The Truth Commissioner (22 page)

‘Trade?' he offers.

‘Yes, trade. We give something, we get something. You understand?'

He nods and splays his hands on the table like a pianist about to play then asks, ‘Why do you think Melissa said those things?'
The words hang in the air unanswered for a few moments then she shrugs her shoulders and holds her arms outstretched wide.

‘The girl sees what she wants to see. Sometimes I think she is a little sick in the head,' she says, tapping the side of her
own. ‘Did she tell you that she spends half her time telling the children that they must love Jesus? Or that she takes them
into the woods and makes them pray?'

Fenton shakes his head and narrows his eyes as he forces himself to sip more of the wine.

‘I go back in the morning,' he says, telling her what she already knows.

‘Will you tell your people about what she said?'

‘No, I won't, Estina.'

‘And you will come back?'

‘Yes, I will. Thanks for the wine,' he says, standing up. ‘I should get some sleep now.'

‘But you haven't finished it yet,' she says, smiling for the first time.

‘I'm not really a wine drinker. But thanks anyway.'

As he walks away she holds up her glass in salute but as he slowly climbs the stairs to his room he tastes the lingering bitterness
of the wine on his lips and the bed he gets into feels cold and solitary.

In the morning everyone has assembled to see him leave and when he says farewell to Estina and Natlia they both offer him
a quick handshake but not their cheeks. Melissa stands a little way off and waves while the children bounce around the van
excitedly like buoys in a choppy sea. He looks around for Florian but there's no sign of him and he assumes he's still somewhere
up in the trees. One of the children hands him a small posy of wild flowers wrapped in silver paper, and he slots it into
the dashboard before starting the engine, then as he slowly and carefully sets off, they stream on either side of him waving
and shouting. But gradually he pulls away and finds the road that will curve his route back up the valley. The corkscrew of
a road feels like the slow unravelling of the last few days and there's a stillness in the van that he welcomes at first but
which gradually becomes edged with an unexpected sense of loneliness.

Everything presses in on him through the windscreen – the frayed and ragged encroachment of trees to the road's edge; the
grey snakeskin of the river that is spotted by black stones; the remote foreignness of the sky that seems to arch a heavy
indifference over his journey. But he tells himself that some day he will return and when he does he'll bring books and materials
for Florian that will help him achieve his ambition.

He passes through the same small villages and the town where nothing seems to happen and everything seems smothered under
a layer of dust and lethargy and the thought of what he might be able to do for the boy restricts the slow seep of emptiness
that threatens now to engulf him. He tells himself that Alec will pull through for him, that it's the younger man's opportunity
to pay back what is owed to him, and there are others who owe him, too, and they will not let him be hung out to dry. There's
too much respect for that to be allowed to happen. He tells himself that when he returns he'll plan his big journey. It's
not the time to go on it now – he knows he'll need a long rest after this trip is over – but at least he should start to make
plans and decisions for the future. In the intervening time he will build up his stamina and experience, getting into the
mountains as much as he can, and there is a cancer charity walk up Ben Nevis that he could do in October.

The return journey feels like the rewinding of a tape as sometimes he passes places and even people that seem frozen in situ
from the outward journey. Occasionally his mind plays tricks on him and he projects the homeward sequence incorrectly but
there's really only one road to the border and so he rarely feels the need to refer to the map and is able to slip into automatic
pilot. Perhaps that is what takes him so long to realise, or is it just so long to admit to himself what he knew right from
the outset? His knowledge springs less from the evidence of the slightest movement, or the sound of breathing, but rather
from an instinctive sense that someone else now shares this space that has been exclusively his for so many miles. But he
continues to drive, playing it over in his head, desperately trying to think it through and only occasionally glancing fleetingly
in the mirror that he has quietly adjusted. Without ever seeing him he knows it's Florian and he feels a welter of confusion
as if he has arranged for the boy to be hidden here, but only now is reluctantly admitting the truth to himself. Several times
he goes to call out to him but stifles the words because he's unsure of what words he wants to use. He knows the boy must
be taken back, knows it, knows it, but there's something else he hears in his head and it's telling him that this is the son
he never had, the child that will make sense of his and Miriam's life, pull together all the frayed edges of their existence.
His mind races, flooding with the kind of images that only the childless secretly store, and with each one his heart beats
a little faster. He thinks of the boy's rightful future life stifled and taken from him if he's imprisoned in a world of narrowed
horizons and drudgery. He itemises what they could give that life and all the ways they could open it up to something infinitely
better so the appeal to altruism is only partly undermined by the selfish motives he is forced to acknowledge.

