by Karen Perry
Why won’t she sit up? I think. I’m still in the water. I’m shivering now. I want to say: ‘Stop play-acting.’
But I can’t say anything.
I want to say: ‘Luke, let’s not play this game any more.’ I want to say: ‘Let’s never play this game again, Luke.’
‘Luke, can you hear me?’
Luke is kneeling by Cora’s side and pushing on her chest, up and down. He is frantic and afraid.
Her struggle and the terror she must have felt at the end are not captured in her body or in her eyes. Instead, her pale blue eyes look like they have seen Heaven.
Katie is crying out now as she scrambles towards us. Amy is nowhere to be seen.
Katie’s eyes are large and afraid. My head fills with noise. I’m standing in the water, shivering.
Luke is pressing his mouth to Cora’s – breathing into her.
The trees are crowding around us, black and silent.
Then we are moving through the water – me, Luke and Katie – pulling, dragging. The river water is rolling down my back, beginning to dry in the heat. Something passes over my hand; it’s Cora’s hair, like weed, floating beneath the surface as we take her upriver. Her wrist is gripped in both my hands. I cry out, letting go of her arm, watching it float away to her side.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ Luke shouts.
What happens then? Shouts and murmurs. Luke saying, ‘Keep a lookout.’ Branches gathered – sticks, leaves, twigs. Slowly, Cora becomes hidden from view. A bird shrieks high in the branches. Movement on the bank and Katie screams. She’s standing in the water, her eyes enormous, hands over her mouth. My head is filled with noise. I cannot hear what anyone is saying. I can only hear the sound of water rushing upward. She screams again, and Luke swings around, shoves her back hard so that she loses her footing, falls into the water. He turns back to the bank, his face hot and white with fury, finishes the task. Something moves on the other side of the river – Katie glances downstream. Then Luke is grabbing me by the wrist, pulling me so hard I lose my footing, bare feet scrabbling in the dirt, but still he keeps pulling. Katie is by my side and now all three of us are running.
Later, my dad asks us a hundred questions, and then another hundred.
‘Tell me,’ he says, ‘as clearly as you can, exactly what happened.’
Was this before or after the police came? I can’t be sure. But I can’t say a word. Something is stopping my throat.
‘We were playing,’ Luke says.
‘And then?’
‘We started this game.’
‘What game?’
‘Just a game.’
My dad has never hit us, but I feel the great rage within him and the will-power it takes to stop himself shaking Luke or lashing out at me when I won’t speak.
‘What happened to the other girl?’ Luke asks.
‘What?’
‘The other one? Amy?’
Dad tries to stay calm, but he keeps asking question after question. The hours that pass are blurred and indistinct. Some things puncture the vagueness. The policeman’s height – he might be the tallest man I’ve ever seen. I hear my dad say the word ‘accident’. Sitting in the police station, picking at the scab on my knee. My fingers still white and wrinkled from the river. The station is bare. Mum fidgets, biting her thumbnail, sits close beside me. My father writes out our statements; we sign. A swimming accident. Children unsupervised. The declarations are witnessed.
I have a strange feeling there was no morgue. The girl may have rested on a pallet in the back room of that station.
The policeman holds out his massive hands. ‘A tragic accident,’ he says, and sighs.
He closes his eyes.
I imagine that when he opens them, he wishes us gone.
The long drive back to Nairobi – not a word spoken.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ is my dad’s plaintive refrain. He says it over and over and over again; late into the night, all night, every night for the rest of our lives.
Mum cries and cries.
That night, back in our house in Lavington, we are sent to bed. Katie’s bed remains empty. Tonight she sleeps in her mother’s room. I can’t imagine sleeping ever again. I am afraid to go to sleep. Afraid that if I close my eyes, the only thing I will see is the water, its silty murkiness and the girl’s eyes wavering, staring back at me.
I trace the grain in the wood of the beams above my bed. I follow its meandering, circling, maze-like paths as it leads me out of where I am. Luke, on the other hand, has hidden himself beneath his bedclothes, buried himself completely. From downstairs, the adults’ voices rise. Katie’s mum is frantic, a shrill note of fear in hers.
