The Professor of Truth (21 page)

I’d spent a night in Sydney and the next day had boarded a coach south out of the city, through mile after mile of suburbs, past shopping malls, technology parks, fast-food restaurants and, occasionally, surprisingly old-looking industrial buildings. I’d always thought of Australia as being a new, clean country, not one with a past of factories, grime and toil. White beaches and blue sea appeared for a few minutes on my left, then the highway turned inland again, and a haze of green hills rose beyond the houses on my right. The coach was only half-f. No one was sitting next to me. What were another four hours of travel, of staring, thinking, stretching my cramped muscles, on top of two days I’d already spent travelling? In the last hour or so the settlements became smaller, the stretches of farmland or scrub between them greater. I had a sense, simultaneously, of arrival and anti-climax. I could hardly persuade myself that Parroulet would be at the end of the journey. And yet I had to believe that he was, or what was my purpose in making it?

At last the coach pulled in to Turner’s Strand. I had reached, perhaps, the punchline of Nilsen’s final earthly joke. Had he sent me on the longest, most pointless excursion of all, to an unremarkable little town in search of a man who wasn’t there? Well,
I
was there. I would see it through—I heard Nilsen’s voice, saw his doglike smile again—to the end.

I’d not reckoned on the numbers of holidaymakers in the town. When I stepped off the bus it was late afternoon
and there was a throng of people in shorts and swimwear on the main shopping street that led to the seafront. The schools were still on holiday, of course. There were families and young couples, bronzed gods and goddesses and leathery old turtles all apparently in their natural habitat. In my long trousers, shirt and jacket, I was not dressed for these crowds, nor for the heat.

I sought out the town’s tourist information office and inquired about accommodation. The assistant said it would be difficult to find me a single room, especially as I didn’t know exactly how long I’d be staying. She suggested I go for a coffee or a drink for half an hour while she phoned around. “Come back before six, though,” she warned. “That’s when we close.” All I wanted was to go to sleep, but I did as I was told, bought a coffee and a slice of cake in a cheerful little diner and wondered if an Australian Mrs Hastie might turn up out of nowhere and take me home. But no Mrs Hastie was forthcoming.

Somebody had left a copy of the local paper at my table. The front-page story was about the prolonged spell of dry weather—two months without rain—and the perilous condition of the bush. Fires were breaking out inland, and a few remote properties had had to be evacuated. The coastal zone was unaffected so far, but the authorities were asking all communities and individual citizens to exercise due vigilance. So far, the story concluded, it seemed that all the fires had started naturally, but human carelessness could not be ruled out and nor could the possibility of arson.

When I returned to the tourist office the woman said she had booked me into a hotel called the Pelican, for four
nights. After that I’d have the option of extending my stay by three nights at a time. “I’ll be honest,” she said, “it’s not the best hotel around, but the staff are friendly and it hasn’t got a noisy bar or anything.”

I obviously gave the impression of someone who didn’t want to spend time in a noisy bar. She was more a girl than a woman. I must have looked like an old man to her.

I asked for a street map of the town. She gave me a brochure, divided into “what to do and see” and “where to eat, drink and shop” sections, that folded out into a reasonably detailed map. I made sure it extended as far as Sheildston. “Can you walk to Sheildston?” I asked.

She looked surprised. “You can,” she said.

“Good.”

“It’s more fun down here.”

I almost laughed at the conviction with which she said this. It seemed a strange remark after what she’d said about the hotel. Perhaps it was part of her job to stress the fun element of Turner’s Strand.

“I’m not really here for fun,” I said.

“Business, is it?”

“Pretty much.”

“That’s all right, then. It’s just, they can be a bit snooty in Sheildston.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” I said. “Thank you for all your help.”

“No worries,” she said. She followed me to the door and locked it behind me.

The Pelican was a short walk away, in a quiet street set back from the main downtown district. The building was
old enough to need work but not so old that its shabbiness had charm. I signed in. The young man behind the reception desk said, “If you’re going out, best take your room key with you. There isn’t somebody here all the time. The front door’s always open though.” I said I wouldn’t be going out again that evening. I climbed two flights of stairs and felt the energy draining from me with each step. I’d been lying on the bed trying to cool down ever since.

On one TV channel there was a documentary, which seemed to be about anarchism or anti-capitalism or revolution but I couldn’t hear the voice-over clearly and the picture was poor. I hovered on the edge of sleep, but the twitchiness in my legs kept bringing me back. I tried to focus on the screen. Masked protestors in a city I didn’t recognise surged against riot police who looked like Chinese terracotta warriors. A car was rocked and overturned, the word SCUM in red paint dribbled down the cracked window of a department store. A bloody-headed boy was dragged off by a group of angry policemen. You poor kid, I thought, you have no idea what you are up against, the sheer weight and immovability of it. I switched channels to a chat show, a game show, a chef race. A news update briefly mentioned the threat of bush fires again, but spent more time reporting a big lottery win for a couple in Wollongong. The ticket belonged to their dog, apparently. Television was the same the world over, utter trash only with different commercials. I killed the TV and let the remote drop on the sheet beside me.

In the morning, before it grew too hot, I would go looking for Parroulet’s house.

DID NOT WAKE UNTIL NINE O’CLOCK. ANNOYED, I GOT
up at once and stood under the rickety shower. Searching for my razor, I realised I must have left it in the hotel in Sydney. Further irritated, I dried myself and put on clean clothes. A vague memory came of having been briefly disturbed by drunken exchanges outside my door during the night, but generally, and despite my edginess, I felt as if I’d slept better than I had for years. I went downstairs and ate breakfast—the universal self-service fare of budget hotels: cereals and fruit juices, processed bread, processed ham and cheese, jam impregnated with fruity flavours, undrinkable coffee from a machine. For the rest of my stay, I decided, I would eat elsewhere.

