The Insult (24 page)

Christmas had been difficult for me. I stayed up late most nights and went for walks around the frozen lake, thinking of Nina. Once, on New Year’s Eve, I ventured out across the ice, my footsteps echoing as if in some great hall. A fine, powdery snow blew towards me, thin snaking lines of it, reminding me of electricity, or the way light moves on the surface of a swimming-pool. I would never see her again, yet images of her rose constantly before my eyes. In motel rooms, in cafés, in her car. Our dinner at the Metropole. Or the first night, in that mansion near the woods … I had to put her behind me, I knew that. My life would go on without her. Still, I thought it might be easier if I pretended she no longer existed.

To some extent, I must have succeeded. Because, when Munck came to me in January and told me that she’d disappeared, I wanted to say,
I know. I made it happen. Like a magician.
Of course, he was talking about disappearance at another level. A level that was, to me at
least, irrelevant. As far as I was concerned, she couldn’t disappear any more than she already had. It’s the same as someone telling you that someone you used to know has died. Since you were no longer actively aware of their existence, from your point of view they might as well have been dead all along; you might even see their death as a form of overkill. Earlier in the evening Munck had said,
They’re saying you could’ve done it.
I was being blamed for something that had happened in another dimension. He might as well have told me that I’d killed a ghost. It was abstract, esoteric. Tautological.

I was floating now, the codeine dreaming in my blood. Slowly I turned away from the view. I noticed a car parked on the other side of the road. Its lights were dimmed.

Curious, I walked towards it. I thought I could see someone inside, a shape behind the wheel. But as I walked towards the car, it started to reverse.

‘Who are you?’ I called out.

It was moving backwards, silently, its lights still dimmed. I was already too far away from it to make out who the driver was.

I began to shout. ‘Visser? Is that you?’

I was running now, but I couldn’t keep up.

‘Visser?’ I was shouting. ‘What do you want?’

I watched the car withdraw into the darkness further down the hill. I stood on the road, uncertain what to do. A crack opened in my skull. White light poured in, bounced from one curved piece of bone to another. Gasping, I bent down. I clutched my head between my hands. My cane dropped away without a sound.

I tried to count the seconds – one … two … three … four …

Then I could see again. That codeine, it was dying on me. Or maybe I’d taken too much of it.

Walking back to Loots’ car, I didn’t look behind me once. I didn’t even listen for tyres on the road below, an engine firing in the distance.

But there was a fear.

The fear that, any moment now, I’d feel a gentle nudging at my legs and that, when I glanced over my shoulder, the car would be
behind me, right behind me, its front bumper touching the back of my knees and no one at the wheel.

I parked Loots’ car outside his apartment and dropped his keys through the letterbox in an envelope. When he rang me later that day I still hadn’t been to bed.

‘You sound upset,’ he said.

I told him I was fine, just tired. There was a deadened area inside my head, like the shape a hare leaves in the grass where it’s been sleeping.

‘How did it go last night?’

I didn’t say anything.

‘She didn’t show up, did she?’

‘Well –’

‘I thought so.’

I asked him what he meant by that.

‘My car,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t look as if it’s moved.’

I stood outside the building where Robert Kolan lived and looked both ways. Rain dripped from the trees on to the paving-stones below. The street was empty. As I paid the taxi-driver, I thought I saw a man in a herring-bone overcoat standing on the corner, but it must have been an illusion, the moon shining through bare branches, a chance pattern of light and shadow.

I’d called Kolan earlier to arrange a meeting. I had to talk to somebody about what Munck had said, and Loots and Gregory were no use to me; they’d just sympathise. I wanted somebody who knew Nina, and Kolan seemed the obvious, almost the only, choice. But when I called him, his first question was: ‘How did you get my number?’

I tried Munck’s theory on him. ‘There are intelligent life-forms out in space,’ I said, ‘and they’re watching you right now.’

‘Don’t give me that shit. I asked you a question.’

I grinned into the phone. ‘What are you so nervous about?’

‘I’m hanging up –’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute.’ Kolan’s paranoia didn’t bother me;
I’d already prepared an answer. ‘Nina gave it to me once,’ I said. ‘She made me memorise it, in case of an emergency. She told me I had to call you first.’

