The Truth Commissioner (32 page)

‘And what is the broader picture?'

‘Well that depends really, doesn't it. You see it's quite liable to change from time to time, even from day to day, in ways
that we might not quite expect. There's only one thing that's certain and that is that we're leaving. Not today and perhaps
not tomorrow but within a foreseeable future and you see, the problem is, Henry, we can't tip our hats goodbye until the bricks
are in place to hold the house together. So as you might also appreciate we need people like you on occasions to understand
this broader picture, to have the necessary vision.'

Stanfield smiles briefly – it almost amuses him that Walters should use the word vision when they both know that what he really
means is people who will close their eyes at the required time and because he understands now what it is that they want from
him. As Walters goes on speaking in his delicate, gossamer riddles Stanfield feels a dislocation from the moment. He thinks
of Maria Harper, he thinks of Emma and sees again the naive earnestness of their faces. What can they ever know of the world's
realities? What can they ever guess lies beyond the reach of their simplistic sincerity?

‘And this is an official or a personal view that you're giving me?' Stanfield asks.

‘Who can know these things? Wheels within wheels – that sort of thing. Pointless to worry about where ideas start. The only
thing that's certain is that if it works out, a politician will claim it.'

‘So what if I walk away now and ring the politicians or the press and relay this discussion?' Stanfield asks, feeling the
first tremble of fear.

‘Most unwise and I'm sure when you've had time to reflect you'll see the foolishness of that idea. But I don't want to drone
on all evening and distract you from your meal, so I'll let William sort out some details.' He delicately dabs the corners
of his mouth then stands up and smooths the front of his jacket before raising his hand lightly in farewell.

Stanfield watches his steady walk through the restaurant and then at his companion's back still hunched over the bar. Their
eyes meet once more in the glass but this time Stanfield sees nothing in his watcher's eyes except perhaps a grey glimmer
of tiredness. Stanfield is uncertain about what he should do and then after a few minutes he sees him stub his cigarette out
with a curious twisting movement of his wrist and come towards him. Now he's close enough for Stanfield to see the light blink
of disdain in his eyes and just for a second he thinks of the shiny sleekness of the shark coming alongside the boat and he
shivers a little. When he sits down there is a thin smirk on his lips.

‘All right, Henry? he says. ‘The old lad's a bit of a tosser, isn't he? Past his sell-by date if you know what I mean.' Stanfield nods non-committally and lifts the wine glass in an attempt to appear nonchalant. ‘You like your wine, don't you, Henry? In fact you like a lot of expensive things. I admire your taste.'

‘Thank you,' Stanfield says, ‘I'm glad it meets your approval.'

‘Oh yes it does, Henry. I like a man with good taste. Sometimes in my line of work I have to deal with people who have very poor taste and some who have no taste at all.'

‘So what is your line of work?' Stanfield asks.

‘Well there's some would say that I'm the monkey and Mr Walkers is the organ grinder but it they were to say that directly to me, I'd take offence – know what I mean?' Stanfield nods again – he has a feeling that the less he says to this person the better it might be. ‘Now you've heard what Mr Walkers had to say, Henry, and he's one of the smartest men I've ever met, even if he is a bit of a tosser sometimes, so my advice is to pay good attention to him.'

‘And if I don't?' Stanfield utters the words before he's had a chance to determine whether it was a good thing to say or not. And at first there's no reply as the man leans back on his chair and takes a theatrical little intake of breath. Then he slowly reaches inside his jacket pocket and just for one ludicrous second Stanfield thinks he's he's going to be shot but what is produced is a brown envelope that is dropped dismissively in the middle of table.

‘This is what happens, Henry. You get screwed. Big time.'

‘Stanfield lifts the envelope, trying hard not to let his hand shake. Inside are photographs. They're taken in the hotel room that first time with Kristal. As realisation floods in he tries to hold his face impassively and he flicks the photographs
with an attempted display of indifference.

‘Lovely girl that Kristal. Quality goods. You did all right there, my son.' Then stretching across the table he points to
one and says, ‘That's my favourite.'

