The Truth Commissioner

by David Park

‘No, Dad, I don’t want to talk about it. That’s not why I’ve asked you to come here.’

  She’s called him Dad for the first time and it spurs him on. ‘Please, Emma; there are things I want to say. I think you have to let me say them and if not here, then somewhere else.’

  ‘And would sorry be one of those things you want to say?’

  ‘Yes, sorry is one of the things I need to say, sorry and many other things.’

  ‘There’s just one problem: the person you most need to say sorry to isn’t here any more to hear it.’

  So this is it, Stanfield thinks, he’s to be eternally held to account without the possibility of parole because there’s no forgiveness possible from the dead. Like Sisyphus he is to be condemned to ceaselessly push this burden through whatever years lie ahead and at the end be no closer to her forgiveness than when he started. He bridles at the unfairness of it, the moral righteousness of this young woman who sits as his judge.

  ‘The quality of mercy is not strained,’ he says, indifferent to whether it sounds ‘portentous or not.

  ‘I don’t want a pound of your flesh.’

  ‘What is it you want, Emma?’ he asks, exhausted by the vertiginous precariousness he feels, willing to plunge headfirst into the chasm below rather than continue to walk this knife edge. Better to know his fate, receive his sentence and try to let his life continue in whatever ways he himself will choose.

  ‘I want your help,’ she says as she straightens her back and looks directly at him. Then she looks away again and asks the waitress if she can have a glass of water.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asks. ‘You mustn’t get upset in your condition.’

  ‘So you’re an expert in pregnancy now?’ But there is no bitterness in her words and he’s able to reply with a smile and a shake of his head. ‘And I’m not upset.’

  As the waitress brings the glass, he asks for another coffee, keen to extend their entitlement to the table. She wants his help and that cheers him but he knows it won’t be the beautiful simplicity of money that she’ll request and he knows so little about the circumstances of her present life that he can’t even begin to anticipate what she’s going to ask. What he does know, however, is that a request for help opens up possibilities that formerly seemed closed and so he leans attentively towards her.

  ‘Anything,’ he says. ‘You only have to ask.’

  Perhaps it’s something to do with the child that’s coming – perhaps she needs him to fulfil some role in relation to that, or even might it be that she’s thinking of moving back to London. He has a vision of their lives intertwining again in a better place than this, of the infinite possibilities of a newly found future. But his hopes tumble about him as he hears her say, ‘It’s not for me; it’s for Maria Harper.’

  Why has he not seen it coming? Why has he not had the intelligence to understand what lay behind her call? And he feels like a fool who’s been suckered in and as he watches her sip from the glass he tastes the bitterness of his disappointment and then anger at his blinkered naivety.

  ‘Maria Harper?’ he asks coolly as if the name means nothing to him.

  ‘Yes, you met her a week ago. Maria is my classroom assistant and a friend. Her brother’s Connor Walshe.’

  ‘Connor Walshe?’ Already this is a name that he doesn’t want to hear.

  ‘She wrote you a letter, told you what happened to him.’

  ‘Emma, I can’t discuss the private affairs of the Commission.’ Immediately he regrets using the word ‘affairs’ but takes refuge in a flow of words. ‘I’m sure you understand that these are delicate matters and we’re bound by very strict codes of confidence. I can’t sit here in a …’ he leaves the description unfinished but gives a little gesture with his hand ‘… and discuss matters that are bound by the protocols of the Commission.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to discuss it,’ she insists, putting the glass down on the table with slightly too much force so that the water slurps against the rim, ‘I’m asking you to help her.’

  He has to resist the momentary temptation to punish her with a cold indifference hidden in some supposed strict adherence to a set of rules but he knows this is perhaps his last opportunity to establish a bridgehead so instead he says, ‘Of course I’ll help her.’

  ‘She wrote you a letter, didn’t she, told you everything that happened? She asked me to read it, to help with the writing.’

  ‘It’s very well written,’ he stalls.

  ‘And you’ll be able to help her?’

  ‘Of course I will. It’s my job to help her.’

  ‘And you’ll listen to what she has to say, listen to what she says really happened?’