‘We need to leave here,’ she says. ‘In the morning, first thing. The risk is too great. Please, Ken.’
My father’s voice is low, calm, yet he sounds different now, taken by a new seriousness. He urges Helen to remain calm, but she is well beyond that.
‘Control myself? A child was killed! How can we possibly stay here?’
My mum makes inarticulate objections, which end up sounding like a series of buts.
‘Do what you want, Sally,’ Helen says sharply. ‘But Katie and I are leaving. My God, I wish we’d never come!’
The argument continues through the night. I keep my eyes closed tight. In the darkness, as I drift in and out of consciousness, I think I can hear, from under his blanket, Luke counting again, his voice fragile: ‘Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two …’
Katie’s mother goes to her room. I hear them whispering and know that Katie is awake but I can’t make out what they are saying.
My parents stay downstairs, talking. I hear the murmur of their voices mingling, kept low.
‘A tragic accident.’ My dad’s voice. ‘That’s what the man said.’
‘Yes, but the other one. The smaller one. The way he was looking at us …’
‘Sally.’
‘If we had had more time … If we’d just come up with something clearer, something more solid …’
Dad says something then, something indistinct and muffled.
Mum’s voice, prickly with fear: ‘I don’t know, Ken. I just wish we could be sure.’
I’m counting now in my head. I’ve taken over from Luke, who has fallen silent. He might be asleep. Either way I keep counting, as if counting is a kind of prayer, lulling me to sleep.
The memory fades.
I hear a car rev its engine outside. I open my eyes and see dust floating through the air. I lift myself from the bed, stand and walk to the window of the room. Outside, a shimmer of heat is rising in the distance. In it, the world wavers, like some kind of mirage. My limbs are leaden. I walk back to the bed, ready to fall onto it, but hear footsteps hurrying down the corridor towards my room.
And then comes the frantic knocking on the door. I turn.
‘Nick? Are you there? Open up!’
I struggle to the door, fling it open with my last ounce of strength and there before me is Murphy – sweating and wild-eyed.
‘Something’s happened,’ he says, reaching for me. ‘There’s been an accident. You need to come with me now.’
Part Four
* * *
KENYA 1984
14. Sally
The scream. She cannot shake the scream from her memory. It keeps coming back to her, unannounced and unwanted.
That last scream, different from the others. And she knew from it, before she ever got to the river, that it was not a child’s voice. The sharpness of the note, the depth of it, spoke to something primal within her, the burning point of motherhood, and she recognized the distress within it and that was the thing that made her run, breathless and ragged, feet slapping the dry earth hard, all the way to the river. That was when she saw her – a woman standing up to her hips in water, turning about frantically to scan the surface, the riverbank, the surrounding trees. She saw the heave in the woman’s chest, the craning of her neck, features stretched in desperation, in he
r hand green ribbons, and from her mouth, the one name called over and over in a shrill note of panic. Behind her on the banks, skulking in the shadow of the trees, the little girl, the younger of the two, watched Sally with solemn eyes.
‘Everything has changed,’ she tells Jim.
They are sitting outside a café near her home in Lavington – plastic tables, scalloped parasols protecting them from the sun’s glare, cans of Coke sweating in the heat.
‘Not everything,’ he says. He’s holding her hand, kneading her fingers and knuckles, and she feels the pressure of his touch. ‘We’re still the same – you and me.’
Conscious that they’re in a public place, she withdraws her hand from his, glances around at the other diners.
After that, he sits in injured silence for a while, ferocity in his gaze.
Before the Masai Mara, before the thing, he had pressed her into making a decision. An ultimatum delivered: me or him. She had come close to leaving her husband.
