Rupert Thomson - The Insult

‘Don’t worry. She’ll turn up.’

I said good-night, then turned and walked to the entrance. The doors were spinning slowly when I reached them. I waited a moment, then stepped forwards, moving in time with them, as if we were a couple dancing.

The coast, out of season — there’s a smell to it. Briny, damp. It’s everywhere: in hotel rooms, in taxis, in cafés. I’d never liked the coast much; I always seemed to slow right down, as though my ankles were caught in seaweed.

I’d eaten in a small place by the train station. The man who ran it was a foreigner. He wore a pale-blue suit and white patent-leather shoes with gold buckles, and he had that clammy seaside skin. I ordered chicken salad and a beer. He stood in front of me, staring down with slightly bloodshot eyes, a sack of gelatinous flesh beneath his chin. When he spoke, his words blurred on his tongue.

‘Your first time here?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘You like?’

‘No.’

‘Me also,’ the man said. ‘I don’t like.’

He dropped his shoulders, moved away. At the bar he picked up a hand-mirror and studied himself for a long time with no change of expression. Then he began to pluck his eyebrows, a faint pop each time a hair came loose. I imagined the root of every hair he plucked; I saw the tiny pellet of skin they were embedded in. I drank my beer, but left most of the food.

Karin Salenko lived in a modest stucco building on the seafront. I leaned against the balcony outside, the plaster flaking away beneath my hands. I could hear breakers behind me, like something being dynamited. Why had I come here? Was it to get away from Visser? (Could he have followed me?) Was it because I was curious about Nina’s life, a life I’d been excluded from? Or did I think I was some kind of detective, trying to unearth the truth about her disappearance? I brushed the dust off my hands and turned to face the apartment. Maybe I just wanted to hear somebody talk about her. Maybe all I wanted was to hear her name. I knocked on the door. When it opened, the security chain was still in place.

‘Karin Salenko?’

‘Yes.’

‘My name’s Martin Blom. I called you yesterday.’

‘Oh yes.’ Karin Salenko unhooked the chain. ‘Come in.’

Once I was settled on a sofa in the lounge, she asked me if I’d like a drink. Something cold, I told her. Anything, really (I wanted to wash the taste of that restaurant out of my mouth). She brought me a beer from the fridge. Then she sat down opposite me, with the light behind her. I thought she must be working later, at the casino, because she was wearing a glittery, skin-tight turquoise dress that was split to the thigh. Eye-shadow, too. Mascara. And then there was her blonde hair, back-combed and lacquered at the front, and falling in a sheen of gold past her right shoulder. She had a tall glass in her hand.

‘You wanted to know about Nina.’

I nodded.

‘There’s not much to tell,’ she said, ‘not recently. I haven’t seen her for a while. We talk sometimes, you know, but, well …’

She had a lazy voice, but there were edges to it. She knew how it sounded, the lazy part. Maybe she even pushed it a little. It wasn’t hard to see how it might work with men. The edges, she couldn’t do anything about. The edges were memories. Things that hadn’t gone right, things that had taken too long. Things that had never happened at all. I don’t know. Maybe I was reading too much into it.

‘When did you see her last?’

‘August. I was in the city, for a convention.’ She looked at me. ‘I’m a croupier.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Where did you meet? Her apartment?’

‘No, we had lunch together. A Chinese restaurant she knew. We argued about Christmas.’ She smiled faintly. ‘We always argued about Christmas. And Easter.’

‘What was it about, the argument?’

‘She didn’t want to come and see me. She wanted to go to her father’s place. I said she was always going to her father’s place. She was there in the summer, for instance. “That’s right,” she said. “I was.’” Karin Salenko lowered her eyes.

‘So you argued about it?’

The ice-cubes rattled in her tall glass as she drank. ‘You have to understand. She adores her father. When I left him, she blamed me for everything.’

‘And you haven’t seen her since then?’ I said. ‘Since August?’

‘That was the last time.’ Suddenly she began to cry.

At first I didn’t realise she was crying because she cried in a way I’d never seen before. She kept her head very still, level, too, and stared out across the room. She didn’t try to hide the tears. I asked her if she was all right. If I could get her anything. She didn’t answer.

‘You see, I have a bad feeling,’ she said eventually.

She pushed the knuckles of her left hand into her eye.

I saw the car standing on that piece of waste-ground, both doors open, like an insect on the point of flying. But it didn’t move.

‘How did you find out that she’d disappeared?’ I said.

‘My ex-husband rang me up. She hadn’t sent him a birthday card, that was the reason. He’d called her three nights in a row, but she was never there. He wondered if I knew anything.’

‘You didn’t, though.’

‘No.’ Karin Salenko reached behind her neck with both hands and, lifting her hair off her shoulders, twisted it a couple of times and then released it. I’d seen Nina do the same thing. ‘I was almost happy when he told me. I was glad. But then I started thinking, she’d never do that, not Nina. She’d never forget his birthday.’

I took the address book out of my pocket and handed it to her. ‘Your ex-husband,’ I said. ‘Could you tell me if his address is in this book?’

She stared at the book for a moment before she opened it.

‘Yes, it’s here,’ she said. ‘Jan Salenko.’

I held my hand out for the book. She hesitated, then gave it back.

‘Other people walking around with her things,’ she said. ‘It’s like she’s dead or something.’

‘I was a friend of hers,’ I said, ‘before all this.’ I paused. ‘I loved her.’

There was a silence.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know.’

I wanted to change the subject. I was looking down at the book I’d stolen, a dark shape on my palm. ‘You kept his name.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You still call yourself Salenko, even though —’

‘Oh, I see. Yes. Well, I never liked my name before.’

She left her chair and walked to the window. Her feet were silent on the carpet. All I could hear were the ice-cubes in her glass. The sound of her moving behind me was the sound of a chandelier in the wind.

‘We’re not a close family,’ she went on. ‘Sometimes it seems like we tried to get as far away from each other as we could.’

‘You too?’

She was staring out into the darkness. ‘Especially me.’

When she talked about her family, the words seemed to curdle in her mouth and, just for a moment, she reminded me of myself. She’d had some kind of bullet fired at her. The way she was behaving now revealed it. The path of the bullet, the rhythm of the knife.

Thunder rolled on the horizon. It was so continuous, so unbroken, it could have been a plane circling in the sky, waiting for clearance.

At the window, Karin Salenko shivered. ‘I think it’s going to storm.’

I thought I should leave. I rose to my feet, but didn’t move towards the door. I just stood in the middle of the room. The carpet was deep-pile, ice-blue. I drew a pattern on it with my stick.

‘I had her when I was sixteen. It was too young.’ The edges in her voice, they’d taken over. ‘In that part of the world,’ she said, ‘you know, people …’ She tailed off again, in that way she had.