  ‘Emma, I’m going to do my very best to give her the truth about her brother,’ he says as he stares at her green eyes and for a second recognises something, something that is more than just a physical resemblance to her mother but in its expression reproduces the striated lines of suspicion that always sought to pierce whatever pretence he offered. Never jealousy in Martine’s eyes because that would have meant the continued possibility of love, but only the clouded coldness of whatever emotion had replaced it.

  ‘I promise you,’ he says.

  ‘That’s good,’ she answers and something has broken in her tone of voice and when she speaks the guarded hesitation has been replaced by a quicker flow of words. ‘They’ve had a terrible time, all these years. Never knowing for sure and then when they knew, not knowing where the body is or how to get him back. And Maria started with nothing and somehow despite it all managed to make something of herself. But there’s something like a hole or a space that they can’t fill until they have a body to bury. She’s been good to me, she deserves the truth – the whole family does. What’s left of them. Over the years they’ve drifted apart almost as if being separate might lessen the memory.’

  ‘It’s very terrible and very sad,’ he says but what he wants to tell her is that the truth can’t be deserved, that if it exists at all, it exists outside the constraints of need or personal desire. That truth rarely makes anything better and often makes it worse.

  ‘They need their lives to move on. They can’t move on until they have him home.’ And this time when she looks at him there is only a passionate intensity in her eyes and now it is he who is jealous, jealous that what she can’t give to him is so freely available to strangers.

  ‘I understand,’ he says but he doesn’t even for a second comprehend how he has come to this place and this moment when he sits with his daughter and she gives her act of love to someone else. What he does understand is that now he is expected to win something back from her through an act of service, that she has told Maria Harper she will speak to her father and that he will help. It seems like something a small girl would do, in part out of righteous indignation at the injustice of the world and in part out of the secret pride she felt in her father’s capacity to right a wrong.

  Afterwards she thanks him but resumes some of her original detachment as he pays the bill and they step outside, so when he offers to walk her home or to take her there in the car she refuses politely but firmly and he doesn’t try to persuade her. Her goodbye is neutral and after a second mumbled thanks she turns and sets off down the main street. He sees Beckett watching from the car and signals that he’s finished his business. As a lighter, finer rain begins to slant down he watches his daughter walk briskly away, from the back revealing no sign of her pregnancy. He feels a sudden shiver of sadness, a glimpse of what their future might be, and blinks his eyes against the rain.

  That night in the apartment he sits at the seat by the window and looks down on the river where random smears of neon slip across the surface in frittering glazes of red and gold. Only a small reading light illuminates the table he sits beside and the wine glass squints a bleary echo as his hand moves its emptiness away from the letter. He lifts the envelope and weighs it in his hand – so much weight, he thinks, in so much lightness. Then he carefully opens it and
lets his eye flick across the neat black rows of type. He won’t bring himself to read it again – there’s something profoundly draining about the emotional need that generates it, something that tries to cling to the reader and won’t let go until it’s fastened like some parasite to the lining of the brain. How can he be tied now to a boy whose photograph he’s never seen? How can his desire to see his only child be meshed with some other long-dead boy from a Belfast back street? A car’s headlights briefly score the surface of the water with spears of light. For a second he forgets the glass is empty and lifts it to his lips then returns it slowly to the table. It feels cold in his hand. Then she calls to him from the bed and he turns his head and smiles at her. Her face is pale like frost, her shoulders white like snow. It feels like there is a ghost in his bed. She calls gently again and he wonders why she’s calling him a different name from his own and then he remembers. A ghost who deserves no truth and asks for none, so in a little while he shall go to her, but first there is something he has to do and, taking the letter and its envelope, he tears them carefully into tiny pieces, then lets them flutter to the ground until they drift round his feet like the first fall of winter.

  Francis Gilroy

  He believes that there are only good habits and bad habits, and good habits don’t die hard. In the old days it was bad habits that got you killed and the worst habit of all was to be in the right place at the right time, leaving yourself freeze-framed, the perfect picture begging to be shot. It could happen in many different ways – sleeping too long in the same bed in the same house, taking the child to school by the same route, obeying the call of your thirst at the favoured time and in the same watering hole, even going to confess your sins and meet too predictably with God could ensure the encounter became face to face.

