by Karen Perry
Lauren streaks past me, terror in her flight. I can’t move, the fear inside me solidifying. Up ahead, I can see Nick on one knee – a strange genuflection, his hands on his face – the gunman taking a tentative step towards him before Murphy grabs him back, barks something at him. By the time my legs start working, Lauren is peeling Nick’s hands away from his face to reveal a mash of gore, blood blooming on his T-shirt, a livid red flower burning through pale cotton.
‘What are you thinking?’ Murphy is shouting at the gunman. ‘This is not what we agreed! Not at all!’
But the gunman is oblivious, staring down at Nick, nostrils flared, breathing heavily.
I know who my assailant is now. Of course I do. Memory lashes like a whip, the scent of it ripping through me, the tang of sweat, acrid smoke from roll-up cigarettes, my mother’s whispered frustration, I do wish he wouldn’t smoke those vile things. Our driver.
Lauren presses a corner of her T-shirt to Nick’s face in a bid to staunch the bleeding, and for a moment Nick remains still, silently bearing his wife’s ministrations. There is something vulnerable about him that cuts through my fear to a softer place. It lasts until he gets to his feet, pushing her away – a brush-off that is dismissive and curt. She reels back from it.
He knows about her, then.
The hurt is in her face as she says his name and goes towards him, but he holds up his hand in warning, and she shifts from one foot to the other, racked with indecision.
Something of her restlessness takes hold of me. The dryness of the land, the sense that, for all you can see of the fields and plains, most of the life here is hidden, skulking in the undergrowth, camouflaged and waiting, but I can’t stand the waiting any longer. The shadow I have been living under since the morning Reilly told me Luke was missing – how long ago that seems – now I feel crushed by the weight of it, dried out by fatigue and sick of it hanging over me. I think of Reilly’s words of warning, ‘Father Murphy? I’m not sure about him, Katie,’ and turn towards the priest. ‘What are we doing here, Murphy? What is it that you want?’
‘Quiet!’ the driver barks, and I feel my face grow hot. His eyes burn with fury and shift between me and the others, deep-set eyes that try to observe everything. Impossible to slip past.
Ignoring me, Murphy faces Nick, eyes narrowed as he assesses the injury, murmuring, ‘You’ll be all right, son,’ but his frown betrays his anxiety. As he reaches up to clasp Nick’s shoulder, the old man’s hand shakes. He is visibly trembling. Nick’s face is pale and there’s a greyish tinge to his skin.
‘What is it you want?’ I repeat, despite the driver’s presence, his dark frown. My tone is hard and insistent, seeking to cut through the infuriating vacancy in Murphy’s voice and eyes.
His gaze is on Nick, concerned, loving, like that of an anxious parent. ‘For too long I’ve stood by and watched Nick suffer,’ he says, ‘pushing down the past, thinking it can be obliterated. But something like that is too big to be squashed. It’s like a tumour. It grows silently in the dark.’
There’s a drumming pulse of blood behind my eyes. The hard sun beats down from above and I long for the rain – I can almost taste it. The driver has taken steps towards me, the gun at his side. He is so close that I can smell his sweat.
‘When a man is facing his own mortality, he feels a great need to put things right.’
I look at Murphy, the gaunt features, the boniness of his face and wrists, the yellowness at the edges of his eyes, and I see it all at once: the lurking shadow of Death that stalks him. How had I not noticed it before?
‘I wanted to put things right,’ Murphy says again, his face pained. ‘All these fractured lives. The ripples sent out by this terrible thing. I knew somehow that if we all came here together, back to this place, if we brought it out into the open, it would draw out the poison and the healing process might start.’
‘A catharsis?’ I say, and I can’t keep the sneer from my voice.
He goes to answer but is interrupted by the driver.
‘Enough of this talk!’ Words spoken right into my ear, the heat of his breath on my neck.
He indicates with the gun that we are to move down through the field. Down to where the black boughs lean towards the creek.
‘Please, Mack,’ Murphy says, his voice weary.
‘No!’ The word fired out. ‘No more talk! Move!’
