The Insult (12 page)

‘Stand there.’

The wall was made of wood. Maybe it wasn’t a wall. Another fence, then. No, I could feel where it ended. A shed of some kind. The side wall of a shed.

Six knives. The side wall of a shed.

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I think I know.’

‘Stand there,’ Loots called out, ‘and don’t move.’

‘But I know –’

Loots was chuckling, some distance off.

‘It’s perfect,’ he said. ‘You won’t even see them comin –’

The g was cut off by the whistle of the first knife through the air and the thud a split-second later as it stuck into the wood next to my ear.

The other five followed, at two-second intervals. I dug my fingernails into the crack between two boards and held on, grateful that it was light and I couldn’t see the blurred blades come hurtling towards me.

‘Hey!’

‘Who’s that?’ I said.

‘It’s an old guy,’ Loots said. ‘He looks angry.’

I grinned. ‘It’s probably the next-door neighbour.’

‘That’s right, it’s the next-door neighbour,’ the next-door neighbour said, ‘and the next-door neighbour wants to know what the fuck six knives are doing stuck in the side wall of his garden shed.’

Loots tried to explain that he used to work in a circus and that he was just demonstrating the art of knife-throwing to a friend.

The next-door neighbour interrupted him. ‘First I’m kept awake half the night, some wedding, now there’s a fucking circus in my garden. Go demonstrate in your own garden, for Christ’s sake.’ He blew some air out of his mouth. ‘Jesus.’

Loots retrieved his knives, then led me towards the fence.

‘And don’t fucking break my fence,’ the next-door neighbour shouted after us, ‘all right?’

We didn’t start laughing until we dropped down on the other side. Then we couldn’t stop. Every time Loots said, ‘It’s probably the next-door neighbour,’ we started again. My stomach ached with it.

‘Were you really a knife-thrower?’ I asked him.

‘Well, I trained as one,’ he said, ‘but they never actually let me loose on anyone.’

The two of us laughing, but more quietly now. Sitting on a damp lawn, with our backs against the fence. Dawn in the suburbs.

At last we walked back towards the house. There was something I was still curious about, though, and now seemed as good a time as any. I turned to Loots.

‘Do you do any tricks with bicycles?’

‘Bicycles?’ He sounded baffled. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Oh, you know,’ I said casually. ‘Handstands, juggling – that kind of thing.’

‘No, I don’t know anything about that.’

I smiled to myself. Obviously he didn’t want to talk about his bicycle trick. He was probably still perfecting it. I decided not to press him. Loots was a man of many talents, and some of them were hidden. If anyone understood the value of secrecy, it was me. The fact that he also had secrets didn’t frustrate or discourage me at all; if anything, it lifted him higher in my estimation.

We travelled back into the city together. The tram was empty to begin with, then it filled. The people getting on hadn’t been awake for long. They talked in murmurs, if they talked at all; they were still carrying their last night’s sleep with them. I heard the stamp of tickets being punched in the machine. The wheels grinding on the rails. The whiplash of electric cables overhead. Loots fell asleep beside me, his cheekbone knocking against my shoulder. I opened the window and cool foggy air flowed in. November.

Just before my stop, I reached into my pocket to check that my key was there. My hand closed round a piece of paper. I lifted it to my nose. The scent of apple blossom still lingered.

Inge had suggested that I choose the place. Somewhere you’re comfortable with, she said. Somewhere you know. While it was thoughtful of her, it wasn’t easy. All the places I knew – or rather, used to know – I couldn’t go to any more. I could only think of the Bar Sultan, which was in a small street on the east side of the railway station. Gregory had taken me there one night.

We’d agreed to meet at nine o’clock. I was there at three minutes past. I couldn’t see her, though, so I took a stool at the bar and ordered a beer. It was a long, narrow place. Dark wood, framed photographs of local football teams (the owner used to keep goal for the city), and a juke-box and a pool table in the back. I wondered what would happen when she arrived. I didn’t think we’d dance again; there was nobody to blackmail me into it this time and, besides, the music wasn’t suitable. Maybe we’d talk. I didn’t have much to say that anyone would believe, but I was curious about her. I knew so little. I drank my beer and when it was gone there was still no sign of her. I ordered another.

