The Insult (8 page)

He led me to a cage and then bent down and pointed at the snail in the corner. ‘See that flash,’ he said, ‘just there, below the suture …’

Do people really take on the appearance or character of their pets? Or do they choose a particular pet because they feel a kinship with it? I’ve never been sure. Either way, it was certainly true that there had been a narrowing of the difference between my father and his snails over the years, especially since he’d retired. He was constantly, as they say, retreating into his shell. He’d started eating the same food as they did, too. Most of it was fit for human consumption – potatoes, apples, carrots, etc. – but, over the weekend, I’d caught him in the kitchen after midnight, cramming leaves into his mouth. Not lettuce, though. Not spinach. Sycamore. And now, as we moved off down the garden, I noticed that he no longer picked his feet up when he walked. He didn’t walk at all, in fact; he shuffled. I looked over my shoulder and it wasn’t footsteps that I saw but one long, suspiciously continuous and slightly silver trail.

‘I know how difficult it must be for you,’ he said.

I turned and stared at him.

‘Visser talked to us about it. How you believe you can see sometimes. How you can’t accept what’s happened …’

I shook my head. How could Visser do that? It was the last thing I needed, my parents pretending that they understood.

‘You know, he’s a good man, Visser. One of the best in his field.’ My father’s tone of voice was guarded, wary, as if Visser was actually a criminal, but a criminal he was defending, a criminal who might be capable of going straight.

‘He’s clever,’ was all I was prepared to say.

‘He’s done a lot for you.’

We walked as far as the fence at the top of the garden. On the other side was a field. Everything was grey or brown or yellow, dulled by the rain. The brown horse that was standing there looked camouflaged, almost invisible. My father bent down to pluck a weed out of the flowerbed.

‘It’s a good clinic they’ve got up there,’ he said. ‘Excellent facilities, very up to date …’

I thought of the broken windows, the paint peeling off the ceiling, the narrow metal beds. I thought of the interminable corridors, the old linoleum. The chill.

‘It was the best place for someone with your injuries. Everybody said so.’

He’d seen the place. Only once, admittedly, but he’d seen it. Obviously his faculties were going. Going, gone. All he was left with was the desperate stubbornness of old age. How long, I wondered, did the average snail live?

‘I just wanted you to know. I just wanted to say that we did the best for you that we could …’

The space my father occupied was shrinking, tightening around him. Everything he said now mattered to him because there were so few words left. Let him believe what he wanted to believe. Let him be. It astonished me that I could be so charitable.

I walked several paces, my cane scanning the wet grass.

‘How’s Peristome?’ I said. ‘And Streak, how’s Streak?’

The taxi dropped me by a public phone-box at one end of the shopping precinct. I waited until it had turned the corner, then I walked back
along the main road that led east out of the town. The tarmac shone like black glass with the recent rain; trees boiled overhead. I remember a neon sign outside a bar and how it seemed to flicker on and off. I thought it was a faulty connection; the damp must have got into it. But then, when I was closer, I realised it was just a low branch dipping, blown sideways, so it kept covering the sign. Cars rushed past like gusts of wind. Once, a man stopped and offered me a lift, but I told him I didn’t have far to go. It took me two hours to reach the station.

When I bought my ticket I disguised myself, replacing my white cane and my dark glasses with one of my father’s gardening hats and a pair of his half-moon spectacles. I didn’t want anyone in the station to remember seeing a blind man board the 9.03. I wanted my trail to go cold outside that phone-box, on that anonymous street-corner.

I chose the compartment that seemed the most dimly lit (one of the bulbs must have blown) and sat down by the window. Everything was blurred, of course; I hadn’t realised his eyesight was quite so bad. No wonder I hadn’t been able to find the right platform. After a while I had to take the glasses off. Alone in the compartment, I leaned back in my seat and peered at the photographs of national beauty spots which hung on the wall below the luggage-rack: woodland, river valleys, lakes. I wasn’t sure how I felt. It was a mixture. Relieved, elated, edgy.

