The Truth Commissioner (23 page)

‘You want to get married? You want me to beg?'

‘I want to get married,' he says, looking at where her lips have blushed and dampened the glass. ‘There's no one else I want
to marry. There's things I need to sort out first.'

‘What are these things you always talk about?'

‘Family things, just small things to tidy up.'

‘You haven't got a wife already back in Ireland?' she asks, almost smiling.

‘No, I haven't. You know I haven't got anything back in Ireland that's important to me.'

‘I want it soon, Danny. Before it starts to show and I can't get into anything but maternity wear. They would let us use the
college chapel and Father Mulryne would do the ceremony. You could bring your mother over. I'd like to meet her.'

‘She's getting on, I don't think she'd be up to the travel,' he answers, glancing at his watch.

‘Well in that case, after we get married, we can go over to Belfast, have a blessing ceremony there for all your relatives.'

‘You've it all worked out,' he says, his voice neutral and quiet.

‘I guess someone has to take the lead because if I wait for you it looks like it might never happen.'

From the apartment above there is the sound of a radio. He tries to think of the calm of the lake, of how he can go to work
now without leaving behind the ashes of an argument that will smoulder through the rest of the day and finally slowly flare
into unhappiness for both of them.

‘It was you, Ramona, who always insisted that we go slow. That everything we did, we did slow. Always you were saying that
you never wanted to make the same mistakes as you made before. That you had to be sure in your head.'

‘But that's it, Danny, that's what I've been trying to tell you. I'm sure, I am sure. Sure I've got one who's never going
to treat me badly, or raise his hand, or any of that shit.'

He reaches his hand across the table and takes hers. ‘I want to marry you, I want to marry you soon. And we will. I'll talk to Father Mulryne, see how to go about it.' He squeezes her hand and nods his head at her, and as she smiles quickly back he goes to her, places his hands on her shoulders and kisses her on the top of her head, his lips lingering in the springy tautness of her hair. ‘I'll talk to him tonight, I promise. Now I got to go to work, make a dollar for this child that's coming. You be all right?'

She says nothing but pats the back of his right hand with her palm and he tells her he'll see her during the afternoon break
and then lifting his cold flask and his cap he opens the door and steps on to the porch. Hesitating he considers going back
but he looks at the stars and stripes Ramona draped over the stoop after September the eleventh, at the rising press of light,
and knows there's nothing more he can say. The silver flask feels cold against his skin and for a second he holds it against
his cheek as if it might soothe away some of the stress beginning to burn in his head.

As always he walks to the college along the lakeside path. By now there's a steady traffic of joggers, some elderly from the
condominium, some faculty members and a few serious pursuers of physical perfection. This morning he chooses not to meet any
of their eyes and returns any offered greeting with only a nod of his head. On the tennis courts the women's team is having
an early-morning training session and the constant thwack of the ball is broken only by the shouted instructions of the white-suited
coach, who points with a racket that never seems to hit a ball. Sometimes she does a slow-mo of a particular shot at the same
time as her other arm is used to illustrate the angle of the racket head or point to the position of her feet. Through the
mesh of the fence it looks as if she is performing a kind of t'ai chi as sometimes the other players copy the rituals of her
movements. On a bench a student smokes a cigarette and flicks the pages of a book. He catches the smell of smoke and feels
the temptation rising. Just another one, a little before it's time, to ease away the growing worry, but he thinks of the swathe
of day he has to get through and fights it off and anyway he doesn't want to be late. In nine years he has never been late
or missed a day and so he has come to pride himself on it, hooked on the belief that it's a record worth preserving.

