Only We Know

by Karen Perry

  I look up at Lauren, standing in the sun, so cool and untouched.

  ‘Does he know? Nick?’

  A shadow crosses her face. ‘Not yet. But he will soon.’

  I stand up straight and look her full in the face. ‘How could you keep something like that from him?’

  ‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ she says coldly, but there is defiance in her tone. ‘It’s not an easy thing to explain to someone.’ Her voice tapers off, her gaze drifting to the distant trees, some private thought taking her over.

  ‘I don’t remember you,’ I tell her.

  She turns back, gives me a sharp look. ‘I wasn’t born when it happened.’

  A quiver of heat in the air. We stand there, regarding each other. Across the distance, I feel the stirring of nerves inside her – the build-up of all these emotions, all this information, the welling up of her story inside her. And now that it comes to it, now that she has me here, in this place, her captive audience, I sense she feels the nudge of stage-fright. But then, finding her voice, she says: ‘After what happened to Cora, my mother left here. Took Amy with her. Left her husband and got on a plane back to the States, a place she’d sworn never to return to. But I guess when you’re hit hard by something, home takes on a different meaning.’

  She pauses briefly, before going on.

  ‘She met my father not long after she returned. They weren’t exactly love’s young dream, but it’s not like that for everyone, is it? My dad says she cured him of his loneliness, and in return he offered her protection, the security of home. My brother Daniel was born not long after they got together, and I followed some time after that.’

  ‘Did you know about Cora – about what happened here?’

  ‘Not for years. My dad treated us all the same – me, Dan, Amy. I assumed Amy was his. I think even she forgot after a while that he wasn’t her real father. She was so young when it happened. And my mother never said anything.’

  ‘When did you find out?’

  ‘When I was in high school. I got it into my head that I wanted a passport – some stupid notion of travelling the world although, up to that point, I’d barely been outside the state. I went looking among my mom’s things and found her marriage certificate. Only my dad’s name wasn’t on it. Some guy I’d never heard of – the marriage dating from years back. That was when I found out that my mom and dad weren’t actually married to each other and that my mom had this husband living in the back of beyond in Africa. That my sister was actually my half-sister.’

  ‘And Cora?’

  She pauses. I watch her carefully.

  ‘Yeah. That came out too.’

  Concentration clouds her face.

  ‘There were times while we were growing up when my mother would be so totally absorbed in her own sorrow that she was hardly able to get through the day. It wasn’t all the time – but still. She’d go through these phases of turning inwards. It wasn’t just that she got depressed – it went so much deeper than that. Like she was infected with sorrow. It was in the meat and bones of her.’

  The rippling of the grasses has stopped, the air around us grown still. There’s an ache in the back of my head, a trickle going down my neck that makes me worry about the wound. I cannot break my attention, though, riveted by her account.

  ‘From the time I was a small child, I knew that she was not like other people’s moms – she was broken in a way that couldn’t ever be fixed.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what that must have been like.’

  ‘No. I don’t suppose you can.’

  Her tone is hard and pointed, and I feel the threat in it. But she seems to lift herself, and her voice when it comes again seems matter-of-fact.

  ‘It was weird for a while, but we carried on. I finished high school, started in college, but it was always in the back of my mind – this curiosity. About Kenya, about this other sister, about this whole other life my mother had lived.’

  ‘Is that why you came here?’

  She nods, fiddling with a stem of grass she has picked.

  ‘My mother got a letter one day, informing her of her husband’s death. Strange news for her after all those years – something and nothing, you know?’

  ‘And that’s when you decided to come here.’

  ‘I needed to see for myself.’

  ‘And the letter your mother received?’

  ‘Father Murphy sent it.’

  ‘Murphy? But how did he know?’

  She seems to consider my question and, as she does, her gaze drifts upwards.

  ‘Rain is coming,’ she tells me.

  Following the line of her vision, I see a swathe of iron-grey cloud, ponderous but approaching fast from the horizon. There’s a weakness in my legs now, a pounding at the base of my skull. ‘We should go back to the car.’