It’s all right to be on your first drink when you’re waiting for somebody, or on your second, that’s all right, too. But if you’re on your third, it starts to feel like something’s wrong. I asked the
bartender what the time was. Ten-thirty-five, he said. Inge was an hour and a half late. My neck ached from looking round whenever the door swung open. My head ached as well. I’d been looking forward to the moment when the crowd parted to reveal her, like something at the centre of a flower. I’d been looking forward to it, and now it wasn’t going to happen.

By the time I ordered my fourth beer I was past caring. I drank it down in two savage gulps and ordered a fifth immediately.

Someone sat down on the stool I’d been saving for her. Well, she wasn’t going to be using it. She wouldn’t be coming now, and that was probably just as well. I couldn’t even remember what she looked like. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to leave, though. It wasn’t twelve o’clock yet, and, anyway, I didn’t feel like going to Leon’s. I went to Leon’s every night. So there I was, five drinks inside me, sitting at the bar.

I couldn’t have said exactly when I noticed the girl sitting on the stool beside me. Midnight, maybe. Maybe later. It seemed to me that she’d been sitting there for some time. Not saying anything. Just sitting there, like me. Her elbow touching mine. But I wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone. Not any more. I’d been stood up. Whatever dream I’d had, it was in pieces. The girl was still there, though, even after I’d registered all that.

‘Have you got a light?’ she said.

I found a lighter in my pocket. She cupped her hand round the back of mine and guided it towards her cigarette.

‘Thank you.’

She inhaled, drank from her drink, then blew the smoke out. She was still sitting there. Dark-brown hair, with gold in it. Dark eyelashes.

‘Can I kiss you?’ she said.

I stared at her. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.

She leaned closer. ‘I’d like to kiss you.’

And before I could say anything, one of her hands reached up and rested on my shoulder, then her lips touched mine.

That girl from the wedding. Inge. Her small mouth. That tremor in her voice.
You don’t have to.
She was actually, now I thought about it, pretty ugly. Repulsive even. Old, too. Thirty-five, at least. What had I ever seen in her? There was a kind of revenge in the way I kissed the girl who was sitting next to me, a vehemence that tasted sweet. And after that, another kiss. Longer this time. And suddenly all thoughts of revenge had lifted and there was only disbelief. That this girl, who was beautiful, had kissed me. That this was happening at all.

‘There’s something I should tell you,’ I said.

She pulled back. ‘You’re married.’

I smiled at her. ‘No, not that.’

‘It’s some disease then.’

‘No.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘You don’t like girls.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘I can’t think of anything else.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m blind.’

She laughed. ‘I knew that.’

I wondered how.

‘That white stick of yours,’ she said. ‘Kind of gives you away, doesn’t it.’

‘You don’t mind?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind.’

The city was deserted. It must have been late.

Wide streets, silver tramlines bending off into the distance. A cold wind blowing.

Spiral staircases rose into the air, built out of newspaper, sweet-wrappers, empty bags of crisps. And sometimes there was a van parked on a street-corner with a flap open in the side of it. One fluorescent light. A man in a white jacket selling sausages, chips with mayonnaise, soft drinks.

Then just houses with dark windows, leaves on the pavement. The moon high up in the branches of a tree.

Nina, I whispered to myself. Nina.

That was her name.

I couldn’t believe my luck. Hers was not a perfect beauty – she had a slight swelling on her upper lip, where she had run into an open window once, and there was a small right-angled scar on the bridge of her nose – but it was close; and that closeness made it better than perfect. Heads had turned when we left the bar.

‘Are you tired?’ she said.

‘No, not at all.’ I told her how I lived – going to bed at dawn, getting up in the afternoon.

‘I do that, too.’ She lit a cigarette, then talked with it in her mouth. ‘I work in a club. It’s south of here. The Elite.’ Her chin lifted as she took the cigarette from between her lips and blew the smoke into the top corner of the car. I watched the street-lights edge her throat in orange. ‘What were you doing in that place?’

‘Waiting for someone.’

‘Not me?’

I smiled. ‘No, not you. Though it feels like that now.’