Something passes over the priest’s face then – a flash of irritation. He lets it go, nodding peaceably, that remoteness coming over him again. He turns away from his companion and walks with his hands behind his back, his eyes on the ground in front of his feet. I almost want to laugh at his foolishness: to think that he could control this man, this loose cannon.
But the laugh doesn’t bubble up. It’s swallowed in the acid of fear churning in my stomach. We walk through the field in an odd procession – funereal, except there isn’t a body, yet. The dry grass prickles underfoot, the earth hard and unforgiving, pain travelling up the backs of my calves. Ahead of me, Nick walks with a pensive air, the blood on his T-shirt a shocking reminder. I cannot fathom what thoughts are passing through his head. Lauren catches up with him, reaches for his arm, but he pulls away from her savagely.
‘Please, Nick –’
He cuts across her: ‘You knew about this? You were in on it?’
‘It’s not like that,’ she says, urgency in her voice as she hurries to keep up with him. ‘There wasn’t supposed to be any violence. I would never have agreed if I’d known –’
‘I don’t understand you,’ he goes on. ‘I don’t know who you are.’
‘I’m the same person, Nick. I’m your wife –’
‘You’re a stranger, Lauren. A phoney.’
‘No!’
‘Tell me this. Was any of it real, what we had between us?’
‘Of course!’
‘What was your plan? To get close to me and then, when my defences were lowered, you’d strike?’
‘I love you, Nick, you’ve got to believe –’
‘Love! Honestly, I don’t know what that is any more.’
The contours of the land are changing, dipping as we get closer. I can hear the swish and movement of water now. My pulse quickens.
‘I was trying to help you. The way you’ve changed since Luke killed himself … it frightened me.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about your mother? About your sisters? Why did I have to find out like this?’
I can see her searching for words, the regret visible in her. ‘I wanted to tell you myself. I kept waiting for the right moment, but it never seemed to come. And then things got serious between us so quickly and I was frightened that, if I told you, you wouldn’t want me any more.’
‘You lied to me –’
‘I didn’t mean to! I didn’t want to, but it got so that things were so complicated and messy, I just didn’t know how. And when Murphy said there was a way I could help you, a way we could bring the truth out into the open, I thought it might be a way of letting go of this secret. Because I hated keeping it from you, Nick.’
He stops, looks her square in the face. There is naked disappointment in his gaze, such surprise and hurt that it is as if all his beliefs have been kicked out of him.
‘You spoke to him about me like that? You went behind my back? Lauren –’ He breaks off and still there is pain in all he has left unspoken. Lauren glances behind her, catches me looking, and I am ashamed for being a witness, listening in on this most private exchange, the breaking of something that was precious and intimate between them.
It lasts but a moment, and then the gunman barks a command and we do as he says and march towards our fate.
This is how it happens. This is what comes in advance of the headlines screaming of bodies found by a river, the lurid details of bullet wounds and carnage, an inventory of the dead, analysis of an execution. Photos of the victims from a time before, when they had no knowledge of the terror that lay ahead. I think of Reilly hunched o
ver his desk, trying to choose a picture of me to print, and in that moment what I feel is not fear but a strange sorrow. I see the trees looming.
I always knew it would come to this. Deep down, I knew that we couldn’t get away with it. You find ways of coping, ways of forgetting. You bury yourself in work, striving to be successful, wealthy and powerful. You engage in philanthropy, in charitable works, as if that might alleviate the guilt. Or you run away, explore the four corners of the world in an endless quest for meaning. You look for temporary solutions to deaden the memory – alcohol, drugs and a string of ill-advised romances. Or you let that memory become a black hole, a vacuum within your soul. But you know – deep down, you can’t escape it – that one day there will come a time of reckoning.
Murphy stops. He has reached the river.
We stand there, watching his back, the droop of heavy shoulders, the deliberate way he steps out onto a rock in the water, then straightens.
