Rupert Thomson - The Insult

The sun slowly warmed the left side of my face.

To think that I’d entertained the notion of a silver room! I could still imagine it — the walls and ceiling lined with kitchen foil, and bits of wire radiating in all directions — but I knew I’d never build it, not now. I couldn’t spend my life in a place like that. Nobody could. And besides, it wouldn’t have been going far enough. After all, what would happen when I left the room? Everything I’d been trying to avoid would be waiting for me just outside the door. No, a silver room would never have sufficed. I’d have needed more protection than that. A silver suit, perhaps, like something an astronaut might wear. A helmet, too. But why stop there? In the end I would have been forced to take the idea to its logical conclusion. Silver skin.

I took a deep breath and let the air ease out of me. The smell of the countryside in winter. Wood fires and muddy fields. Snow.

At last I heard the car. It crept, soft-tyred, along the road and parked outside the inn. I stood up, stretched. A door opened. Footsteps across the grass, keys bouncing on a hand.

Loots.

‘About time,’ I said.

The footsteps stopped. A shadow fell across me. ‘There you are.’

I stared. Because it wasn’t Loots’ voice. It was Visser’s.

‘We’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

I stepped backwards, stumbled, almost tripped. What I felt was partly surprise — I’d been expecting someone else — and partly trepidation, which was the legacy of all the hallucinations. But there was nothing to be frightened of, I told myself. There was nothing to fear. Visser was my doctor. And excellent he was, too, by all accounts. He would only have my best interests at heart.

‘How are you, Martin?’

‘You know, you were right,’ I said. ‘You were right all along.’

There was a silence, one of Visser’s famous silences, but I knew that, if I’d been granted a moment’s vision, if I could have seen him, just for an instant, standing there in his overcoat (if indeed he wore an overcoat!), he would’ve been smiling down at me, with pride.

At the same time, though, now that he was here, in the village, it was hard to rule out the possibility that he might simply have discontinued the experiment. Just kind of disconnected me. Brought the whole thing to an end. Out of pity. Believing, finally, that I’d had enough.

It was possible, surely.

After all, on the far side of the moon, there are intelligent life-forms who are keeping us under constant observation.

And there is always somebody behind you, with a gun.

RUPERT THOMSONis the author of eight highly acclaimed novels, of which Air and Fire and The Insult were shortlisted for the Writer’s Guild Fiction Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize respectively. His most recent novel, Death of a Murderer , was shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Novel Award. His memoir This Party's Got to Stop was published in 2010.