by Karen Perry
‘You shouldn’t have done this,’ she whispers, feeling herself coming close to the brink again. ‘You might need stitches.’
‘It doesn’t hurt,’ Katie says stoically. ‘Not really.’
But her eyes are smarting with tears and Sally finds herself letting go of the child’s hand and reaching up to touch her cheek – the only tender gesture she has made to her since her arrival.
The children are silent as she washes their wounds, wincing as the cold water runs into their palms.
‘Wait there,’ she instructs them, as she goes to her room for the first-aid box.
When she returns, they are standing together with their backs to her, Nicky leaning against Katie, in their shorts and T-shirts, feet bare on the cool tiled floor. Something about the way they stand together – how small and vulnerable they look – makes her stop short, holding her breath. Katie has her arm around Nicky’s shoulders as if comforting him. Sally, entering the room, disturbs them, and when her son turns to face her, his eyes are swimming with tears.
‘What is it, love?’ she asks tenderly. ‘Is it very sore?’
‘Luke says you’re sending her away.’
‘What?’
‘Katie. He says you’ll make her go. I don’t want her to go,’ he says, his face contorting with emotion, so that she draws him to her, whispering words of comfort into his hair.
It’s not until a few minutes later, not until she has left the children alone with their bandaged hands to change for dinner, when she reaches the bottom of the stairs that Sally feels it.
In the hallway, she hears Jamil singing in the kitchen, and through the open door, she can hear the starlings flapping restlessly in their cage on the veranda. From the next room comes the low murmur of Ken’s voice and the tinkle of Helen’s laughter, and Sally feels the steel entering her heart, tastes it on her tongue. She knows now what will happen: she will join them in the living room and, calmly but firmly, she will tell her friend that they will go to the Masai Mara – a final trip – and afterwards Helen and Katie must go back to Ireland. Ken has given her an ultimatum, but that is not why she does it. She sees in her mind’s eye the knife on the basin, the blood, her son’s whimpering body, and feels a shudder go through her. The bond between the children, intimate, too close, sealed now with blood, hardens her heart to any possible protests. The decision has been made. Ready now, she puts her hand to the door, pushes it, and the others turn to greet her.
Part Three
* * *
KENYA 2013
8. Katie
The day I found out about Luke’s death, I stopped drinking. It wasn’t a conscious decision, not really. I didn’t suddenly decide to flip over a new leaf. It was more a feeling that rose up from my gut, a deep revulsion with myself and with what had happened, so dark and intense that I could hardly stand my own company. Something had to change.
Three weeks of sobriety have passed without much strain, but now, sitting in the airport lounge with Reilly, nursing a cup of coffee, I feel the fear inside me and with it the nudge of longing for a drink.
‘Penny for them,’ Reilly says gently.
I look up at him, see his chin resting on his hand, a thumb meditatively stroking his bearded jaw, a furrow of concern between his eyes as he watches me carefully. He had picked me up when dawn had barely broken over the city and driven me to the airport, insisting on keeping me company. Here, in this bustling, transient place, there is a firmness about him – a solidity – which makes me feel safe, but a bit panicky too. In a few moments, I will have to leave and Reilly will stay, and this makes me feel uncertain.
‘I’m wondering why I’m here, Reilly – why I’m about to get on this plane.’
‘Because he wanted you to,’ he says.
‘That’s what’s bothering me,’ I say, leaning in closer to him. ‘Why did Luke want me to come?’
‘You must have meant something to him,’ Reilly suggests.
‘But that’s just it. Including me in this group of intimates suggests a closeness between us that no longer exists. And why Kenya? It just doesn’t stack up. His whole adult life, he never went back, yet he wants to be laid to rest there?’
I bite my lip, my eyes darting around. I can’t seem to shake the twitchiness I’ve been feeling ever since I got the phone call asking me to attend the event – one of a very small and select group of people that Luke requested be present when his ashes were scattered on the wind.
