The Truth Commissioner

by David Park

  It had begun good-humouredly enough with a competition in the sea-front shops to buy the tackiest shark souvenir and even he had participated, purchasing a bottle opener shaped like open jaws, and close to the beach they had bunkered up at a little bar with a veranda under a makeshift canopy of tarpaulin to compare their purchases. It was a no contest in the end when Simon produced a little plastic toilet from which a shark’s head appeared as it was flushed. They had drunk beer from bottles and he felt comfortable enough, still able to enjoy the prospect of shaping the rest of the time available. He had started to imagine that there might be dancing after the meal, started to consider how she might feel in his arms, but the intense pleasure of that was broken when they were approached by a couple of white kids distributing fliers and selling the prospect of cage-diving. If they had been pushing the finest cocaine, or free sex, Stanfield could not have imagined it inducing a more excited reaction and despite his attempted dismissal of the idea, with what he seemingly alone considered a series of witty ripostes about having met enough sharks in court over the years, within a few moments the whole group was entirely sold on the excursion. And then all at once the tables were turned and for the first time he found himself on the receiving end of their collective kickback. So as he listened intently, his smile growing a little thinner by the minute, he heard them tell him that it would be ‘the experience of a lifetime’, that it was ‘the very latest and very best thing’, that it was totally safe and there was ‘nothing to be frightened of. This imputation of fear sees the final trace of his smile fade and forces him into some heavy-handed and embarrassingly pathetic references to his responsibility for collective safety, and a series of rhetorical questions about how it would look if he were to lose one of the working party to a shark. As his words tumble inelegantly out he knows he sounds like a parent of unruly children, or a teacher admonishing his wayward charges, and in desperation he tries to save the day by conjuring facetious newspaper headlines that announce something about a shark eating a shark, but he can’t quite find the killer one he’s looking for and so in full retreat he holds his hands in the air and surrenders.

  There are times like this when the sad reality that he is of a different generation impinges sharply on his consciousness, reminding him that he is in fact more than old enough to be the father of most of them. It’s not just in their clothes and in particular their predisposition to wear multi-pocketed trousers with more zips and buttons than a mechanic’s boiler suit; their incessant texting on mobile phones that are also constantly brandished in the air like badges of honour to take some photograph; it’s not even their laptops and iPods and their curiously innocent embrace of technology like children who have found Hornby train sets under the Christmas tree. It’s in their use of language that he feels it most, the way when they are excited they revert to a minimalist vocabulary that spins on a few self-consciously faux and wearisomely trite examples of adjectival slang, the way they never speak in complete sentences but use a kind of shorthand that appears to serve them admirably in the delivery of both facts and emotions. Every utterance seems to take a short cut, to be bereft of pleasure or style, and he supposes that is why they prefer to get in a steel-framed cage and be lowered in the ocean to get a close-up view of a shark than engage in the more civilised and demanding art of conversation over a meal. He feels a sense of superior sympathy for them as he considers their insatiable need for thrill, thrills of the most base and vulgar types that speak only of an absence of human intelligence and appreciation of life. It’s the generation of the bungee jump, bouncing feverishly up and down on an ever-diminishing return, the generation of ecstasy tablets, of the binge. If he were truly their teacher he would gather them round and try to explain that all his days he has known what it is to be thrilled, show them how to find pleasure in the warmth of that sun-ripened grape that stirs the wine into life – the slow sweet burst of the cluster on the tongue; the aria, the requiem that takes you to the very edge of your own mortality; and above all, far beyond everything else, the thrill of a woman’s body you touch for the first time. Nothing is better than that first moment and so it fills him with regret that in relation to Laura this pleasure is, even superficially, the prerogative of someone else. She wears his engagement ring on her finger and every time it sparkles in the light it sends a shard to his heart that she has given herself to a rugby-playing buffoon in property development who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing, someone who splashes his money on fripperies, each more vulgar than the next, and who seems to spend so much of his life on a sports field or golf course that he wonders what time is left him to give his adoration to the woman of whom he is clearly unworthy. Stanfield wonders if he has ever seen the beauty of her eyes with the same clarity of vision that transfigures him every time he meets their gaze.