He goes to speak again but knows that a single word will signify complicity with the boy's presence. Different options shower
up inside his head, each one passionately and momentarily bright like some meteor before burning out and falling to earth.
Border guards are only likely to take the most cursory interest in a van returning empty of its delivery – there's just a
chance it could be done. But with every optimism comes a subsequent slew of questions to which he has no answer. As he drives
he barely registers the world outside – the world itself feels as if it has contracted inside the van, this journey, and if
will alone could effect his desire then it would happen regardless of what might stand against it.

More traffic is on the road and every vehicle that passes him seems blind to his secret, intent only on their drivers' own
concerns. What would the world really care even if it knew? Who would say it was a bad thing? Up ahead the traffic is beginning
to slow. In a short while he will reach the straggle of single-storey buildings that mark the border and soon he will stare
into the unsmiling faces of young men in seal-grey uniforms whose eyes will register only a surly indifference even as they
mechanically pursue the rituals that justify their own existence. The line of traffic stops. Fumes from the cracked lips of
the exhaust of the truck in front spume into a blue gauze of smoke. He closes his window tightly but even then there's the
sound of music from a nearby cab – a high-pitched wail of violin and voice. It sounds like music to which there should be
frantic dancing, perhaps at the latter stages of a wedding when passions are uncurtailed, dancing where flailing arms propel
partners in frenetic, staccato rhythms and the strutting heels of shoes clack like castanets against wooden floors. Never
in his life has he danced. Never in his life has he been invited to the wedding feast. He tries to shut his ears against the
music, looks at the posy fastened to the dashboard, wants to touch the petals, but his hand shakes when he reaches out and
he pulls it back and grips the wheel.

And one night as he sits alone in an office lit only by the screens of computers and the outside ochre sodium lights that
try to rebuff the darkness beyond the perimeter, a phone rings. Walshe's phone. But when he speaks to the boy his words fall
into a silence opening like an abyss and then there is nothing. He looks at himself in the mirror and thinks of a boy with
a white owl face swooping towards him out of the darkness, then turns the van slowly round and follows the road that brought
him.

Danny

The swell off the lake pushes through the fringe of reeds and fur-headed rushes forming the shore's inner penumbra and washes against the little wooden jetty. He lights his first cigarette of the day. It's one of only five he's reduced himself to and so every second has to be savoured – even the striking of the match and its sweet flare of sulphur. The best part of the day. Just turned six and the first light already slowly stretching itself a little tighter and sharper. It's the cool he loves best, this time before the sun begins to bake everything dry and crisp and starts to choke the juice out of the day. Ramona tells him he will catch a cold but all he feels is a relief that he's made it through another night and so there is pleasure in everything as he stands at the end of the jetty and stares out at the lake.

A small boat is already far out. Perhaps it's Arnie, eager to catch the fish before they have had a chance to rub the sleep from their eyes, when their stupor summons them to what looks like an easy breakfast. He strains his eyes to recognise the boat but it's still blurred by the softness of the light. Some day he will take up his invitation and join him, even though he knows nothing of fishing and the only thing he has ever caught were smicks in a jamjar when he was a boy. He draws slowly on the cigarette, feels it balance him and clear his head. Only five a day now and this one is the best so it can't be rushed or wasted in any way. He has already promised Ramona that when the child is born he will stop altogether, then as he remembers his words he panics a little and wonders how he will be able to do it, but tells himself it'll be a small price to pay.

Across on the other shore where the big-money houses are, the first lights are starting to appear with housekeepers and cooks stirring things into life, getting things ready. They say some of the owners only come down from up north a couple of months a year and there's always stories about their identity, so sometimes it's big-shot businessmen or movie stars, and sometimes there are even whispers about shady money. The closest you can see the houses is from the lake; he had done the boat tour
soon after he had arrived and still remembers his sense of wonder at their magnitude. Great baronial palaces with turrets, mock-Tudor and Gothic extravaganzas – he still remembers some of the descriptive words the tour guide had used – and all with their jetties and boathouses, all with their screened pools and perfect lawns stretching elegantly to the water's edge.

He lets the smoke stream slowly through his lips. No heed to hurry – he has a little longer before it is time to go back up
to the house and get the coffee going. Help Ramona waken. Sometimes she will stretch out her arms to him, invite him to join
her in the limbo world between wake and sleep, and then he will slip inside the folds of her embrace and she'll say he feels
so cold and pull him tighter so that he smothers his face in the splayed black pillow of her hair and buries himself ever
deeper in her sleep-stirred warmth. Then after a long while she will break the silence by saying, ‘What does a girl have to
do round here to get a cup of coffee?' and he will drag himself reluctantly from where he hides and stare into her brown eyes
to see if he has dreamed this happiness or if it's some illusion woven by sleep.

