mat on the surface of the table.

‘Maybe I loved you in the beginning,’ she said, after a while, ‘but I don’t any more.’

‘Maybe you’d like to say it again,’ I said. ‘Maybe I didn’t hear it the first time.’

She sighed. ‘I’m sorry.’

I stared at my pastry, its flaky crust baked to a perfect gold, its dusting of spotless white sugar. I wished I was blind. We should have met in the daytime, like before. Or some bright place. Somewhere with fierce lights, preferably fluorescent. Then I wouldn’t have been able to see her. Then I wouldn’t have known what I was missing. Then I wouldn’t have been staring at a fucking pastry.

‘Guess what?’ I said. ‘I was on TV.’

‘Were you?’ She was somewhere else, though. She’d hardly heard me.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.

‘No, tell me.’

I stood up. ‘I’ll pay on the way out.’

‘I’ve got to go to the bathroom,’ she said. ‘Will you wait for me?’

I sat down again. This hurt more than almost anything else. Will you wait for me? So trivial, so everyday — and yet it meant there was something between us. We were connected, together.

I didn’t watch her walk away. Instead, I looked at the place where she’d been sitting. There was a shallow indentation in the plastic. I reached over, touched the indentation. It was still warm. Then I noticed her bag on the seat. She’d left it behind. Without thinking, I slipped my hand inside it. The usual jumble of lipstick, make-up, money. A notebook, too. Scalloped edges to the pages. Her addresses. I picked up the book and tucked it into my pocket. I wasn’t sure why I’d done it. And by the time I thought about putting it back, it was too late. I heard the door to the toilets open. She was walking towards me.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Nothing.’ I pointed at the seat. ‘You left your bag.’

She was staring down at me. No warmth in the look, no suggestion of any intimacy at all. It was more sort of dissatisfied. Disillusioned even. I obviously wasn’t handling this the way she’d hoped I would.

‘Is there anything you want to ask me?’ she said.

I sat there for a moment longer, trying hard to concentrate. I kept thinking of her address book in my pocket. I still didn’t know why I’d taken it. I shook my head. ‘No.’

She walked ahead of me, up to the cash-register. She reached into her bag.

‘I already told you,’ I said. ‘This is on me.’

She took her hand out of the bag again. She hadn’t noticed that her address book was missing. I paid for two coffees and a pastry.

‘Didn’t you like the pastry?’ the waitress said. She seemed to be taking it personally, the fact that I hadn’t touched it.

‘I lost my appetite,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

When I walked out of the café, Nina was waiting in the station concourse. There was that whispering again, the sound I’d heard when I first returned to the city. Voices lifted into a great emptiness. Voices appealing to something they didn’t even know was there. She took hold of my arm. ‘There’s a man staring at me.’

‘There’s always men staring at you,’ I said, irritated suddenly. ‘The saxophone-player the other night. He stared at you, too.’

‘How do you know that?’