  There is still time to change his mind and clamber into one of the suits, ignoring the fact that it will parade his paunch, that he will feel reduced to a common level, but if she were to make her way towards him and lead him by the hand he would undoubtedly follow. However, he knows that it’s already too late – he isn’t sure if it’s to save face or lose it – because she stands with her back to him, one of the group of tar babies who melt seamlessly into each other and whose excited preoccupation acts as a barrier to any interloper. The boat’s engines are cut and the vessel rocks gently in the shifting cradle of the waves but sometimes, as it at the receiving end of a more forceful hand, it dips deeper before rising again. He assumes that they are anchored in the preposterously named Shark Alley and that soon it will be time for the charade to commence. Two of Ahab’s crew carry a sawn-off oil drum and tip its contents over the side. His stomach churns again as he watches a crimson mix of gore and blood stream into the sea, its stain steaming through the water. Without knowing why he thinks of Macbeth’s bloody hands and his words about turning the ocean incarnadine. He feels that there is something intensely primitive about what he’s watching, something redolent of the amphitheatre and barbarous games. At least the modern hunt wraps itself in some aesthetically pleasing rituals and Stanfield feels a surge of resentment against her for her participation, for a second wills her to have too close an encounter, be confronted by the vulgar recklessness of it all. Let her be shaken. Let her need something solid to lean against. Let her have the humility to acknowledge that he was right and then lift her tear-stained eyes towards him for the comfort he will know how to give.

  But his reverie is shattered by the high cries of excitement as they catch the first sighting. They’re pointing, squealing, cameras held aloft like silver-headed flowers seeding light, and despite himself he crosses to where they’ve seen it, rubbing the back of his hand across his mouth in an attempt to erase the sourness. There are two: a kind of galvanised blue-grey colour, smooth stretched skin like wet plastic, bigger than he had anticipated and sleek in the water as if moving in the slipstream of their own silent arrogance. One comes close, a sudden disdainful shadow, perhaps a metre under the surface and then for a second brindled and striped by parabolas of light. The other has gore in its mouth as with a quiver of its tail it shakes blood through the water like exploding dye, its jaws shaking the find the way a terrier might shake a rat. He feels his own heart beat a little faster and directs scorn at himself before shouting a quip to the spectators, but it gets lost in the breaking wave of hysteria and then as cylinders are strapped to backs and the steel cage is hoisted into place, he finds himself in the way and so he makes his unsteady path to a new vantage point.

  Afterwards he is struck most by how their paucity of language leaves them unable to communicate what they have seen. The words tumble out in broken, incoherent fragments until eventually they are reduced to single words and the air quivers like a single plucked string with shouts of ‘unbelievable’, ‘wow’, ‘cool’ and, perhaps the most popular, ‘wicked’. There is a great deal of hugging and high-fiving to which he is not party and when Laura has changed and rushes up to tell him wh
at it was like he avoids looking into her eyes and listens with as much indifference as her excitement will fail to register. When she has finished he nods and smiles, asks her if she likes dancing, but in all the rush of noise she doesn’t hear his question and turns her head away before he can repeat it. Then she pats him on the arm and once again he has to endure the skirmish of light in the rosette of her ring. He watches her return to the backslapping crew of her colleagues whose friendship, now strengthened by shared experience, constructs an exclusion zone round them and feeling his new isolation more keenly than ever he takes himself to the stern of the boat and hunkers down on an upturned crate. The rising spray-ladened wind moistens his face and, as the engine starts up, he watches the sea churn and choke itself on funnels of white foam. He wonders how the sharks feel having had a close experience with the human representatives of the law, of truth and reconciliation. Do they now share their excitement and describe it as ‘wicked’ or ‘cool’? Do they even possess the curse of memory at all? He tries to contain his spreading anger by telling himself that with a little creativity it will shape itself into a good story, that he will be able to mine a rich vein of laughter. Already he constructs a comic portrait of Captain Ahab, searches for a punchline that will send the story spinning into folklore. Of course he will have to reinvent his own role, airbrush the inconvenient parts that go against the flow, but it’s what artists do and above all he is an artist. The screeches and laughter of his team rise up unabated: he cringes as he thinks how often he will have to endure a full-bodied reprise of it all on the homeward journey but then as the boat veers slowly to shore, he comforts himself with the warming thought that he might be able to work the return flight so that she sits beside him. Then the salted bitterness of the air is rendered a little sweeter by the conjured image of her resting her head on his shoulder and as she slips into sleep he imagines the warmth of her breath on his cheek, the way her mouth will be opened slightly and raised towards him like a child’s.