Now, her focus is on containing this thing. She cannot even bring herself to give a name to what happened. Nor can she tell him about it – not properly. The details she has given him are vague, sketchy. Even telling him that much feels like a betrayal. She looks to him for reassurance, for distraction, but even when she’s with him, she’s reliving it in her head. The woman’s scream of fright. The solemn gaze of that little girl watching her from the other side of the river. The rise in her gorge of fear for her own children as she began to search for them, adding their names to the air in her own clear note of fear. She had tried to engage the other mother, asked her about the boys, about Katie, but the woman was well beyond that, had burrowed deep into her own fear. She held the green ribbons to her chest, sobs coming between the cries of her daughter’s name. The woman wading through the water, and Sally running along the bank, searching through the trees, through the long grass of the field beyond, the pressure building in her chest, a prayer running through her head: Not the boys, please, God, not the boys.
She doesn’t tell this to Jim. She doesn’t tell him much at all. Their meeting feels flat, a little desperate, cursory too, and when she tells him she has to go, the injured look he gives her tears at her a little.
She gets on her bicycle to leave, and he makes her promise not to forsake what they have but to hold on to it, to feel the strength and depth of his love and it will carry her through this difficult time.
‘Promise me,’ he says, with an urgency that unsettles her.
But Sally knows that promises – after what has happened – can no longer be made or honoured.
The cycle home is mainly uphill and Sally feels it in the muscles of her thighs, staring at the blurred strip of clay road ahead of her under the glare of the afternoon sun. By the time she reaches home, she has sweated through her clothes and feels dizzy from the heat of the day and her meeting with Jim.
A jeep she doesn’t recognize is parked in front of the house, and beyond it, on the veranda, Jamil stands deep in conversation with a man in a white suit whose face Sally cannot see. Her pace quickens and her heart beats a little faster. Jamil catches sight of her and points towards her. The man turns, a big man, his dark face shining under the sun. He squints and raises a hand in greeting, a smile broadening his features as she leans her bicycle against the post and climbs the steps to greet them.
‘Mrs Yates,’ the man says, a deep voice, a ready smile, eyes that seem bright with interest as he goes to shake her hand. ‘I’m so glad I’ve caught you.’
‘Hello,’ she says, attempting a smile as she takes his hand, feels the cool dryness of his skin against her sweaty palm, and laughs apologetically. ‘Do forgive me.’
‘Not at all. It’s a hot day,’ he says warmly. ‘And you have been cycling.’
His suit, though crumpled, has a sort of elegance. At a guess, she imagines him to be in his early forties. His English is perfect, his accent cultured, and there is an air of quiet authority about him, a gleam of intelligence in his soft eyes, and Sally knows, somehow, that for all his charm, the visit is official. This man is police, and she knew, all along, that this was coming.
‘Jamil, could you get us some iced tea, please – I’m dying of thirst.’
Jamil nods and turns, and it is only when the two of them are left alone on the veranda that the visitor introduces himself. ‘I am Inspector Atabe of the Rift Valley Police. I am the officer in charge of investigating the death of the little girl.’
Even as he says this, she feels herself drawing away, a kind of heave coming over her whenever she is brought to the brink of remembering. Hearing it again: ‘Hello, lady!’ in that sing-song voice. That girl, freckles on her nose. A rabbitty face.
‘I see,’ she says, nodding, taking on a serious look. ‘Such a tragedy. We’re all still in shock.’
‘I can imagine,’ he says kindly, adding, ‘I have children of my own and it is my worst fear. That something like that will happen to one of them.’
‘Indeed.’
‘I was hoping you might be able to help me with my investigation.’
‘Of course,’ she agrees quickly. ‘We gave a statement at the time to one of your colleagues …’
‘Yes. Thank you. It has been very helpful. There are just a few small things that I would like to go over with you.’
‘All right,’ she says, feeling the sweat on her body, her face flushed. ‘My husband is at work in the city, but I’m sure he could come home if you need –’
‘No, no. That won’t be necessary. I have only a few questions that I’m sure you can help me with. If there’s anything further I require, I can always go into the city and meet your husband later.’
She directs him to the cane chairs on the veranda, then asks him to excuse her for a moment while she freshens up after her ride.
‘Of course.’
She smiles like a gracious hostess, but once inside the house, she hurries to the kitchen and finds Jamil setting the glasses and jug on a tray. ‘Where are the boys?’ she asks, keeping her voice low.