He seemed satisfied with that. (I’d known he would be; it addressed his vanity.) And once that awkwardness was dispensed with, he agreed to see me.

It was an old house, with tall trees in front of it which resembled the trees outside the clinic. Pieces of plaster and roof-tile had fallen into the garden and a sun-dial lay under a bush, its markings cloaked in moss. Kolan had told me there was a flight of stone steps on the right-hand side of the house. His apartment was at the top. Though it was three in the morning, I could hear music. He was still awake.

I found a door at the top of the steps and knocked on it. I had to knock four times before it opened. Kolan stood there, holding a cigarette. ‘I thought you were the police again.’

‘They’ve been here then?’

He looked past me, into the darkness. ‘You’d better come in.’

The lighting was low in his apartment and there was a stick of incense burning. I watched Kolan as he sat on the threadbare carpet and began to roll a joint.

‘Was it Munck?’ I asked him.

‘They didn’t tell me their names.’

‘They always tell you their names.’

‘In that case, I forgot.’

He trickled grass into a cigarette paper that was already filled with a thin roll of tobacco.

‘The police,’ I said. ‘Did one of them chew gum?’

‘Christ, you’re as bad as they are.’

I sat down on a chair by the window. His music reminded me of the music they play when something unpleasant’s about to happen. You hear it in airports and mental homes. You hear it at the dentist as well. Sometimes you hear it as you lift out of an anaesthetic.

‘They told you about the car,’ I said.

‘Yeah.’

‘They’re saying she might’ve been killed.’ I paused. ‘They think I might’ve done it.’

He licked the narrow strip of glue on the cigarette paper and stuck it down, then he ran his finger and thumb along the length of it several times, making sure it was sealed. There was a kind of fussy expertise about the way he built his joints. He should’ve been exhibiting at country fairs, along with the basket-weavers and the ceramicists.

‘I’ve even got a motive,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

‘She was leaving me. I didn’t want her to.’

‘Do you smoke?’

‘No.’ I reached into my pocket for my bottle of pain-killers. I tipped two pills on to my hand and knocked them back.

‘What’s that you’re taking?’

‘Codeine. For my head.’

‘Yeah, right.’ His joint crackled as he drew on it. He must’ve missed some of the seeds. ‘Her frame of mind,’ he said. ‘I’ve been doing some thinking about it.’

Something had been worrying her. He had the feeling that was why she’d asked him over on Tuesday night. And she’d made a date to see him on the Wednesday, too. He often sat in her apartment while she talked. He never said much. What happened was, she’d launch into a kind of monologue. But he had to be there, otherwise she couldn’t do it. Sometimes there were drugs as well, to help the process. He’d score for her. There was someone in the 15th district, out near the cemetery. He could get them anything they wanted.

‘She won’t do it herself. Thinks it’s squalid.’ Kolan’s voice pinched as he held the smoke inside his lungs. ‘If I’d seen her Wednesday night, that’s what would’ve happened.’

‘You’ve no idea what it was?’

He studied the roach. Then he brought it to his lips, inhaled three times quickly, dropped it on to a saucer. ‘I was thinking about her being worried,’ he said, ‘and it reminded me of something else.’

She’d called him a couple of weeks back. She’d had a strange
experience. A man had walked up to her on the street and he’d shown her a picture of herself. She didn’t know the man. She’d never seen him before. He was a complete stranger. But it was definitely a picture of her. It unsettled her. Maybe she’d been living the wrong way, she said. She couldn’t explain it. It was just a feeling. But things had to change. A different job, a different apartment. Maybe even a different country.

‘She told me I could come too.’

Kolan smiled absent-mindedly. Then he started to roll another joint. He had to keep scraping his hair back behind his ears, otherwise it fell over his face and he couldn’t see what he was doing.

‘Maybe that’s what she did,’ he said. ‘Maybe she just left and decided not to take me after all. Or she just forgot.’ The smile was still there – absent-minded, self-deprecating. ‘Keys in a car, it’s like clothes on a beach, you know what I mean? It’s a smokescreen. It’s the kind of thing she’d do.’

I thought about it for a while. I remembered what she’d said on the street that night, just before I turned away from her.
There’s too much going on. I need some time.
Then I remembered what had happened just before that.

‘What is it?’ Kolan said.