It must be some programmed biological clock, whose hands cannot be stopped, which wakes him every morning at the same time.
Some legacy of a different time and place, some throwback that cannot be thrown away. At first he had forced himself back
into sleep but each time that was when the dreams had come, so now as soon as he wakes, he gets up and goes outside to the
lake, the lake where each morning he watches the light strengthen and shape the coming day. As the water breaks in little
spurts of white to lap around the wooden posts of jetty, it looks as if he could scoop it up and hold it in the palms of his
hands. Because it's still early, the water is not coloured or skimmed by a burning shock of sky and as it seeps and slurps
through the reeds and grasses, it lulls his senses, reminds him of where he is. In the condominium, on the other side of the
coach house where they rent their apartment, yellow light blinks the windows' eyes awake. Almost all of its inhabitants are
old, retirees seeking to warm new or longer life into the tiredness of their limbs. Maybe their biological clocks are still
locked in work time because by the time he goes to his own work some of them will have started their early-morning jogs, in
their pressed tracksuits and fresh white trainers, their green sun visors shading their eyes but not hiding the serious concentration
in their faces. Some will lift a hand in silent salute as they pass him, as if they have no energy to spare for words, and
he will say good morning as they pass him with the curious, slow-angled shuffle that they all seem to share.

Gradually the light is beginning to sheen the water, frazzling the sleeping surface into trembling swathes. The cigarette
is almost finished and from out on the road there's the growing sound of cars. Already it feels as if the waking day has begun
to claim what is rightfully its own, so he takes one slow final drag, then flicks the butt into the water that laps between
the rushes. He stands and stretches, breathes some of the clean coolness of the lake and stares one last time at the fretting
stretch of light. Every morning its pattern is different, impossible to predict, and that thought is enough now to make him
uneasy, to start his day with a sudden shiver, and when he tells himself it's only the cold, he knows it is a poor lie. Then
he tries to rekindle a spark of comforting heat by telling himself that the longer things endure, the less chance there is
of everything he now thinks as his being snatched away from him. The baby is growing. There is his job to go to every day.
There is the lake itself which will soon settle into the fixed frieze of an unchanging and cloudless sky. For some reason
he raises his hand. Perhaps it is a wave to Arnie far out in his boat, a greeting to the wakening houses on the opposite shore.
His way of saying he belongs here. The syrupy swell ripples through the reeds and rushes. A promise to tell the truth? He
spits the sudden sourness into the water and turns his back on the wavering seam of light beginning to stitch sky to water.

As he walks back up the lawn towards the white-painted coach house, the stream of his breath is like lazy smoke and the sky's unfolding itself in a tautening skein of blue. Already he is thinking of Ramona, her eyes still soft with sleep and the possibility of her arms stretched in invitation. It quickens his step and throws the shiver into the shadows of memory. He thinks of the scent of her half-wakened body, the warmth of her honeyed skin that will embrace him and erase afresh whatever it is needs burying. The anticipation warms him and he feels his daily little burst of gratitude to where his life has brought him in the regular, comforting raising of his personal flag, the sincerity of his personal salute. Feels again there's something in this country that makes each morning hold a newness, an opportunity for something more than just the making of a dollar. He tells himself it must be something to do with the light, the certainty of the slow bake of heat, or maybe it's just the knowledge that your neighbour is already at his desk, or has jogged the first of many miles. In the kitchen he sets the coffee percolator going, starts to stir some breakfast and tries to flap the smell of smoke from his body before going into the bedroom. The white sheet is thrown back like the crumpled and ripped flap of an envelope and the bed is empty. There's the second of panic he always feels when someone or something is not where he expected it to be, before he hears her retching in the bathroom. Knocking on the door even though it's open, he enters to see her kneeling on the floor, her hands holding the sides of the toilet.

‘Bad?' he asks and when she does not answer he kneels down behind her and strokes the black shock of her hair which always seems a coursing current of electric life. She points to the paper and he tears some sheets which she uses to wipe her mouth, then she spits several times and he helps her to her feet. Quickly she flushes the toilet as if she doesn't want him to see, then going to the sink splashes her face with cold water. For a few seconds he stands behind her holding the train of her hair before she shakes it loose from his hands.

‘Men have it easy,' she says, ‘a moment's pleasure and they walk away. It's the woman who has to do all the work.' She holds
her face close to the glass and looks at him with her brown eyes momentarily wide. Her face is paler than he has ever seen
it, like the lake before the first light touches it. There are beads of water like small tears on her cheeks, on her upper
lip and glittering the darkness of her eyebrows.

