The Truth Commissioner

by David Park

  ‘So, Mrs …’

  ‘Mrs Harper,’ Laura tells him.

  ‘So, Mrs Harper, you’re not happy with the list of people called?’

  ‘Maria, please,’ Mrs Walshe says.

  ‘There’s no other way – I’ve explained it. You know there’s no other way.’

  ‘We just want him back. We don’t want any trouble.’

  ‘I know your daughter, Mr Stanfield,’ she says, not looking at her mother.

  Stanfield stares at her but her face betrays no clue as to the import of her words. He searches her unbroken expression but beyond the intensity of her eyes is unable to distinguish what she hopes to achieve if anything. Is it a threat, or some kind of leverage? Is it an indication that she knows from her what sort of person she claims he is?

  ‘Emma?’ he says, unsure of where he’s heading.

  ‘I work in the same school.’

  ‘You teach with her?’

  ‘I’m her classroom assistant.’

  ‘Right … ’

  ‘But as you know she’s off now – on maternity leave.’

  He doesn’t know but acts as if he does, staring at the papers in front of him, trying to keep his focus and not betray any of the confusions that spring around his head,

  ‘A terrible thing to lose your child,’ Mrs Walshe says and her words make him physically start. ‘No one knows the pain but those who’ve been through it.’ He looks at her daughter but there’s no change in her expression or any sign of connection with the words.

  ‘It must be very painful,’ he says, lifting his eyes to the back of the room. ‘Listen, why don’t you go home and talk to your family, think it over, decide if you want to go ahead?’

  ‘We want to go ahead. We want the truth,’ the daughter says, opening her handbag and taking out a letter.

  ‘OK, if that’s what you want. But you said you weren’t happy with the list of those to be called …’

  ‘I’ve written it down, explained it all. The name’s here.’ But she makes no effort to hand over the letter, the envelope whiter against the blackness of her coat.

  ‘Are you sure, Maria?’ her mother asks and in wordless answer the younger woman stretches out her hand towards him offering the letter.

  As he takes it, just for a second, it feels like the letter from his daughter that five years’ separation has failed to bring and in his hand it feels suddenly fragile. He sets it on top of the folder, holding its ends with both hands. His name is on the front. He can’t remember how his daughter’s handwriting looks.

  ‘We’ll not take any more of your time,’ the daughter says as she stands and signals to her mother. ‘I want you to read the letter. Everything we have to say is written there.’

  ‘We’ll be in touch very shortly,’ he says but staying in his seat. ‘Laura, could you show Mrs Walshe and Mrs Harper out?’ He watches them make their way to the doors, the sound of their feet echoing in the vaulted silence of the room, then stares at the envelope. What is it he would like it to say? That she doesn’t hate him, that she understands he loved Martine in his own way, his own imperfect way, but he never sought to hurt or humiliate her? That she wishes things had been different? He tries again to remember what her handwriting looks like but it blurs into uncertainty. Could he ever persuade her that to love many – and he tries to convince himself that it was love he always felt – doesn’t mean that he had less love for them both? It’s important for him to think of it as love because otherwise they were only the sordid satisfactions of the self and he can’t bring himself to believe that. True, there was always desire, the stirrings of the flesh, but he tells himself its origins were always in his head, in his capacity for the adoration and worship of beauty.

  His daughter is going to have a child of her own. He is uncharacteristically confused about what it is he feels. Holding the unopened envelope in his hands he feels first a perverse pleasure that some day she, too, will feel what it is to be judged and found wanting. It is the prerogative of all children to turn the coldness of their critical gaze on the flaws of their parents. No one can survive it unscathed, he tells himself. But then the momentary pleasure is replaced by a sense of how much further she has travelled beyond him. A child will take her to a different place, perhaps carry her irrevocably beyond his reach or any future need of it. And a child, too, that he might never see. He doesn’t know how he feels about the unborn child but as Laura returns to the room he doesn’t turn his gaze towards her walking towards him because he is suddenly frightened that what she will see looking at her is an old man.

