The Truth Commissioner

The Truth Commissioner

A Novel

DAVID PARK

For Alberta, James and Sophie

Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda having five porches.

In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water.

For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling
of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.

St John 5, 2-4

Contents

Beginnings

Henry Stanfield

Francis Gilroy

James Fenton

Danny

Endings

A Note on the Author

By the Same Author

Beginnings

He's never been anywhere he's never been. Apart from the time Fenton took him to see the sea and a couple of other places
he can hardly remember, he's only ever been where he's been before. The familiar is what he knows and never willingly strays
from, so all his life has been a slow trawl through the safety of his own area where the boundaries are fixed and mind-narrowed
into a meshed grid of streets and a couple of roads that only rarely has he followed into the city's centre. When there's
a catch it's never spectacular – loose change lifted from a kitchen board or bill money nestling on a mantelpiece behind some
brass ornament, once even an old run-around that he kept until the petrol ran out and then torched. Not spectacular but enough
to sustain and even nurture a greater ambition. The desire to be someone. That's all he really wants.

So now the journey he's being taken on feels as if he's travelling to the end of the world and he's frightened that he could
fall off its unknown, unchartered edge. In the car, wedged tightly between the hard rods of the two men's shoulders and legs,
he tries at first to look out of the window, thinking that he needs to memorise it so that he can make his way back the first
chance he gets, but as the minutes turn into hours, he gives up and knows that there's no way he can unravel the endless tangle
of roads back to their origin. He's more frightened of the distance that he's travelling than the three men in the car even
though he knows them to see and what they're part of. He feels like he's drifting slowly out of the world to which he belongs
and he thinks of an astronaut he once saw on television doing some repair outside the craft while attached to it by a cable.
What happens if the cable snaps? And in the car he feels suddenly weightless, carried away from home and safety by currents
he can't resist or even see. He shivers suddenly and one of the men squirms away from him as if frightened of contracting
some contagious disease.

They pick up a fourth man who gets into the front seat and stares at him then turns away again. It's a look he's seen before.
He knows what it says but this time he doesn't give back defiance and instead drops his eyes to the floor. If someone in the
car spoke he might be able to tell what they're thinking and what's going to happen to him, but the only voice belongs to
the man who sits in the front passenger seat and gives directions to the driver without moving his head or gesturing, so he's
not even sure that the words actually belong to him. When the man on his right takes out a packet of cigarettes and offers
them to the others, only the driver, the youngest of the four men, asks for one and it's lit for him and passed into the front.
He wants one, too, and he turns his head sideways to look at their owner but he's answered with a mouthful of smoke in his
face.

He wants to go home but is scared now to say anything. He tries to think about it. If he says it, he will sound like a child
and they'll have no respect for him, but maybe a child is what he needs to be. Maybe that's what will be best for him so if
he's young enough they'll take him home where he belongs, deliver him back to his own street like a package in the post. The
hazy smoke from the two cigarettes drifts lazily past him and he really wants one. He thinks of asking but doesn't because
children don't smoke and then the silence starts to press against him and it feels as if he's drifting in the vastness of
space, as if he's been cut off from the mother ship. He has to find something to hold on to so as his fear slimes in his throat
and raises the pitch of his voice he says, ‘I want to go home.'

The man in the front half turns in his seat and points his finger at him. ‘Don't speak,' he says. ‘Don't speak until you're
told to.' He goes instinctively to answer him, to say something in reply, but the man to his left presses his elbow into his
side and it's not done to hurt but to warn him and feeling the fear in that touch, someone else's fear, he falls silent.

They're in the country now and the fields on either side of the car roll in like green waves. It's getting darker and there
are no street lights. This is the worst place he's ever been and then the car bounces along a narrow lane where trees lean
forward and almost brush the sides with their branches. When they stop in front of a house he's signalled out of the car -
he sees already that no one wants to touch him – and when he gets out he looks up at the sky and feels the terror of its arching
blackness, its multitude of stars. He's almost glad to be inside the house and then he's sitting in a room with the reassurance
of old furniture and, even while his eyes scrutinise it professionally before dismissing it as offering slim pickings, the
questions start.

‘Why did you do it?'

‘I don't know,' he says. ‘Honest to God, I don't know.'

His first answer results in a back-handed blow to his face and the slow soft plop of blood from his nose that drips hotly
on to his lips but the pain itself is almost cauterised by the sudden shock. Soon after there's a blow to the side of his
head that also catches the corner of his eye and ignites a sharp flare of pain. Now he's crying.

‘Stop that before you get something to cry about,' the man says and he does what he's told because this man sitting in front
of him frightens him more than anyone he's ever known. And it's not because of the sudden, unpredictable flurry of his fists,
which is something he understands, but because his eyes say it's personal and he doesn't know how it can be when they've never
seen each other before.

‘When were you first approached? What did they say to you? How much were you paid? What did you tell them?' It's the same
questions, over and over again.

