Only We Know

by Karen Perry

In the morning I take a shower, then stand in the kitchen drinking the hot coffee that Lauren has brewed. It’s black and tarry with a bitter tang, and I’m grateful for its strength. Lauren sits on the couch, legs curled under her, a mug of coffee in one hand as she sifts through the post.

  ‘I think I’ll go out,’ I tell her, and she looks up. I say nothing of the dream.

  ‘But the service?’

  ‘It’s not till four.’

  ‘Right – but I told Julia we’d be there early to go through things with her. And we still have to pack for Mara …’ She trails off, watching me as I reach up to the top of the press and take down my helmet. ‘Where’ll you go?’

  ‘Downtown. Don’t worry,’ I tell her, as I lean in to kiss her goodbye. ‘I’ll be back in time.’

  I keep the bike in a lock-up behind the bar below us. It’s not the safest place in the world but it’s close to home, and when I unlock the door, it’s a relief to see the old KTM still there on its stand, bodywork gleaming as the sun breaks through the gloom. I’d spent a good deal of time getting it cleaned up before the wedding because it was meant to be our honeymoon transport, and as I put my lid on and wheel the bike outside, a strange feeling comes over me, a premonition, perhaps, that Lauren and I weren’t meant to go to Madagascar.

  I throw my leg over the bike, give myself a little shake, gun the engine and take off out of there, dust kicked up in my wake. My plan was to head out to Lavington and swing by the old homestead, but now that I’m on my way, something in me rears up against that idea. Instead, I turn the bike around and head south towards Kibera.

  It’s been a while since I’ve been out this way, but nothing much has changed. Still the same depressing poverty, the same tide of filth and waste. The sprawling mass of human tragedy is so vast, it splits into villages, and it is here, in the village of Kianda, that I have come to find Murphy.

  For all the money that has come pouring into the coffers of ALIVE since my mother started it ten years ago, little seems to have been spent on the premises. The structure is sound, a few steps above the makeshift corrugated sheds that line the streets here, but it’s not much to look at. A block-built hut with a tin roof and a wooden door, iron bars over the windows. I pull the bike up outside and chain it to the post, casting an eye around the street for any possible trouble. Three young boys are sitting on the steps and jump up when they see me. I look down at them, their skinny limbs and infectious grins. One is wearing an ancient sweatshirt, the colours faded, although I can just about make out ‘E.T.’ on the chest.

  ‘Here,’ I say, giving them some change. ‘Keep an eye on the bike, yeah?’

  This sends them into whoops of ecstasy. I leave them, jumping and pulling at each other, and step in through the open door, my eyes adapting to the gloom of the room. Murphy is on the phone, seated behind his desk. He raises a hand to me, signals that he’ll be with me in a minute. The walls of his office are plastered with posters warning about AIDS, clean water, immunizations, education, and a massive corkboard swarms with dozens of local community advertisements printed in a neat hand on various coloured postcards. A large map of Nairobi is tacked up on one wall, marked with coloured pins and flags, lines drawn in blue and red ink.

  I take a seat at the second desk, and wait, swinging in my chair, my eyes roaming the room. Murphy is on his feet, anxious to finish his call. Finally he tells whoever is at the other end of the line, ‘Look, I have to go,’ and hangs up.

  ‘Trouble?’ I ask.

  ‘No trouble, Nick,’ he says, forcing a smile. ‘You been up to the Safari Club yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Well, there’s time enough,’ he says, glancing at his watch.

  I feel a twinge of guilt. I suppose I should have called to check on Julia, but a sense of estrangement has already crept between us. After the service, when I went to hug her and felt the thinness of her body in my embrace, a whole clatter of thoughts went through my head – that this was the body my brother had loved and worshipped and ultimately abandoned, that this woman and I were linked by name, and yet, without Luke, the bond seemed tenuous. I found myself wondering whether, after all this was over, Julia and I would ever speak to each other again.

  ‘I do regret not making it to Ireland,’ he says, with a look that is both intent and troubled. ‘You know I would have … It’s just that things here have been so busy and I didn’t feel up to the journey.’