We were driving through the north-west suburbs of the city. Out there all the houses stand in gardens the size of parks, and the streets are silent, narrow, sinuous. Through the window I could see a field sloping upwards to a solid bank of trees. We were almost in the country. She was taking me to see a friend of hers whose parents were away on holiday.

‘She’ll be awake,’ Nina said. ‘She’s always awake.’

But when we walked in and Nina called her name, there was no reply.

‘The door was open. She must be here somewhere.’

Nina took my hand and led me through the house, a huge old place that smelled of the oil they used for heating it. There were double-doors between the rooms, and walls hung with tapestries, and stuffed animals with eyes that looked real (I stared at the otter in the hallway and it stared back, hostile, wary). There were mirrors two metres tall, with frames that seemed to have spent a century under the sea (I
watched the two of us, shadows moving past the glass). There were fireplaces with gargoyle faces carved into the marble. At last we heard something. Nina said it was coming from the kitchen. A rhythmic creaking that was unmistakable. I thought I could hear Nina’s friend too. The clicking sound she was making in the back of her throat was like the ticking of a bicycle wheel when the bicycle’s been thrown down but the wheel’s still turning.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘She’s definitely awake.’

We decided not to go to bed, not yet. Maybe those two people in the kitchen had wrongfooted us. We crept back to the drawing-room instead and poured ourselves some drinks.

‘Do you smoke?’ she asked me.

‘Sometimes.’

She rolled a joint and we smoked it on the sofa, her head against my shoulder. She told me what she thought when she first saw me. She said I was like ice, the way my eyes just kind of slid over the top of everything. Her included.

‘I didn’t notice you,’ I said. ‘I mean, not right away.’

‘And then you did?’

‘Your elbow. It was touching mine.’

‘I had to do something.’

Can I kiss you?

I heard a siren in the distance. The sudden urgency seemed exaggerated, lonely, even pitiful, in the deep silence that surrounded it.

Later, as we climbed the stairs, she told me it excited her, knowing that I couldn’t see. She said it was better.

‘Better?’ I didn’t understand.

‘Men can be so brutal,’ she said. ‘Looking at your tits or your ankles, telling you what’s wrong with them.’

‘They wouldn’t say that to you,’ I said, ‘not the way you look.’

‘I’m not good-looking. I never was.’

‘You must be joking,’ I said. And then, ‘You are to me.’

She laughed softly.

‘Martin,’ she said.

It was dark in the bedroom. I watched her lift her blouse over her head. Her face was hidden temporarily; her stomach muscles hollowed, stretched. I undressed quickly. My clothes fell to the floor. Then she was pushing me gently back on to the bed. I watched her lower her body on to mine, her nipples touching me first – my thighs, my hips, my ribs. Her lips touching me next. We rolled over. I ran my tongue down the centre of her, through the sudden growth of hair, to where the skin delicately parted, to where it started tasting different. I saw the damp trail that I had left behind on her, and thought for a moment of my father. It was a strange time to be thinking of him.

‘What is it?’ she murmured.

‘Nothing.’

She was looking at me over her breasts, her eyes half-closed. She had a triumphant expression on her face, almost greedy, as if we were playing a game and she was winning. Her breathing shortened and accelerated. ‘I think I’m turning into a man,’ she said.

I looked up at her again.

‘My clitoris,’ she said. ‘I get erections.’

It wasn’t an exaggeration. There was such wetness when she came, the sheet beneath that part of her was soaked.

All night I lay beside her while she slept. I watched her turn over, brush her face with the back of her hand. I saw how she gathered the corner of a blanket in one fist and brought it up below her chin. I listened to her murmur, lick her lips. Sometimes I thought I was imagining it all, and I had to reach out and touch some part of her, her shoulder or her hair.

When I heard the clock downstairs strike five I left the bed. She woke up, but quickly fell asleep again. After I’d dressed I wrote the name of my hotel and the number of my room on a piece of paper. I thought for a moment, then, underneath, I wrote,
Ice melts.
I put the note on the pillow next to her.

Outside, it was almost light. The air was so cold, I could feel the shape of my lungs when I breathed in. There was frost at the edge of
the road and each blade of grass seemed brittle, as if a white rust had attacked it.