‘Christ, what must his wife think?’ I run a hand over my eyes and, in the lidded darkness, I see Julia Yates’s face, her eyes level and examining that day in her house when she gave me the picture. I’ve brought it with me, tucked inside my handbag, and now, on a whim, I take it out and pass it to Reilly. ‘Julia Yates gave this to me. She found it on his desk the morning he went missing.’
His eyes travel over it, taking it in: Luke, Nick and I, sitting in the African sun.
‘Look at you,’ he says quietly, ‘before you were corrupted.’
‘That was a hell of a long time ago,’ I say drily.
‘Ah, now, none of that. Fishing for compliments about your age.’
He turns it over in his hand, peers at the back, then slides it across the table to me. ‘Do you think it’s significant?’
‘Something happened. Back when we were kids … something happened and now I wonder, I can’t help but think that …’
My eyes fill, the room a blur, and his hand is on mine, steadying me. I hear his voice telling me that I need to calm myself, that there is no point second-guessing why the man killed himself, that people carry around inside them all sorts of secrets, all sorts of pain, and that no good ever came of that kind of soul-searching. But all the time he is talking, I keep thinking of the little bird, and the shadow of something else: a cage on a veranda, the fluttering of wings.
‘The last thing you need right now,’ Reilly says, ‘is to spiral off into some kind of introspective self-examination of some long-forgotten childhood act that means nothing to anyone but you, probably. Do you hear me, Katie?’
I feel the wisdom in his words, tenderness too. If only it were true.
‘What are you doing here, Reilly?’ I ask. ‘Why are you being so kind to me?’
His hand, still on mine, feels suddenly heavy, and something changes in the air between us.
‘Because I care, Katie.’
He says it awkwardly, then withdraws his hand.
Across from us, a little girl sits with her mother, swinging her legs and staring right at me. The mother is peering into a hand-held mirror and dabbing at her cheeks with a little sponge. Where is the father? I wonder.
Something about Reilly, how safe he makes me feel when I’m with him, the way he’s looking at me now with a mixture of interest and concern, reminds me of my father, and all at once I’m back in my parents’ kitchen, a weekend home from university, my father frying bacon, and I’m saying to him casually: ‘Guess who I bumped into the other day? Nick Yates.’ The way his back, curved then in middle age but still elegant, had seemed to stiffen at the name. But I pressed on brightly, telling him about my new friendship, feigning an ease I didn’t feel, pressured as I was by his unspoken anxiety. He didn’t say anything at the time. But later, when the weekend was over and he was dropping me back to the station to catch my train, he reached out to grab my wrist before I climbed out of the car, an urgency in his voice and a warning in his eye as he said: ‘Stay away from that boy now, Katie. He’s no good for you.’ And that was the last we ever spoke of it.
Now, with my coffee cooling in front of me, and a voice on the Tannoy announcing the boarding of another flight, I say to Reilly: ‘I’m frightened about going back there.’
His eyes flicker over my face. ‘What happened, Katie?’
‘We were just kids. We’d been playing. But then … something terrible …’
Reilly’s mouth bunches into a pensive pout and I hear him exhaling. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
I feel the pull of him there, and in one way it would be so easy to tell him, the relief of just letting it out. ‘No,’ I say quickly, wishing I hadn’t brought it up.
Still, I can’t help but feel the creep of sadness now. ‘What I don’t get is why he wants to go back there,’ I say. ‘Why would Luke Yates want his remains scattered over the one place on earth that this awful thing in his life happened?’
‘To atone?’ Reilly suggests.
‘Maybe.’
But the unease remains. It stays with me as I gather my belongings and, with Reilly to accompany me, make my way towards the security gates. As we reach the barrier, I stop. ‘When someone’s remains are flown to a different country, do you think they’re packed in the luggage hold with all the suitcases and golf-bags?’
Reilly doesn’t answer. Instead he takes my shoulders and leans in to kiss my forehead. I feel the brush of his beard and with it comes a lurch of fear, like a foreshadowing of something unseen but terrible. I want to hold on to him then and keep him close. But he draws back and gives me a smile of reassurance. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he says then, and I can feel his eyes on me, watching me as I make my way up the queue, until I’m through the barrier and lost from sight.