  ‘No,’ she says firmly. ‘Follow me.’

  We move quickly. Rain in this part of the world comes swiftly, clouds scudding across the sky or moving in great bulky masses, crowding out the sun and dumping rain on the parched earth below. As we walk, I try to take in all that she has told me, but in truth it seems too vast to contemplate. Instead I consider her marriage, the schism at the very heart of it – the pull she must feel between her love for her husband and the pain of her family history. How has she managed to conceal it? To see your husband every day and know that the great sorrow that laid your mother low was his responsibility. The straightness of her back, the relaxed set of her shoulders, you would never think that such conflict might exist inside her.

  She leads me down towards the trees, along the jagged edge of the river. Under that dark canopy of leaves, there is coolness. I shiver, which has more to do with memory than the dip in temperature. Despite myself, I peer up into the boughs, hoping to see what? That little girl perched on the edge of a branch, swinging her feet and grinning down? With a flash of startling clarity, I see her smile, the gap where her tooth had fallen out, the bright white square of a brand new adult tooth next to it. But the memory fades and I’m staring at an empty branch, hearing the rustle and shush of leaves overhead, the lonely sound of moving water.

  On the other side of the stream, a dirt track leads up a sharp incline and, breaking clear of the trees, I find myself in another field, smaller this time, where a hut stands – a low, squat thing – no more than three metres squared, with a flat roof, a curtained window and flimsy door. The type of hut you see in the townships and villages, makeshift and poor. There’s a weathered look about it, paint peeling at the edges, a strip of felt coming away from the roof.

  ‘This is where he lived?’ I ask, and she nods, running her eyes over the poverty of the place.

  I want to ask did he die here, but the words stop in my throat. Perhaps it’s because I’m weakened by what happened last night, or perhaps it’s because of the distrust that bubbles between us, but I experience a rush of fear at the thought of being alone with her. There is nowhere out here I can run to, no nearby house or village, no one, apart from the animals that stalk in the surrounding plains, to hear me scream.

  She reaches for the handle, opens the door and steps inside. Turning to me, her face is in shadow. ‘Are you coming up?’

  I hang back, hesitant now.

  She shrugs. ‘It’s your choice.’

  But I have no choice. I need to know.

  I hurry up after her, into the tiny confined space, and she closes the door behind me.

  For a moment, I stand there, adjusting to the dimness after the glare of the afternoon sun. A musty scent invades my nostrils, the smell of too much living inside too small a space. Curtains are drawn over the window and below them I see the gatherings of a rudimentary kitchen – a tiny fridge tilted at an angle, a one-ring burner on a Formica-topped table, condiments sitting in neat order alongside stacked plates and a thin clustering of cups. Behind me, I am aware of a narrow bed pushed against a wall. A blue plastic basket hangs from a hook, spilling over with clothes, sleeves dangling down, lik
e ghostly forms.

  Lauren says nothing, and I can see that her face has changed. She is regarding me with an expression so grave and intense that it feels threatening. All the danger that has been hovering at the edges of our contact comes flooding into this room.

  ‘There,’ she says then, pointing to the wall behind me, and loath as I am to turn my back to her, I do as she asks.

  I draw in my breath.

  Over the bed, plastered the full length of the wall, are a mass of paintings and photographs. They crowd the entire space as if each one is fighting for supremacy. Blonde girls, hair in bunches, grin down at us, caught in the bleached light of a 1970s summer. Polka-dot dresses in the long grass. A blue swimsuit, a chubby arm holding a crab aloft. A woman with the same white-blonde hair, sunburned face running to tan, teeth slightly crooked, staring back at the camera, a baby held to her shoulder. I look at that baby and see the tenderness of her bald head touching her mother’s cheek, so real that I can almost smell the newness of her scalp. But it is the paintings that bring the tightness across my chest: a child’s artwork, great big daubs of gaudy colours on paper that seems to crackle with age. The whole wall is taken up with them, in varying degrees of ability and imagination. On the bed, I see a gathering of toys – dolls and teddy bears, soft bunnies and Barbies with raggedy hair. Something about the way they sit tells me they have been carefully arranged. All of it – the paintings, the photographs, the dolls – preserved as if time had stopped on the day she died. In that one small space, the child’s life has been carefully sealed in aspic. I stand there, taking it all in, the enormity of it. I am observing far more than just pictures and keepsakes. I am beholding a life’s work. I am staring obsession in the face. And when I turn to Lauren, her gaze seems empty, as if she has seen this room so many times, she has become inured to it.

