by Karen Perry
Silence for a moment, the whisper of running water. Murphy’s companion says something I don’t understand. I’d almost forgotten him. But now, as I turn my attention to him, I see the hardness of his stare, a malignant flash in the amber light of those glassy eyes before he backs away into the shadows.
‘Wait,’ I tell him, but he turns on his heel.
‘Tell him to wait,’ I say to Murphy, but he draws in his chin, watches his friend disappear into the dark clump of trees.
‘Who is he?’ I ask, my heart beating loudly now. A kind of excitement taking hold of me, interlaced with fear. I’m close, so close I can almost touch it.
A tightening in his face, mouth crimped in a defiant pout. Hands in his pockets, he turns from me and starts back towards the hotel.
‘Murphy!’ I shout after him, but he doesn’t turn.
A frozen instant of indecision, but the pull of the river is there – a path through the trees. Without stopping to think, I turn to follow the stranger.
I don’t know what direction he’s gone in, but feel I’m close nonetheless. A faint stirring of branches up ahead, the crunching footfall. I hurry now, the trees a hard, dark presence above me, the river bubbling. I don’t know where I am but I need to move, to follow, to find. I know this man. Somewhere down the dark corridors of memory, a match has been struck. In these woods are answers to my questions and, whatever the risk, I’m propelled by something outside myself to hurry, to hunt him down.
The path thins – an animal track – and leaves become densely packed. The earth under my feet is softer, branches scrape my face, and I flick them away, pushing hard now against the growth, the dripping trees. Heat trapped in this space, musty and savage, odours rising from the river, animal and strange. The track is leading me to the water, and as I near its banks, a shape forms and moves, a lizard slipping into the depths. I stop. Feel the breath catching in my throat. The air grows still. The darkness around me seems oppressive. A threat forms in the air. It comes to me at once: no longer in pursuit, I have become the hunted one. All at once I feel it – a presence. Watchful. Disturbed. The silent power of the river. Cora. Her name carried in the water, dripping from the trees above; it’s there in the wet mud that grips my feet. The cloying presence of her; the air clogged with her death.
I hold myself still. Senses heightened like a startled deer.
A crack behind me and I swing around. Pain breaks like a wave against my head, a thousand nerve endings screaming in chorus. Blackness sings in my ears, a wash of it coming over me, pulling me down, down. A presence at the edge of my sight, a faceless figure, my fall silently observed by him and no one else but the listening trees and the hanging vines.
13. Nick
That night my sleep is broken. The cooling air of the Masai Mara has got into my bones. Lauren stirs next to me. Her breathing is laboured. We don’t talk. That can wait until morning.
When light finally breaks into the room, Lauren pulls herself from the bed. She stretches before going into the bathroom.
As I swing my legs out and go to stand up, it hits me – I feel as if I’m under water: a sucking noise in my ears.
‘Are you all right?’ Lauren asks, when she comes out of the bathroom. She is clutching her towel in front of her, frowning.
‘I don’t feel well.’
She comes forward, presses her hand to my forehead. ‘You’re burning up.’
‘I’m fine,’ I say, needing to get moving, to get away from this place. I reach the end of the bed and the room swirls around me.
‘Nick, you’re sick. You may need a doctor.’
‘I need paracetamol, that’s all. And some water.’
‘I’ll find Karl – tell him we won’t be able to leave today.’
‘No!’
My shout makes her draw back, startled.
‘No,’ I repeat, softer this time, but still firm. This noise in my ears that started on the journey down here has been building to a crescendo, its whine driving me to distraction. I can’t shake the feeling that until I leave this place, until I start to put distance between me and the land where my brother now lies, I will get no peace. I start to get dressed while Lauren looks in her bag, then hands me some painkillers and a bottle of water. I knock them back and swallow hard.
‘We need to talk,’ she says quietly.
‘I know we do. I know. But, sweetheart, can’t it wait? I feel so strange. This noise in my ears …’
‘No, I don’t think it can wait, Nick.’
