The Professor of Truth (22 page)

Nevertheless, I had arrived.

I walked as far as I could along the perimeter. Shrubs and bushes behind the high steel fence obscured most of my view whenever I stopped to peer in. At a little distance from the house I could make out another building, a garage in all likelihood. After another fifty yards the road ended at a dusty turning-area. A thin hiking track disappeared into
the bush, which stretched beyond to the horizon. A permanent metal sign next to it bore the words
TOTAL FIRE BAN
—
NO FIRES
, and its arrow was pointed to the red
EXTREME
position. I wondered if it ever indicated any other level of risk, and who was responsible for moving the arrow.

There was no shade at all in the turning-area. The sun was pitiless. I retraced my footsteps, pausing whenever an overhanging branch provided a little relief. When I reached the gates I looked again for any sign of occupation. Well, I thought, I am here now, and I pressed the buzzer.

No response. I pressed again. Nothing. The gatepost was made of some composite material meant to resemble marble. I lowered myself to the ground, put my back against the post and closed my eyes. I knew this wasn’t sensible, but I needed to think, and I needed to rest for a minute before the walk back to Turner’s Strand. At least I would be going downhill.

I must have dozed for a few moments. A voice—hard, Australian, male—cut through a drowsy confusion of thoughts in my brain.

“You needn’t bother nodding off,” it said. “And you needn’t think you can hang around here any longer either.”

I opened my eyes. My sunglasses seemed hardly to darken the day at all. My head ached. I struggled to my feet.

The man who had spoken was wearing khaki shorts, white socks to his knees, sandals and a Tooheys Beer T-shirt over his big chest. He had a small pair of binoculars hanging round his neck, a wide-brimmed hat on his head and a red, angry face.

“Don’t think I haven’t been watching you snooping around. What’s your game?”

I had no idea where the man had come from. His clothes were clean and well pressed, as if he’d just put them on. I was conscious of my own dishevelled, unshaven, dirty and probably disreputable appearance.

“My game?”

“Yeah, what are you up to? I’ve had my eye on you for a while.”

“I’m not up to anything. I’m trying to make contact with the person who lives here.”

“Make contact? What do you mean, ‘make contact’?” He made it sound like the prelude to a criminal act.

“I’ve come to visit.”

“Well, it looks like you came on the wrong day, mister.”

“I’m trying to speak to the occupant.”

“We’re all owners here.”

“Owner, then.”

“Well, nobody wants to speak to you, do they? I saw you ringing the bell. I’ve been watching you.”

His tone was unrelentingly aggressive. I said, “Do you know him? Do you know who lives here?”

The man’s rage notched up a tone. “Don’t
you
? You said ‘visit.’ Are you selling something? Is that what’s going on, you’re selling something? There’s a sign back along the way, maybe you didn’t see it, it says ‘no hawkers or canvassers.’ That applies here. So you can move on.”

“If I was selling,” I said, “don’t you think I’d have a case of samples with me? Or leaflets or something? Don’t you think I’d have been at your door too?”

This seemed only to infuriate the man more.

“So what is your game, then, snooping around for no good reason? Eh?”

“I already explained. I’m trying to speak to the owner of this house. Do you know who lives here?”

“One of my neighbours lives here,” the man said. He leaned in close, inhaling noisily through his nostrils as if trying to sniff out my “game.” “But that’s as much as you need to know. We like our privacy round here and, you know what, we mind our own business. So you can ask as many questions as you like and the only answer you’ll get from me is ‘Move on.’ You understand me? Move on. Or do you want me to get the police to move you on?”

He produced a mobile phone, held it threateningly, returned it to his shorts pocket. Folding his arms he took up a stance that suggested he could wait all day until either I got the message or a patrol car rolled up.

“All right,” I said. I couldn’t hang around indefinitely. It was far too hot, and the last thing I wanted was the attention of the local police. “All right, I’m going. But I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Loitering,” the man said. “That’s what you’re doing.”

He stood in the middle of the road, chest projecting, with a satisfied sneer on his face. “You should get out more,” I said, and started off, back towards Turner’s Strand. If the oaf told Parroulet someone had been looking for him, that would be the end of it. But I doubted this would happen. For one thing, it didn’t appear that Parroulet was at home. For another, even if he was I couldn’t imagine there would be
much communication between a man like that and a man like Parroulet.

“And don’t come back,” was the man’s parting shot, and when I turned he tapped his binoculars significantly. “We like our privacy here.”

Perhaps they did, but I hadn’t come all that way to be thwarted by a big ugly brute like him.

FTER I
’
D STRUGGLED BACK TO THE PELICAN HOTEL I
collapsed for a few hours. When I came to, my head was less sore, but I felt slightly nauseous. I showered again, changed my clothes and ventured out to buy a hat and a razor. I needed to refresh my wardrobe too. In this weather, some shorts, some loose, light shirts and a pair of deck shoes were called for. I’d known when I packed my case that what I was taking would be neither appropriate nor adequate. At the time this had seemed a trivial matter, but not now.

I decided I did not much care for Turner’s Strand, or at least not for “the Strand,” which the brochure informed me was the informal name for the seafront area. The principal street was a jumble of fast-food outlets, minimarkets, ice-cream stalls, cafés, and shops bursting with beach umbrellas, snorkels, flippers, frisbees, Boogie Boards, buckets, spades and brightly coloured balls. The smell of cheap, hot fat was in the air. Along the seafront were more expensive boutiques, some restaurants, a gallery or two. The order of the day, it really did appear, was to have fun. Everybody was stripped down or dressed up for it. I found a shop that sold a few relatively sober-looking men’s clothes, and got what I needed, including a hat not unlike that worn by the bully of
Sheildston. I was probably highly conspicuous, a middle-aged man on his own, not here to have fun. That said, nobody seemed to pay me the slightest attention.

