The Insult Read online

  I sat on a bench outside Visser’s office, waiting for someone to call my name. It was early evening; through the open window I could hear birds settling in the trees. Just before dawn, two of the night-staff had found me hiding (their word) in the broom cupboard. They assumed I was having another of my depressive episodes. They even suspected that I might be harbouring suicidal thoughts, that I might have been about to swallow bleach or some other convenient domestic poison.

  The fools!

  Almost a week had passed since the revelation in the gardens. I’d spent the time constructively, exploring my condition. In the wash-room first, then in the broom cupboard. There were no windows in the broom cupboard. There was no gap at the bottom of the door. It was here, in absolute darkness, that I was able properly to test my theories. (I also believed – mistakenly, as it turned out – that I might have more privacy.) I would wait until everyone was asleep, then I’d tiptoe down the ward, out through the swing-doors, along the corridor and left, into the broom cupboard. Once inside, I carried out a series of simple experiments. I read the labels on bottles of disinfectant. I counted the strands on a mop. I tracked the progress of a spider as it crossed the cracked concrete floor and climbed the wall. It didn’t take me long to reach a conclusion: night was my ally and my vision was in some way linked to it. In other words, I could see – but only in the dark.

  My name was called. I tapped my way into Visser’s office.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Martin.’

  He was most curious to learn more about what he referred to as my ‘adventure in the cupboard’. He wanted to understand my motivation. What could I tell him, though? I couldn’t think of anything. Also, I was distracted by his physical appearance. My brief glimpse of him in the wash-room had not been misleading. He did have a moustache. Thick and brown, it was. Lustrous. And yet, when I asked him to describe himself, he hadn’t mentioned it. Why not? Could it be that he was sensitive about it? (Sometimes it hides a weak upper lip.) My God, a moustache – I’d never have guessed. I thought he looked a bit like a dictator. Not Hitler. It wasn’t that kind of moustache. More like Stalin.

  ‘Well?’ Visser was still waiting.

  Sweat began to accumulate on the inside of my elbows. Then, out of nowhere, inspiration: ‘It must be something to do with not seeing anything.’ I was making it up, but it sounded plausible.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I faltered, and then plunged on, ‘maybe I was putting myself in a place where nobody could see anything. The kind of place where it doesn’t matter who’s blind and who isn’t. I mean, in a broom cupboard everyone’s blind, right?’ I smiled. ‘Maybe that’s what I was after, the feeling of being the same as everybody else.’

  ‘That’s why you were in the broom cupboard?’

  ‘Well, it’s a thought.’

  ‘See how this sounds.’ Visser paused. ‘You’re finding it hard to deal with the world, to come to terms with it, so you turn your back on it. You isolate yourself. You hide.’

  I leaned back. ‘Mmm,’ I said. ‘Interesting.’

  The whole premise was a fabrication – and yet Visser had swallowed it. How could I respect the man when I could so effortlessly steer him away from the truth?

  And what is the truth? I asked myself later, as I walked out of his office. Each time the sun sets, I begin to see. Each sunrise I go blind.

  As yet, I had no explanation for this.

  Since becoming nocturnal, I’d learned something else about Smulders: he talked in his sleep. I stayed awake for hours, listening to his monologues. They were exactly like the announcements you hear on station platforms. This was Smulders being nostalgic, I decided. Smulders returning to happier days, when he still worked for the railways. He was particularly keen on departures and arrivals, the times, as always, strangely fastidious, almost neurotic: the 5.44 to somewhere, the 21.16 to somewhere else. And, every now and then, there were warnings, prevarications, excuses – especially excuses. A train had derailed. Points had failed. There was a cow on the line, or a child. Or a leaf.

  I became addicted. Smulders sent me on journeys I had never thought of (once I even left the country!). Smulders offered me rail passes. Smulders marooned me on the platforms of obscure provincial stations, then told me that the next train wasn’t due for three hours. I ate terrible food at stainless-steel kiosks. I got indigestion. Chilblains. Flu. Smulders apologised and I forgave him. His announcements took me out of the closed world of the clinic and put me somewhere else, somewhere real. They could often have the same effect as lullabies, long lists of destinations taking the place of sheep.