  ‘Interesting,’ she says, standing on the other side of the desk. ‘You haven’t opened the letter yet?’

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘not yet.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Congratulations?’

  ‘You’re going to be a grandfather.’

  He looks up at her and for the first time takes no pleasure in her smile then slowly opens the envelope.

  He is unsure if he should say anything to Beckett or not. It’s none of his business and he doesn’t give Stanfield the impression that he’d thank him for sharing anything remotely personal, so at first he just gives him the address and asks him to drive him there. It’s about twenty-five minutes outside Belfast in a tidy town where the rural indigenous population and middle-class commuters cosily coalesce. When Beckett asks him if he knows where the address is exactly, he has to say that he doesn’t and so they have to stop and enquire in a garage. It’s a five-minute drive from the town’s main street and as he feels a rising flush of nervousness he tries to distract himself with conversation.

  ‘Do you have children?’ he asks.

  ‘Two,’ Beckett says. ‘Two girls.’

  ‘What age?’

  ‘The oldest is nine, the other six.’

  Stanfield feels as if he is cross-examining a defendant determined not to give anything away. On either side of the road are developments of new houses, all depressingly similar. ‘What are their names?’

  ‘Flora and Fiona. Their mother’s Scottish.’

  He searches the houses in the Close looking for clues that might distinguish his daughter’s home but then realises that he has no idea what he’s looking for and his nervousness is beginning to rattle against the hollow opening inside him. A terrible thing to be frightened about seeing your own child. It’ll be the first time in five years, five years in which she has acquired a husband whom he has never met, a teaching job he knows nothing about and now a baby about to be born. A stubborn child always and his frequent absences during her adolescence helped separate them from whatever intimacy is supposed to exist between father and daughter and forged the bond tighter with her mother.

  Beckett glances at him in his mirror looking to see where he wants him to stop. It’s difficult to see the numbers in the dark. Will she even see him, let him through the door? He catches a number and then works out that it’s two houses along. ‘Just here,’ he says as if he always knew it. It’s a small, detached bungalow with white walls and a tiny square of front lawn open to the road. In the driveway sits a grey Volkswagen Golf – he forgets how to tell how old it is from the registration. The front room’s lights are on but the curtains are pulled and it’s possible to see a little of the hall through the glass panels on other side of the door. He doesn’t want to get out of the car. The hall is painted a cream colour and it looks like there is a wooden or laminate floor through to the kitchen. It’s completely ordinary, devoid of any feature or design that would allow him to glean something of the life inside. Beckett is looking at him again in the mirror and just when he knows he’s about to get out and open the door for him Stanfield leans forward and stops him with a tap on the shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I’ve just remembered something important. I need to go back to the apartment.’ He slumps back in the seat and avoids catching Beckett’s eyes in the mirror as the car is turned and heads back to the city.

  When they’re alm
ost at the apartment he feels a reluctance to return to its emptiness and he’s almost on the point of asking Beckett if he wants to go somewhere for a drink but knows that it’s a no-hoper and inappropriate to ask someone who is both on duty and driving. As the car pulls up outside the apartment block Beckett gets out and opens his door.

  ‘Sorry for the wasted journey,’ Stanfield says, conscious of how much simpler it would be with Beckett if gratitude for service could be demonstrated by a discreet monetary recompense. He stands watching the car disappear, the lingering gaze of its tail lights a slowly fading blink of indifference. He wonders if Beckett will see his two daughters when he gets home or if they’ll be asleep. Maybe he’ll be lucky and catch them before they drift off and he’ll sit on the edge of their beds and ask them about their day. He keys his security number into the communal doorway and then takes the lift to his top floor trying to remember such moments with his own daughter but although he’s sure they existed, the memories are vague and blurred by the passage of time. He stares at himself in the lift’s mirrored panel. Did he ever love her as he was supposed to do? His face is sharpening, the lines more pronounced at the sides of his eyes and across his forehead. He needs a drink to smooth things over, a drink to flush away some of this unfamiliar and unwanted seep of sentimentality. A child is a responsibility. Easy for a responsibility to become a burdensome thing. Now she has chosen to relieve him of it why should he feel any guilt? Let him embrace the lightness of it, let him stretch his wings. He blinks, as if the reflex will enable him to see this more clearly, but in the glass it is his slowly receding hairline on which he focuses. He has started to look like his father did in those black-and-white family snapshots.