Something sinks within me. I stop buttoning my shirt, put my hands on my hips and try to steady myself, try to feel the floor beneath my feet. My head is swimming with fever, water rushing through the channels behind my ears, and even though I know she’s entitled to a decent explanation, I’m not sure I have the energy to give it.
‘Nothing happened, Lauren. I promise you. We talked – that’s it.’
She is frowning with frustration at herself, at me, impatient. ‘You know what, Nick? I believe you. I do. You went to Katie’s room, you talked, you fell asleep. Fine. If that’s what you say happened, then I accept it.’
‘If you accept it why do you sound so angry?’
‘You just don’t get it, do you? You think this is just about sex. About fidelity. But the thing is this, Nick.’ She draws close, close enough for me to see the bright flecks of amber in her eyes. ‘I am your wife. That means that I should be the one you go to when you need to talk. I should be the one you confide in. I should be the one you turn to for understanding, or for comfort. Not her.’
I feel the stab of each one of those Is and sit down on the bed. I am so tired of running from this thing, from avoiding it, and now with the plains of the Masai Mara swarming outside me, pressuring this room, trying to get inside my head, I cannot bear it.
‘There are some things I can’t talk to you about, Lauren.’
‘What things?’ she asks, but I can’t answer.
‘I see,’ she says, her voice icy now. ‘So you can’t talk to me about it, but you can talk to her.’
I close my eyes, but that just makes the whining noise worse. When I open them again, Lauren’s eyes are red and teary. My mind’s on fire. There are too many things I can’t figure out right now. Too many memories that clash.
A voice in my head is pushing me to tell her, whispering to me: Let her in.
The room seems smaller now. There’s no air. I get up, cross to the window and throw it open. I feel claustrophobic, breathless. My hands are shaking and my head is full of a noise that sounds something like an untuned radio.
When I turn back, she’s staring hard at me, in a way she’s never looked at me before. It’s as if she’s urging me to say something. And in that moment, it feels as if we could kill each other or make love.
We do neither. Of course we don’t.
Instead, Lauren goes to the window and stares out at the savannah beyond the hotel grounds. ‘This place. What it does to people …’ she says enigmatically.
And finally the pressure that has been building in me breaks, and I say what I have wanted to say but not allowed myself to do so until now: ‘When I was eight, I watched my brother kill a little girl. It happened here in the river. I watched him hold that girl under the water until the life went out of her. I watched him do it and I didn’t stop him. And Katie saw it too. That’s why I went to her. That’s why I had to talk to her. That’s why I couldn’t talk to you.’
Lauren looks at me, but says nothing. She turns, takes her bag, and leaves. The door falls shut heavily behind her.
I sit on the bed again, hang my head in my hands. My whole body is shaking.
I realize I may have lost her. The look on her face, the fear that had entered her eye. I never told her I loved her. I never said I was sorry it had happened – that it was the greatest regret of my life. I am amazed at my own recklessness – that I would gamble with our happiness like that, take such a foolish risk and tell her what we had done. I stare at my hands
and see the dirt around my fingernails, the reddish arcs of dust beneath them, and I think of my hand going into that urn, the coolness of the ash, and feel a sudden panic. Quickly now, I get to my feet and rush for the door, feeling the spinning as if my brain is floating in water.
I’ll find her, I’ll tell her I love her. I’ll tell her that what happened when I was a child was awful, too awful for me to think about, to look at. But I will open up to her about it, if that’s what she wants, I will tell her what happened, confess my part in it, but then we would put it behind us, lock it away in the past, push it back down there into the dark, return it to its place in the shady waters, where it belongs.
But my legs buckle and my hands drop from the door-handle. They’re too weak. I’m too weak even to open the door.
I stumble to the bed, sit down on its edge and hold my head. I’m dizzy and nauseous and the world seems to be spinning in furious revolutions. The sweat is cold on my forehead. I wipe it with a shaking hand, close my eyes and try to steady myself. As I breathe in and out, it comes back to me then, like a half-forgotten melody my father might once have hummed, the day it all happened.
‘We’re going down to the river,’ Luke says.