‘I'm sorry,' he says, as if apologising for all his gender, for all the men he knows have treated her badly in her past. For
her father who raised his hand to show his love, for Vicente her ex-husband who abused and humiliated her and cheated on her
every chance he got.

She half smiles. ‘I suppose it's not your fault and I suppose you were only doing what I'd asked.'

He watches her pat her face with the towel, pressing it tightly against her skin and holding it for a while. He rests his
hand lightly on the small of her back, feels the heat of her body through the thinness of her nightdress. ‘Better if a stork
brought them,' he says as she takes the towel away and blinks again.

‘I look like shit,' she says, stretching the skin below her left eye with the tips of her fingers.

‘You look beautiful,' he answers, slipping both hands round the still faint swell of her belly. She squirms a little then
settles back against him and they look at themselves in the mirror. The edge of her hair fans against his cheek. He breathes
in the scent of her, takes pleasure from the heat that seems to come from the core of her being. They stand as if waiting
for the mirror to preserve the moment in a photograph.

‘You're a liar,' she whispers, angling her head against his cheek and pressing the flow of her hair against his skin.

‘Would I ever lie to you?' he asks, his face assuming a wide-eyed innocence.

‘I don't know, Danny, would you ever lie to me?' she teases and then as she sees his face fall, she presses herself tightly into him and clasps the arms that envelop her.

‘Come back to bed,' he says, embarrassed to meet her eyes in the mirror. ‘There's still time.'

‘I think I'll be sick again if I lie down. I need some fresh air, something cold to drink.'

‘So you don't want me to cook you some breakfast?'

‘No thanks, just some orange juice and a bit of dry toast maybe.' She pushes gently free from the corral of his arms and reaches
for her toothbrush. ‘Well was the lake still there? It hadn't evaporated in the night or anything?'

‘Still there,' he says, reluctant to give her up to the day, watching as she pulls her hair into a temporary ponytail with
one hand.

‘And you'll be a good father to this child?' she asks, her attention focused only on placing toothpaste on the brush.

And he doesn't know if she's still teasing him or if she's serious so he hesitates before he answers, looking for clues in
her face, but all he can see in the mirror is the top of her head as she bends over the basin. She scrunches her shoulders
as she brushes and the sound of the running water suddenly becomes loud in his ears and he tells her yes he will be a good
father. Always. And the full force of the future is bright in his mind with truth. Always shining true in the transfigured
days that lie ahead. It's of what he can be certain, of what they can both be certain.

He leaves her to prepare the breakfast and set places for them both.

‘Do you want to meet up for lunch?' she calls from the bathroom.

‘Basketball day, unfortunately,' he says. ‘Sorry. You know what the guys are like about it.'

‘Yeah, yeah, and the team can't do without Danny, the Irish Michael Jordan. Danny – you're too small to be a basketball player,'
she says, standing in the doorway.

‘I'm the playmaker, the guy pulling the strings. Playmakers don't have to be big. And anyway you've seen it; some of the guys
who play can't see their own feet. Lonnegan, the irrigation man, is so fat it takes about a day to run round him.' She smiles
and presses the towel against her face again. ‘Once he got whistled out for travelling – his own team cheered, said it was
a miracle to see him moving off the spot.'

It's what he does best. Making her laugh. Making her brown eyes spark into smiles. She flaps the towel at him, then disappears
into the bedroom. By the time she's dressed he's everything ready on the table. She's wearing the short-sleeved white blouse
he likes with a pair of black trousers. The white sets off the brownness of her skin, the black fierceness of her hair. Everything
about her strikes him as crisp and fresh, the way she seems able to stay all day, and for a moment he envies her the air conditioning
of the college library, the coolness of the alcoves and the silent lairs of books and wooden shelves.

‘So you'd rather play basketball than have lunch with the mother of your baby?' she teases.

‘We're playing the waste technicians – dirtiest team in the league,' he says and when she smiles, ‘No, I'm not joking, they
really are. Why don't you come over and watch the game?'

‘What you going to do – call time-outs every five minutes so you can share a bite of my sandwiches? Think I'll give it a miss.'

‘You could be missing the game of the season,' he says, ‘but anyway I'll drop in for a few minutes, mid-afternoon break, soak
up the air conditioning. Are you feeling any better?'

She nods her head and sips the orange juice. ‘When are we going to get married, Danny?' she asks, setting the glass on the
table.

‘Soon,' he says. ‘Soon.'