The other guests were mostly young and foreign—backpackers from Brazil, Ireland, Korea, Sweden. I tried to spot the ones nursing hangovers, but probably they were still in bed. I too, I reminded myself, was a foreigner. I did not linger. I collected my sunglasses and the street map from my room, and with the room key in my pocket headed back to the middle of Turner’s Strand, and from there started off for Sheildston.

Whatever excitement there was in Turner’s Strand seemed to be confined to the shopping and seafront zone.
The further from the beach you walked, the quieter everything became. The only people I saw were a woman hanging out washing and a man weeding his garden. Had it not been for the different vegetation, the absence of snow and the bone-dry heat, I could almost have imagined myself to be at home. The heat really was intense, and seemed more so away from the sea. I considered turning back to buy a hat, but decided that the longer I delayed the hotter it would get. According to the map it was only three miles to Sheildston. I’d be there in less than an hour.

Beyond the last houses of Turner’s Strand were a couple of hard, dusty football pitches and a barren-looking field, then the road began to climb, and the bush took over. The incline was gentle, but I found it hard work. The flight had taken more out of me than I’d realised. The atmosphere seemed—not heavy, because it was not humid—but thick, like the blast of air from an opened oven door. I began to sweat, and had to use first my handkerchief and then the front of my shirt to wipe my face. I regretted not having gone back for a hat.

The road—it was called Glen Road, and I wondered if John Sheild had been a Scot—turned back on itself often as it worked its way up into the hills, and where it turned it became steep, then levelled out again. I began to dread these turns. My calf muscles ached as I pushed myself round them, and my shirt was now completely drenched. I cursed my stupidity. This was supposed to be a reconnoitring expedition in which I did not draw attention to myself, but the way I was beginning to feel I might have to be taken back to Turner’s Strand in an ambulance.

On one side the ground fell away from the road, and split into rocky gullies, dense with tangled vegetation, which presumably became watercourses when it rained. On the other side eucalyptus trees, and others I did not recognise, stretched to the sky, rising from a similarly thick bed of undergrowth. Grasshoppers kept up their tedious scraping, and there were the sounds, too, of stones or leaves disturbed by birds or insects or perhaps snakes. I knew that Australia had numerous venomous creatures: I kept to the middle of the road. Not a car had passed me in either direction in half an hour.

The trees grew taller and thicker, and occasionally shielded me from the blaze of the sun. The road, though partially striped by shadow, nevertheless beat waves of heat up through the soles of my shoes. I hadn’t seen a house since leaving the town. Could I have taken a wrong turn? I consulted the map. No, there was only one road to and from Sheildston, and I was on it. I kept going. A few minutes later I rounded another bend and the road flattened out completely. I had reached the higher ground above the narrow coastal plain.

I looked back down on Turner’s Strand. Most of it was hidden by the trees, but part of the beach was visible, and the sea beyond it. I’d been wondering why anyone would choose to live up on the hill, and here was one reason: the view was magnificent. The coast with its sandy bays and rocky inlets stretched north and south into the hazy distance, and a vast expanse of glittering turquoise ocean, dotted with sailboats and larger vessels, rolled to the horizon. To look out on that every day—well, you would never tire of it.

And now the houses of Sheildston started to appear. “Discreet and secluded,” “desirable” and “wealthy,” the websites had said, and they were not wrong. The properties were mostly set away from the road, guarded by high walls or fences. Shady drives led from the gates towards half-hidden mansions in pink or white. I glimpsed grass, trimmed hedges, a tennis court, a statue or two. Almost every house, I thought, would have its own pool. From somewhere not too far away I heard children’s cries, the sound of splashing. From another direction came the drone of a mower, the sit-upon kind required for big lawns.

The road meandered between these properties like a tired, depleted river, and my walk along it was laboured. I had not brought Nilsen’s slip of paper with me. I knew the address by heart, knew the number of the house on Glen Road that was supposedly Parroulet’s, but not all the houses had names or numbers displayed. I went on, and came to what was, or had once been, the village centre. A stone-built church, Presbyterian according to the board outside, was the most prominent building, but it didn’t look as though it saw much use. Close by was another stone building, the old school, which a second noticeboard indicated was now a community hall. One poster warned that door-to-door selling was prohibited. Another advertised a few forthcoming events but when I inspected it I saw that they had all happened months before, if they had happened at all. Half a dozen houses, built mainly of wood and much smaller than the ones I had already passed, stood within a hundred-yard radius of the church, and then the earlier pattern of large,
secluded properties resumed. I spotted a number in blue-and-white tiles stuck on a gatepost of one of these, and deduced from it that I would reach the house I was looking for after six more properties. Glen Road continued on its way. And so did I.

I was counting down, and knew it was Parroulet’s place before I saw the number painted on one gatepost, and before I realised that it was the last house on Glen Road. It didn’t look like the other properties. They, from what I could see, were well maintained and cared for. This one was separated from the road by a steel fence and, beyond that, by an expanse of tarmac cracked and swollen by the sun and dotted with tall weeds. The white paint on the cast-iron gates was peeling. Attached to the other gatepost was a mailbox with a couple of flyers hanging from its mouth, and next to it an electric buzzer and a small loudspeaker. These things had been stuck on with no aesthetic consideration. There was no sign of a vehicle, nothing left lying outside to indicate that anyone was at home. I thought I was probably looking at the back of the building. It looked as if it might not be occupied.