  When he enters the apartment he doesn’t switch on the main lights and, without taking his coat off, pours himself a drink and carries it over to the seat by the window. Down below, trembling razor shells of light fan across the blackness of the river. The unlit swathes of water look so dark and thick that it feels as if he could scoop up a handful and hold it in his palm without a drop being spilled. The wine tastes sour and he knows no matter how much of it he drinks it will not dissipate the growing sense of solitariness the apartment spreads over him. Further down to his right blooms the soft white haze of the floodlit tennis courts and the private club to which he has been given membership. He tries to lift himself with the thought of a tennis game with Laura and afterwards she comes back to his conveniently close apartment for a drink and well one thing leads to another but it feels hopelessly and desperately adolescent in its fantasy. However, the sparked consciousness of her confirms what he already knows, that there is only one salve for the spreading loneliness at his core and it doesn’t come out of a bottle.

  He hesitates and tries one last glass of wine but knows it’s futile so he goes to the bathroom and splashes his face, then pats it delicately with a thick white towel, as if offering it gentle commiseration for the shock of the water. He looks at the bottles of fragrance, runs his index finger along them like a man about to select a book from a shelf, and pauses at the Guerlain. The words he likes as much as the scent – citrus, lapsang, hibiscus seeds and patchouli flower. As he spreads a little across his cheekbones and on his throat he feels a renewed flare of vigour and blames the stinking cesspit of the country he’s temporarily found himself domiciled in for his momentary fall from grace. Hard to lift your head above it in a godforsaken land, he tells himself, where a ship that sank and an alcoholic footballer are considered holy icons.

  He straightens his tie and runs a hand through his hair, confident there’s still a decade before recession slips into a dignified, only partial baldness. The number is exactly where he remembers noting it and he smiles as he sees it listed in his address book under Emergencies. Supplied by a former civil servant who described his term in the North as his exile to the Gulag and recommended as high class and discreet in all aspects, he blocks his own number and dials. It’s a woman’s voice, polite, business-like, with no extremities of accent and mercifully free of coy, knowing intimacies. Yes, he’s happy to pay by cash. Personal preferences? He can hardly tell her that a connoisseur has no particular favourites or that part of the pleasure is in the surprise, the fascinating uniqueness of each one, so he chooses at random from the menu with which she prompts him. He likes her adjectives, the terribly polite and pleasantly old-fashioned words such as ‘elegant’ and ‘educated’, but balks a little at ‘warm-hearted’. He doesn’t need to be reminded that it’s purely a commercial operation but nor does he need to think that it’s some act of charity. No, not in his own home – he’ll meet her in a city-centre hotel and is happy to take her recommendation. Yes, she can prearrange and prepay the room – simply add the additional cost to the girl’s payment. She needs a name, any name will do, and for a second when faced with the magnitude of that choice he is temporarily thrown. She’s been here before and suggests names that sound in his ears like former footballers or travelling salesmen so as his eyes scan the stack of CDs sitting close to the phone he tells her his name will be John Tavener.

  As he sits in the back of the taxi he feels a little nervous. It’s not a new experience but nor is it a particularly frequent one. Desperate days. Needs must. He tries to remind himself of the formalities, runs through a mental checklist, confirming that he has left his wallet in the apartment, that he has the necessary cash, that he has no personal documentation on his person. He has one credit card carefully stashed for unforeseen emergencies.

