Only We Know

by Karen Perry

  I think of when I went to visit him in his office only the other day: his irritation on the phone, his annoyance and distraction were the same as they are now.

  ‘Why wayward?’ I ask, despite myself.

  The second lion comes to Murphy’s door and pushes its head against it, shaking the car.

  Murphy says something to Mackenzie in his language, which I’m not supposed to understand. He turns to me. ‘Mack has a habit of taking things into his own hands. He has a problem sometimes with authority, with not doing what he is told.’

  Mack grunts back, ‘I do what you tell me to do.’

  ‘But not now?’ Murphy says.

  The driver gives him a hard, serious stare.

  ‘Mackenzie has had his fair share of injustice, his fair share of misery. I shouldn’t be so hard on him,’ Murphy says.

  My heart starts to beat a little faster. ‘What do you mean?’ I say, but Murphy doesn’t answer.

  The lion on the bonnet lets himself down and walks to my side of the car. I can feel it rubbing its haunches against the car’s panelling; I can hear its heavy breathing.

  ‘I remember you,’ the driver says coldly, ‘and your family. They complain. They don’t want Mackenzie to drive.’

  ‘History, Mack. Ancient history,’ Murphy says.

  ‘Look, maybe you should start the car, Mackenzie,’ I say. ‘We’ve seen enough of the lions and it’s time we got going. Katie’s hurt, for Christ’s sake.’

  He swings around to me, his voice leaden with fury: ‘You dare to tell me what to do? You? After what you have done?’

  ‘Me?’ I say.

  ‘I lost everything because of you – my job, my family, my home …’

  ‘Because of me?’ I don’t understand.

  ‘My life was ruined because of you and your family.’ His voice is filled with bitterness. ‘I lost my job. I lost my family.’ He spits the tiny stub of a cigarette from his cracked lips onto the floor of the car.

  ‘It was very unfortunate,’ Murphy says. ‘Very sad. Everything that happened …’

  ‘I had a family to provide for. Mouths to feed. So when I lost my job, my family went hungry. You understand?’ he says, raising his voice, but he’s not looking for understanding. That’s not what his tone suggests at all. He’s looking for someone to blame.

  ‘Driving was a good job. But I lost everything,’ he says, through gritted teeth, his anger escalating. Even if Murphy has given him some work recently, it’s obvious he hasn’t let go of what happened to him.

  ‘They came for me … they arrested me.’

  ‘Arrested?’ I say, the word hitting me like a gut-punch.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, squinting harder at me, ‘arrested me for the death of a girl who drowned!’

  ‘You mean …’

  ‘The police came for me late at night. They took me to the station, kept me awake until morning, told lies to me … They said I had killed her. I said, “How?”’

  His voice is forlorn, his tone bordering on hysteria, his jabbing finger coming at me again and again, each time with greater force.

  ‘They said, down by the river … down by the river, because I wanted to do bad things to her. I said, “No!”’

  His ‘no’ is wild-eyed, his hands reaching out to me, beseeching, threatening.

  Now he straightens his back, leans towards me, lowers his gravelly tone to an even deeper bass register: ‘I said, “Who says I do such things? Who says I went down to the river?”’

  His face comes close to mine. I can smell the stale tobacco, and last night’s putrid alcohol on his breath. ‘They say you, your mother, Nick. They say she said so.’ His eyes are so wild and his anger so palpable, I want to run from the car. But I can’t. Not with the lions out there. ‘They say your mother,’ he repeats, his eyes bulging out of his head, his breath threatening to suffocate me.

  He nearly shrieks in pain, grits his teeth. ‘My wife came to visit me in jail. She said to me: “What have you done?” I told her, “I have done nothing wrong, nothing,”’ he exclaims, shaking his finger in front of my face again and again. ‘I told her, “I am innocent.”’

  Years of pent-up fury are finding their voice, seeming to embolden him to the point that he’s going to jump into the back seat and attack me. ‘When I am finally released, my family is gone. I have no job. No one will give me a job – no one will give a job to a driver to take white folk around Mara when they think he has killed a little white girl.’