I bought a newspaper and sat at a café table under a sunshade, and a girl who could have been the sister or best friend of the girl in the tourist office brought me a sandwich and a beer. The other customers, all in couples or groups, were laughing and chatting but nothing I heard them say was of any importance. I looked at the paper. It was a different title from the one I’d seen the day before, but it carried a similar front-page story about the threat of bush fires. A major fire had broken out near a town twenty miles to the north, and was believed to have been started deliberately. Fire crews had fought it through the night and brought it under control, but there were worries about a westerly breeze getting up, which would drive any flames towards more populated areas. As if to emphasise the point, a sudden gust came out of nowhere and almost blew the paper, and my beer with it, off the table.

I couldn’t see anybody else reading a newspaper. Everybody but me was here for fun. News was not fun. Bush fires were not fun. Here by the beach, with its perfect curve of white sand washed by the brilliant blue ocean, it was hard to imagine any danger, any sudden or utter destruction. I’d read in an in-flight magazine between Singapore and Sydney that the average Australian life expectancy was one of the highest in the world. You lived a long time, you had fun, as much of it as you could get, you died. I watched the other people. I did not want their lives to be shallow and
inconsequential. I had no right to presume that they were. I wished them well. And yet I could not help thinking about the question Nilsen had asked that had so angered me:
were you even alive before the bomb went off?

Were these people alive?

Was
I
alive?

Something flickered at the corner of my vision. I raised my sunglasses to see what it was. The glare of the low white wall, of the beach, of the sea, blinded me, and I had to lower the brim of my hat.

What was I to do? I couldn’t keep returning to Sheildston every day in the vague hope of catching Parroulet at home. That would be ridiculous. But what else? I simply didn’t have a plan.

And something else: Parroulet would surely have another name here. I couldn’t even ask around to see if anyone knew of him.

A sudden, fantastical idea came to me, that I would break into the empty house and find some incontrovertible proof of the falseness of Parroulet’s testimony. This really was madness. Perhaps I had a touch of sunstroke.

The flicker happened again, and this time I saw where it was coming from. Not from a distance, as I’d thought—a surfboard or dinghy in the waves. It was just a few feet away, at the foot of the white wall. A pale, almost translucent gecko, now as motionless as a model of itself.

What were we doing here? What was I doing here?

I thought of Nilsen again, disappearing into the snowstorm. Was he really dead? Was he in a mortuary now, in
cold storage? Or had he flown back to the USA, to die or to live? How would I be, how would I act, if I had to contend with what Nilsen had said he had? A slow, terminal disease. But in a way that was what I did have.

Maybe a fast, terminal disease would be better. Maybe anything would be better—a step in front of a bus, a dive off a cliff, a walk in the sea, a walk in the snow. I had thought of these things before. In the depths of my grief I had considered ending it. Something stronger than grief had always prevented the thought from growing into action.

What did it take, to take your own life? When I’d told George Braithwaite I could never kill another person I’d meant—I believed that I’d meant—that my sense of a shared humanity was too strong to do such a thing, even under the most terrible provocation. But humanity might not be the real reason, and the same might be true of my aversion to suicide. The real reason, in both cases, might be that I was a coward.

Nilsen, now, was he a coward? He had seemed to face his own death with confidence, but that wasn’t the same thing as bravery. If you were convinced that God would save you, that there
was
life after death, what need was there to be brave? Was it not braver to knock at a door, not knowing if anyone would answer? Braver to go through the door, fearful of what might or might not be on the other side? For what is it, to face death? What does it mean? Is it a braver thing to do than to face life? Is there even a difference? If you are not afraid, then to be brave is nothing. To be afraid and go forward, to meet life or death shaking but to go anyway, to walk
terrified into the snowstorm or the wall of fire, that surely is the mark of bravery. To be a coward and yet still to act, that is the thing.

I thought of Carol. I had never possessed a mobile phone. This had made some aspects of my research, of my quest, difficult in the past, but still I’d always resisted getting one. I’d always felt a need to be reachable through my landline, but I also wanted sometimes
not
to be reached. People said it was up to you, you could switch a mobile off anytime, but I knew if I had one I never would. I’d always be waiting for it to ring. So Carol and I had made no arrangements about being in touch. She did not expect to hear from me, I did not expect to call her. And yet suddenly I felt as though I would like to do that.

But if I did, and anyone else was listening in, they would then know where I was.

The gecko darted forward suddenly. Stopped. It was flat against the wall, head tilted towards me. It and I exchanged views.

I thought, what advantage, for all my supposed superiority, do I have over you?

I thought, either they know already where I am, or they don’t because they don’t care.

The gecko had five splayed toes on each foot. From head to tail it was no more than three or four inches long. There was something fabulous and beautiful about its prehistoric ugliness.

It ran again, stopped again.

Around us both, everybody was laughing, talking. What was that to the gecko but meaningless, irrelevant noise?

What was relevant to the gecko?

I reached for my beer. The movement was slight, but it seemed to be enough to trigger the creature—if indeed it had been watching me at all—into making a dash across the floor of the café and down a crevice in one corner.

I sat back. I was alone again amid the sound and colour of the Strand.

Tomorrow, early, I would go back to Sheildston.

STARTED WALKING AT SEVEN AND WAS IN SHEILDSTON
by eight. I’d thought of getting a taxi from the middle of town but realised it wouldn’t be necessary. The earlier start made all the difference in terms of the heat. The sky was as cloudless and the atmosphere as dry as ever. But not as still, I noticed. The breeze that was worrying the authorities was on the rise.