Free The Insult by Rupert Thomson Page B

was going. Who were my friends? Robert, Daphne, Hermann, Paul. Max and Irene. Oh yes, and Patrice. Was that all? There were a few people from the bookstore, too, of course. The boss, Mr Schlamm. Iris, who I’d had a thing about. Another Robert. They’d sent flowers to the clinic. Cards as well. They’d done their bit. Most people were busy, or lazy. I knew what they’d think. He’ll get in touch sooner or later. When he’s ready. That suited me. Now I’d drawn up a list, I realised there weren’t too many of them, anyway. It was a relief to me that I wasn’t more popular. There was less likelihood of an uncomfortable coincidence. If I did run into someone on the street, someone I knew, I’d just pretend I hadn’t seen them. Nothing personal. I simply wanted to start again, with no awkwardness and no comparisons – no past. I wanted my life to begin with the shooting, as though that stranger’s bullet had given birth to me, as though the pain I felt in that split-second was the pain of a baby being catapulted from the womb.
    When I returned from the bar, my parents were in the drawing-room. My father offered me a schnapps, which I accepted. I chose the moment to inform them of my decision.
    ‘I’m leaving,’ I said. ‘Tonight, probably.’
    I pressed my face to the cold glass as the train rushed north through endless fields of beet. I remembered something Visser had said about rebuilding the relationship between myself and my parents. It would take time, he said. We would have to be patient withone another. He was sure that, in the end, some kind of harmony could be achieved.
    But there were things he didn’t understand about my parents, things I hadn’t told him. My sister had died as a result of misdiagnosed appendicitis when she was twelve. I couldn’t honestly remember her at all – I was five at the time – but everybody said she was a bright, fun-loving girl without a care in the world. Her name was Gabriela. I wasn’t like her – never had been – and I’d always had the feeling that, if my parents had been forced to choose between us, if they could have said which one of us they were prepared to lose, it would have been me, not her. Yet I was the one they were left with. And this knowledge, this frustration, was something they couldn’t quite shake off. On my first evening home, it was my reference to the death of someone close that had so upset my mother. I also thought that what had happened to me in some way reminded my parents of what had happened to Gabriela. Their grief rebounded between the two terrible events; it had grown with time, rather than diminishing, as grief usually does. I doubted this was something they’d get over. Even our family name had a morbid, rather lugubrious ring to it. Blam would have been a gunshot (quite appropriate, actually), but Blom was a tolling bell, that gloomy m reverberating: Blommm … Blommm … Blommm … Blommm …
    Yes, Visser was wrong.
    I peered at the bleak, unyielding landscape. My parents would be sitting at the kitchen table, eating a supper of cold meat, pickles, soda bread. Upstairs, in Gabriela’s room, the ice-skating trophies, ballet certificates, pictures of pop-stars who were also, mostly, dead. She would have been thirty-six next month.
    Both my parents cried when I left. My mother first, her weeping so violent that I thought her body wouldn’t stand it. My father later, just before the taxi came – silent, almost sacrificial tears. I didn’t tell them where I was going. I didn’t promise to write or phone either. There was nothing heartless about this; it was as much for their comfort and well-being as for mine. Though the more I thought about it, the moreI realised my plan demanded it. I now saw my visit for what it was. Not a convalescence, not a reunion at all, but a leavetaking – a goodbye.
    It was late evening by the time the train pulled into Central Station. I stepped down on to the platform, my cane in one hand, my