  His stare is so intense that I can tell he has lived with this awful truth for many years and it has been gnawing away at him, literally eating him up inside.

  I look to Murphy for help, but what he has to say is of little use to me: ‘It seems Mackenzie was wrongly implicated.’

  ‘One year and seventy-two days in prison before they dropped the case. One of my children died while I was there,’ Mack says, saliva gathering at the corners of his mouth, his voice cracking.

  Murphy lowers his head.

  ‘All because of you,’ Mack says, continuing to jab a finger at me. ‘You know how many years I had been driving the safari van?’

  I say nothing.

  ‘Five years. Five. Never once did I have a problem over those five years. Not until you and your family complained. Not until that girl died, not until you all fled, not until your mother said to the police that it was me. Do you know what it is like in a Kenyan prison? Do you know what they do to child-killers there?’

  With the lions lurking and Mack squinting at me, the fear is peeling off me in waves. That this man has spent time in jail for something Luke did, for something I was involved in, for something my mother accused him of, makes me weak with shame.

  ‘Enough,’ says Murphy. ‘Please. Apportioning blame is not going to change anything.’

  Mackenzie turns back to the front windscreen and lights another cigarette; he’s not dropping the subject, I sense, just taking a break, weighing up what to do, his eyes on the big cats outside, staring them down to gain some kind of manic strength from their very presence.

  Murphy coughs violently, rubs his temples. I’m desperate for him to take control of this man and his anger, but he’s so tired that what he says has nothing to do with Mackenzie losing his job or going to jail or whether my family had anything to do with it.

  ‘Do you remember the starlings, Nick? The ones in the cage?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I say, hoping to win him back onside so that he can protect me in some way.

  ‘I gave them to you – a gift for each of you, a bird for both of Sally’s boys. Superb Starlings, they were called.’

  He smiles then, a private smile at his own recollection, and the uncomfortable thought comes to me that maybe Katie isn’t hurt. Maybe this is not about her, but about me – that Mackenzie and Murphy are colluding in some way. The light strikes my eyes in a way that makes me think of the moment I stepped into my parents’ bedroom to see Luke dangling from the end of a rope. I shiver.

  Murphy continues, lost in his own private reverie: ‘I was very lonely after Sally … after your family left. I wrote to her.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘She never replied.’

  ‘You wrote to me too.’

  ‘I did.’ He turns to smile at me again, but it soon vanishes. ‘You never wrote back,’ he says sadly.

  ‘My dad thought it inappropriate,’ I say, remembering him holding a letter I had received from Murphy, reading it, and bringing it to Mum to see. I heard them arguing – the actual words are forgotten, but the tone was sharp and unforgiving.

  ‘No more letters,’ Dad said then to me. ‘Not from him.’

  I couldn’t think why he was so furious at the time, but it’s obvious to me now. He didn’t want Murphy dredging up the past. He wanted to leave in Africa the things that had happened there.

  One of the lions is scraping at the driver’s door. Then it swipes the car with such force that it shakes. For a moment, I think it’s going to topple over.
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  Murphy, woken from his daze, shouts: ‘Mack! Get us out of here.’

  Mack guns the engine and we speed off, the wheels spinning dust in our wake.

  I look out at the passing landscape: more dust, more grassland, a herd of wildebeest scattering from the speed and noise the car is making. A red hot-air balloon rises in the distance, but I don’t know where we are, don’t know where Mack is bringing us. I wish I was in the balloon, for the landscape and sky to swallow me. At the same time, I want to say how sorry I am to this man, to make it up to him – which I know is an impossible task. I don’t know how to help him, how to offer recompense. What can I give him that could in any way atone for what has happened?

  ‘Where are we going, Jim?’

  ‘Down to the river.’

  Not the river. Not again. Once the river rose to meet us and we ran to it – now all I want to do is run from it.

  ‘What about Katie?’

  ‘She’s with Lauren.’

  ‘Lauren?’

  ‘Nick. There’s something I must tell you about Lauren …’

  I listen as he says the words, as he tears apart her past, the past I had understood her to have, and recreates a new one that is more shocking than I could ever have imagined.