  It’s something he never forgets and something he struggles to make the youngsters understand – the need for vigilance, the constant need for caution. Struggles and fails. So as Francis Gilroy, the newly appointed Minister with responsibility for Children and Culture, gets out of his bed and goes to look at the early morning, he doesn’t open the middle of the curtains but stands to one side and lightly lifts the cloth and the voile drape his wife considers sophisticated elegance away from the sill. The street is empty of people but filled with a metal-coloured mist that drifts in from the mountain and rasps everything soft and smooth. He turns to look at his still sleeping wife as she stirs in the bed, bunching the pillow under her head as if the restlessness of sleep has flattened too much of the life out of it, and for a moment he’s tempted to postpone the start of the day and rejoin her. Join her in the newly bought, canopy-covered, wrought-iron four-poster bed that embarrasses him even to look at and makes him hope it’s not the place he has to die with an awkward audience standing at its foot. But instead he goes to the other side of the window and viewrs the opposite end of the street. Only familiar cars, but all rendered cold and lifeless by the grey drape of mist and fossilised into frozen memories of themselves.

  Less reason to worry now perhaps, but always cautious, a creature shaped by the enforced habits of a lifetime’s struggle, so let the younger ones snigger, puffed up on their own bravado and big talk. It’s what makes him a survivor. That and luck. And if there’s less obvious reason to worry, there still lingers the permanent possibility of a hit – from some maverick, another Michael Stone perhaps, high as a kite on his own ego; one of the dissidents – the fanatics with hurt in their eyes who stand at the back of meetings and shout at him about sell-outs and betrayals; some unknown relative of a forgotten victim who has never forgotten, the memory eating away like cancer until they have to staunch the pain.

  Marie pulls the duvet over her shoulders as if putting on a winter coat and he feels the temptation once again to snuggle into the heat of her back but he knows he has work to do so he sits on the edge of the bed and fumbles with his feet for his slippers. Three visits to the toilet to pee during the night. His bladder feels as if it is about to give out. A sack with a hole. Drink anything at all – even a cup of tea – in the hours before sleep and it wants out again, whining away like a locked-up puppy until its plea cannot be ignored. And as he stands up there is a sudden twinge at the base of his spine as if it, too, is complaining about something. It cannot be his weight because he weighs no more now than ten years ago. Sometimes his whole body feels like a sullen malcontent casting up past failures or years of supposed neglect. He massages the area with his fingers and tries to stretch himself straight then slides his feet into the slippers and pulls on his dressing gown. Maybe he needs an MOT and wonders if medical care is one of the rights of his post. Nothing private of course, just someone who will come to him and give him the once-over with discretion. He’s not going to see McCann at the Health Centre again, he knows that; the last time he had to sit and listen to all his doctor’s complaints about underfunding and hospital waiting lists. That’s the trouble with people – they all start to think he has the keys to heaven in his pocket. And the other thing is that if people see him sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, then before the day is out the word spreads round that he’s at death’s door and wizened old women come up to him on the street and tell him they will say a Hail Mary for him, or press some lucky charm into his hand.

  He goes down the stairs, unlocks the security door and switches off the alarm system. He stops to gather the pile of papers and his briefcase from the hall table then goes into the kitchen and fills the kettle. The clock’s just turned six and that gives him a good hour to read the papers again and try to absorb as much as possible. It’s a draft set of proposals for new child-protection regulations for voluntary and community groups. Forty-six pages of it and every couple of sentences Crockett has added handwritten notes or potential issues in blue ink. Nearly as many words as the type and all of it in the same scrupulously neat writing. He thinks of the fountain pen that Crockett uses with its gold nib and clip, its shimmering pearled blue body, and tells himself that the last time he saw someone use a fountain pen was his father sitting at a kitchen table filling in a job application form about 1960. Did no good then either. The kettle comes to the boil and hisses angrily as if looking for a fight before it switches off its fury.

  He has to be prepared, show them all that he knows his stuff. And the bastard Crockett is always looking for a chance to expose his ignorance, just waiting for him to put his foot in it. Even the word Minister curdling on his lips gives the impression that there’s a bad taste in his mouth. He’s a sharp boy, too – so sharp that one day he will cut himself – and Gilroy hopes he’s there to see it. Outwardly there’s never anything but a scrupulous display of politeness. Even that, however, is an insolence because it only serves to prevent any form of personal exchange and it signals that he will give what is required by the demands of his job as a top civil servant but not an iota more. If they were to meet in the street outside the normal parameters of work – and he’s not sure if Crockett has ever been in a street except by accident – he would probably walk by with an almost imperceptible nod of the head, if any form of recognition at all. He goes to the cupboard then throws a tea bag in the teapot and pours in the water. Perhaps he should invite him and his wife to tea – that would wipe the smugness off his face. Tell them it would be best to come in a black taxi, to leave the Merc at home. A journey into the heart of darkness. A visit to the Third World. See what excuse he produced to escape his worst nightmare.