The blue knotted rope hangs from a branch high above. Unnerving to see it still there. I remember the hut and all it contained – that mausoleum, a shrine to the dead. The colour of the rope, although faded with time, is still vivid in the shadows, the frayed ends, a slight sway from a passing breeze. It makes me think of Luke and his own lonely end. I blink the thought away.
Somewhere above us, a bird flutters in the branches. A breeze reaches us briefly, then dies away. The only sound is the flow of the river, until it builds inside me again, the need to know, a question bubbling to the surface.
‘What about the birds, Murphy?
He turns to me. Something in his face changes.
Nick looks up sharply.
‘It was you, wasn’t it? You sent those dead birds.’
‘Birds?’ Nick says.
‘No,’ Murphy says, but his face tells me that this is not wholly true. ‘That wasn’t me.’
His eyes dart to Mack, whose jaw tightens, then lifts defiantly. There isn’t a jot of apology or regret in his face.
‘You?’ I say, addressing him for the first time. ‘Why? I don’t understand.’
‘It was a sign, a message,’ he says, in a strident voice. ‘A calling.’
I laugh suddenly, but feel the thump of fear inside. The way he is looking at me – so cold, so committed to his own path, his own truth. It’s fascinating and deeply unnerving.
‘The starlings,’ Nick says to Murphy, confusion clearing from his gaze. ‘The ones you gave me and Luke.’
‘A gift for each of you,’ he answers quietly. ‘One for each of Sally’s boys.’ He lowers his head, puts a hand to his temples as if in pain. There follows a moment of silence. Above us, the wind wafts lazily through the trees. ‘Sometimes things happen,’ he says, ‘things that make us stop in our tracks, make us sit up and take notice. Things so unusual that they make us believe there must be a God and that this is his signature. Some months back such a thing happened to me.’ He swallows hard, and looks at us in turn, but when he speaks, he is addressing Nick alone and the rest of us are spectators. ‘I was sitting in my office in Kianda when a man came rushing in. He was agitated, very worked up, telling me that I needed to come quickly, that something terrible was happening. I didn’t want to know. Not on that particular day – a hard day for me. That morning, I had received my prognosis and it wasn’t good. An inoperable tumour, a ticking clock. So there I was, sitting in a pool of self-pity, shocked, angry, fearful, when this man came and told me that there were birds falling from the sky. Reluctantly, I went with him to a patch of scrubland where rubbish was piled high and there I saw it, birds, dozens of them, maybe even a hundred, lying dead upon the mound as if they had been shot down in a flurry of bullets.’
He pauses, a frown of concentration on his face.
‘But they hadn’t been shot, those tiny starlings, some of them still flapping pitifully, as death overcame them. “They fell from the sky,” Hamisi said. He was wild-eyed in amazement. “They just dropped from the sky. Like rain.” He looked at me as if I could interpret what had happened.
‘Various reasons were put forward, that they had been attacked by hawks and in their panic had flown into a tree or building, or that they had feasted on grain or plants that had been treated with a pesticide that had poisoned them. We went over the mound, picking up these tiny feathered bodies, and all at once I thought of Sally.’
‘My mother?’ Nick says sharply.
‘The starlings I had given you. She set them free – it was the night she broke with me.’ And I see it happening: something shutting down behind his face, a hardness coming over him. But then he seems to shake himself. ‘I picked up a couple of those little birds from the mound, and took them back with me to the office. I don’t know what I intended to do with them. Nothing, I suppose. I went back there, laid them on my desk and took out a bottle of whiskey. I felt … I felt overcome. It was all too much – the cancer, and all these memories of Sally filling me. And that was when Mackenzie came.’
He looks across to where his companion stands under the shadow of dark foliage, the gun in his hands, his expression unreadable.