  Then, one night, Smulders didn’t talk. I waited in the darkness, ears cocked. Nothing. Not even a murmur. Somehow I resented it; this was a service I’d come to expect, rely on. How else was I going to get through the night? I wasn’t going to risk another visit to the broom cupboard and I was tired of making maps out of the cracks on the ceiling. I wanted entertaining. I wanted announcements.

  I decided to try something.

  I crept across the gap between our beds. I paused. Smulders was asleep, his breathing coarse as someone tearing lettuce. I stooped over him. There was an intriguing shape to Smulders. It was as if his belly was the clumsy packaging for something else. Strip away the blubber and you’d come across it: a large cardboard box, containing some kind of domestic appliance. A TV, maybe. A Jumbo microwave. A tumble-dryer. I stooped lower. Ah yes. The reek. The stench. The butter trapped in trenches that were almost bottomless. I placed my lips as close to his ear as I dared. I composed myself. Then, softly, I began: ‘Ch . . . . . Ch . . . . . Ch . . . . . Ch . . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . . Ch . . .’

  A big round moan rose from Smulders’ lips –

  ‘Ch-Ch . . . Ch-Ch . . . Ch-Ch . . . Ch-Ch . . .’

  – but he could not resist: ‘The train now departing …’

  I tiptoed back to bed.

  He kept it up for more than an hour. There were the usual time-tables. There were details of various connections. And there was something new – a convoluted explanation of the reason why a commuter train scheduled for an 18.04 departure had been cancelled, together with an appropriately long-winded apology. I lay there imagining the people massed in front of the departures board, their faces at angles of forty-five degrees. They’d be fuming. I smiled and turned on to my comfortable side.

  The last thing I heard before I fell asleep that night was a reminder that smoking was forbidden on all platforms. I imagined that Smulders, with his great appetite for cigarettes and the freedom, presumably, to smoke them in his office, must always have relished that particular announcement.

  ‘You have a visitor,’ Nurse Janssen told me.

  Visser stood beside her. I detected an exchange of glances that I didn’t understand. The thick air of conspiracy hung around my bed.

  ‘Someone to see you,’ Nurse Janssen said.

  I raised myself a little higher on my pillows. ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s your fiancée, Claudia.’

  She’d visited before, apparently, while I was either medicated or unconscious. I’d been told how she would sit beside my bed with one of my hands in both of hers. A lovely girl, Claudia; that was the general consensus. It had even been suggested that her devotion had helped to pull me through.

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. I didn’t like people gushing, I never had; I didn’t like mindless sentimentality – and it surprised me to discover that not only Nurse Janssen (predictable, perhaps) but also Visser (Visser!) might be prone to it. And as for the idea of someone holding my hand without me knowing, it suddenly struck me as a violation, an obscenity – even if that someone was my fiancée.

  ‘Aren’t you pleased?’ Nurse Janssen said.

  ‘Where is she?’ I said.

  They led me to a room I’d never known was there. It didn’t seem to belong with the draughty, antiseptic corridors and hallways of the clinic. Smelling of sponge cake, wood-polish and c
ut flowers, it was more like the drawing-room in a country house. I waited for Claudia in an armchair by the window.

  Before too long she came quietly into the room and sat down in the chair next to mine.

  ‘You look just the same,’ she said.

  I turned to face her. ‘I can’t see you.’

  I was lying, of course. I’d asked them to dim the lamps in the room before they left. They probably thought it was for reasons of modesty or romance. It was nothing of the kind. It was so I could look at her.

  She began to cry.

  I studied her closely. Her narrow knees were pressed together and her head was bowed. She’d altered her hairstyle, drawing it sleekly back behind her ears. She’d fastened it with a piece of dark velvet. The colour was hard to make out against the light, but I imagined it was purple. She’d always liked purple.

