Free The Insult by Rupert Thomson Page A

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 backalong 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