Murphy lets out a puff of air and I can see how close he is to coming undone, the toll this is taking on him. He glances up at the sky peeping through the leaves and blinks away sudden tears, then gives me a watery smile. ‘They say things happen in threes, don’t they?’ A stab at humour, but the smile dies on his face. When he speaks again, his voice is low, wistful with memory. ‘I hadn’t seen Mack in over twenty years. Isn’t that right, my friend? Both of us adrift, wrestling with our own demons. But by the time Mackenzie stepped back in through my door that day, I had pulled myself together, reassembled my life into some sort of order. I had my work, and with ALIVE I had a goal, a sense of purpose. Sally was dead, but I was managing to cope. At least, I thought I was …’
He drifts for a moment, then addresses his next words to Mackenzie. ‘We must have talked all night, until the whiskey was gone and the dawn had broken. No one there to hear us but the birds on the desk. One of those rare conversations full of confessions and doubts and broken dreams. I told him about Sally. About what we had shared. I told him about the starlings I had given her boys, the ones she had set free. I told him about ALIVE and the work we’d done together. I told him about the boys – about Luke and Nick – about what they had done. And I told him what little I knew of you, Katie, from what Sally had told me. I told him all about how your lives had carried on after that day by the river. I told him all of this in good faith, not knowing …’
His voice breaks a little then. Mackenzie stares at him, impassive. Still I can feel the jittery presence of nerves beneath the calm exterior, the sense that at any moment he could explode.
‘We talked of our various disappointments,’ Murphy continues, ‘the ways in which our lives had gone off-course, our challenges, our regrets. I do believe that I confessed more to you on that one night, my friend, than I have done in a lifetime to my confessor. It was a long dark night of the soul, wouldn’t you say, Mack? For both of us. But now … now, I realize, I said too much.’ He looks at Mackenzie, his eyes narrowing. ‘I didn’t know … your dark heart.’
The air around us seems to hum with moisture and heat. A muggy blanket pulling at my limbs, creeping into my lungs. I can see the sweat on Mackenzie’s face, droplets glinting in the light, one tracking down his cheek, like a tear. But he is not crying. His expression is of quiet fury, eyes fixed on the priest.
‘You and your words,’ he says, so softly it’s almost inaudible. There is something menacing in his stillness that frightens me more than when he was shouting, threatening us with the gun. An eerie quiet fills the space around and between us – a slinking animal rubbing its hide against our rigid bodies. ‘I have not come so far for this.’
‘You came here for the truth,’ Murphy says.
‘A debt must be paid for that girl’s death. And I, too, am owed for all that I have lost.’
His eyes go to Nick, who stares at the river, a
frown hovering on his face.
‘Now it is my turn to be priest,’ he says darkly. ‘You will give me your confession.’
‘You shouldn’t have sent those birds,’ Murphy goes on. ‘It was not what I wanted.’
‘Oh, I know.’ Sarcasm makes his voice heavy. ‘You were happy to sit in your little room, feeding your anger with whiskey and thinking of all the wrongs done to you. Luke, the boss-man, doesn’t trust you with his money. Your woman left you because she loves her boys more than she loves you. Please,’ he says, his dry lips cracking into a grin of disgust, ‘you talk about pain but you don’t know what it is. None of you do.’
Eyes flashing around at all of us.
‘So I do what you are too yellow to do. I send those birds. Put them in a package and send them. Pictures of drownings too. I send them a message, make them scared. Dead birds don’t sing. Taste a little of what Mackenzie has gone through.’
‘You took care to cover your tracks,’ I say, and he turns at the sound of challenge in my voice. ‘The English stamps.’
‘I couldn’t make it too easy for you, could I?’ There is a hint of humour in his eyes, as if some part of him is enjoying this. ‘So I sent the package to my friend in England. He found your address and sent it on.’
Throughout this exchange, Nick’s face has kept his eyes fixed on the river. But now he turns back and I see that his expression has changed. All this information is coming at him too quickly. Confusion slips away to be replaced by horror. He addresses Murphy. ‘You and my mother?’
‘Yes, Nick. I loved her,’ Murphy says simply. ‘I loved her with all of my heart. And she loved me.’
‘No,’ he says, shaking his head.
But Murphy goes on: ‘She was going to leave your father. We were going to be together, but then …’ He lets out a sigh.
‘But then it happened,’ I say, finishing his sentence for him. ‘Did you really think she would go with you? That she would choose you over her own children?’