  Her shoulders shook inside her cardigan. I felt sorry for her, but in the way you might feel sorry for a stranger you saw crying in a public place – sitting beside a fountain, say, or standing at a bus-stop. There was nothing personal about it. On the contrary, I felt removed from her. Distanced. I felt so distant that I was almost curious to know the reason for her tears.

  At last, she sat up straighter in her chair. She wiped her face with a hand that seemed clumsy; it was as if she’d lost the use of it, as if it had been broken at the wrist. That slender wrist. There was a time when it had meant something.

  She apologised for not visiting me during the past few weeks. She’d had examinations. She reminded me that she was studying to be a lawyer.

  ‘Did you pass?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded.

  I congratulated her.

  Outside, it was September. The wasps on the windowsill were drowsy, and there were fires burning in the fields beyond the clinic wall. I saw Visser and Janssen walking through the orchard, among the pear trees, her dark head bent, his moustache mysterious in the half-light.

  After a long silence, and so abruptly that I jumped, Claudia offered to come and live with me. She’d cook, she’d clean. She’d see to my every need. Her face tilted eagerly.

  I tried to conceal my horror.

  ‘What about your career?’

  ‘I’d give it up.’ She lowered her voice. ‘For you.’

  I found myself launching into a speech; it was completely unrehearsed, but the way it flowed from my lips without any prompting or effort, I might have been practising for months. I couldn’t possibly ask such a sacrifice of her, I said. Since the shooting and the operations that followed it, I’d become erratic, demanding – even violent. In short, I’d changed. And I couldn’t bear to burden her with such responsibility. She should leave me now, today, avoiding what would only be a far more painful parting in the future. I had, in any case, never been good enough for her – I held up a hand as she tried to interrupt – my father a post-office clerk in the provinces, now retired, hers a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Education. Leave me now, I told her, while our memories were unblemished, while we still had respect for one another and were free of bitterness and resentment, while we could still avoid recriminations. After all, she had her whole life in front of her (yes, I actually used that line!). She should find some young man who could provide her with the kind of future she deserved. I’d be better off with my doctors and nurses – people who understood my condition, and were trained to deal with it. As I was talking, I realised what an enormous relief it was to be able finally to put an end to our relationship. I’d just been waiting for a good opportunity, the right excuse. I wondered how long it would’ve taken if I hadn’t been shot in the head. Years, probably.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘if I don’t show you to the door.’

  She began to cry again, her mouth crumpling, curving downwards, despite her efforts to straighten it, as if there were tiny weights attached to the corners.

  I turned away from her, gazed vaguely into the room. I even wobbled my head a little, the way blind people often do. I heard her gather up her coat and rush out.

  With Claudia gone, some kind of atmosphere or trance appeared to lift, its departure smooth, almost imperceptible – one level of reality shedding another. It reminded me of lying in bed at night when I was young. Sometimes a car passed and its headlamps entered the room. The way the block of light slid along the wall. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with the car in the street outside or the sound of an engine. And yet the two were linked. That was the feeling I had suddenly. I was no longer sure why I’d acted the way I had. I hardly recognised myself. Was this the new personality they’d been talking about? If so, wasn’t it rather early for it to be manifesting itself? Where was the numbness, the anaesthesia? Where were the suicidal thoughts?

  I sat in my armchair, staring at the fireplace and breathing steadily.

  At last Nurse Janssen came to fetch me. She was surprised that Claudia had left before visiting hours were over. She’d thought that every moment would be precious. No time goes faster, she told me, than the time that star-crossed lovers spend together.

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘The voice of experience.’

  I’d like to have heard her on the subject. I’d like to have known the truth about her and Visser. Were they involved? And, if not, what were they doing walking practically hand in hand among the pear trees? But she would not be sidetracked. All she was interested in was how I’d got on with Claudia. One or two of her nursing colleagues had joined us in the corridor. They were all clamouring to know.