  ‘It’s all right, Jim, you don’t need to explain. Luke would have been happier at the thought of you remaining here to steer the ship.’

  ‘Yes, well …’ He nods awkwardly. ‘I wish I could have been there for him. He meant the world to me. You both do. When you walked in that door just a few minutes ago, and I saw you, you reminded me so much of Sally. It was just like thirty years ago when she stepped over the threshold announcing her willingness to help.’

  He smiles at me then, a grin tinged with nostalgia and the light that comes to his eye whenever he speaks of my mum and dad. ‘What was it she said to me?’ he says, almost to himself. ‘Oh, yes – “I’m here to help.” Like I should have been expecting her. You’d swear she was answering a job advert instead of just showing up here on a whim – ha!’ He gives his sudden barking laugh. ‘But that was Sally all over. Christ, but you’re so like her, Nicholas.’

  ‘Well,’ I say, leaning against the opposite desk and raising my palms, ‘I, too, am here to help.’

  ‘You, Nicholas? You’re not serious?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ I ask, with a grin to mask the surprise of hurt. ‘There’s no one else to do it.’

  ‘It’s very good of you to offer, Nick – it’s the honourable thing to do. But it’s a lot to take on, and you have your own life to lead – you and Lauren. Nobody expects you to yoke yourself to this place.’

  I examine the laminate surface of the desk, my fingers going instinctively to the edge where it is starting to peel away. ‘I feel I should. Luke wrote me a letter some time ago, asking me …’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ he says swiftly. ‘If that’s what you wish to do, then please, don’t let me stop you. I’m only looking out for you.’

  There is a sharpness behind his tone despite the kindness of the words. Exhaustion is etched into the creases of his face. Murphy is an old man now. It isn’t fair to expect him to carry this thing alone.

  ‘So, where do we begin?’ I ask.

  He takes a deep breath, collects himself and moves purposefully to the filing cabinet.

  Onto my desk he piles several folders in different colours, each marked with text in Magic Marker. He leaves me with them and, for about an hour, I pore over the pages, trying to make sense of the columns of figures, the printed information, the projections and memos. The air in here is fetid and clotted with heat. The only air-cooling device is the open door.

  Eventually I get up and stand with my hands in my pockets, staring out at the narrow streets shabby with rubbish and waste, effluent running along a channel at my feet. Two of the boys are sitting on the motorbike, one wearing my lid – outrageously oversized above his skinny shoulders, as if the weight of it alone might cause him to lose his balance and topple into the dirt. It’s ten years since my mother began her campaign out here – Mum and Murphy battling the evils of poverty together – but with the vast sprawling slum of Kibera before us, I can’t help but think that it hasn’t made a bit of difference. With Murphy getting on in years, who knows how much longer he can continue, and then what?

  ‘I don’t know, Murphy,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what to do. As my father used to say, I’m all at sea.’

  ‘Come on, Nicholas,’ he says kindly, his hand heavy on my shoulder. ‘Let’s leave these decisions for another day, when we’ve less weighty things on our minds.’

  I nod, step out into the midday sun and turn back to him. ‘Best get ready, I suppose.’

  ‘Good man.’

  ‘You’re travelling down to Mara tomorrow?’

 
‘Indeed.’

  ‘Karl is giving me and Lauren a lift, but I’m sure there’d be room for you.’

  ‘No, no. Don’t worry. An old friend is driving me there.’

  ‘All right,’ I say, my voice betraying my uncertainty.

  He picks up on it straight away. ‘Is everything okay?’ he asks, with concern. ‘Are you worried about tomorrow?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say quietly. ‘It’s just strange, I suppose. It hasn’t really sunk in.’

  I let the words hang, and Murphy nods, understanding, then puts his hand to my back solicitously. ‘Don’t worry, Nick. It’ll all be fine.’

  I go down the steps, wrestle my helmet from the youngsters, and reward them with a handful of sweets. Their laughter carries back to us as they run off down an alleyway. I turn back to Murphy. ‘Actually,’ I begin, ‘when I think of Luke – of laying him to rest – I feel more than strange. I feel … scared.’

