The Truth Commissioner Read online

  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 hi
mself 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.

  Henry Stanfield

  Even now, if she were to ask him personally and stand so close that he could drink from the brown depths of her eyes, he might just say yes. But she is already in her diving suit, standing stiffly with the others on the far side of the boat like an Antony Gormley figure cast in black metal. Even in a profession that continues to cling quaintly to the dress of a bygone era, these young men and women look curiously separated from any recognisable reflection of themselves and although he stares at her, the dark brown eyes he savours so much are blanched by the light that falls on her ridiculously enormous goggles. A taste of sickness lingers in his mouth and as each moment goes by Henry Stanfield feels a little more of his dignity being slowly shredded. Hopefully he had found a shielded spot to empty the contents of his stomach as the boat entered a particularly choppy channel just after they had made their way across False Bay. Somehow he had expected the Indian Ocean to be glass smooth and appropriately perfumed with mystery, but this far out, the incredible blue of the water is relentlessly chopped by sizzling, spitting, ridged frets of white and to add to his ever-increasing sense of the expedition’s inherent ludicrousness, and indeed vulgarity, comes the unwelcome affliction of splayed feet and drunken lurching. To move anywhere takes on the challenge of a steeplechase as he tries to step over the boat’s detritus that layers the deck in a mess of buckets, ropes, bits of indeterminate machinery and clothing.

  At the end of a three-week fact-finding trip to South Africa, to see what lessons could be gleaned from their experience of a Truth and Reconciliation process, this is not the perfect climax he had envisaged. He had eagerly anticipated, had even started to arrange, an end-of-trip dinner in one of Cape Town’s most celebrated east-coast restaurants where they would sit on the edge of what he previously assumed to be an inordinately elegant ocean, eat exotic seafood and he could deliver humorous stories about the workings of the law. Presiding at a long table, cigar and glass of wine in hand, entertaining his newly formed secretariat with a final night of the best of his old favourites, his tried and true repertoire guaranteed to generate laughter. Holding court – that was what he had imagined, not holding on to the side of a rickety old boat captained by someone who looks as if he has modelled himself on Robert Shaw’s Quint. The old salt has already rolled up a trouser leg to reveal a white-seamed, sickle-shaped scar that he claims was inflicted by a shark. More likely to have been a drunken late-night tumble from a motor bike or a dockside tangle with fishing gear but amazingly when he invited them to touch it, to trace the supposed teeth marks, Laura had been the first to take up the offer, like some doubting disciple nervously reaching out her hand to feel the stigmata. Then one by one they had all followed suit as this Captain Ahab bristled with pride and the bravado that inflates every one of his barked commands and his barrel-chested rollicking gait as he scuttles from one end of the boat to the other like some scabbed and crusted crab.

  The one pleasure he has found in the whole sorry business was momentarily wiping the smug grin off the old sea dog’s face when he had presented them with his indemnity forms that supposedly absolved him of any responsibility if anyone was eaten by a shark.

  ‘Thank you, Captain,’ he had announced, ‘but I think it only fair to inform you that this crew you propose to take out on the high seas is in fact a collection of lawyers, of the finest legal minds. So if you could just give us a chance to peruse this document for a second?’ He enjoyed the muffled sniggers of his team, the sudden look of discomfort on Ahab�
�s face, and felt particular pleasure in the laughter he saw crinkling her eyes. ‘So the organisers accept no liability for personal injury, loss to property or limbs, accidental bodily damage accruing from intimate contact with any predatory sea creature and in particular a shark.’ Then they had read the long list of waivers in a parody of studious legal expertise, each one finding a line to expose to communal laughter until they had milked it dry and agreed that when they got back home they would have one of the documents framed and hung in their offices.

  However, the fun of that moment now seemed poor compensation for the realities of the experience unfolding before him. They had always decided that the trip would end in Cape Town where the final three days were to be personal time and in truth it was a suggestion that originated with him. After three weeks of the suffocating, endless meetings with the smugly condescending ANC and their carefully chosen supporters; detailed study of legal documentation and lengthy reports; long pointless journeys on dusty roads to the townships to talk to those who had participated in the Truth and Reconciliation process and the interminable lectures on the need for ubantu, the African philosophy of humanism – it had seemed a pleasant prospect to finish with the cooler air of the coast and some well-earned relaxation. Days when he thought there might be opportunities, possibilities of development and even, in his most optimistic and private imaginings, consummation. But things had gone wrong from almost the first day when, as white-bellied and bloated clouds blotched the deep blue of the sky and vanquished the top of the mountain, he found himself no longer leading a team of previously industrious and sober members but a group of high-spirited youngsters let loose on the first day of the summer holidays and suddenly and bitterly he had been confronted with the realities of their age difference and his hopelessly out-of-touch concept of what constituted a good time.