The Insult (17 page)

I could smell her perfume. It didn’t belong there. Perfume, ancient paper, dust: it felt wrong as a combination.

‘I didn’t make it to your place,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I noticed.’

She didn’t say anything.

‘That was five days ago,’ I said. ‘You didn’t call.’ I hesitated. ‘I was worried about you.’

She still didn’t say anything.

‘I went to the club –’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘They told me.’

I ran my hand along the edge of the table. It was rounded, worn. I stared at where my hand was, but I couldn’t see anything. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. I should be in bed. Away from all this. As far away as possible.

‘Did you hear the message?’ she said. ‘On my machine?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘It was for you.’

‘It sounded like a funeral.’

‘You told me about your name once, how it was like a bell. Don’t you remember?’

I was looking up into the corner of the room. Where the corner of the room would be if I could see it.

She sighed. ‘Why are you being like this?’

‘Like what?’

‘This isn’t going anywhere,’ she said.

I almost said, What isn’t?

‘This conversation,’ she said, ‘is not going anywhere.’

‘I love you, Nina.’ I just blurted it out.

She eased down off the table. I heard something metal touch the radiator. A belt? A ring? I didn’t even know what she was wearing.

‘I love you,’ I said.

Then it was silent.

‘There’s a man down there,’ she said. ‘He’s got a tattoo on his neck. A spider’s web.’ She paused. ‘Only you can’t see it.’ She paused again. ‘Because it’s daytime.’

‘Nina–’

‘Reach out,’ she said. ‘Your left hand.’

I reached out slowly through air that seemed to thicken, to resist the passage of my fingers. Slowly through the air, so any contact would be gentle, soft as the contact between capsules when they link or separate in space.

I felt the heat of her skin before the skin itself. She took a quick breath, then she seemed to hold it. My hand didn’t know where it had landed. Her bare skin – but where? It moved one way, then the other. Identified a curve. Moved further over. At last the tiny hairs explained it. Her thigh.

She was wearing almost nothing. Had she arrived like that? If not, I couldn’t imagine how she’d taken off her clothes without me hearing.

My hand moved softly inwards, upwards. I felt her body arch and stiffen against the point where I was touching her.

‘I don’t think you should leave me,’ I said.

‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Why’s that?’

‘It’s too exciting.’

‘Really? Who for?’ She could hardly talk.

‘You.’

‘And not for you?’

She was leaning back against the radiator. I imagined the ridges on
the metal printing a row of vertical lines across her buttocks and her upper thighs. As if that part of her was in jail.

‘I mean, who else could you do this with?’ I said.

She moved against my hand. She didn’t answer.

‘Is there anyone else you could do this with?’

‘What are you telling me?’ she murmured. ‘You’re the only blind man in the city?’

‘How many do you know?’

Her breath rushed fast and soft across her bottom lip.

‘How many?’ I said.

Her inner thigh began to tremble. That shallow trough, that channel in the muscle. Trembling.

‘I bet you don’t know any others.’

Her whole body shuddered. I pulled her towards me.

‘Not even one.’

Loots called me late that afternoon. As soon as I picked up the phone he started talking. He’d had some news. There was a man on the eastern border who claimed to have seen someone disappear right in front of his eyes.

‘Another hoax?’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ Loots said, ‘but I’m going out there anyway. Do you want to come?’

An hour and a half later we were on the motorway, heading east. For the first sixty kilometres you drive through thick pine forest. There are silver birches in the foreground, a tinge of red to their dead foliage, but it’s the pines you notice, massing behind the metallic speckled trunks, deep and darkest-green – impenetrable. The road feels blinkered. Most of the traffic was coming towards us, bound for the city. Loots leaned over the steering-wheel, his eyes narrowed against the dazzle of their headlights.

There was a dusting of snow along the hard shoulder and in the grass verges, but on the road itself the snow had melted, and the surface was glassy and wet. Each time a car passed, it reminded
me of the library. Each car that passed was someone asking us to be quiet.

‘Did I tell you about the house?’ Loots said.

I looked at him. ‘What house?’