  ‘There’s something you don’t know about her,’ he falters, but he steels himself to go on. ‘Her mother lived out here once, before Lauren was born. She was married to another man, who was not Lauren’s father, but he was the father to the girl …’

  There’s something weirdly recognizable about what he is saying, but also something so frightening that it’s as if I am being dragged down under the riptide of truth.

  ‘… who drowned,’ he says finally.

  I flinch – just the sound of the word makes me crazy. I have spent my whole life trying to outrun the past, trying to outplay its ragtime rhythms, to swallow its white noise, and here it is again, spilling from the mouth of Murphy.

  I’m like a man who has fallen from that hot-air balloon, a man who is rushing towards the earth without a parachute.

  ‘She never told me …’ I say, and before Murphy can answer Mack swerves the car violently out of the way of a wild dog sauntering down the road. I am thrown across the back seat.

  This time Murphy speaks to his driver in English: ‘Careful, Mackenzie, please.’

  I sit up again, and even though this news of who Lauren really is will turn my world upside-down, what goes through my mind is my dad, speeding through the Wicklow hills, past the Featherbeds and through the Sally Gap, his own ending just up the road ahead of him. Did he see it coming? In that last moment, as the car swerved around the corner, did he try to control it, to steer it out of danger? Or did he fly into Death’s waiting arms, eager to embrace it after all that life had done to him? Was he crying as the car hit the wall, or did he let out a great sigh of relief that it was all over? Did he think of us, of me and Luke, of what we had done?

  I hope he didn’t. And I hope he didn’t think of Mum and the whispered arguments he’d had with her, arguments I’d overheard more than once late at night. An argument that seemed to pivot on one thing: who to believe? Me or Luke?

  ‘He says he didn’t do it,’ Mum said about me.

  Murphy turns back to me. ‘You know, I’ve thought about her, Cora, down through the years. She’s always been with me in a way, passing in and out of my thoughts, like a ghostly figure. Her death touched so many lives, Nick, and we’ve all been hurt by what happened. Now at last there’s a chance to commemorate her passing and find, if we can, some healing in that commemoration. This is my last chance to make things right, Nick. I’m an old man. That is why we need this, you and I … and Mackenzie. We have all suffered. And I don’t want to do this in a church or a chapel. You know I lost all faith in the structures of religion, its buildings and outhouses. For me, God resides out here, in the air, in the soil, among the people and the beasts of the savannah and its rivers. Here’s a real chance to heal for all of us.

  ‘It will also be a chance to remember the girl who drowned there,’ Murphy continues, ‘to commemorate the passing of a life. No one’s assigning any blame, Nick, but saying some prayers for one taken so prematurely would be an act of kindness, don’t you think? There’s nothing wrong with that, surely. And it will certainly mean a great deal to Lauren … and to Mackenzie.’

  Mack is driving faster now, blowing smoke more furiously and nodding in exaggerated agreement. ‘Prayers,’ he says aloud, and coughs harshly – or is it a volley of scornful laughter?

  ‘Jim, this is crazy,’ I say, and yet part of me, the part that lived under the shadow of my parents’ doubt, almost aches for a ceremony like this – even if it scares me to my core. And if it can, even in the smallest way, act as an apology to Mack, well, I’ll go where Murphy wants me to go and say the prayers he wants me to say and beg, on Luke’s behalf, forgiveness from Mack, and from Lauren too.

  ‘My days are numbered, Nick. I’m very sick. I don’t have long and I need a day of reckoning – before I meet my Maker. We all do. Today is that day.’

  Murphy is dying. I see him in a different way. His strength and vigour have diminished, almost without my noticing. He is a pale shadow of his former self. It’s difficult to see him in this new light, and I feel his words threatening to break me down again, to obliterate my composure, but still something in me fights against what is happening. ‘It was a game that went wrong. An accident …’ I say, but there’s no time to discuss it, because the car has puttered to a jerky stop.

  We are here.

  As Murphy climbs out, he says: ‘Don’t be afraid. This is all for the best.’

