The Professor of Truth (33 page)

“But it is good only on surface. Underneath it is dark.” He tapped his chest. “In here. I don’t say this to her because already I think I make her unhappy enough. But everything is black for me. I cannot hide it. She ask me, what is it wrong with you? And I say it is God who punish me. She says, for what? I tell her about the trial. She says, if it is God, if you have done wrong in his eye, then ask him to forgive. If it is not God, then you punish yourself. Why?”

He sighed heavily. “I don’t know why. What is my crime, Dr Tealing? If I have done wrong, I am sorry.”

It was the first, the only, time that I had seen no calculation, no defence in his eyes. I took my chance.

“Then make amends,” I said. “Don’t ask for forgiveness from God. He’s not there. Say something in public. Write it
down and give it to me. You can still make the case against Khazar fall apart, even though he is dead. You can still help us get at the truth.”

He shook his head. “Come. I show you something.”

He limped to the door, and I limped after him. We were like two soldiers in the First World War, made old in the trenches and limping back from them, one after the other. Into my mind came David Dibald, who was in that war but never wrote about it, never came back, whose fiction was all about life before it, before the loss of innocence.

Parroulet led me to the next room and switched on the main light. A kind of small study, barren in the glare of the light, was revealed. There was a desk, a cabinet, a computer, a printer, a TV. The walls were naked.

In the middle of the room Parroulet turned. “You come here because you hate me,” he said.

“No, I don’t hate you,” I said.

“Why you don’t hate me? You lose everything, and it is not Khazar you hate, not when he is alive, not when he is dead. It is me you hate.”

“No,” I said. “I hate what happened. The bomb. And I hate what you did, what you said in court. I hate the fact that they paid you to do it. When Khazar was convicted it put a massive barrier in the way of the truth. Without you that wouldn”t have happened. That’s what I hate, not you.”

“It is same thing,” he said. He went to the desk, opened a drawer and took something from it. A key. He closed that drawer and unlocked another. “Look,” he said, and I approached and saw what lay in the otherwise empty drawer.

“That is how much I have fear,” he said. “I am not hero. I have fear. All this time, I am afraid of someone come. I don’t know who but one day maybe he come. They say to me, Martin, you are safe now, you never hear from us again, but how do I know this? And how they can be sure I am safe? And what does this ‘safe’ mean? Safe for me, or for them? Maybe they don’t come, but if someone else come, like you, then what? If I tell you I make mistake at trial? If you tell the world? Maybe it is better for them if they make sure. Better safe or sorry, yes?”

“Than,” I said. “Better safe
than
sorry. Yes.”

“So I keep this here, always. But really I know, if they want to make sure, this won’t stop them. So who do I keep it for? For you, for me?”

The drawer lay open. The gun in it was a threat or an invitation. We were both beside it, so close our shirts were touching. It felt like looking over the edge of a cliff.

I thought of my own fear, my looking over my shoulder, my wondering who might come in pursuit of me. It seemed a long time since Nilsen had come, but it was only a week. And before that there had been years of it, of fear and wondering, but there was nothing there now. Nobody was coming, and even if they were I didn’t care.

I reached out for the gun, but then I didn’t. It was the last thing I wanted to touch.

“Not you, not me,” I said. “Not either of us.”

Parroulet nodded. He seemed relieved, as if I’d declined some terrible offer.

“You go away tomorrow,” he said. “Kim fix you bed, you can sleep here, but you go in morning. I don’t want to see you
again. I thank you for fighting fire with me. I don’t thank you for coming.”

I said, “I don’t have what I came for.”

“We will see. What do you came for? The truth? You must know by now, I don’t have it.”

“To say you made a mistake,” I said, “to describe the pressure they put you under, as you have told me this evening, that would be something. That would be a start.”

“We will see,” he said again. He half-turned, as we both heard footsteps, then the faint mewl of the cat. With sudden swiftness Parroulet pushed the drawer shut and locked it, and put away the key.

“Now you go sleep,” he said. “I stay here. I have plenty to do. Clear up. Take care of my cat.” He turned fully, and Kim was in the doorway. “Take care of my wife,” he said, smiling at her.

Kim held the creature out to him. “I heard her crying,” she said. “You were not there.”

SAT IN A WICKER CHAIR IN A CORNER OF THE GUEST
room where earlier Kim had tended my feet, and watched as she plumped pillows and turned down the sheet.

“In the morning I will take you to the hospital,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said. “You are kind.”

“It’s what I said before. It is not much to be kind.”

“Women are better at it than men.”

She gave one of the pillows an extra thump. “That is stupid. Why do you say such a thing? Men can be kind.”

“By choice?” I said. “Or by chance?”

She gave me a little, unamused smile. “You always play word games. Why don’t you stop being so clever?”

“You sound like my sister,” I said.