  In the end I gave them the substance of our conversation. I’d felt it only fair, I said, to bring the engagement to an end. I talked of selflessness (my own) and the need, at certain times, for sacrifice. By the time I’d finished, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place. It was all I could do not to wind up with the words, ‘And she was such a lovely girl …’

  During the week that followed, Claudia wrote to me every day, sometimes more than once, catching both the morning and the afternoon post with an efficiency that seemed to augur well for her career in law. Nurse Janssen took it upon herself to read the letters to me. Terrible, heart-wrenching letters they were, too, full of pleading and regret. Fortunately, I’d never been much of a listener; within seconds of hearing the words My dearest Martin, my mind would be somewhere else entirely; there were times when I even drifted off to sleep, exhausted after having been awake for most of the night. I was only dimly aware of the tremble in Nurse Janssen’s voice as Claudia reaffirmed her undying love for me or begged me to reconsider – though, once, Nurse Janssen had to break off altogether, and the rustle of starched cotton told me she was searching the pockets of her uniform for a tissue.

  ‘Are you all right, Nurse?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said tearily. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’ A quick blast and then a sigh. ‘Tell me, Martin, have you spoken to her?’

  I told her that contact would only raise the poor girl’s hopes. It was better to maintain a silence, no matter how punishing that might be – for everyone.

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘I am.’

  At the end of that week, just after midnight, the door to the ward swung open and, unexpectedly, Nurse Janssen appeared. My first reaction was one of dread; another letter had arrived – delivered by hand, no doubt – and she’d come in to read it to me. It must be something urgent – a threat of suicide, perhaps. I could think of no other reason for Nurse Janssen being there at midnight. I’d heard the hour strike and, like all regular staff, Nurse Janssen went off duty at nine. I peered at her as she approached, but I could see nothing resembling a letter in her hand.

  Smulders was mumbling. ‘All trains … delayed … signal failure …’

  Nurse Janssen stopped at the foot of my bed. I didn’t understand what she was doing, and she didn’t seem about to offer an explanation. In fact, now I thought about it, her behaviour seemed strangely automatic, trance-like. Could it be that she was walking in her sleep?

&n
bsp; As I stared at her, she removed her starched white hat and let it fall silently to the floor. Then she reached up and began to unpin her hair, her bare arms forming a pale diamond-shape against the darkness. Her hair tumbled on to her shoulders. She tilted her head to one side, so her hair hung down, vertical as a curtain, and bounced the tips of it on her upturned hand, as though testing its weight. It was an overwhelmingly erotic gesture. I propped myself higher on my pillows, but couldn’t bring myself to speak.

  She didn’t seem to be aware of me at all. First she kicked off one shoe, then the other. Her hands lifted simultaneously to the top button of her cotton blouse, which slowly parted beneath her fingers. White lace showed underneath. She eased out of the blouse, her breasts pushing forwards, the points of her shoulders smooth and round. I watched the blouse float to the floor behind her.

  ‘… delays of up to an hour … try the buffet… east side of the station … hot coffee and fresh rolls …’

  Nurse Janssen casually leaned sideways, the skin creasing between her right hip and her bottom rib, and unfastened the catch on her skirt. The zipper’s I became a V. She began to push the skirt down, over her hips. It was tight. She had to shift her weight from one foot to the other; she almost had to wriggle. The skirt dropped to her ankles and she stepped out of it.

  Now she reached both hands behind her, her top teeth gripping her bottom lip. Her breasts rose in their lace cups, then toppled forwards as the bra came loose. They were much as I’d imagined them: a heavy curve up to the nipples, which were wide and dark. Bending over, she slipped her thumbs inside her knickers. Her hair drifted across her face, concealing it. Light caught her breasts as they swung out into the air and trembled. I came into my hand.

  Smiling faintly, as if aware of her effect on me, she straightened up again.

  ‘Nurse?’ I whispered.

  She wasn’t looking at me. She was still smiling, though. Blissfully. Into the distance.

  ‘I’m talking to you, Nurse.’

  She knelt at the foot of the bed and began to gather up her clothes.