  And more than anything they are children, bright-eyed with idealism and the belief that the report they will present in a month’s time will illuminate the way forward, that they will have played an important part in constructing the way out of the morass, in building a new bridge to healing and forgiveness. So how would they feel if he were to tell them now that it’s all been for the optics, that what will happen and how it will happen has already been agreed, mapped out, and the fixity of the main boundaries established like every continent after every war? A few small disputed areas still exist that might be left as neutral or placed under joint administration but by and large it’s a done deal. So perhaps it was not such a bad thing that they have had their compensatory fun, their day in the sun, even the obligatory ritual of a visit to Robben Island where they were given a tour guided by an ex-prisoner. Afterwards they had a group photograph taken in the entrance to the prison, under the sign which reads: ‘We serve with pride.’

  A snow cloud of petrels flakes thickly around the boat, hovering as if frozen on the layered air before free-falling. He watches and envies the effortless grace of their flight, their balletic eloquence, and then his eye catches something further off. Too big to be anything else. He doesn’t want to admit it at first and then he starts to laugh. He looks around for someone to share the joke with but there’s no one close enough to hear his voice, so when he speaks, the words are for himself:

  ‘ “God save thee, ancient Mariner!

  From the fiends that plague thee thus!

  Why look’st thou so?” – With my cross-bow

  I shot the Albatross.’

  It can’t be anything else. Nothing has that wingspan. The joke is delicious and he feels a rich syrupy laughter lace and warm his throat like the sweet burn of whiskey. It’s an albatross – unbelievably it’s an albatross! He suddenly shivers. Who is he? The Ancient Mariner? A bleached-boned and weary Poseidon? Samson with his locks shorn? He savours the self-mockery and each one fixes the bitterness of his smile deeper in the frozen mask of his face. An albatross! He holds his face up to the white-mottled wrap of sky as a ragged laugh breaks free and he shouts the word ‘Wicked!’ to the falling flakes of petrels that spangle the salted air.

  If he is honest with himself, and there are occasions when he admits the painful benefits of such moments, then he has to admit that it was the job’s title that first prompted his acceptance. ‘Truth Commissioner’ has a nice ring to it and its accompanying salary is almost as generous in its scope. Also in momentary truth, his career in recent years has stalled a little, diverted into the dull-as-dishwater and hopelessly technical sidings of railway-disaster inquiries, or arcane and never-ending reviews of contentious anti-terror legislation. Having moved from what he found to be an increasingly moribund and emotionally stultifying stint at the Bar, to do some work at the International Court and experience the pleasures of a cultured European city, he has continued to live comfortably off his two books on human rights and the law. A couple of years’ lecturing proved rather intoxicating – all those beautiful young women diving for the showered pearls of his words – but rather like an alcoholic working in a liquor store, he knew it was not the most prudent of places to see out his days and so when the opportunity came to be involved in investigations into human-rights abuses in various parts of the world’s cesspits, he grabbed it with both hands. The Balkan business secured his international reputation and no doubt placed him on the short list for similar job offers. However, he was genuinely surprised to be invited personally by the Prime Minister to this present post, one of six on offer, and despite his best cynicism found himself unexpectedly susceptible to that chummy telephone flattery. An Irish Catholic mother and an English Protestant father allow him to straddle both tribes and, despite spending the first twelve years of his life in a leafy suburb of Belfast, he has no personal or political baggage to be unpacked by either side. Not even any meaningful or sharp memories to prick him towards anything as strong as a prejudice.

