The Professor of Truth

by James Robertson

  I reached out for the gun, but then I didn’t. It was the last thing I wanted to touch.

  “Not you, not me,” I said. “Not either of us.”

  Parroulet nodded. He seemed relieved, as if I’d declined some terrible offer.

  “You go away tomorrow,” he said. “Kim fix you bed, you can sleep here, but you go in morning. I don’t want to see you again. I thank you for fighting fire with me. I don’t thank you for coming.”

  I said, “I don’t have what I came for.”

  “We will see. What do you came for? The truth? You must know by now, I don’t have it.”

  “To say you made a mistake,” I said, “to describe the pressure they put you under, as you have told me this evening, that would be something. That would be a start.”

  “We will see,” he said again. He half-turned, as we both heard footsteps, then the faint mewl of the cat. With sudden swiftness Parroulet pushed the drawer shut and locked it, and put away the key.

  “Now you go sleep,” he said. “I stay here. I have plenty to do. Clear up. Take care of my cat.” He turned fully, and Kim was in the doorway. “Take care of my wife,” he said, smiling at her.

  Kim held the creature out to him. “I heard her crying,” she said. “You were not there.”

  14

  SAT IN A WICKER CHAIR IN A CORNER OF THE GUEST room where earlier Kim had tended my feet, and watched as she plumped pillows and turned down the sheet.

  “In the morning I will take you to the hospital,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You are kind.”

  “It’s what I said before. It is not much to be kind.”

  “Women are better at it than men.”

  She gave one of the pillows an extra thump. “That is stupid. Why do you say such a thing? Men can be kind.”

  “By choice?” I said. “Or by chance?”

  She gave me a little, unamused smile. “You always play word games. Why don’t you stop being so clever?”

  “You sound like my sister,” I said.

  “You have a sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Be kind to her. Who else? A mother, a father?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I felt ashamed. “They are still alive.”

  “And who else?”

  “No one else.”

  “I don’t believe you. It is a long time since … everything. Don’t you have anyone now? Not just to be kind to. More than that.”

  I shook my head. “It wouldn’t be enough.”

  She had finished with the bed. She said, “I’m going to get you some water,” and she left the room. I felt so weary that the gap between the chair and the bed seemed like a chasm, not wide but too terrifyingly deep to cross. On the other side, above the bed, hung one of those seascapes that Parroulet had once painted obsessively but that now, according to Kim, he no longer did. This one looked like an evening view, in muted colours, mostly shades of blue. You could see the ocean and the sky, but you couldn’t see clearly where they met, and if there were any boats out there you couldn’t see them either. It was a painting of nothing, really, but I could have looked at it for a long time.

  Kim returned with a bottle of water, which she put beside the bed. She also had the jute bag.

  “Here are your things,” she said, and I knew that the recorder would be in it again. “He is upstairs, at his desk. He is writing something, I don’t know what. I thought I should tell you.”

  She stood there, small and strong, with her arms folded, and yet I knew that she was not so strong, and it was as if she had been thinking, in the few minutes she had been away, exactly how to say what she now said.

  “Alan Tealing,” she said, with that same curious elongation of the syllables, “sometimes it happens, you love someone but you don’t know why. Sometimes you love someone but you don’t like them. Sometimes you love someone but they don’t love you. It isn’t enough, it is never enough, but it is still love.”

  “I told you,” I said, “I don’t have anyone.”

  “I’m not talking about you,” she said. “The thing I know about love is you can’t stop it, you can’t kill it. Love can die, but it’s nothing to do with you.”

  A pause.

  “And you can’t make it either, in a bowl, like a recipe. But if it is there, what do you do? Throw it out? Leave it to go rotten?”

  “I don’t have anyone.”

  “There is always someone,” she said, and she looked at me very long and hard before she went away.

  She didn’t know who she was talking about, but I did.

  Somehow I made it across that chasm into the bed. I knew that I would sleep, and I did not expect to dream. But before I slept, thoughts passed like gulls across the grey sky of my mind.

  I thought of Parroulet’s gun, lying in its drawer, and the fear that kept it there. I thought of the little plastic clip in the wooden bowl on my desk at home.

  I thought of Ted Nilsen, cold in the snow, in the mortuary. I thought of him not there.

  I thought of Maisie Miller and her dog, and of Roger Dinning and his wife. “Blue gums love fire,” Maisie had said. “They grow back very fast.” Tomorrow I would see if their houses were still standing, and they would be back to see too. I thought of my own house, and my neighbours Brian and Pam. I thought of the fires, and how many people and houses they might have taken. I thought how cruel a place the world can be.

  I thought of Khalil Khazar, and those words of Nilsen: In other circumstances … In another life. And that thing he’d said that would always haunt me: were you even alive before the bomb went off?

  I thought of Emily, the little girl I had never known, the one Alfred and Rachel could never forget. I thought of Alfred and Rachel. I thought how long it was since I had kissed my wife goodnight.

  I thought of Alice, the little girl she was, the woman she never became. I thought of whom she might have loved, if she had had the chance or the choice.

  I thought of Carol. I would phone her from the hotel, say I was coming home. I’d tell her I’d call again from the airport, to let her know my flight. I’d ask her to meet me. I’d say how good it would be to see her. I would mean it.

  I thought of the morning. I knew I could not walk back to Turner’s Strand. Kim would have to give me a ride on her scooter or maybe she would have to call a taxi, if a taxi could get to us. But it was by neither of these methods that, lying there with sleep rushing in from all sides, I imagined myself leaving Sheildston. I imagined myself alone, going down the twisting road. I saw myself in my hat and borrowed clothes, with the jute bag over my shoulder with its contents, including whatever Parroulet had written. I saw myself moving through a charred and smoking wasteland, past animal corpses and the skeletons of trees, my shoes and ankles white with ash. I’d walk past the roadblocks and the fallen trunks, the wrecked cars and the road signs stripped of their painted words and symbols. I’d be returning from a war. I’d be limping home from the trenches. I’d be coming out of the fiery furnace. I’d be back from the dead, with news.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my editor, Simon Prosser at Hamish Hamilton, to my agent, Natasha Fairweather at A. P. Watt, and to Anna Kelly, Sarah Coward, Donald Winchester, Alistair J. M. Duff, Gwen Enstam, Robert Forrester and others who have helped and advised me.

  A version of the first half of this novel was written during my time as Writer in Residence at Edinburgh Napier University, and I am grateful to the University and the Binks Trust for the opportunities afforded by that post.

  Biggest thanks, and all my love as ever, to Marianne.

  James Robertson is a prize-winning Scottish author and poet. He has published four previous novels: The Fanatic; Joseph Knight, winner of the Scottish Book of the Year Award and the Saltire Prize; The Testament of Gideon Mack, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and has sold more than 250,000 copies in the United Kingdom; and And the Land Lay Still, winner of the Saltire Prize.

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  James Robertson, The Professor of Truth