The Insult by Rupert Thomson Read Free Book Online Page B

landing that was unfamiliar to me. The air was still, the floor littered with empty pill bottles, old magazines, bits of broken glass. I noticed a dandelion flower floating motionless above me, as though it had been there for centuries. Dead flies lay on the windowsill in heaps. At the far end of the landing was a door with a horizontal bar on it. I leaned on the bar and the door opened. A cool night wind. The roof. But which part of it?
    I picked my way through heating-vents, fuel-gauges, pipes, my shoes sticking to the soft, tarred surface. There was a sudden rush of air above my head. Pigeons. I heard the clock strike three, each note blown out of shape by the wind and the cold. No walkway anywhere; no lit windows. I reached the edge of the roof and lifted my face towards the sky. I could smell salt now – no more than a trace element, but it was there. It was the sea that I could smell, pushing against low dunes some twenty kilometres to the west. The city lay south-east of where I stood, its skyline of domes and spires concealed behind a ridge.
    I climbed on to the parapet, feeling like a swimmer at the beginning of a race. I bent from the waist and stretched my arms out past my ears. Then peered down. A drop of thirty metres, maybe more. I wasn’t tempted. Those thoughts of suicide that Visser had predicted, they’d never be mine. I had to reshape my life, that was all. I would live the way people lived in primitive societies, only the other way round: I’d get up when the sun went down and go to bed when it came up again. I was glad it would be winter soon. What good was daylight to me? No good at all. It was an obstacle, a hindrance – the last thing I needed. I remembered Claudia’s idea – how she wanted to look after me. I imagined her constant presence, her careful ministrations. I shuddered. It would have ruined everything.
    ‘Martin?’
    I jumped.
    ‘What are you doing, Martin?’
    I saw Nurse Janssen standing by the door to the roof.
    ‘Nothing,’ I called across to her. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’
    I straightened up and watched her walk towards me, the wind flattening her thin cotton nightgown against her belly and thighs. Was this another of her routines?
    ‘Aren’t you cold?’ I said.
    ‘Don’t worry about me.’ She stepped up on to the parapet and stood beside me, looking out into the darkness.
    ‘Careful,’ I said. ‘It’s a long way down.’
    She laughed, though somewhat breathlessly.
    ‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘You could fall.’
    ‘And I suppose you couldn’t?’
    I turned to face her. The way she looked just then, I could have kissed her. Her eyes were so dark that I could only see the core of silver in the pupil. Her dark hair, which was usually pinned close to her head in a tight, sexless coil, now hung loose, touching her shoulders lightly, the way willow branches touch the ground. Her face, a little blurred, still held the memory of sleep. I wished I could ask her about the night she walked up to my bed and took off all her clothes. Did she do that kind of thing often? Or was it just for me? (For me, I hoped.) What was the pleasure she derived from it? I remembered how she smiled when I came; not gratified exactly, not merely amused either – a smile that was as enigmatic in its way as that moustache of Visser’s. I had so many questions, but each and every one of them was dangerous. Because they weren’t really questions at all. They were admissions. Confessions. They were keys turning in locks, nails in my coffin.
    ‘What’s your name?’ I asked her.
    ‘You know my name.’
    ‘Your Christian name, I mean.’
    ‘Maria.’
    I smiled. It suited her.
    ‘Do you think it’s wise,’ she said, ‘coming up here?’
    ‘Wise?’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’ I stepped down off the parapet and leaned on it. ‘It’s just, I’ve always been a private person. I don’t like crowds.’ The wind had dropped; I wondered how long it was till dawn. ‘It’s hard being on