The Truth Commissioner by David Park Page A

flicker round the other tables and her hands straighten the cutlery on the table. He feels like a climber exposed on the narrowest of ridges where a second’s carelessness might send him spinning to disaster so he asks, ‘How have you been?’
    â€˜Good.’
    â€˜Good,’ he replies, noticing for the first time in his life that she has her mother’s eyes.
    â€˜And you?’ she asks. There are still little beads of water trembling in the thickness of her hair.
    â€˜Not so bad.’ For a second he has the crazy idea of inventing some serious illness in the hope of generating the possibility
of sympathy but instead he asks about her pregnancy and she tells him that it’s been fine and just when for the first fleeting
moment it feels as if they’re having a conversation, the waitress arrives with the soup and she lapses into silence.
    â€˜So you’re going to be a mother?’ he offers and in that moment how much he would give to hear her say, ‘And you’re going to
be a grandfather,’ but instead she merely stares at the bowl of vegetable soup then stirs it slowly with her spoon. ‘And Alan,
how is he?’ It’s the first time he has ever spoken the name of her husband and the word sounds inexplicably strange. She tells
him he’s fine and blows gently on the spoonful of soup. He breaks the brittle freshness of the roll on his side plate and
some of the crumbs fritter on to the white tablecloth. ‘What does he do?’ he asks.
    â€˜He’s a teacher.’
    â€˜In the same school?’
    â€˜Yes. He teaches geography.’
    Geography. He thinks of cartographers, of maps, tries to see what direction he now should take. The soup is overheated and
overdosed with barley. He stares at her eyes again. Is it his imagination or have the intervening years of absence propelled
her to this likeness to her mother, a likeness that he has obtusely failed to recognise in the past? He stares, too, at her
wedding ring – a thin, plain band of gold. A functional ring devoid of decoration or the need to proclaim anything other than
to herself.
    â€˜I’d like to meet him.’ She doesn’t answer and he has a sudden urge to reach his hand across the table and touch her hair,
to express the surge of affection he hadn’t expected to feel. But there is no map and he flounders lost and blind in some
unknown terrain where even the bright stars of instinct are hidden from sight. ‘I suppose he thinks I’ve got two horns and
a tail.’
    â€˜He knows about you, if that’s what you mean,’ she says coldly and without embarrassment.
    Her words make him flinch and it feels as if a hand has just unveiled what their circumspect politeness had left discreetly
covered and the pain of knowing that nothing has changed collides with the shock of knowing, perhaps for the first time, how
much she means to him.
    â€˜Emma,’ he says, setting the spoon down and resting both hands on the table.
    â€˜No, Dad, I don’t want to talk about it. That’s not why I’ve asked you to come here.’
    She’s called him Dad for the first time and it spurs him on. ‘Please, Emma; there are things I want to say. I think you have
to let me say them and if not here, then somewhere else.’
    â€˜And would sorry be one of those things you want to say?’
    â€˜Yes, sorry is one of the things I need to say, sorry and many other things.’
    â€˜There’s just one problem: the person you most need to say sorry to isn’t here any more to hear it.’
    So this is it, Stanfield thinks, he’s to be eternally held to account without the possibility of parole because there’s no
forgiveness possible from the dead. Like Sisyphus he is to be condemned to ceaselessly push this burden through whatever years
lie ahead and at the end be no closer to her forgiveness than when he started. He bridles at the