He passes benches where students slump quiet and bleary as if left punch drunk by the early hour, staring miserably at the
morning light, their books beside them in slovenly, sliding piles. Outside the canteen a girl on rollerblades is distributing
fliers from a yellow bag slung across her shoulder. She is wearing khaki-coloured shorts and her elongated brown legs turn
circles of herself like the arms of a compass. Already, knots of students, mostly male, are making their way to the canteen
but there's none of the high spirits or goofing about that usually mark these moments. They all wear a kind of uniform, a
nondescript downbeat combo of jeans, trainers, open checked shirts over T-shirts, and baseball caps often worn back to front
– a camouflage that's carefully constructed to hide all signals of the family wealth and privilege that allow them to study
in this exclusive, expensive place where the annual fees are more than he earns in a year. He watches them with no resentment
because this is a world where envy is not allowed and he has long since ditched the negative, restricting weight of it. He
passes along the front of one of the residential halls where contrary to campus rules brightly coloured towels are draped
from open windows to dry. As always his eyes linger on the parked cars outside. In this area at least, ostentation is approved,
and Japanese sports cars nestle neatly beside smoked-glass four-wheel drives. He cuts down behind the Health Center and the
Marsden Graduate School, before following the narrow path that skirts round the back of the administration building. Down
by the services entrance a secretary haloed in a fine gauze of blue is having a furtive smoke and for a second he thinks about
joining her but remembers what Ramona said about men having it easy, about her being sick, and finds a new determination to
stick to his five. But even that's not enough to assuage his sudden pulse of guilt and he resolves that he will stop completely
long before the baby arrives, have his lungs clean and clear before he holds her in his arms, because in his imagination she
is always a girl.

In the assembly area at the back of Facilities Management, most of the crew are filtering into place. They all wear the same
green overalls but they cluster in teams according to profession. So under the newly planted palms stand the carpenters, plumbers
and electricians, united by their belief that they are the skilled elite, while close to the fencing bunch the mechanics and
the irrigation specialists. To their right are grouped the custodians, painters and a little way beyond them his fellow groundskeepers.
As he passes the waste technicians, one of them slaps him gently on the back.

‘Ready for a hiding today, Danny Boy?'

‘Dream on, Eamon,' he answers. ‘Only in your dreams, boyo.'

‘We're up for it,' Eamon says, looking round his colleagues for confirmation. ‘Aren't we, boys?'

‘It's in the bag, Danny,' one answers. ‘You boys should throw in the towel now, save yourselves the embarrassment.'

‘Talk on, boys,' he says, smiling, and heads towards his waiting group who open their circle to receive him. He gives a collective
nod and they greet him in their familiar and individual ways.

‘They try to psyche you out, man,' Raul says. Shows they must be worried – that's all.'

‘If we can't beat those bozos, we don't
deserve to be a team,' Lester offers. ‘Last time I saw Eamon play he could just about carry his beer belly round the court.'

Everybody chips in with an opinion, everybody except Edward, the team's best player. Younger than the rest of them, a college dropout and one of the few African-Americans in the workforce, he stands, as always, slightly apart and self-contained. At first Danny had assumed the stance was prompted by arrogance but after a while had come to realise that Edward's shyness was the cause.

‘So what you think, Edward?” he asks.

‘Ain't no stopping us, man,' Edward answers, then looks away as if he's said more than he meant to.

Josh Thornton, the Facilities Manager, arrives as always flanked by the assistant administrator who hands him the daily copy of the duty roster. “OK, you guys, listen up!' he calls in his bullhorn of a voice and at the command the disparate groups coalesce and filter towards him. Then he reads out the duty schedules for the day, makes some announcements about charity events that need volunteers and, with his usual go-get-them admonition, dismisses everyone to their assigned tasks.

The first few hours of his morning are spent with Raul and Edward, trawling the picnic areas round the lakeside for litter,
pruning back shrubbery that's beginning to encroach on the walkways and removing the detritus that's been washed up against
rhe mesh of the chain-link fence surrounding the sports area. Even though he's thirty-five years of age, this is the first
real job he's ever had and although sometimes it aches his body, he likes it and likes how it makes him feel.