  Mackenzie glances into the rear-view mirror, his face swathed in smoke, but he says nothing, just smiles disdainfully and follows Murphy.

  In the clearing, there is a hut – a poor wooden box, lonely and forlorn out here on its own amid the sprawling grasslands.

  Now that we have stopped, there is no breeze rifling through the car to keep me cool. There’s a rumble in the distance. The weather is changing.

  I look out at the long grass, the trees, and the forlorn hut ahead of us.

  Here I am again.

  The river is not far from us and the sky is a brilliant burning blue. My hands are shaking and I’m too scared to move. I can see from where I’m sitting the door of the hut opening. I watch as Lauren steps outside, and feel the shock of strangeness between us. Everything has changed.

  A mangy black mongrel weaves its way out from behind the hut to see what’s going on and sits down to watch. Its tongue lolls over its tarry lips; flies circle its head. Time seems to stand still. A wind is picking up. Overhead a flurry of bee-eaters passes.

  I imagine my mother running towards us on that day. I see the limp body of the girl in Luke’s arms. I hear him counting again.

  ‘Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two …’

  A terrible ache spreads about my temples. Something I have been holding in threatens to burst its banks. There’s an awful pain in my chest and I’m short of breath.

  I imagine Mackenzie sitting in a cell, weeping into his hands, before being dragged out by the police to be interrogated, threatened, beaten.

  Above us there is a loud crack of thunder. The wind picks up. I want to ask Lauren why she kept this secret from me. Both of us felt a need to keep something of ourselves apart from the other. I had seen it as an expression of love and trust, but now I see it as something else – I see it as a mistake, a terrible mistake. I’m struck dumb at the vast chasm opening between us, and the tinnitus in my ears swells, like a tide coming in.

  I’m scared, unsure exactly of what is going on. There’s another wild crack in the sky. My hand is on the door handle, but I can’t bring myself to use it. Lauren raises her arms in appeal.

  Before I can do anything, the car door is flung open.

  Mackenzie stands broad and menacing before me. There’s a shot-gun in his hands and he’s pointing it at me. ‘Get out,’ he growls. �
��Now!’

  17. Katie

  So this is how it happens.

  There are three of them, two standing alongside the car, the one with the gun screaming at a third who remains inside. I look at the gunman, feel my legs buckle, air escaping my lungs in short bursts of fear. It’s him. Jesus, it’s him. I can’t see the person in the car, but I know it’s Nick. Soon enough the gunman reaches in and hauls him out, a handful of Nick’s shirt caught in his grip. For a moment, Nick just stands there, stunned, hands out by his sides. Murphy is saying something I can’t hear – his voice is too low and I’m too far away – but I can tell from his gesture, his hands pushing down the air in front of him, that he is trying to placate the gunman. The air around us crackles with danger. Even without the gun, I’d feel it. It’s coming over me again, that wash of pain, the crack against my skull, a searing blackness, almost as vivid in memory under this hot sun as it was in the pitch darkness of the previous night. My assailant, the man who attacked me: I know it’s him.

  Lauren takes a step forward, her eyes fixed on the tableau by the car. I can feel her hesitation. Nick hasn’t looked at her – not once – and there’s something very deliberate about that. I can tell she feels it too.

  It’s so hot. Too hot to think. Standing in this baking field, paralysed by indecision and fear, I feel the scald of the sun, think about the shade of the trees by the river. The bank of grey clouds approaches from the west, slanting rain visible in the distance, a rumble of thunder disturbing the air.

  Murphy is by the gunman’s side now, plucking at his sleeve – an ineffectual gesture, easily shrugged off. The three stand there, locked in a tense negotiation. We wait, Lauren and I, nothing but the hush of grass around us, the passing shadow of a bird high in the sky. The plains around us stretch for miles – all that empty space, the rolling silence, the shimmering heat. Nowhere to run.

  Movement then. It happens swiftly. A raised hand, the black shape of the gun, the butt brought down heavily and the sickening crunch of impact. A shout, then Nick staggers backwards, holding his face.