‘Really?’ I ask.
‘Mum says it’s okay.’
Dad has gone looking for another driver. Katie’s mum has gone with him. She’s in a huff, Katie says. Luke says she’s ‘distraught’. It makes me think of the word ‘drought’, and the dry expanse of desert we crossed with our parents only months before. I thought I’d seen a pool of water on that trip. But my dad called it a mirage. It’s when you see something that isn’t really there.
‘Come on,’ Luke says. ‘Let’s go.’
The three of us run into the undergrowth towards the river. Luke is ahead and Katie comes streaming by me. We run through the high grass and, after several minutes, stop to catch our breath and take stock. From where we are, I can see the van we came in, but not the driver. He’s asleep in the front seat.
The grass scratches and tickles us as we run through it. Luke is singing a song of nonsense and I’m smiling broadly into the rushing wind. Then, as the muddy smell of the river rises, we see her – Cora.
She’s sitting in a tree, her feet dangling over the river. She has blonde hair tied in green-ribboned bunches. She’s talking, not to another person but to herself. The closer we get, I realize she’s not talking but singing quietly. It sounds to me like some kind of lullaby.
One hand clutches the bough she’s sitting on, the other a green-leafed branch, which she is sweeping this way and that. I wonder what her song is, or where she imagines herself to be. I can almost make out the words as they leave her lips in gentle plosives.
Her younger sister, Amy, is crouched on the riverbank, entranced by a game of her own. When Luke arrives first, panting, it looks like he’ll startle the girls, but he doesn’t. They turn and gaze at him as if they’ve been expecting him, as if we’re all grown-ups and he is some gentleman caller.
I wave, like we’re old friends, not kids who’ve only known each other a short time. Yesterday we found them here by the river, and together the five of us had splashed around at the water’s edge until the sun dipped low and our dad came down and called to us back to camp, it was getting late.
Luke walks to the riverbank and kicks stones, digs his hands into his pockets and looks from one girl to the other. Then he pulls off his T-shirt and walks into the water.
I follow, but Katie stays where she is, at a distance. The water is cool and clear, not cold. It feels good to put my toes into it. The water tickles. Cora jumps down from the tree – she follows us to the water, giggling. The girls wear dresses. One is pink, the other green. They are sitting by the water now with sticks and are making spells.
Luke asks if they’re witches and they laugh.
‘Is it deep?’ Luke says, pointing into the water.
Cora shrugs. He dives straight in and the girls gasp. When he emerges, his smile is broad and the water trickles down his face.
‘There might be crocodiles!’ Katie shouts.
‘It’s not even cold,’ Luke says. He waves to her. ‘Come on in,’ he hollers, but she doesn’t budge.
I want to follow him – it’s so hot and the river is begging me to come in – but Katie’s caution holds me back. I hunker down in the shadows, scan the surface of the water for the stealthy glide of a ridged back. One of the sisters crosses the river – Amy, the younger one. She inches her way towards me, staring at me with curiosity.
Mum comes to check on us, her form a silhouette against the white light beyond the trees. Hands on her hips, she hollers at Luke, but he won’t come out of the water, even though she tells him to. I’m not sure if she can see me in the shadows. I’m not sure I want her to.
After she goes, I follow his lead and dive in. We jump on each other’s backs and splash. Cora has moved closer to us: she wades into the water, and before we know it, we’re all splashing each other.
‘Where are your folks?’ Luke says, and she laughs.
‘Folks?’ she says, and giggles again.
‘Parents?’ Luke clarifies.
She keeps laughing. Apparently there is no answer to this question, or, where they are from, parents are hilarious creatures, or perhaps they don’t exist at all. I run out of the water to pull Katie in, but she shrieks and I leave her be. Then Luke asks me to count as he plunges his head into the water.
‘Now your turn,’ he says.