Mid-morning they filter back to the administration building and he buys a coffee from the canteen, takes it outside and stands
in the shade of a tree while he smokes his second cigarette. During this he likes to be on his own, undistracted from the
pleasure by the rattle of conversation. Above him the stretching tree smells fresh and green, impervious to the thin stream
of smoke he angles upwards. In the strengthening press of light the leaves tremble, as they are limed and waxed by the sun.
The day is warming now, but there is a slight breeze that blunts the edge of its sharpness. He watches two girls cycle past,
listens to their laughing voices. Suddenly he feels as if he lives in a big place, that there's room inside his head to construct
whatever it is he wants to be his future. It gives him a feeling of lightness as he squints up at the shifting canopy where
dappled rays try to flicker through the shade. The leaves are polished and sweetened by the sunlight and he thinks again of
Ramona's skin and of her scent in the moments between sleep and wakening. To have her love seems a richer blessing than he
could have thought possible and out of gratitude he takes a final drag of the unfinished cigarette and stubs it out in the
dirt with his foot.

After break he's asked to help Jolie Peters in the rose garden which has been constructed under the windows of the President's
office. There's not much thinking to do, except what his exacting senior instructs as she frets over the roses, moving delicately
through them with her secateurs and sprays. He watches her tilt their heavy, blown faces to the severe scrutiny of her gaze,
like a mother inspecting the health of her child, and for a second it makes him think of his own mother but there's little
nostalgia or meaning in the memory. Sometimes she sends him to the store for another spray or a particular feed. He tries
to talk to her, to show his admiration for her skill, tells her that the roses look great.

She lifts her head and glances at him. ‘You don't know anything about roses, Danny – that's for sure. If you did you'd know these little bitches are in deep shit.'

‘Sorry,' he says.

‘Don't worry about it. You got any children, Danny?'

For a second he thinks of telling her about the baby. It's on the very tip of his tongue but at last he swallows the words,
frightened that to release them too early might bring it bad luck, so he shakes his head and leans against the hoe which he
has been shown how to move delicately round the beds.

‘Well these here roses are like a sickly child and if you ever have a sickly child you'll know what I mean. The wind blows
a bit too hard, they get a cold. Get their heads splashed, they catch pneumonia.'

He watches her liver-spotted hands cup the black-stippled and blistered head of a rose, then push away a brittle strand of
grey hair which has fallen across her face.

‘Never had a sickly child gave me as much grief as these. Mildew, spot – you name it, they get it. If I had my way, I'd dig
them all out. Spiteful children, too, never let you touch them except they prick you with a thorn.'

‘Why don't you get rid of them then? Save yourself all this grief.'

‘They're her favourite,' she says, pointing with the secateurs to the President's window. ‘Likes nothing better, apparently, than looking out over her roses. Well, let her come and tend them. Then she'd change her tune.'

‘Way to go,' he says, uncertain whether it's all right to smile.

Later when he's finished helping and is walking away, she calls to him, ‘Danny, never have a child who gives you grief.' He raises his hoe in acknowledgement and a farewell salute but as he walks away there is a confused and splintered story trying to form in his head of spinning wheels and thumb pricks, of slights and enduring sleeps, of tall towers choked by thickets, and he has to whistle it clear.

At lunchtime he heads over to the Field House where in the changing rooms, the team are already kitting out and joking with
each other. Each Friday they get the use of the main court for an hour. The previous year they had to play on one of the outside
ones and so are grateful to be spared the midday sun. There is much high-fiving and back slaps – sometimes he thinks the rituals
are as important as the game itself. It's as if these help cocoon themselves from the ineptitude of their play. So there's
much stretching of muscles and binding of knees and old weaknesses with tape. Raul does his usual quota of ten press-ups followed
by the windmilling-arms routine that threatens to decapitate any colleague who stumbles too close, while Cedric uses the mirror
to position his headband in precisely the right place on his bald and shining pate. Kenny sips from a lime-coloured sports
drink and at intervals puffs out his cheeks. Only Edward sits still and quiet. Someone passes him the ball and he sets it
on his thigh for a few seconds before rolling it slowly up and down, using the palm of his hand.