‘They said they'd have me killed. That they knew my family and they'd have them done as well,' he says, pretending to cry.
‘I hardly told them nothing – I didn't know nothing. I just made up stuff because I was scared. Swear to God I didn't know
anything about anything. How could I know anything?'

The questions seem to go on for ever and he answers them all with what they already know and what he thinks they want to hear.
He gives them any good reason under the sun and he pleads with practised sincerity so that they might believe him. But he
lies to them because he knows it's not the right answer and how can he tell himself, or them, the truth that he did it because
just for a while it made him someone? That he liked the meetings with Fenton, that out of nothing, out of nowhere, he found
an importance that he savoured as much as anything that had ever happened to him. He thinks of the day Fenton told him they
were letting him go, that he was no use any more, of how it was a waste of time and money. Its memory still tastes sour. But
he never did it for the money. Honest to God, he never did it for the money.

Sometimes he thinks he never did anything for the money. Even the breaking into houses, even the thieving. Not really for
the money. There was something he liked about being in other people's houses, about stepping into someone else's world, touching
their things, seeing what they had, how they lived. Sometimes taking things was only his way of justifying to himself what
he was doing and the risks he was running. Sometimes, too, he took things that had no value and couldn't be sold, took them
just because he liked them and wanted to have them for a while before he threw them away again.

He has to tell everything for the tape recorder and sometimes he gets it wrong and they have to start all over again so it
takes a long time. After he thinks it's over he asks, ‘Can I go home now?' but there's no answer and he's left alone in the
room until someone who wasn't in the car comes and looks at him. The man doesn't speak but puts his fingers under his chin
and angles his face as if inspecting it. Then there's shouting from outside, voices arguing, but although he knows it's to
do with him he can't hear the words through the locked door. The silence that follows frightens him more than the shouting.
He touches his eye socket tenderly with the tips of his fingers – the skin feels swollen and softly misshapen like the burst
remnant of a balloon and when he puddles it with his finger it moves and stretches.

As he delicately presses his nose with the back of his hand dark spots of hardened blood the colour of rust drop on to his
skin and he quivers them to the floor. He tries to look through the lock of the door but the key on the other side blocks
his view. Going to the window he opens the curtains and tries to peer out but all he sees is his own reflection and even though
he knows he could switch off the light his fear of the dark prevents him. It's a large, solid window but on top it has two
tiny fanlights each not much bigger than a shoe box. It doesn't look possible but the memory of the shouting voices and the
silence drives him on so he picks up the chair he's been sitting on and positions it against the glass. It takes him a few
seconds to understand how to angle his head but when he's worked it out he knows he can do it. He hesitates, suddenly more
frightened of what's outside than what's in the house, then shivering like a swimmer just emerged from the coldness of the
sea he slips his head sideways through the narrow space and as his feet squeak the glass he contracts his shoulders and squirms
into the opening. It's too small, too tight, but he sleeks and slithers his body like an eel and bit by bit trembles himself
through until his head and upper body are outside, and as he lowers his hands to reach the sill, his legs come finally free
and without their anchorage he tumbles to the ground.

The world is strange, stranger than he's ever known, and it takes his breath away. He hears his own whimper as he looks up
at the white fullness of the moon and the air is scented with smells he doesn't recognise. There's the distant wail of some
animal and he presses his back into the comforting solidity of the brickwork but there's no respite because almost immediately
he hears a voice shouting in the room behind him and he's no choice but to get to his feet and hurtle further into the unknown.
Round the side of the house and across the yard – he suddenly freezes unsure of where to run. There's the grey blur of metal
sheds but the terror that they might hold animals propels him forward again down the side of the house and into a field that's
full of trees. He knows it's not a forest – the trees are all in straight rows – but doesn't know what its name is. As he
runs he hears the voices shouting and the banging of doors. The voices are angry and it makes him run faster, stooping down
under the canopy of branches, and sometimes he almost trips as he stumbles over uneven ground and his feet press against hard
objects that feel like stones buried in the grass.

He can't run any more – he's never been a good runner and his chest is swelling with fire so he cuts across the rows and hunkers
down behind a tree. There's a smell he thinks he recognises – it's like the brown sweetness of the empty beer bottles stacked
at the back of the club – and as his hands pluck nervously at the grass he finds an apple but its flesh is pulpy and rotten
and he throws it away in disgust. They have torches, their fuzzy yellow rosettes of light turning this way and that, but one
is starting to shine a path steadily towards him.

‘I want to go home,' he says as his hand grips the bark of the tree that's unlike anything he has ever touched before. It's
uneven and furred and gnarled and feels so alive in his hand that he wants the dead touch of brick, of concrete, of the streets
where he belongs, and he says again, ‘I want to go home,' and he's never meant anything as much as he means this. He looks
at the light getting ever nearer in its swinging arcs and shuts his eyes for a second as if that might make it go away but
when he opens them he sees the white-faced plate of a moon set amongst a cold rack of stars and the shadowy shape of his pursuer
slowly closing in the dusk.