‘It’s something she said that night. I forgot all about it.’ A chill spread across my shoulderblades. It was in my hair as well, at the back. ‘She said there was someone staring at her. Following her. She said she’d seen him before.’ I looked at Kolan. ‘You think it was the same man?’

‘Don’t know. Could be.’

‘This man she told you about,’ I said. ‘She didn’t know him, but he had a picture of her.’

‘Right.’

‘What kind of picture was it?’

‘It was a photograph.’

‘How did he get hold of it?’

‘Who knows?’ Kolan stood up and walked over to the stereo. ‘She wasn’t really interested in the guy with the picture. Not in itself, anyway. It was what they meant, that’s what interested her. She
saw it as a sign, an omen.’ Once he’d changed the music, he sat down again. He was holding his new joint between his fingers and looking at it. ‘Or maybe she saw it as a warning.’

‘Did she tell you what he looked like?’

‘You’re not listening, man. She wasn’t interested.’ He lit the joint and took his first hit off it, then he lay back on a pile of cushions. ‘She said there was something weird about him. The way he looked at her or something.’

When I got back to the hotel I called Munck. He didn’t answer. Well, perhaps that wasn’t so surprising, at five-thirty in the morning. I tried again just after sunrise. This time he was there, yawning into the phone. I told him what had happened at the railway station.

‘She seemed afraid suddenly,’ I said. ‘She asked me to walk her to her car.’ I paused. ‘I thought it might be important.’

‘This man,’ Munck said. ‘Did she say anything about him?’

‘She’d said she’d seen him before.’

‘She didn’t describe him to you, though?’

‘No.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘I don’t know. I forgot all about it.’

Munck didn’t say anything.

‘You don’t think she was just imagining it, do you?’ I said. ‘I mean, that’s what I thought at the time.’

‘Excuse me, Martin.’ Munck spoke to someone who was in the room with him, then came back on the line. ‘We’ll check with Central Station, see if they can tell us anything.’

After he’d hung up, I lay on my bed thinking about what Kolan had told me. What I realised was this: for all her unpredictability, Nina was a still point. She was attractive, in the literal sense: people were drawn to her. She was the box of matches for their stack of firewood. This could be good or bad. There was loyalty and then there was obsession. They shared the same root.
He’d kill someone if I asked him to.

My eyes were closing. I could have slept, but I resisted it. I had the feeling I was getting somewhere.

So. Things collected around her. Things accrued. I imagined she was often surprised when she found out. No, more than surprised. Astonished.

Even, sometimes, frightened.

That was one way her disappearance could’ve come about. The man with the photograph was a blueprint for it. Leave that magnetic quality in place, but change the situation, change the details. Funny. I’d always thought of her as somebody who made things happen. I’d thought that was her brand of magic, her particular gift. I’d thought that was her. Now I wasn’t so sure.

What if you turned the whole thing round?

Suddenly I saw her as the centre of an area of ignorance. She was ignorant of how she was being affected, and ignorant, in turn, of her effect. You could map it like an earthquake. Where she was, the ignorance was at its most intense. It wasn’t stupidity exactly; more a simple lack of knowledge or awareness, which wasn’t the same thing at all.

Just before I fell asleep, a question floated to the surface. I’d been thinking about Nina, yes – but hadn’t I also, in some indirect way, been thinking about myself?

The next night I sat in the Elite drinking beer. Beside me, there was a stool with no one on it. The stool unsettled me. I didn’t know who was going to sit there first, Nina or Bruno Visser. I tried to distract myself by looking round. A girl was dancing on the low stage to my left. She had the fixed smile of an air hostess as she drew a pale feather boa between her legs. There were the usual men, middle-aged and nondescript, their faces absorbed but, at the same time, curiously bland and empty of expression.

I saw the dark car back away from me, its tyres like treacle on the tarmac. Towards the end of my last conversation with Munck I’d asked him if I was under surveillance. ‘Not so far as I know,’ he’d replied. But if it wasn’t the police, then surely it had to be Visser, didn’t it? I saw him propped against that concrete pillar in his expensive winter coat. Of course he could always claim that he was
merely concerned for my welfare. What had he said on the phone once?
It’s important that we don’t lose touch.
But following me in a car with the lights switched off? Wasn’t he taking things a bit far?