That afternoon I’d been for a drink in a place I used to go sometimes when I went home at weekends; they knew me there. I walked in through the door just after sunset and ordered a whisky and a beer. Suddenly it was as though all the voices and sounds in the bar had been poured into a jar and then a lid had been put on it. Everybody turned round. They were staring at me, and they all had the same look on their faces. I felt as if I was in a western. As if I was a stranger in town and I’d done what I’d just done: walked into a bar and ordered a drink. I spoke again, into the silence: ‘A whisky and a beer, please.’

At last Andreas, the owner’s son, responded. ‘I heard about the accident.’

‘It wasn’t an accident, Andreas. They did it on purpose.’

This was meant to be a joke, but nobody laughed.

‘I mean, the gun didn’t go off by mistake,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t someone who just happened to have a gun and their finger slipped or something and the gun went off. What happened was, they pointed the gun at me and then they fired.’

It wasn’t getting any funnier.

And suddenly I knew what I had to do. I had to move away from everyone I’d ever met. Find somewhere different to live. I had to disappear. I knocked my whisky back and chased it with the beer. It couldn’t be that difficult. All I had to do was leave and not tell anyone where I was going. Who were my friends? Robert, Daphne, Hermann, Paul. Max and Irene. Oh yes, and Patrice. Was that all? There were a few people from the bookstore, too, of course. The boss, Mr Schlamm. Iris, who I’d had a thing about. Another Robert. They’d sent flowers to the clinic. Cards as well. They’d done their bit. Most people were busy, or lazy. I knew what they’d think.
He’ll get in touch sooner or later. When he’s ready.
That suited me. Now I’d drawn up a list, I realised there weren’t too many of them, anyway. It was a relief to me that I wasn’t more popular. There was less likelihood of an uncomfortable coincidence. If I did run into someone on the street, someone I knew, I’d just pretend I hadn’t seen them. Nothing personal. I simply wanted to start again, with no awkwardness and no comparisons – no past. I wanted my life to begin with the shooting, as though that stranger’s bullet had given birth to me, as though the pain I felt in that split-second was the pain of a baby being catapulted from the womb.

When I returned from the bar, my parents were in the drawing-room. My father offered me a schnapps, which I accepted. I chose the moment to inform them of my decision.

‘I’m leaving,’ I said. ‘Tonight, probably.’

I pressed my face to the cold glass as the train rushed north through endless fields of beet. I remembered something Visser had said about rebuilding the relationship between myself and my parents. It would take time, he said. We would have to be patient with
one another. He was sure that, in the end, some kind of harmony could be achieved.

But there were things he didn’t understand about my parents, things I hadn’t told him. My sister had died as a result of misdiagnosed appendicitis when she was twelve. I couldn’t honestly remember her at all – I was five at the time – but everybody said she was a bright, fun-loving girl without a care in the world. Her name was Gabriela. I wasn’t like her – never had been – and I’d always had the feeling that, if my parents had been forced to choose between us, if they could have said which one of us they were prepared to lose, it would have been me, not her. Yet I was the one they were left with. And this knowledge, this frustration, was something they couldn’t quite shake off. On my first evening home, it was my reference to the death of someone close that had so upset my mother. I also thought that what had happened to me in some way reminded my parents of what had happened to Gabriela. Their grief rebounded between the two terrible events; it had grown with time, rather than diminishing, as grief usually does. I doubted this was something they’d get over. Even our family name had a morbid, rather lugubrious ring to it. Blam would have been a gunshot (quite appropriate, actually), but Blom was a tolling bell, that gloomy m reverberating: Blommm … Blommm … Blommm … Blommm …

Yes, Visser was wrong.

I peered at the bleak, unyielding landscape. My parents would be sitting at the kitchen table, eating a supper of cold meat, pickles, soda bread. Upstairs, in Gabriela’s room, the ice-skating trophies, ballet certificates, pictures of pop-stars who were also, mostly, dead. She would have been thirty-six next month.

Both my parents cried when I left. My mother first, her weeping so violent that I thought her body wouldn’t stand it. My father later, just before the taxi came – silent, almost sacrificial tears. I didn’t tell them where I was going. I didn’t promise to write or phone either. There was nothing heartless about this; it was as much for their comfort and well-being as for mine. Though the more I thought about it, the more
I realised my plan demanded it. I now saw my visit for what it was. Not a convalescence, not a reunion at all, but a leavetaking – a goodbye.