‘Upstairs, Miss Sally.’
‘Let me take that. You go upstairs and stay with the boys – keep them in their room until our guest is gone.’
If he’s surprised by her request, Jamil doesn’t show it, and when she adds, over her shoulder, ‘And keep them quiet, Jamil, okay?’ his face doesn’t betray a thing.
Outside, the inspector has turned his chair to face the garden and he sits with one leg thrown over the other in a louche manner, slouching a little in his seat. Bougainvillaea spills over the roof of the veranda, long tendrils trailing down the wooden posts. In silence, he watches the whirling spray of water from the sprinkler on the lawn catching the sunlight in a flurry of sudden stars. He accepts the glass of iced tea she offers and compliments her on the garden.
‘So lush and green!’ he remarks with pleasure.
‘A small reminder of home.’
‘Ah, yes. Although I have never been to your country. The United Kingdom is the closest I have come.’
‘Well, that’s very close,’ she says, sitting opposite him and sips from her glass, trying to calm her nerves. She wonders how long he will be there, and strains to hear any noises from the boys in the house.
‘I’m always glad to return home, though,’ he continues, in a relaxed manner. ‘Even coming here to Nairobi – I cannot wait to leave and get back to Narok.’ He flashes her a smile, then fixes his eyes on the garden again. ‘But that is just me. I’m a home-bird. Some people love to travel, don’t they?’
‘It’s true.’
‘Like the Gordons, for example.’
‘Who?’ she asks, and he turns to her, still smiling, although his eyes seem more serious, as if he is looking at her properly for the first time.
‘The family of the little girl.’
‘Oh,’ she says, and feels her cheeks flush.
A flash of memory: that woman in the water, clutching those hair ribbons, anguish contorting her face, making her de
af and blind to everything except her one need – to find her child.
‘The worst thing to happen to a parent. My heart goes out to them,’ she goes on, but he makes no answer, just a slight inclination of his head. She feels as if she has failed the first test.
His body has grown still now that he has arrived at the reason for his visit.
‘Did you know them?’ he asks, and she tells him, no.
‘They have been living in the valley for a while, now,’ the inspector says. ‘They have kept mainly to themselves. Looking for a simple kind of life, I suppose.’
‘We saw the lights from their hut in the evenings, across the river. But we never saw them, never spoke to them. Except the children.’
‘The children knew each other.’
‘A little. They played together a couple of times over the course of the few days we stayed there. God, I still can’t believe that poor girl drowned.’
‘Cora.’ He says her name, and Sally lifts her head.
‘Yes, Cora.’
He holds her gaze for a beat or two, then turns his gaze back to the garden once more. ‘She was eight years old. The same age as your son, Nicholas.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are they home, the boys?’ he asks casually, as he reaches for his glass and takes a drink.
‘No. They’re at a friend’s house.’ She tries to make it sound relaxed, fears her own voice will give her away.
‘And the girl, their friend – Katherine?’
‘Katie.’
‘Yes.’
‘She and her mother have gone home, I’m afraid.’
He pauses, his smooth face frowning just a fraction. ‘That is a pity. I would have liked to speak to her.’
‘It was the end of their holiday. They were only here for a few weeks.’
‘Ah. Well …’ He allows a silence to drift in, while he gathers his thoughts.
From their perch behind her, Sally can hear the twittering of a pair of starlings in their cage. Automatically her thoughts go to Jim. A memory comes to her: the two of them lying together in that great raft of a bed, the hardwood frame that groaned, the cloud of the mosquito net billowing out, like the lazy inflations of a jellyfish, whenever a breeze passed through the open window. With the tip of his index finger, he traced the brown curve of her nipple, the gentle ridge of the areola like a ring of tiny blisters. Her hand stroking the hairs on his arms. The two of them lying there, in the swamping, limb-draining fug of this strange new love, worn out by the long months of resisting temptation, and the radiant explosion inside her once she had surrendered to it. She had felt as if that great bed were floating out on a body of water and never wanted to touch land again.