“You have a sister?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Be kind to her. Who else? A mother, a father?”

“Yes,” I said, and I felt ashamed. “They are still alive.”

“And who else?”

“No one else.”

“I don’t believe you. It is a long time since … everything. Don’t you have anyone now? Not just to be kind to. More than that.”

I shook my head. “It wouldn’t be enough.”

She had finished with the bed. She said, “I’m going to get you some water,” and she left the room. I felt so weary that the gap between the chair and the bed seemed like a chasm, not wide but too terrifyingly deep to cross. On the other side, above the bed, hung one of those seascapes that Parroulet had once painted obsessively but that now, according to Kim, he no longer did. This one looked like an evening view, in muted colours, mostly shades of blue. You could see the ocean and the sky, but you couldn’t see clearly where they met, and if there were any boats out there you couldn’t see them either. It was a painting of nothing, really, but I could have looked at it for a long time.

Kim returned with a bottle of water, which she put beside the bed. She also had the jute bag.

“Here are your things,” she said, and I knew that the recorder would be in it again. “He is upstairs, at his desk. He is writing something, I don’t know what. I thought I should tell you.”

She stood there, small and strong, with her arms folded, and yet I knew that she was not so strong, and it was as if she had been thinking, in the few minutes she had been away, exactly how to say what she now said.

“Alan Tealing,” she said, with that same curious elongation of the syllables, “sometimes it happens, you love someone but you don’t know why. Sometimes you love someone but you don’t like them. Sometimes you love someone but they don’t love you. It isn’t enough, it is never enough, but it is still love.”

“I told you,” I said, “I don’t have anyone.”

“I’m not talking about you,” she said. “The thing I know about love is you can’t stop it, you can’t kill it. Love can die, but it’s nothing to do with you.”

A pause.

“And you can’t make it either, in a bowl, like a recipe. But if it is there, what do you do? Throw it out? Leave it to go rotten?”

“I don’t have anyone.”

“There is always someone,” she said, and she looked at me very long and hard before she went away.

She didn’t know who she was talking about, but I did.

Somehow I made it across that chasm into the bed. I knew that I would sleep, and I did not expect to dream. But before I slept, thoughts passed like gulls across the grey sky of my mind.

I thought of Parroulet’s gun, lying in its drawer, and the fear that kept it there. I thought of the little plastic clip in the wooden bowl on my desk at home.

I thought of Ted Nilsen, cold in the snow, in the mortuary. I thought of him not there.

I thought of Maisie Miller and her dog, and of Roger Dinning and his wife. “Blue gums love fire,” Maisie had said. “They grow back very fast.” Tomorrow I would see if their houses were still standing, and they would be back to see too. I thought of my own house, and my neighbours Brian
and Pam. I thought of the fires, and how many people and houses they might have taken. I thought how cruel a place the world can be.

I thought of Khalil Khazar, and those words of Nilsen:
In other circumstances … In another life
. And that thing he’d said that would always haunt me:
were you even alive before the bomb went off?

I thought of Emily, the little girl I had never known, the one Alfred and Rachel could never forget. I thought of Alfred and Rachel. I thought how long it was since I had kissed my wife goodnight.

I thought of Alice, the little girl she was, the woman she never became. I thought of whom she might have loved, if she had had the chance or the choice.

I thought of Carol. I would phone her from the hotel, say I was coming home. I’d tell her I’d call again from the airport, to let her know my flight. I’d ask her to meet me. I’d say how good it would be to see her. I would mean it.

I thought of the morning. I knew I could not walk back to Turner’s Strand. Kim would have to give me a ride on her scooter or maybe she would have to call a taxi, if a taxi could get to us. But it was by neither of these methods that, lying there with sleep rushing in from all sides, I imagined myself leaving Sheildston. I imagined myself alone, going down the twisting road. I saw myself in my hat and borrowed clothes, with the jute bag over my shoulder with its contents, including whatever Parroulet had written. I saw myself moving through a charred and smoking wasteland, past animal corpses and the skeletons of trees, my
shoes and ankles white with ash. I’d walk past the roadblocks and the fallen trunks, the wrecked cars and the road signs stripped of their painted words and symbols. I’d be returning from a war. I’d be limping home from the trenches. I’d be coming out of the fiery furnace. I’d be back from the dead, with news.

Thanks to my editor, Simon Prosser at Hamish Hamilton, to my agent, Natasha Fairweather at A. P. Watt, and to Anna Kelly, Sarah Coward, Donald Winchester, Alistair J. M. Duff, Gwen Enstam, Robert Forrester and others who have helped and advised me.

A version of the first half of this novel was written during my time as Writer in Residence at Edinburgh Napier University, and I am grateful to the University and the Binks Trust for the opportunities afforded by that post.

Biggest thanks, and all my love as ever, to Marianne.