Rupert Thomson - The Insult

‘One last thing,’ I said. ‘I don’t want anybody to know I’m here. Nobody, Loots. Do you understand?’

‘OK.’ He spoke hesitantly, still puzzled by my behaviour.

‘I appreciate this,’ was all I could say. ‘I really do.’

When we woke up in the afternoon, he told me that he didn’t have another night off until the weekend. He hoped I’d be all right on my own. He’d get some keys cut before he went to work.

‘There’s no need,’ I told him. ‘I won’t be going out.’

‘What? Not at all?’

I shook my head.

He laughed. ‘I wouldn’t either,’ he said, ‘not if I looked like you.’

This hadn’t occurred to me as an excuse, not until Loots mentioned it, but I seized on it with gratitude. ‘I may be blind,’ I told him rather pompously, ‘but I still have my pride.’

Though I’d moved away from the Kosminsky, I didn’t feel as if I was out of danger (after all, I could easily have been followed to Loots’ apartment). I took a number of precautions. I decided not to leave the house, for instance, not under any circumstances. Not even at night. I devised an escape-route, too. As soon as Loots left for work in the evening, I double-locked the door and jammed a kitchen chair under the handle. I took another chair and stood it directly beneath the skylight in the living-room. I climbed on to the chair, opened the skylight and pushed my white cane out on to the roof. On the floor beside the chair I placed a travelling bag that was already packed with a few necessities — money, codeine, a change of clothing. I practised my emergency exit several times that week. It began in one of two ways: a ring on the bell downstairs or — more urgent this, more threatening — a knock on the door of the apartment itself. The procedure was the same, though. I would slip the strap of the bag over my shoulder and climb on to the chair. Then I’d reach above my head and, gripping the frame of the window in both hands, I’d haul myself up into the night. I knew I could be out of the room and across the rooftops in less than the time it would take to force the door. My only worry was the chair. Its position under the skylight might betray me. After a great deal of thought, I decided to leave it facing the TV, with the newspaper on the floor in front of it. The newspaper would be opened on the page that listed the programmes for that day, and certain of the programmes would be circled. That would explain the chair’s position in the room. Even if it didn’t work, it ought to buy me a few precious minutes. It was cold in the apartment with the skylight open; I had to wear a coat and gloves. I would close the skylight when I heard Loots’ footsteps on the stairs, but he often remarked on the temperature when he walked in. I’d put a grin on my face and breathe in deeply. ‘Ah,’ I’d say, ‘fresh air.’ Each night, after he’d gone, I’d be back on the chair with the skylight open again and my eyes fixed on the door. Before too long, I knew it intimately. Every nick and dent and scratch. Every pattern in the grain. Say it went missing and the police wanted a description. They couldn’t have done better than to question me.

When the knock came, on my fourth night in the apartment, I was ready. Like a spirit departing from a body, I rose out of the chair and stood beside it, in a kind of half-crouch, scarcely breathing. The knocking came again, more insistent now. The wood seemed to bulge each time the stranger’s fist pounded on it. Curved lines appeared in the air, the way they do in comic-books, to show the power of the blows.

‘Blom? Are you there?’

It was Gregory. Surely they couldn’t have recruited Gregory? They must have been more desperate than I thought. I was still standing beside the chair, motionless, hunched over.

‘I know you’re in there, Blom. Open up, will you?’

But I wasn’t opening the door for anyone. I had a curious sensation suddenly. The door wasn’t made of wood at all, I felt, but glass, and Gregory could see me through it. He was staring at me through the door, and I was crouching there, next to the chair, pretending that I didn’t exist. It was absurd. But it was unnerving, too, somehow.

‘Come on, Blom. Open up.’

The blows on the door were harder still, and there were more of them. They came in groups of five instead of two. I reached down, hooked the strap over my shoulder, then I placed one foot on the seat of the chair. My heart had a heavy, sluggish beat to it, as if the blood it had to pump round my body weighed too much.

‘Blom? Come on, Blom.’

I must have stood on that chair for fifteen minutes. Eventually I realised that Gregory wasn’t about to break the door down. At first I was angry to have been disturbed in this way, for no good reason. Then I thought that perhaps it had been good practice — a useful false alarm. In the end, though, I just felt sorry for him. I almost stepped down off the chair and unlocked the door. But how could I have explained the delay? His blows grew weaker, less impassioned. I heard him murmuring outside, like something dying. I was astonished he’d kept it up for so long. Is persistence a sign of wisdom or stupidity? Normally I would have said, Well, it depends. But we were dealing with Gregory. Wisdom wasn’t even part of the equation.

Sometime later I watched him from the window as he walked off up the street, his shoulders hunched inside his donkey jacket, his scalp showing through the usual thinning mist of hair. Yes, I felt sorry for him — but what could I do?

During that same week I noticed a dramatic alteration in my vision. I was watching the door one night when a kind of whiteness flashed in front of me. I didn’t think of TV interference, not right away, but later I realised that that was exactly what it had been like. There’d been a buzzing, too, loud at first, then fading to nothing. And suddenly a woman was standing in front of me. She was holding a packet of soap powder. And she was smiling, as though she knew me.

My first instinct was to climb on to the chair. But even as I did so, I realised it was too late. The woman was already inside the apartment. I looked down at the woman. Her smile didn’t seem to be affected by the sight of me standing on the chair. She didn’t seem to find it peculiar, or even funny (she didn’t make any jokes about mice, for instance). I was about to ask her who she was and what she was doing in Loots’ living-room and, more to the point, how she’d got in, for Christ’s sake, when I noticed that it wasn’t his living-room that she was standing in. It wasn’t a living-room at all, in fact. It was a kitchen. And not his kitchen either. Slowly I lowered myself back down to the floor.

The woman showed me a soiled T-shirt. She seemed downcast, dismayed. I’d no idea why she was showing it to me. It wasn’t mine. And it didn’t look as if it belonged to anyone I knew either. I could hear her talking about stains. I heard the words grass and blood. I watched her put the T-shirt into a washing-machine and add some powder from the packet she’d been holding. When she took the T-shirt out again, only seconds later, it was clean and white. She held it up for me to see. Her plump cheeks shone with happiness. It occurred to me that I was watching TV, even though the TV wasn’t on. I was watching TV inside my head.

I tried to stay calm, establish what was happening. It was a commercial channel, but not one I recognised. When the commercials were over, I was returned to a film which had something to do with police corruption. It had all the usual car chases and shoot-outs and, every twenty minutes, there were more commercials: cars, beer, holidays — and soap powder, of course. I saw the woman with the T-shirt so many times that night that I knew almost every second of the thirty seconds it took her to find happiness.