  ‘Scared?’ His face is poised and still, a shadow passing over it. ‘But what are you scared of?’

  ‘Me?’ I whisper. ‘I’m scared of myself.’

  He stands at the doorway and watches as I steer carefully along the street. I can see him in my side-mirror, his broad shoulders and solemn face, his eyes squinting in the sun, until I turn a corner and he is gone.

  We get to the Safari Club an hour before the service is due to start, and join the others in Julia’s suite. To anyone’s eyes, we are an odd gathering, Julia, her mother and sister, tailored in pinched black suits, heels that could puncture tyre. Lauren has persuaded me to wear my wedding suit, but now I wish I hadn’t – it seems disrespectful, somehow, not to mention the confusion it creates, the two events merging in my mind. Lauren stands to one side, unusually sober and understated in a dark blue dress and sandals. We haven’t spoken much today – she didn’t ask where I’d been all morning, and I never said.

  Julia breaks free from the cluster of her family and I catch her mother throwing me a glance loaded with suspicion. It makes me wonder what Julia might have said about me. Or is it less about me and more about my brother? After all, he was the one who abandoned her.

  ‘You’ve seen the room?’ Julia asks me, taking me by the elbow and leading me to the window.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Do you think it’ll be all right?’ she asks nervously.

  I see all the tension, the toll these last weeks have taken on her, and can’t help but feel sorry for her. So I don’t tell her that I think the room is a joke, with its ostentatious displays of flowers, its sterile furnishings and manufactured reverence, like some kind of fake chapel set up a stone’s throw from the cocktail lounge. Instead, I say: ‘It will be fine, Julia.’

  Out of the window, the horizon is blotted with cranes and scaffolding. Nairobi is a building site. It is being dug and reshaped into something else. Drills, engines and sirens fill the air, and my ears. All I want to do is block it out.

  Julia is talking to me, telling me, in a voice that sounds controlled and a little cold, the order of play, so to speak, who will say what, the roles we must take. I listen to her with a kind of distant fascination, as if I’m not really present in this scene, but a spectator watching from afar – trying in an absent kind of way to stave off the anger that is building within me at the charade of grief. It’s only when she hands me a piece of paper busy with words that I focus on what she’s saying.

  ‘I’d like you to say this poem,’ she tells me. ‘I know it’s very long, and if you prefer, you can swap with my sister, Andrea – she’s reading the psalm. But I think you’ll do it justice.’

  I stare at the paper – ‘The Castaway’ by William Cowper – and something in me rails against it. I look up at Julia and she sees the defiance in my eye.

  ‘This is wrong. All of this. It is so wrong,’ I say, unable to hold back any longer.

  Julia’s back stiffens. Behind, her mother and sister turn around.

  ‘This isn’t Luke. William Cowper? Seriously? I’m pretty sure he’d never heard of the bloke.’

  ‘Nick, please.’

  ‘Not him or any other eighteenth-century poet. This isn’t right, Julia … It’s a sham.’

  I’ve said the words and they can’t be taken back.

  For a moment, Julia holds herself so still, her face unreadable, that I can’t be sure if she’s going to burst into tears or hit me. She does neither. Instead, she speaks to me in a low voice that is pulsing with anger.

  ‘A sham? You can call it that, but to me it is trying to put a little bit of dignity to this whole mess. You can say that it isn’t what Luke would have wanted, you can stand around with your hands in your pockets, like some moody teenager – and I really couldn’t give a damn. Because this is what I want, Nick. This is what I need. To claw back a little bit of dignity for myself.’

  Julia’s eyes are wild with the rage and the injustice that has been done to her and I feel myself drawing back, mumbling an apology, ashamed of my outburst, burning with regret.

  ‘Of course I’ll say the poem,’ I tell her, but I’m speaking to her back as she has turned away from me, scorn coming off her in waves.

  I look at the piece of paper in my shaking hands, try to pull myself together, and from the printed words that crawl around the page, these two lines break free and catch my eye:

  We perish’d, each alone; But I, beneath a rougher sea,

  And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.