  ‘He even kept her clothes,’ she says, in a deadened tone.

  ‘But why?’ I ask, and turn with a sweeping gesture that encompasses the whole room.

  ‘He lost the only thing that mattered to him. He needed to fill the emptiness.’

  Something seems to heave within me – a kind of dread. I want to know what happened. I want to understand, and I don’t know if it’s being in that room with its ghosts, or the lingering memory of violence from last night, but I feel afraid. I can sense the danger.

  Just then there is a screech of brakes, then the slam of a car door.

  Lauren goes to the window and peers behind the curtain.

  In a voice that betrays no emotion, she says: ‘They’re here.’

  16. Nick

  ‘Is it Lauren?’ I ask Father Murphy. I see worry in his eyes; his face is drawn and haggard.

  I think about what I told her then, about what Luke did, and my ears fill with a noisy clamour.

  ‘It’s Katie, she’s been hurt,’ he says, leading me down the hotel stairs and into the lobby.

  ‘She’s been hurt? But how? What happened?’ I ask, stalling on the steps to the hotel.

  ‘There’s no time for explanations. Please just come. I’ll take you to her,’ he says, guiding me to the car.

  The windows are rolled down and the back door is open. A man with a black leather cap is leaning against the bonnet. He watches us approach with a lazy indifference. There’s something about him I recognize, a local, perhaps, but I can’t think how I know him or where from.

  Murphy nods to him, but the man makes no sign. He simply spits whatever stalk he’s been chewing onto the ground and climbs into the driver’s seat.

  I get into the back and Murphy takes the passenger seat. He says something to the driver, who turns on the ignition, and we pull away with a stutter.

  ‘Tell me, Murphy,’ I say, my head pounding. ‘What’s happened to her?’ My voice sounds shaky and tense – it’s full of the same unnerving echoes it contained when I asked all those questions after hearing of Luke’s disappearance.

  ‘I don’t know the details, Nick, but it sounds like she had some kind of fall,’ Murphy says slowly, keeping his eyes on the road while the car travels at a steady speed.

  I stare out at the land around us. The houses have fallen away, and there is only the wide expanse of the plains, broken here and there by a clump of trees, a scrub of bush. The road is narrow and dusty – a track the car rattles and lurches over. We’re the only vehicle for miles. I don’t know exactly where we are and my brain’s sucked dry and addled with memories I don’t want to relive.

  The driver lights up and smoke from his cigarette wafts through the car. A silence comes over us as we travel further inland – it reminds me of the silence of waking alone in a small hut on the outskirts of a nomadic village in Mozambique, in the years before I met Lauren, a thread of raindrops falling onto my face as dawn broke, the village quiet, the wildlife about to stir.

  A moment of beforeness, like the one into which my tears fell after my dad had said to me, one night in Wicklow: ‘It’s not your fault. You were only a child.’

  I had woken up from a nightmare and cried out in fright. He came to my bedroom door. I was shaking with fear.

  ‘What is it? A bad dream?’

  I nodded and told him what I had dreamed, told him about the river again.

  He came to my bed, sat down. He didn’t want to hear the details of the dream: he had stopped asking by this stage what had actually happened. He only asked us to forget. ‘It was an accident,’ he said, ‘time now to put it behind you,’ all the while rubbing my back and calming me until I finally fell asleep again.

  I’ve tried, Dad. I’ve tried to put it behind me, to push it down, to forget, but it catches up. It won’t let me alone.