Someone had offered him a house for Christmas. It was more of a cabin, really – a log-cabin. It stood on the shore of a small lake, all on its own. He was taking his girlfriend down there. Maybe I could come along as well, he said, with Nina.

‘Then I’ll get to meet her at last.’

In his voice there was a trace of something rueful, a kind of fatalism, as though what he was hoping for was unlikely, if not impossible. Nina, I thought. That was Nina. I watched the telegraph poles flash past. Black trees unreeled on both sides of the car. I felt like a thirsty man who’d drunk something with too much sugar in it. I felt unquenched.

‘I didn’t know you had a girlfriend,’ I said.

‘Her name’s Helga. She works at the factory. I told you I was in Sponge Cakes?’

I nodded.

‘Well, she’s next door. In Chocolate Éclairs.’

I asked him what she was like.

‘Gorgeous,’ he said. ‘Half the men in Jam are after her.’

In two hours we had reached the place. It was a run-down farmhouse, three kilometres from the nearest town. We sat in the kitchen – a bleak and cheerless room, its whitewash stained floral yellow by the damp. There were tools leaning against the walls, and the wood stove in the corner had burned down far too low. I could smell dogs, mildew, washing. The man offered us a schnapps, which we both accepted. Cold from the drive, I drank mine down in one.

‘I never saw nothing like it before.’ The man’s hands fumbled the top back on to the bottle. He had the kind of hands that look as if they don’t feel anything, that look numb.

Loots asked him what it was exactly that he saw.

‘I were inside the shop and he were outside of it, just, you know, peering in the window, see if something took his fancy. He were an ordinary-looking bloke – or so I thought until he disappeared.’ The man wiped his nose on the side of his forefinger, which was rough as pumice-stone, and reached for the schnapps. He poured us both another glass. ‘I don’t mean he disappeared into a crowd or nothing. There weren’t no crowd around him. Weren’t nobody near him at all. He just disappeared.’ The man wiped his nose again. ‘Short bloke, he was. Ginger hair.’

We drove into the town. The shopping precinct was deserted except for a couple of youths sharing a cigarette by the fountain. A weekday night in the provinces, rain tumbling through the dull orange light of the street-lamps. We stood outside the shop where it had happened. In the window there were power-tools, lawn-mowers, rolls of wire-mesh fencing. We trawled the damp air for the missing man. But there was only the scrape of waste-paper on concrete and the crackle of archaic neon. The next time I looked round, we were alone in the place. Even the two youths had gone home.

We ate in a cheap restaurant on the main road. It, too, was deserted, apart from four drunk men in hunting-caps who were sitting in the corner singing songs. I didn’t have much appetite; I could only eat half the chicken dish I’d ordered. I wasn’t sure what I was doing there.

Loots thought we should stay the night, though. ‘It was only two days ago that he was seen. I’ve got the feeling he’s still here somewhere.’

I agreed, but without much enthusiasm.

As we left the restaurant, turning our collars up against the rain, something unexpected happened. Two men approached out of the darkness and introduced themselves. A reporter and a cameraman from a local TV station, they wanted to do a report on The Invisible Man for a regional news programme. They’d already talked to the farmer who’d actually seen The Invisible Man. Now they wanted to talk to me.

‘You’d be better off with Mr Loots,’ I said. ‘He’s the one who organised it all.’

‘No, no,’ they said. ‘You don’t understand. It’s you we want.’

They explained that a blind man was a more potent image, a more poignant symbol of the quest. It would be good television, too. I’d just have to take their word for it.

Loots pulled me aside. ‘It’s OK, Martin. You do it. But listen. Talk to him directly. It’ll work better than answering questions. And use his real name. I think that’s the mistake we’ve been making – not using it.’

I thought Loots had a point. One thing worried me, though. If I was on TV, people would see me. Maybe even the people I’d left behind would see me. Claudia. My parents. Dr Visser. Then I remembered that we’d be broadcasting from an obscure town near the eastern border, at least two hours’ drive from the capital. A programme like that might actually work in my favour, as disinformation: it would throw everybody off the scent. I suddenly became amused by the idea: someone who didn’t want to be found looking for someone who didn’t want to be found. It was like a lift with mirror walls: if you stand in the right position you can replicate yourself, there are hundreds of you, nobody can tell which one of you is real. I patted Loots on the back and walked over to the reporter.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m ready.’