  I read those words and all at once I’m back there, water up to my waist, the sun beating down overhead, and that girl’s hair spreading out like weed in the water – and it’s so real that I can feel it, soft and weighty in my hands. A voice in my head, Katie’s, screaming: ‘Stop! Stop! You’ve got to stop him!’

  ‘Nick?’

  Lauren’s touch is gentle but I nearly jump out of my skin.

  Her eyes are round with concern. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  She takes my arm, turns me to the door. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘It’s about to begin.’

  10. Katie

  It happens on the morning of the memorial service.

  An envelope slid beneath the door of my hotel room.

  Blinking away sleep and bleary with a headache that feels like a hangover, I pad across the floor barefoot, stoop to pick it up. A brown envelope, innocuous enough, until I turn it over in my hands, see my name scrawled in the same blue marker and feel a lurch of recognition that comes straight from my stomach. The dead bird. I’d almost forgotten. Sweat on my upper lip, I open it and glance inside, try to ready myself for whatever it is I will find.

  A bunch of documents. Printouts from the internet. I place each one on my bed, covering it with images of drownings. Milky white limbs submerged in water, faces still and open-mouthed beneath the surface. Some are blurry and indistinct; others have a shocking clarity. Standing in my underwear in that unfamiliar hotel room, poring over each page, each image, then dropping it onto the bed with the rest. Fear and confusion washing through me, like a cocktail that is getting me loaded in a way I don’t like. My mind teems with thoughts, each one clambering over the last: who uploads this stuff to the internet? Who looks for it? Who are all these people whose death masks are tossed about from one server to another? And, of course, the question that overrides all others: who is sending me this?

  I think of the day in the office, the pictures of that girl in the swimming pool, hair spreading out in water, and for a moment it distracts me – I’m even heartened a little, thinking that this has nothing to do with me and what happened in the river that day. That this is about some sicko with a mobile phone who’s pissed off that we wouldn’t print his ghoulish shots of a dead girl and has decided to take out his bile on me. For just a moment, I can almost convince myself that this, the dead bird, these pictures, all of it is the handiwork of some nasty little wanker with his own personal agenda. For a moment I convince myself that I am still safe.

  Then I turn to the last page and my convictio
ns desert me. I hold it in my hand, feel the belt around my throat.

  This one is different from the others. It hasn’t been gleaned from the internet. A photocopy of an old newspaper clipping. Details of a gruesome find on the banks of a river. A picture of a girl grinning at a camera, the kind of school photo that stood on sideboards in homes throughout my childhood: big front teeth, a rabbitty face. Seeing that face again, after all these years, sends a jolt right through me, and I realize I’m standing straight and still as a stick, every muscle and sinew alive with tension. I can hardly feel my hands, my feet. Nerve endings prickle like a rash over my skin. That face grinning out at me from beyond the grave. Her name printed in black and white: Cora Gordon. Until now, I never knew her surname. I had never thought to find it out.

  But someone had.

  The fear is in the room with me now, like something crouching on top of the wardrobe, casting its malignant gaze down on me, watching for my reaction. The belt at my neck is cinched to strangling point. The paper trembles in my hands. For a moment, I can’t move, but neither can I look away, appalled by what has been sent to me. And I think of my other gift from this anonymous correspondent – the little bird – and I cannot deny the connection. Those birds on the veranda. The fluttering of their tiny wings. Two little sparrows.

  Someone knows. Someone has found out.

  By the time I reach the Safari Club, the service has already begun. Beyond the bright noise of the lobby, I join the others and sit in the hush of the heavily air-conditioned room, trying to bring my breathing under control. The priest stands at a lectern beside an ostentatious floral display, holding forth on the mysteries of life and death. He wears an open-necked white shirt, no sign of a collar. He hardly looks like a priest at all. I sit on a fold-out chair, the plastic hot at the backs of my thighs, wearing yesterday’s clothes, feeling chilly and strange and jumpy as a cat. Tanya glances across at me – an enquiry in her gaze – and all at once, my suspicions are aroused. What does she know? Why is she looking at me? I stare at my knees, push down the paranoia that keeps rising inside.