  The job title has a magisterial ring to it but also a rather totalitarian, industrial edge and he enjoys this juxtaposition of ideas. But what he enjoys most is thinking of the book that will surely come out of it and already he’s batting ideas around for the title – The Whole Truth … Nothing but the Truth … perhaps even The Freedom of Truth. He dismisses them all as too hackneyed and obvious, like Perry Mason potboilers. As yet he is undecided on the book’s genre and it’s possible that he might include autobiographical material, give accounts of some of the phases of his career including the most dramatic parts of his human-rights work. He toys with the idea of eschewing a dry academic work and writing for a more populist market, imagines readings at literary festivals in sleepy English towns in marquees garlanded by delicate braids of sunlight.

  There is another reason, of course, that prompted his acceptance but there’s a limit to how far truth can be allowed to journey so he’s not quite prepared to admit, even to himself, that having a daughter living in the North might also have been a significant factor. A daughter called Emma whom he hasn’t seen for five years. A curious coincidence, he tells himself instead, the type of coincidence that life inevitably throws up. That’s all.

  The one thing, however, he knows is that whatever rewards accrue as a result of his acceptance, he will have earned them, not least the fact that he will spend the next two years living in a city that he considers much the same way as he might think of a piece of dirt that he hoped he had shaken off his shoe. It’s true that they’ve given him a rather luxurious apartment overlooking the river and sought to accommodate every possible requirement, and it’s also true that he’s only an hour’s flight away from his London home and Hampstead Heath, but the thought of the actual job precludes any wild surge of pleasure. Still, there is the young team that has been assembled to service the process and of course, and not least, the lovely brown-eyed Laura whose faltering interview required a rather large helping hand before the post was hers. Still, in comparison to the demands of
some of his fellow commissioners, it was a small price for them to pay. He thinks with disdain of the Finnish commissioner, the squat little barrel of a woman with truncated legs whose two preposterous poodles have been allowed to sidestep the laws of quarantine; of the obligatory South African judge who seems to have ensconced a veritable tribe of relations in a most desirable residence in the very heart of Hillsborough.

  He wishes it were Laura who stood beside him now and not Beckett who stands his customary ten feet away, the nothing-to-say, red-haired Beckett who has been appointed by the PSNI as his protection officer and driver. Beckett in his grey Marks and Spencer’s suit and shiny shoes, who is silent as a Trappist monk. The early-morning air is cold and edged by a razor wind that cuts at the cheekbones and pinches the eyes into narrow slits. It’s always good to show willing but he wonders why his presence was deemed necessary – something no doubt to do with the constantly reiterated and linchpin word ‘transparency’. It’s impossible to speak to those in authority without hearing it drip from their tongues like honey, usually coupled with some vacuous statement about the ‘integrity of the process’. Transparency and integrity – words no doubt that help the user feel ennobled and elevated to a higher plane than his listeners.

  So what he is now watching is supposed to be the practical implementation of these concepts and as the first security vans and police vehicles begin to wind their way through the harbour estate he pulls up the collar of his overcoat. Elliot, Simon and Matteo stand at the door of the shipyard’s old and long-defunct drawing office ready to receive the first delivery, the identification badges in their lapels and the metal clips on their boards blinking weakly with reflected winter light. Behind them stands a phalanx of clerical assistants and members of the private security firm who have won the public tender for the work. He has already been given an inspection tour of the building’s restoration and refurbishment, observed the high-tech security system – clearly not the one used by the Northern Bank – with the infra-red scans and bar codes, the palm-print identification, the heating and humidity controls, the computer terminals and the internal and external security cameras. He has seen the certificate from the pest-control company stating that the final rodent has been irrevocably exterminated from the environs. So here, where in a former age under the vaulted ceiling the plans of great White Star ocean liners were drawn, stretch rows of metal tables, partitioned and numbered, and above and around them purrs the steady hum of electricity and an expectant readiness.