Towards eleven that night we checked into a small family hotel on the road that led out of the town. We took a room with two single beds. While Loots showered, I watched an old black-and-white movie on TV. Aliens were taking over the planet. I thought of Nina, who loved science fiction. I sat on a chair by the window with the phone on my lap. The receiver smelled of cleaning fluid. Lemon flavour.

Loots emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel.

‘Did I do OK tonight?’ I asked him.

‘You were great,’ he said. ‘Specially that bit you said – what was it? “We’re not trying to put any pressure on you. We just want to be sure that you’re all right.’”

‘You think that was good?’

‘Great. And at the end, when they pulled back and showed you standing all alone on that empty street. Even I felt sorry for you.’

I smiled.

‘I’m going to get some sleep,’ Loots said. ‘I’m really tired.’

‘Does the TV bother you?’

He said it didn’t. Springs winced as he climbed into bed and drew the blankets over him. He was asleep in minutes.

I sat on my chair by the window. The aliens were going to lose. They always lost. There was always something on earth which they just happened to be allergic to, something ridiculous like toothpaste or concrete. I dialled Nina’s number, expecting her machine. I didn’t mind if I got the machine; at least I’d hear her voice before I went to sleep – or maybe there’d be another sound-effect intended specifically for me. But she answered and, for a moment, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Then I remembered how she liked to start conversations in the middle.

‘Do you think he saw us?’ I whispered.

‘Who?’

‘The man with the tattoo on his neck.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe.’

‘Do you think he liked it?’

She laughed softly, but didn’t answer.

‘I liked it,’ I whispered. ‘All of it.’

‘Why are you whispering?’

‘Loots is asleep.’

I told her where we were. She didn’t ask what we were doing. She didn’t even sound surprised. Sometimes it bewildered me, this utter lack of curiosity. It made me feel irrelevant, disposable. I didn’t think it was intentional. She had her own world, that was all. But still. I changed the subject. I talked about the house that Loots had mentioned earlier, the house by the lake. I said she was invited, too.

‘You should see the clouds tonight,’ she said. ‘Orange and grey, and swirling round and round, like someone’s stirring them …’

‘It’s raining here.’

‘Do you remember clouds? From before you were blind?’

‘I’ve got memories,’ I said. ‘You go blind, you don’t lose everything.’

There was a moment’s silence.

‘I was with Greersen,’ she said.

I didn’t follow.

‘The night I didn’t show up. I was at Greersen’s place.’

‘Oh.’

Greersen ran the Elite. That was all I knew about him. ‘I was there all night,’ she said.

I walked to the window. The phone was in my hand. For a few seconds it had the feeling of a weapon.

‘Quick,’ said someone on TV. ‘Get down.’

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but I never promised –’

‘I know.’

‘Does it matter?’

I parted the brown curtains. The rain was still falling. In the building opposite, there was a man sitting on a chair. The room was pale-green. He was alone.

‘Martin?’

‘Yes.’

‘It doesn’t mean –’

‘It doesn’t mean what?’

There was another silence, then she sighed.

‘I think I’d better go,’ I said.

I waited.

As I took the receiver from my ear, she said something. I only caught a fraction of it, her tone of voice rather than the words themselves; I thought she sounded anxious. I tried to call her back, but the line was busy. I stood by the window with the phone in my hand, watching the rain fall on a town I didn’t know.

By late afternoon I was in a multi-storey car-park, waiting for Loots. It had been a wasted day. We’d got nowhere. That farmer in his kitchen, the empty shopping precinct, Nina’s confession on the
phone. I felt tired and desolate. I didn’t like standing in car-parks either, no matter how many storeys there were. I started imagining men with T-shirts on. I started imagining tomatoes.

At last I heard footsteps approaching. I didn’t hear any keys, though. Loots had this habit of bouncing keys on his hand as he walked towards his car. A lot of people do it. It’s slightly irritating, actually. It’s like people who shake the ice-cubes in a drink just before they finish it. I listened to the sounds surrounding the footsteps. I listened hard. No keys.