Stanfield feels a sickness welling up in his stomach but tries to hold himself together. It feels like he's on that boat again
and the man opposite him is the captain steering him into a dark and deepening sea. He wants to be sick, he wants to go back
and place his feet on sure ground. But all he can do now is slide the photographs back in the envelope and wordlessly toss
them back on the table.

‘No, Henry, you keep them. They're a good reminder and maybe you'll still be able to get a thrill on some dark and lonely
night.'

‘What is it you want me to do?' he asks, but as he slips the envelope quickly into his inside jacket pocket he already knows
the answer.

Gilroy Isn't sure whether the tiredness is in his head or his body but after the wedding he feels empty, drained of whatever
used to sustain him from one day to the next. Something he took so much for granted that he doesn't even know its name has
deserted him. In every speech he makes, every soundbite for the radio or television, he speaks of the future but increasingly
he wants to lie down in the comfort of the past; but not his own one, instead it's a past shaped and nurtured by his imagination
where his life is divested of all its complications and responsibilities. And in it he's a family man with all his children
safely round him. So they sit at a kitchen table and talk about their day and jokes and laughter are passed with the food
and holidays are planned. Gilroy isn't a religious man any more but in his dream the meal always begins with him saying a
grace and when he's finished the children chorus amen and Marie lifts her head and smiles at him.

Sometimes in his lowest moments he tries to pray but he has no sense of the words going anywhere beyond the tightening confines
of his own need and sometimes the words get mixed up with lines and phrases of poetry. He wonders if a poem can be a prayer.
‘The Poet Laureate' is what Ricky has started to call him after his wedding speech. He feels a squirm of embarrassed nervousness
at the memory – did he make a fool of himself? Or did he say the things that although illusive and only vaguely glimpsed he
wanted to say? He shall never know because amidst the congratulations and back-slapping afterwards, he could find no indisputable
witness to the truth in anyone's face. He remembers how one old comrade told him how good it was to hear someone quote Larkin again before he slowly realised that he thought the words were from James Larkin, the Labour leader.

Never before has Gilroy felt his life so full of words and so depleted of those that carry meaning. Some days it feels he's wearing a straitjacket or his brain is clamped in a vice. He wants a new way to speak; he wants whatever's still ahead of him to be lived in a different way. As he sits in the armchair and stares at an afternoon quiz show on the television he feels himself slowly slipping into a doze. At first, as his head jerks awake, he tries to fight it but knows that resistance is futile and then he meekly surrenders.

When he wakes, for a few seconds he doesn't quite know where he is and the voices he's gradually aware of seem to come from
somewhere inside his head. His mouth is dry as bone and his eyes blink uncertainly as he tries to shrug his mind clear of
what sounds like radio static. The voices are layered and then gradually he understands that amidst those coming from the
television are those of Marie and Sweeney. He goes to call out but stifles it as their words press a clearer shape in his
senses.

‘I'm worried about him, Ricky, I've never seen him like this. I think he's depressed.'

‘Maybe we need to get him checked over by a doctor. We could go private – find someone sympathetic to the party who knows
how to be discreet. If he's depressed maybe we need to get him prescribed some happy pills.'

‘I don't think he'll go.'

‘Why now? That's what I don't understand. Why now when he's sitting at the table, when we've finally climbed the mountain?
He should be singing and dancing.'

‘I don't know why any more than you. It's like the bucket went to the well and one day the well was dry. And the wedding -
that seemed to really take it out of him. I don't understand because I thought it would bring him out of himself but if anything
it made him worse.'

Gilroy blinks his eyes and stares at the screen where celebrity cooks compete to concoct exotic dishes out of mundane and
meagre ingredients.

‘The wedding?' Sweeney says. ‘The icing on the cake as you might say. But listen, Marie, the first thing I think we should
try before we start shovelling pills is a holiday – a good old break can work wonders. Blow the cobwebs away. Put a bit of
lead in the pencil.'

‘So where're we going?' Gilroy says, standing in the kitchen doorway. Marie blushes and Sweeney scratches the back of his
neck. ‘You could just take me straight to the old people's home, have done with it.'

‘We're worried about you, Francis,' Marie says and he can see the concern shaping her face into an expression that causes
him shame that he has caused it.

