Free The Insult by Rupert Thomson

luck in our family; there never had been. I thought of her room with its pop-star posters and its shelves of sporting trophies and awards. A museum to her golden childhood. Anyone would think she was dead. I looked round quickly. I hadn’t meant to laugh out loud.
    I heard the french windows open behind me. My father joined me on the lawn. ‘Bit damp out.’ He stood there in his sheepskin coat, peering intently at the sky, half-smiling. I was sure that he’d been sent outside by my mother, to talk to me. He had the look of someone who had drawn the short straw.
    He was a slow man, my father. Life was something he’d entered into reluctantly and withdrew from whenever possible. It came as no surprise to most people to discover that his hobby was collecting snails – though hobby was probably too weak a word for it: it was more of a passion, an obsession. When he worked at the post office, for example, he used to keep a photograph of his favourite snail on the desk in frontof him (of his wife and family, there was no sign). The snails lived in a shed at the bottom of the garden. Their cages were fish tanks, which he’d bought second-hand and then converted. He’d built the environments himself: first a layer of sand, then one of earth and, lastly, various assorted pieces of bark, broken flower-pot and moss. Each cage had a pane of glass fitted over the top of it and weighed down with a stone to stop the snails escaping. He kept a notebook which was filled with observations about their ages, their distinguishing features, even the composition of their faeces. He gave them bizarre names, the kind of names that would have suited racehorses – Bronze Mantle, Lightning, Columella Girl. I remember asking him once if the names were supposed to be ironic. He gave me a blank look. He claimed they referred to individual characteristics.
    ‘Lightning, though?’ I said.
    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