The Insult Read Free Page A

have been anybody’s.
    I tried the same thing with the man in the next bed. His name was Smulders. He used to work for the national railways, first as a signalman and, later, as a station announcer. Then he got cataracts in both eyes. They’d operated during the summer, but the results had been disappointing. I asked him the obvious question, just to start him talking: ‘Can you see anything at all?’
    ‘Sometimes I see dancing girls. They move across in front of me, legs kicking, like they’re on a stage.’ Smulders took a breath. His lungs bubbled.
    He must be a smoker, I thought. Forty a day, non-filter. The tips of two of his fingers appeared, stained yellow by the nicotine.
    ‘Anything else?’ I said.
    ‘Dogs.’
    ‘Dogs? What kind of dogs?’
    ‘Poodles. With ribbons and bows all over them.’
    ‘No trains?’
    ‘Once.’ Smulders chuckled. ‘It was the 6.23, I think. Packed, it was.’
    He talked on, about his work, his colleagues, his passion for all things connected with the railways; he talked for hours. But nothing came. Nothing except a pair of black spectacles, their lenses stainedthe same colour as the fingertips. Then I realised that they belonged to a friend of my father’s, a man who used to work at the post office, in Sorting. I couldn’t seem to picture Smulders at all. Somehow his breathing got in the way, like frosted glass.
    These were, in any case, minor entertainments, scant moments of distraction. There were days, whole days, when I lay in bed without moving. Almost without thinking. The TV cackled and muttered, the way a caged bird might. Meals came and went on metal trolleys – hot, damp smells that were lurid, rotten, curiously tropical. My head felt as if it had been wrapped in cloth, layer upon layer of it. I often had to fight for breath. Once I tried to tear the covering from my face, but all I found beneath my fingernails was skin.
    My skin.
    There was no covering, of course.
    Nurse Janssen sat with me each morning, her voice in the air beside me. It was still a kind of seed, yet I could grow nothing from it, no comfort, no desire. I’d lost all my wit, my ingenuity.
    ‘How’s your face?’ she asked me.
    ‘You tell me.’
    ‘It’s looking much better. How does it feel?’
    ‘Feels all right.’
    ‘You know, there are three trees outside your window,’ she said, ‘three beautiful trees. They’re pines.’
    If this was an attempt at consolation, it was misconceived, hopelessly naive. I stared straight ahead. ‘Pines, you say?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I can smell them.’
    ‘It’s a beautiful smell, isn’t it?’
    I scowled. ‘If you like toilet cleaner.’
    Later that day I picked up one of my rubber balls and threw it into the blankness in front of me. Now that was beautiful, the silence of the ball travelling through the air, an unseen arc, and then the splintering of glass. I hadn’t realised there might be a windowthere. I saw the impact as a flower blooming, from tight green bud to petals in less than a second. It was like those programmes on TV where they speed a natural process up.
    The next morning Visser put me on a course of medication. I took the drug in liquid form. It was acrid, syrupy in texture, but I didn’t make any fuss. I drank it down and then lay back, waiting for the effect.
    What happens is this:
    The world shrinks. The world’s a ball of dust. It rolls silently along the bottom of a wall, meaningless and round. You watch it go. You don’t have to think about it any more. It’s got nothing to do with you, nothing whatsoever.
    You’d wave goodbye to it if you could lift your arm.

Not long after I surfaced from the anaesthetic, Visser visited me. He told me that he had replaced the missing bone with a piece of precision-engineered titanium. The fit was perfect; he’d checked it with a CT scan. There had been no complications, nor was there any trace of infection – at least not so far. The entire operation had taken less than four hours.