‘I'm OK, just a little tired, that's all. I'll be right as rain.'

‘Could we not go away, even for a weekend?' Marie asks.

He hesitates, caught on the hooks of her love, unable and unwilling to struggle free from anything that she says. ‘Is there
a space in the diary?' he asks Sweeney.

‘I'll find one,' he says, ‘I'll find one.'

‘Well that's that then. Any chance of a cup of tea? I've a bake like the bottom of a bird cage.'

‘Very poetic,' Sweeney says and Marie smiles as she lifts the kettle.

‘But I'm not getting on a plane and I'm not going to Bundoran – it's like you're still in West Belfast.'

‘We'll find somewhere,' Marie says. ‘Somewhere nice and not too far. I know what you like. You leave it to me.' And then she
starts to root round in the tins for a biscuit or a chocolate bar.

What she finds is a weekend in a Donegal hotel that is about to close for the winter. It sits overlooking a bay adjacent to
a long dune-backed strand and is about five minutes' drive into the village. They've been here before once and it suits Gilroy
that there are few other people staying and there's a quiet, subdued atmosphere. It feels like a house where the owners are
packing up to go on a long holiday and as they sit in the lounge in front of a turf fire and have a drink from the bar, there's
little to distract them from their mostly silent gaze out to sea. Most of the young staff have returned to university or college
and already there's a drowsy sense of rest settling everywhere like dust. They are grateful that the chef has not decamped
and although they are required to take their evening meal in the bar, the food is good and the owners attentive. No one intrudes,
no one comes up to shake his hand and inform him of his Republican family tradition in which inevitably some relative manned
the barricades in 1916. No one shouts abuse or leaves a room when he enters even though most of the cars in the car park have
northern registrations.

‘Lots of new houses since the last time we were here,' he says to Marie when one of the silences extends slightly too long.

‘It's been a long time since we were here.'

‘It's northern Prods,' he says, ‘buying every house on the market, or building on every plot of land that comes up for sale.
The guy in the bar says the prices have gone through the roof in the last five years – the locals can't afford to live here
any more.'

‘Maybe we should've tried to buy something when things were cheaper – something for our old age, somewhere to retire to.'

‘You're right but we never had any money and what we did have went on the kids,' he says without resentment. ‘It's hard to
beat a real fire. The smell as much as anything.'

‘Maybe we could still do it,' she says. ‘If we could put a bit of money together.'

‘Maybe, but by the time we gathered it up, the prices would be even worse.'

‘Could you not ask the boys who did the Northern Bank for a loan?' she says and then laughs at her own joke.

‘I wouldn't ask those bastards for the skin of their teeth. It's funny though with Prods – they'd fight to the death to avoid
a united Ireland and cut your throat for a holiday home in it.'

When it's not raining they walk along the strand and huddle together like lovers against the squally, fractious wind that
forces Marie to hold a hand to her hair to stop it being massacred beyond recognition. The sea, too, is whipped by anger and
the waves throw up white-crested running and breaking funnels of foam that sometimes suddenly spume about their feet and make
them scurry and scamper further up the beach. Once to their amazement they see a surfer in the sea, a black figure hunched
and stiff arms spread as his board dips and pulls through the water like a needle stitching the hem of the waves.

But in bed they aren't lovers. He tries twice but each time it fades like the afternoon light, collapsing into nothing, and
even though he refuses to accept it's happening and tries to fire himself into passion there's only the spent rush of his
breathing.

‘I'm sorry,' he says, the words and his broken breathing whispering in her ear, and she says, ‘Shush, shush,' and runs her
hand through the back of his hair and tells him it doesn't matter.

But it matters to him and after the second time he stands at the window and looks out at the opaque band of grey. Down in
the car park there is a car with its lights and radio on and a young woman he recognises as one of the waitresses is leaning
in at the open window and then he sees her kiss her boyfriend before he drives off. Later Gilroy imagines he will return for
her and he thinks of them driving somewhere quiet along the coast road and parking the car and as a light spray blows off
the sea effortlessly sinking into each other's arms. But he feels no sense of envy or bitterness, only a sadness that the
world belongs no more to him but to this young couple and all the others like them who struggle to make their way and search
for a love that will sustain them. He thinks of Christine and worries that she'll be happy, worries that London's too big,
that he'll lose her in its magnitude.