  The city looks unfamiliar, divested of its daytime features and dressed now in a hard neon sheen that lets it assume the anonymity of all cities at night. Yet as they get closer to the centre Stanfield tells himself it retains a distinctive tawdriness, the same working-class stigmata borne by cities such as Glasgow and Liverpool, and if it is superficially softened by new construction and the flattering glaze of glass and light, then he senses something primitive that still lurks just below the surface. Is it pure imagination, the fact that he has money in his pocket or simply that he is a stranger in a city at night creating the feeling of menace? His eyes follow a phalanx of arm-linked, bare-fleshed girls seemingly immune from the cold, only their raw sexuality worn as a coat as their high heels tap dance the pavement like a chorus line. A shifting, amorphous drift of young men in open-necked shirts thickens with undefined purpose. One of them holds a glass of beer in the air as a salute to female passers-by. Nestling on the railings of the City Hall huddles a ragged flock of Goths, black like crows. It feels like everywhere and nowhere but he tells himself that if he were to lower his window he would catch the sulphurous smell that curdles the air, as if a match has just been struck, part of the latent sense of friction, the hard edge against which unexpectedly and unpredictably life might at any moment be struck in this city.

  The taxi driver’s lascivious eyes fasten on each group of young women he passes and when he clocks a particularly scantily clad girl he blows a little stream of breath that Stanfield is unsure whether registers pleasure or a type of excited disgust.

  ‘Some rare sights,’ the taxi driver says. ‘More in than out some of them.’

  ‘A bit cold for it,’ Stanfield says.

  ‘Some of the goose bumps have goose bumps. Look at yon! What do they think they look like? You want to come back when it’s getting-out time. You wouldn’t believe what you see. If it was my daughter …’

  Stanfield doesn’t want to hear any more and he interrupts by asking if they’re nearly there but the question is rendered redundant as the taxi pulls in at the front doors of the hotel. He pays while declining the opportunity to book a return journey then hurries out of the cold. He’s been here once before when speaking at a conference and even though the foyer looks as if it’s been refurbished he knows the layout and heads immediately for the bar. He buys a drink and then takes it back out to one of the leather sofas that litter the ground floor. He is a little early and so he sits back and observes the clientele. There aren’t many people about an
d all of them seem preoccupied with their own conversation. A group of four businessmen stare at a laptop, pour each other cups of tea and eat sandwiches. Their accents are English and in between the tea and sandwiches there are bursts of mobile phone calls. He tries to remember what people did before their technological toys arrived to make them feel important, to advertise their membership of some exclusive club. He supposes it all came down to clothes and accent so he takes pleasure in registering their scuffed and chain-store shoes, the cheap functionality of their briefcases and hand luggage, their estuary accents.

  Beyond them sit two couples, perhaps a set of parents and their son- or daughter-in-law. He wonders who is trying hardest to impress and then he remembers that he has never met the man Emma married. What did she tell his parents was the reason for his absence from the wedding? Has she persuaded her new husband of his culpability, his supposedly deeply engrained corruption? Who gave his daughter away or did they have a registry office ceremony laughing off all the moribund church traditions? Perhaps he had already given her away a long time before. ‘He sips his whisky – tonight he feels the need for something stronger than wine, something to light a fire where only smoulders a grey bed of ashes. He has come early deliberately because the anticipation is part of the pleasure and it allows him to subsume each single woman he sees into the unfolding arms of his desire. So for a few seconds it might be the woman with the long black hair and the equally dark eyes, or the young woman in the red coat whose shorter hair accentuates her cheekbones and gives her face an attractive sense of innocence. But each walks past him oblivious, or indifferent, to his admiring gaze. For a brief moment one returns his gaze but before he can reach out to her with a smile she has fallen into the arms of the man waiting for her. And then just as he lowers his eyes to glance at his watch as if from nowhere she is standing in front of him.