It was late evening by the time the train pulled into Central Station. I stepped down on to the platform, my cane in one hand, my suitcase in the other. I could feel the money in my coat pocket, a roll of banknotes tightly bound with an elastic band; my father wouldn’t let me leave until I’d taken it.
That should keep you going for a month or so. Until your disability allowance comes through.
I took a deep breath and then hesitated, uncertain which way to turn.

A dense fog had descended. The voices of travellers beneath the vaulted, wrought-iron roof had a reverential sound, the murmur of worshippers in churches, people speaking to people who are dead. My skin grew thin; a panic whirled inside my head. I suddenly had thoughts I’d never had before. Our century has taken all the things we relied on. Our century has stripped us naked. Religion’s gone, the family, too. We’re alone, among distractions, then it’s over.

I wasn’t sure how long I stood there for.

At last I forced myself to walk. My legs were made of bamboo, with string in the middle instead of muscle. The hand that held the suitcase didn’t feel like mine. I gave my ticket to the man who asked for it and set out across the station concourse. The crowds parted before me. I passed along the tiled tunnel that led to the taxi-rank. A piece of paper fluttered over my face. I bent down, picked it up. There was handwriting on it. It was some kind of note, but the paper was torn; only a fragment was left. Five words were visible and my heart leapt because I knew they were intended specifically for me:

You were brilliant!

Well done!

The Hotel Kosminsky stood on the edge of the red-light district, behind the train station. I remembered it from before – the outside of it, at least. All flaky-grey, it had the look of cold roast pork. The windows were dusty, smoke-stained, often cracked. Above the entrance, a torn black canopy fluttered in the wind that always seemed to be tormenting that particular street-corner. Two brothers owned the place. I’d seen them once, climbing out of a foreign car. They had close-cropped hair and wore identical suits of grey silk. People said they had certain interests in the area – apart from the hotel, that is. I was banking on this reputation; the Kosminsky was dubious, and nobody I knew would think of looking for me there.

I found a bell on the reception desk and bounced my hand on it. A man appeared, his head and shoulders wrapped in cigarette smoke, his eyes filmy, blinder than mine. He looked me over.

‘You’re not planning on dying here, are you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not planning on that.’

‘We had someone die on us last week.’ He pulled on his cigarette and crushed it out in a tin-foil ashtray. ‘Seems people only check in here to fucking die.’ He opened a register, licked one finger. Turned the page. ‘We’ve got a single on the eighth floor. How long do you want it for?’

‘You got a monthly rate?’

‘Two-fifty.’

I paid the money in advance.

When he asked for details, I gave him the name of a boy who’d been in my class at school and the address of a girl I’d been in love with when I was twenty-one.

‘The lift’s on your left, Mr Polyak.’

The lift had wood-veneer walls and a carpet that was brown and pale-orange with a kind of leaf design in it. There was a narrow glass panel in the door so you could see each floor as you passed it, but only for about two seconds. The bell sounded and the door slid open. My floor. I stepped out. There was a strong smell of very old fried chicken. It took me a while to find my room. There didn’t seem to be any sequence to the numbers; they were arranged in the strangest manner, almost randomly.

The room was long and narrow, with a bathroom just inside the door, on the right. Beyond the bathroom door was a miniature fridge, a wooden table and a plastic chair that balanced precariously on slender metal legs. On the table, predictably, an ashtray, a bible and a telephone. A full-length mirror was bolted to the wall above the fridge. Along the left-hand side of the room there was a wardrobe and a single bed. A cheap oil painting hung above the headboard. Those oil paintings. Sometimes it’s a gypsy, sometimes it’s a kitten. This time it was a pierrot, a pathetic drooping creature, with one glass tear gleaming on his cheek. Between the bed and the table was a window. I pushed it open, leaned my elbows on the sill. I could hear the bells of a distant church, three notes endlessly repeating. The old city lay to the east. A glow arched over it, pale as the light that surrounds a galaxy. Below me I could see the humped back of the station roof, charcoal-grey and ribbed, a whale half-submerged. To my left, an abandoned warehouse, dark windows in a face of crumbling brick, and beyond it, concealed by the steeply slanting tiles, the river, thick as broth and garnished with weeds.