Rupert Thomson - The Insult

‘We found the car.’

He wanted me to identify it for him. I’d mentioned certain features, he said. The so-called bullethole. The doll.

Half an hour later he picked me up outside the hotel. He opened the door for me and I got in. There was one last pale streak of daylight to the south-west, but otherwise the sky was dark.

It was cold in Munck’s car. He told me the heating was broken. He apologised.

‘A policeman’s salary,’ he said.

Outside, the streets were wet, but the temperature was dropping; they would freeze during the night. There was a tension in the car, which I took to be anticipation.

As we passed beneath the ring road, Munck told me where we were going. A suburb on the outskirts. Right on the edge of the city. I knew the area. Railway arches, scrapyards. High-rise slums. Children tortured cats in concrete corridors. Babies fell out of windows. It was always drizzling.

I peered through the windscreen. We turned down a wide, deserted avenue. A park appeared on the left. The grass was littered with empty bottles, newspaper, women’s shoes.

In ten minutes we were there. Munck jerked the handbrake upwards, then he faced me. I saw his teeth at close range. Not just the texture of celery, but the colour, too: palest yellow-green, a kind of chlorophyll.

‘Have you been here before, Martin?’

I shook my head. ‘Never.’

It wasn’t until he got out of the car that I realised it had probably been a trick question. Was I really here for purposes of identification? Or was I here to incriminate myself?

Munck opened my door. ‘The car’s to your right.’

He walked me towards it.

It was just a piece of waste-ground, near a flyover. The seashell roar of traffic. Blocks of apartments loomed like prison ships. I glanced over my shoulder. Two motorways reared up and tangled with each other in the sky.

‘There’s tyre tracks stretching ten or fifteen metres,’ Munck said. ‘The car braked suddenly, for no apparent reason. Both doors are open, as if the occupants left in a hurry.’

I moved slowly round the car, my white cane tapping on hard ground. I found the crack in the back window — a crazed area, something like a spider’s web, with a neat hole at the centre. Then I knew it was Nina’s car. I went on checking, anyway. I thought I recognised the dent in the bumper: Nina had reversed into a bollard one night, in the car-park of the Motel Astra. When I reached the door on the driver’s side I bent down and looked in. No Doris. But I remembered how she’d dangled from a piece of ribbon, and there was a bit of it still knotted round the rear-view mirror. I straightened up.

‘It’s her car,’ I said.

Munck nodded. ‘Why would she come here?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Did she have any friends in the area?’

‘Not so far as I know.’ I paused. ‘But like I said, I didn’t know her very well.’

I took a deep breath, turned away. And then, as I stared out across the waste-ground, I noticed him. He was standing some distance off, with his left shoulder propped against one of the concrete pillars that supported the flyover. He was wearing a herring-bone overcoat and a pair of black shoes; and he was holding both his gloves in his right hand. There was frost in his moustache.

I must have looked strange because Munck took me by the arm.

‘Martin?’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

I couldn’t answer.

Visser was looking right at me, with a smile on his face. It wasn’t a malicious smile; it wasn’t gloating or unkind. If anything, he seemed to be taking a kind of patriarchal pleasure in the sight of me. It was almost welcoming. But, at the same time, there was an edge to it that disturbed me: it was as if he’d seen a joke that I had yet to see.

‘You’ve gone as white as a sheet,’ Munck said.

‘I don’t feel very well.’

‘It must be a shock for you. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked you to come.’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I wanted to.’

Visser watched me climb gingerly into Munck’s car. As we pulled away, he didn’t make any attempt to follow us. He didn’t even move. And the smile lingered — indulgent, strangely relaxed.

On the way back to the city centre I started to explain what I thought had happened to me. In a sense, I was just elaborating on certain things I’d talked about in the hotel bar two days before. Ironically enough, it was Visser’s predictions that I was trying to remember and repeat, what Visser had told me I’d experience. I ran through the phases: numbness and shock; depression, self-pity, suicidal tendencies; the gradual emergence of a new personality (I made it sound natural but squeamish, a snake shedding its skin — as if, somewhere in the city, in a hotel room, perhaps, there was a transparent version of me, a twin, identical but lifeless).

‘A new personality?’ Even Munck found it hard to believe.

I laughed. ‘I don’t think I’m quite there yet.’

I introduced a few variations on the theme, lurid variations of my own. I told him about migraines, rushes, panic. I blamed it on the titanium plate. Maybe sub-zero temperatures affected it. Nobody really knew. I was a unique case, I said. An extraordinary phenomenon. I was like those people with shrapnel in their legs who always know when it’s about to rain.

Munck was nodding now. I thought he was beginning to understand. And, gradually, I brought the subject round to Visser, which had been my intention all along.

‘Did you ever meet him?’ I asked Munck innocently.

Munck looked as if he was trying to remember.

I prompted him. ‘He was my doctor. At the clinic.’

‘I think it was Dr Visser who gave us permission to see you,’ Munck said. ‘Yes, I think I must’ve met him.’

‘You don’t know him, though?’

‘Oh no. I only saw him that one time. The second time, it was a nurse. Why do you ask?’

‘Just curious.’

I asked Munck to drop me outside Leon’s. I didn’t want Visser knowing where I lived — though it occurred to me that, in order to be standing on that piece of waste-ground, he must have been following Munck, and if he was following Munck he must have seen me walk out of the hotel that evening. Possibly he already knew all there was to know. Still, I wasn’t going to hand it to him on a plate.

I looked up and down the street. There was no sign of that salt-and-pepper overcoat, no sign of any shiny shoes. I watched Munck drive away, then I turned and walked through the glass-and-metal door, through the heavy vinyl curtain, into Leon’s. Loots was sitting in the corner. He called me over.

‘Was that a police car?’

I hadn’t seen Loots for a day or two and he knew nothing of Nina’s disappearance. I repeated most of what I’d learned from Munck. Then I told him where I’d been that evening.

‘That’s a bad area,’ he said.

‘I know.’

He bought me a coffee and a brandy, and brought them over to the table.

‘Thanks, Loots.’

‘I never did meet her, did I?’

‘She was hard to meet,’ I said, ‘even for me.’

Not all the news was gloomy, though. On New Year’s Day Loots had seen Anton. The circus hadn’t folded after all. They’d found a contortionist known as The Rubber Man who could pass himself through a piece of garden hosepipe. The crowds were back.

By the time we left the restaurant, it was one in the morning and the city was deserted. Street-lamps spread a thin metallic light. At the bottom of the hill, one last tram curved past the station, its yellow windows almost empty. I doubted Visser would be following me tonight. It was too cold to stand in the shadows or sit in a parked car. It was just too cold. Outside the hotel Loots wrapped his arms around me.