‘Come to bed, Francis,' Marie whispers to him but he stands on staring out at the darkening sky. ‘The bed's cold without you.'

‘Cold with me,' he says.

‘It doesn't matter – you're tired, that's all. No one could have gone through everything that you've gone through and not
be tired. It'll be all right. Everything will be all right.'

‘I'd like to live here, Marie. You'd like it, too?'

‘Yes, I think so. For the first time in our lives away from it all. Maybe, Francis, it's time to think of letting the younger
ones do some of the struggling. You've given your whole life to it. Now come back to bed.'

‘I'll make you a cup of tea,' he says as some kind of compensation.

‘I don't want a cup of tea; I want you to come back to bed and hold me. Do you think you can do that?'

He turns away from the window and stumbles over his shoes then awkwardly climbs into the bed and falls silently and thankfully
into the outstretched arms of her tight embrace.

After his return to the city, he tells himself that he carries the freshness of the sea air in his lungs, promises himself
that this part of his life will be a finite one and that if he finds the right moment he will launch out in a new direction.
It's never too late, no one would have the right to criticise him, but as he calls to mind everything he's endured and what's
been achieved, he knows it won't be easy to walk away. And why should he give up these first fruits of victory and resign
his place at the table to someone who hasn't shared any of the sacrifices? He needs to stay, even as a figurehead, during
this period of transition and he tells himself that when things have finally bedded down there might be a better moment. There
are still important things to do before he puts himself out to grass.

So when he meets Sweeney after he gets back he greets him as a man who's found some new sense of resolution and purpose.

‘So the break did you good?' Sweeney asks as he stands at the doorway to his office.

‘What's wrong?' Gilroy asks as he sets his briefcase on the table, glancing at his colleague's face and then at the pile of
papers on his desk. His life has been bound so closely and for so long to Sweeney's that he registers even the slightest changes.
There was a time when in the isolation cells they spoke to each other only through the tapped messages on pipes and now, regardless
of the jaunty timbre of his words, Gilroy hears something that makes him apprehensive. ‘You think I should have stayed away
for longer?' He half smiles but then looks quizzically at Sweeney who stares back at him silently and then closes the office
door.

‘We shouldn't talk here.' Sweeney's voice is expressionless, almost monotone. When Gilroy looks at him he sees the flush of
embarrassment in his face.

‘Is there a bug?' he asks and sweeps his eyes round the room, then for a few seconds lapses into a wordless speech, asking
questions with his face and gesturing with his hand.

‘Probably no more than usual. But better to go somewhere else – somewhere we can talk and not be interrupted.'

‘I don't like the sound of this,' Gilroy says, glancing again at his desk as if the answer might be found there.

‘I'll have Marty bring the car round to the front door. When we go out of this room we'll just say that something's cropped
up. If we're needed for anything important we'll tell them they can contact us on the mobile.'

Gilroy nods and feels another stir of apprehension. Swee­ney is not given to theatricals so he resists the temptation to ask
any further questions and does as he's told. When they get in the car Sweeney tells their driver to take them to Clonard Monastery
and Gilroy sinks back in the seat.

‘Confession time?' he asks.

‘Not quite,' Sweeney says, then they sit in silence during the short journey and when they reach their destination he tells
Marty to go back to the offices and he'll ring when he's needed.

‘Are we meeting someone?' Gilroy asks.

‘No, just you and me. We need to talk. Good place to do it.'

‘Only God listening,' Gilroy says as they pass through the outer and inner doors to enter the great arched vault of the church.
As always he feels an unwelcome sense of intimidation as he's confronted by the Gothic interior with its side chapels and
red granite columns, its imposing high altar and the coldness of marble. He's never liked this place; he feels bullied by
it, that he's expected to bow the head and knee without question. ‘Could we not do this somewhere else? It's always freezing
here. And it looks like that choir is about to start rehearsing.'