By the time the plane touches down on the runway at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport my head is pounding. I have spent the entire flight hiding in my seat, painfully aware of the others on this plane – Nick, Lauren, Julia. I tried to work, reading over the notes I’d made following the autopsy report, but the words kept stringing together – alcohol and narcotics in the bloodstream, evidence of self-strangulation, bruising, the bursting of blood vessels, traumas to the body. Reading it made me feel restless, uncontained, the stirring of some deep-buried emotion inside me. After touchdown, I look outside and see the night sky purple and green where the floodlights colour the air. My limbs ache from the journey. As I come down the steps and breathe in the diesel fumes polluting the soft African night breeze, the tension in my body is morphing into some kind of swamping fatigue. All I want now is to get to my hotel room and collapse into bed.
Standing at a distance from the rest, I watch as one by one the others collect their luggage from the carousel and wander off to find taxis to wherever they are staying. No one makes any attempt to speak to me – not even Nick – which only compounds my loneliness on what is already a solitary journey. Nick and Lauren have their own home somewhere in the city. I picture a bohemian apartment in an old colonial house, rotating fans and hardwood furniture, framed posters and ethnic prints, a cocktail bar in one corner, a piano in the other.
I can’t help but sneak a glance at her – Nick’s wife. There’s something very easy in her manner, the relaxed way she holds herself, the casual flick of her hair, as if she’s blissfully unaware of her own power, her own beauty. I wonder what Sally Yates would have made of her, this blonde creature – shockingly young, as if she’s barely out of school. Looking at her, after the long, difficult flight, I feel old. Old, wasted and unfulfilled.
Julia takes her bag and catches my eye. She, I’m sure, will not be staying at Nick and Lauren’s, more like at the Hilton or the Safari Club. Drowning her sorrows in South African wine, and being comforted by her mother and sister. As for me, I’ve booked a single room at the Meridian. For the price I’m paying, my expectations are pretty low.
A single unclaimed suitcase rides the carousel with a grim determination. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I say, under my breath. My bag, it would appear, has been lost.
After an hour of wrangling and form-filling, I find myself riding in a taxi towards Nairobi’s Central Business District. The driver signals he doesn’t mind so I smoke cigarette after cigarette and feel myself grow calm as I blow smoke out of the open window and watch as we pass through one more roundabout onto another unlit street, scrubby black bushes running alongside the road. An eerie feeling comes over me at being back here. As if I’m entering a place that is out of bounds. It’s almost thirty years since I set foot in Kenya. I was, after all, only a child back then.
Just Mam and me. ‘The two girls,’ she’d said, creating an ally of me. Dad was back in Ireland, still shaken by my mother’s announcement. ‘We’re leaving,’ she had told him, her head held aloft in a challenging way, and then, recanting, she had added: ‘For a while, anyway.’ It was odd to be so far away from him. I remember feeling frightened that we might not go back, that this time Mam really meant it, but I also recall feeling unable to say so to her. She was so wound up – a tightly coiled spring. It didn’t feel like we were going on holiday; nor was it like an adventure. It felt like something illicit and shameful, and the whole time we were away, I couldn’t shake the thought that something terrible would happen to my dad in our absence. Like he was going to get knocked over by a car or something. Lying awake in bed during those hot nights away, I thought of all the ways he might die in our absence and that it would be our fault, mine and Mam’s, for leaving him. I never suspected that the terrible thing would happen to me.
Gradually, the black bushes peter out. Buildings sprout at the sides of the roads, lit now by streetlamps. Road signs appear and the buildings grow larger and more dense. Soon enough, the taxi pulls up outside the Meridian, with its large impersonal façade. I pay my fare, get out wearily and go through the hotel’s doors.
It’s late when I find my room. I look down from my window at the street below; horns honking and the whine of engines reaches me on the eighth floor and restlessness takes hold of me. It’s too late to go out wandering, but I don’t want to be alone, so I go back downstairs to the sports bar that flanks the lobby.