  There’s only me and Katie left from that time, and now that she’s in trouble, hurt somehow, I’m filled again with a paralysing fear, and my mind rushes to what might have happened to her. Could she have walked down the wrong street and met a renegade militia, been overtaken by the heat, consumed some heady cocktail of alcohol and prescription medication, all to stave off the awful time we are having by being back in what is to us a blighted spot?

  My hands shake as they do before I go on stage. ‘I hope she’s okay,’ I say, but no one answers.

  We drive on in silence. I peer out of the window. The landscape unfolds before us, the same undulating vastness – we’re in the middle of nowhere. Then, after some time, the car slows with a judder. The driver takes the cigarette from his mouth.

  ‘Look,’ he says, pointing, his voice deep and gravelly. ‘Two lions.’

  I can’t help thinking that there’s a glimmer of recognition in his eyes: a challenge, even.

  Beneath the branches of a large acacia tree two young lions are resting, sheltering from the sun. They eye us with threatening curiosity, the paw of one lying on the head of the other. The two are so close in size and age they could be brothers, and the way they shift about with such ease and grace only hides their power.

  ‘Why have we stopped?’ Murphy asks, agitated.

  ‘To watch the lions,’ the driver answers gruffly.

  One of the animals moves towards us, watching us closely to see what we might do, padding with slow, deliberate steps – a ferocious strength in its limbs. They seem relaxed, but they are aware of everything around them. They are predators, after all, and later today, in all likelihood, they will kill. And with that thought comes the image of us on safari all those years ago: we’re in the van, my dad has his arm around me and I can feel the heat of his body against my face as I lean into him. ‘Look,’ he says, pointing to a lion in the distance chasing down a hyena. The van races after them and I throw my arms around his waist and hold on for dear life. As quickly as it arrives, the image fades: my dad’s wild smile vanishing with it.

  We’re closer to the lions here than I’d thought. If they decided to take an interest in us, we could be in real danger: the car might not start quickly enough, they could attack and, as predators, they would show no mercy.

  We watch them for a time, in silence
, the driver blowing out one mouthful of smoke after another. His nonchalance is infuriating – Katie’s hurt, and he’s admiring the wildlife. Then one of the lions comes closer to the car. That’s close enough, I think. Time to reverse, time to drive off. But the driver does nothing and the lion lifts his front paw onto the bonnet and raises himself up and onto it. The car creaks and sweat trickles down my brow into my eyes. I want to tell the driver to start the engine, but the words catch in my throat.

  The lion peers lazily at us. Even Murphy seems rattled.

  ‘Mack …’ he says nervously.

  But Mack doesn’t answer him. Instead he turns to see my reaction, as if I am the one who has spoken his name. He smiles, his gaze resting on me, and I can’t help thinking that he’s enjoying how I’m shifting in my seat – frightened and defenceless.

  And as he turns to me, something passes between us – an acknowledgement of sorts. He smiles again, but there’s nothing joyful about it. ‘You know me now, don’t you?’ he says.

  It hits me then. ‘It’s you,’ I say, and just like that I can see myself on tiptoe all those years ago peering through the window of the van watching a younger Mack sleeping, his cap pulled over his eyes, his arms lying slack by his sides, his mouth open – the rise and fall of his chest steady and deep. Luke coming up behind me, peeping into the van as well, then falling back and laughing at the state of the driver. I can still hear his mischievous chuckle – the rat-tat-tat of it tapping out its tune in my inner ear, like a little drum-beat.

  The lion on the car is approached by the other, which begins to circle us.

  ‘Murphy,’ I lean over to whisper in his ear, ‘ask your driver to get us out of here.’

  ‘Mackenzie, time to go,’ Murphy says. But Mackenzie does not start the car.

  ‘You know him well?’ I ask Murphy.

  ‘I know him from years ago,’ Murphy says a little distractedly. ‘He’s one of my lieutenants – a wayward lieutenant.’

  His words fill the car, but he is staring out of the window with a kind of wistful inattention, none of the purpose and focus he normally commands. Sweat forms over my lip and the dryness in my mouth is chronic. The humming in my ears starts again.