After several attempts, it looks like there’s going to be only one winner. I can’t beat Luke, but Cora – she might even be older than him, she’s certainly lankier and longer – says: Let me try. Then it’s my turn again, but Luke has an idea. ‘Stay down longer, I’ll assist,’ he says, using one of the grown-up words he has acquired from our parents. He holds his hands over my head and mumbles something that sounds, as I submerge my head beneath the cool water, like a prayer, like something the priest would say at mass as he passes his hands over the congregation, not Body of Christ, not Take away the sins of the world, but something more garbled: an underwater sermon of sorts.
The game has no name. The game is the game. The game is pulling and pushing and laughing. And taking turns. It’s my turn next. I take a deep breath and look upward. I take such a big breath, my mouth wide open, I think I’m going to swallow the whole of the blue sky.
‘Okay. Now teams,’ Luke says. ‘One boy, one girl. Hold hands and stand over there,’ he tells me and Amy, and I take her hand and we walk down into the water, like Luke and I did at the pool our dad brought us to in Dublin. That was when we lived in Ireland. We now live in Africa. Luke says we’re Africans now. In the swimming pool in Dublin, you have to wear goggles and the chlorine makes your skin crawl and rashes appear, like red maps, and drive you crazy with how they itch. But there’s no chlorine in the water here and I can keep my eyes open, wide open. I think I could be a fish or an underwater creature of some sort.
I’m counting in my head. I could be weightless, floating in outer space. I pull Amy’s hand and we go down into the depths, my legs giving way until it’s deep. Then Amy pulls on my hand and we pop out of the water without a drop of air to spare.
The water sprays from my mouth in a fountain. Amy laughs. Her hand is small in mine, and soft like dough. I feel like I can hold my breath for ever. Cora is brave too. She can hold her breath for longer. Is that because she’s older than me? ‘No,’ Luke says. ‘It’s because she’s brave.’
Katie is walking in circles, talking to herself, sometimes stopping to watch, sometimes with her head down. She’ll get dizzy walking in circles, I think.
But I’m getting tired. Luke says: ‘Another game.’
The sun gets hotter. We play until my lungs hurt. I’m thirsty too. I want to go back to the camp. Maybe Dad’s back now. Maybe he’s found a new driver. I look for Mum from the water. I can’t see her. I wish she’d come to get us. I’m not sure where Amy’s parents are. I haven’t se
en them. For all I know, they don’t exist.
Luke says, ‘One more game.’ But I don’t want to. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘You might win this time.’
I gasp for air, swallow hard, then fall, dizzy onto the riverbank. My mouth has water in it and I sound like I’m gurgling.
Luke calls the next round ‘the finals’. ‘Is everybody ready?’ he says.
We nod and he counts us in again and we all go down, the water covering our heads. Amy and I stay down until she wriggles and struggles. I let go of her hand, pop up, and she pops out of the water after me. I don’t like holding Amy’s hand when she starts to wriggle like that.
Luke and Cora are still under water. Cora is trying to come up for air. Luke is holding her.
Overhead, a hawk swoops and turns. It glides through the air effortlessly. Sometimes I wish I could fly. There’s a stillness in the air, and time seems to have stopped. But something does not feel right.
I’m counting: ‘Thirty-one, thirty-two …’
‘Luke,’ I shout, walking through the water. I’m scared now.
My ears are full of water. I can’t make out anything except that hollow sound, like the ghostly wind when a shell is pressed against your ear.
Maybe there’s nothing to hear anyway. Maybe all there is is silence.
Because the girl is still under the water. Like a rag doll, she floats on the surface, face down.
She starts to turn a little in the water. I’m waiting for her to lift her head, spray water from her mouth and say: ‘I tricked you.’
I’m waiting for her to move in any other way. But she doesn’t. Luke looks at me and there is blood coming from his nose. He reaches for the girl and she turns in the water, a swathe of blood reaching across her face.
He takes her in his arms. She’s limp, her arms draped on each side of her, her face losing more colour, her mouth puckered, her eyes open.
Luke doesn’t look like himself. He looks like someone else. He doesn’t look like my brother any more, but someone older. His eyes are like stunned, frozen stars.
‘Help me,’ he says, but I can’t move. He pulls Cora through the water and lays her on the riverbank.