The place is loud with voices and the clinking of glasses. Muzak is piped through speakers. I’m looking for a quiet corner to hide, when my eyes alight on a young woman darkly dressed, hair pulled back to show a face that is small and pretty, a woman who is regarding me with suspicion. I know who she is – her picture was in one of the tabloids after Luke’s death, part of a montage of various shots of the women in his life. In the caption under Tanya Clarke’s photograph, some sub-editor had added the caption ‘Stalwart assistant’. Before I approach her, I wonder how she feels about being pinned under that label and then, as I step towards her, I see a hint of something in her that I recognize – loneliness, desperation. My spirits rise a little at the glimpse of an opening.
‘Can I join you?’ I ask, indicating the empty chair, and she shrugs, saying, ‘It’s a free country,’ in a nonchalant manner, but her flickering eyes betray her.
A lounge boy passes and I order a club soda for me and a refill for Tanya, who is beginning to thaw a little – vodka and tonic.
‘To steady the nerves,’ she says quietly. ‘Long flights make me anxious. I always need a drink after them …’
I take in her glossy brown hair, her perfectly manicured nails, her correct posture. But there is tiredness in the set of her shoulders, a kind of bewilderment at the edges of her gaze. And I feel her looking at me too, her eyes passing over me, and I imagine how tired and dishevelled I must appear. We exchange some small-talk about the flight, about the hotel. But Tanya also exudes a kind of practical ability, a hyper-organised professionalism, that tells me she’s not one for chit-chat, so I launch right in.
‘It must have been a shock to see yourself in the paper the other day,’ I say.
‘My sudden leap to stardom,’ she says drily, as our drinks arrive.
I watch her adding the tonic to her glass, giving it a brisk stir, then bringing it to her lips. ‘From what I hear, Luke relied heavily on you.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I still can’t believe he’s gone.’
‘You must miss him.’
‘The office is so quiet now. I’m not sure what’s going to happen.’
‘Will you stay on?’
‘I don’t think so. It just wouldn’t be the same.’
I can see that she’s anxious, her hands fidgeting, and I know that she wants to talk but is wary of taking me into her confidenc
e. ‘You must have been close – you and Luke?’
‘Oh, yes! He was great. I’d have done anything for him.’ She catches me looking, and sits a little straighter in her seat. ‘It’s not what you’re thinking. Luke wasn’t like that – I mean, he was very charming, flirtatious even. He loved the company of women but he would never take advantage.’
I wonder, not for the first time, whether she was a little in love with Luke Yates.
‘Anyway,’ she says brusquely, as if she feels she’s said too much, ‘he’s dead now.’
I sense her closing down. Her drink is almost finished and so is mine, and the way she is shifting in her chair tells me she will leave soon.
‘Are you going to the Masai Mara after the ceremony tomorrow?’ I ask, and she nods.
‘I’ve never been,’ she adds. ‘Funny, because it’s a place I’ve always wanted to go. I just never thought it would be under these circumstances.’
‘I’ve been,’ I say. ‘With Luke.’
She looks at me, surprised, and I catch the gleam of interest in her eye.
‘It was when we were kids. His family were living out here – his dad had a job with the World Bank, and his mother was doing aid work of some kind or another.’
‘You came out for a visit?’
‘Sort of.’ Then, leaning forward to create a conspiratorial circle of two, I say: ‘My mother ran away from my father, you see. She took me with her and we fled to Kenya.’
Tanya’s eyes widen. ‘Why Kenya?’
‘Luke’s mother and mine had been friends since childhood.’
‘How long did you stay?’
‘Most of the summer. I’ve no real memory of Nairobi. But I remember the Masai Mara. We spent our last few days there.’
‘It must have been amazing.’
‘Yes,’ I say carefully. ‘Yes, it was.’
Carefully, because of the dangerous tangle of emotions those memories pull on. Carefully, because the joy of the trip was extinguished by all that followed.