  He reads the document again. It’s good to be on guard. Never can be too careful. Bloody paedophiles everywhere. Worming their way in. Waiting in the shadows like vultures. And when in the fullness of time and this thing comes to completion he visualises a major launch, a performance by children in the Waterfront Hall perhaps, lots of media coverage, children being looked after. Taken care of. Children and Culture – it could have been worse, even if the wags are starting to call him the Lemonade Man after C&C the local company. Better to be the Lemonade Man than wear the thorned crown of Health. Thank goodne
ss they shafted a Unionist with that one in the latest incarnation of the Assembly and its musical chairs of ministries. Waiting lists, rationalisation of acute services, superbugs, shortages of specialists, patients on trolleys – what a nightmare! And if he was at death’s door he wouldn’t be able to go and see McCann.

  He sips the tea and tries to read Crockett’s mind from some of his comments, tries to anticipate some question he’ll suddenly spin up at him, then takes heart from his natural advantage. At least he understands what a community is and unlike Crockett his experience isn’t restricted to a golf club or a cluster of holiday homes in Tuscany or Provence. Still he needs Crockett and his cronies’ knowledge about legal issues, about how best to frame the legislation and shape it into a coherent whole, because if there is a flaw or a single weak spot they can be sure that the wolves in the Assembly will fasten their teeth on it and tear and tear until it collapses in ridicule. The one good thing of course is that it will be difficult to flag up opposition when no one wants to appear opposed to protecting children. He’ll play that one to the hilt.

  The tea is hot and strong the way he likes it and in a decent-sized mug and not one of those china cups they use up at Stormont which don’t hold a spit and feel as if they might crack in your hand. He sets the mug down carefully to avoid putting it on the papers then takes a book out of the front of his briefcase. It’s a volume of poems by Larkin. Minister with responsibility for Culture. Needs to read some books. On the quiet. Try to crack it. Understand what it’s all about. It’s a weakness and like all personal weaknesses he’s conscious of it and determined to do something about it, except he doesn’t know where to start and it feels more daunting than anything he has ever done. Worse, too, because there’s no one he can ask or reveal the weakness to. He started with Joyce but gave up after the third page. A secret language, a secret society like the Masons, and he has no one to initiate him or introduce him to the rituals. Hardly better with Yeats, apart from ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death’. The useless buggers at school who failed to teach him anything and helped him out the door at sixteen are the people he blames. The wonderful Catholic education – wonderful for middle-class kids maybe with aspiring mothers and fathers. But if he’s fair he has to concede that he was never the best of pupils and almost squirms at the memory of his waywardness. School was why he tried to read Heaney – he remembered that poem ‘The Early Purges’ and its reference to ‘the scraggy wee shits’ and how they nearly fell off their seats when it came out of Father Dornan’s mouth but the attempt was pretty much a failure. After the early poems it all clouded over like the mist that drifts now against the windows of the kitchen, smearing the glass with the soft dampness of its breath. His eyes flick to the security cameras and their blinking, changing, grainy shots of mottled grey. A good morning to step out of the perfect cover and do what needs to be done. He shivers suddenly and cups the tea in both hands then opens the Larkin. It was the line about books being crap that caught his eye – it still makes him smile. But he feels as if he’s gone far beyond that now and if he’s not yet arrived at a full understanding of some of the poems, he thinks that he is moving steadily towards it and he’s not going to give up. This is the bridgehead; from here there is no retreat. Sometimes it feels like one of those books that contain optical illusions, secret pictures that emerge only when you stare at them for ages and ages. Stare and stare and then suddenly it’s there in total clarity. There are times when it feels as if the meaning will emerge complete and perfect but then it slips away again and everything is blurred and unfocused like the mist outside. But even then lines or phrases stick in his mind and during the day he turns them over in his thoughts like small stones picked off the beach.