Only We Know
Authors: Karen Perry
Perry
ONLY WE KNOW
Prologue
Kenya, 1984
A woman lies in a field, sunning herself.
The grass grows long around her, and from it, she hears the sibilant hum of unseen
insects. Nearby, the children sit in the grass, restless and bored, but content to leave
her be. Above her, the air shimmers with heat. It is almost noon.
She has flattened out a patch of grass with
the tarpaulin they have used beneath their tent. It gives off a stale tang of sweat or
mould, but right now that doesn’t bother her as she stretches out, legs crossed at
the ankles, a paperback novel unread and flattened against her belly, sunglasses
covering her eyes from the white glare of the sun. For now, all she wants is to lie
still and soak up the heat.
She breathes in the heavy air, feels the
baking earth beneath her, and takes in the hush of the great meadows and plains that
stretch out around her. The others left a half-hour ago, down the worn track towards the
Masai village and she, Sally, has stayed behind to watch over the children. But the
children are of an age that resists parental supervision. All summer long, they have
held her at a distance, absorbing themselves in their new-found alliance, forming their
own secret games, their own clandestine code. She feels driven out by their new demands
for privacy. Even now, she can hear them stirring, getting to their feet,
a resolve formed between them. She sits up and watches the
three of them moving purposefully towards the downward slope of the field.
‘Boys!’ she calls to them, and
when she calls a second time, they stop, Luke turning to look at her, Nicky mumbling
something to Katie.
‘What?’
She has to shade her eyes to see her elder
son’s face, and even though it is in shadow, she can still see the sullen set of
his features, the suspicious look he has been giving her for some time now. Recently,
whenever she is with him, she has the sense that the boy is faintly disgusted by
her.
‘Where are you off to?’
‘The river.’
‘No, Luke, it’s dangerous
–’
‘Dad lets us.’
‘Even so, I’m not happy with
–’
‘Oh, for Christ’s
sake.’
‘Luke!’ she shouts, enraged.
He opens his mouth to say something, thinks
better of it and stands there chewing his lip, waiting. Sally feels prickly and
uncomfortable, the vast heat rising around her. When she thinks of the trees that flank
the river, the relief of shade there, she finds she hasn’t the heart to argue with
him.
‘Oh, very well,’ she says,
trying to sound firm and purposeful. She wishes she wasn’t seated. Her authority
seems diminished, stretched out on her tarpaulin sheet, her son gazing imperiously down
on her. Ten years old with the haughtiness of an aristocrat. ‘But you’re to
be careful, do you understand? All of you.’
She casts her voice out
so that the other two will take note. Katie glances back but Nicky keeps his eyes fixed
firmly on the dusty ground.
‘Luke,’ she says sharply, as he
turns to go. ‘I’m counting on you to watch out for the others. All
right?’
He gives her a look, closed and unreadable,
and there it is again, the feeling she’s had lately that he’s holding
himself back from blurting something out and confronting her.
‘All right?’ she says again.
He shrugs, then turns away. She watches him
catching up with the others, overtaking them, his shoulders set with a grim
determination, moving towards the shady banks with a purposeful air while the others
lope along in his wake. How different they are, her two sons. Where one is bold and
enlivened with a kind of animal energy, the other hangs back, dreamy and shy. Sally
finds it hard sometimes to negotiate the role of parent to two such different children.
If she is honest with herself, she knows she leans towards her younger son, finding she
understands him innately, that she can identify with his dreaminess, with the rich inner
life that occupies him. Her older son remains a mystery – an enigma – even though he
lives his life so openly, almost aggressively, with an energy that sometimes baffles
her. A wave of feeling takes her as she watches them until they reach the trees and
disappear into the shadows – her two sons, her beautiful boys.
The sun is too bright, and the stifling heat
makes it impossible to linger in the middle of the field. She can feel her body becoming
desiccated, like the baked earth around her. Besides, there are things to be done before
the others
return. She gets to her feet and
moves back towards the camp, leaving her book and the tarpaulin behind her – she will
get them later, when Ken and Helen return with another driver.
The tents have been collapsed already, but
the job of folding and packing them away was abandoned when Mackenzie came back and they
discovered he was drunk. God, what a scene. Sally doesn’t even want to think about
it. She stops by the white van to check on him before she tackles the tents. Peeping in
through the cab window she sees him stretched out on the seat, one arm thrown over his
head, the other dangling down into the foot-well, the steady rise and fall of his chest
as he sleeps it off. She cannot see his face as it is turned away, into the
backrest.
‘I don’t like him,’ she
had said to Jim that first day.
They were in the office in Kianda, the two
of them. Mackenzie had just left.
‘Why not?’ Jim had asked,
surprised.
‘I don’t trust him,’ she
replied, and Jim had laughed, shaking his head, before returning his gaze to his
paperwork, one hand tapping out a rhythm with his pen.
‘You don’t trust anyone,’
he had said, but there was fondness in his tone, a light-hearted mockery that took the
sting out of his words.
But it was true – she didn’t trust the
man, although she had nothing to base it on, only her own gut instinct. Within minutes
of him stepping inside the office, she had felt the nudge of wariness. He was small,
thin shoulders braced with tension, square-faced and flat-nosed, with nostrils that
seemed permanently flared. She had watched him lighting up, puffing away on his
cigarette the whole time
they were making the
arrangements, his small eyes flicking around the room but hardly ever alighting on her.
He directed his comments to Father Jim, as if Sally wasn’t even there. The whites
of his eyes were tinged yellow, as if nicotine-stained, and he never once looked her
clear in the face.
‘He seems shifty,’ she had
said.
‘Listen,’ Jim was trying to
sound reasonable, ‘he knows the road well, and he knows the safari routes out
there like the back of his hand. By all means, look for someone else, but you
won’t find anyone who can sniff out the big game like Mack, believe me.’
She had gone along with it. So, when they
had woken on the last day of their three-day safari to find their driver missing, it had
been, in a way, her fault.
It was mid-morning by the time the white van
came skidding up the track, coughing up dust around it as it drew to an unsteady halt.
She had known, as soon as Mackenzie stepped out, that he was drunk. The angle of his
cap, the unsteady weave of his gait as he came towards them, the way he heaved in his
breath as if trying to push down on the rising bile inside him.
‘Oh, Christ,’ Ken had said.
‘He’s pissed.’
And he was. Astonishingly and outstandingly
drunk. He had staggered towards them, tried to string a few words together but they had
emerged as an incoherent mash-up of an excuse. Helen, a witness to his inebriation, had
blown up. Ken had lost all his patience, and Sally had felt rage ripping through her as
if she wanted to kill someone. The row that ensued was awful. It was like the
driver’s drunkenness had put a match to a highly
flammable atmosphere, one that had been smouldering for days,
setting it ablaze.
In the searing heat of the midday sun, as
Sally bends to begin folding away the tents, she feels suffused with a sense of shame.
She should never have let it get so far. The words she had spoken, the things she had
said – in front of her own children, in front of Helen’s daughter – were
unforgivable.
She would have to patch things up with
Helen, although time was not on her side. They would drive back to Nairobi tonight – if
they could find a driver – and the next day, Helen and Katie would board their flight
for home. And then what would happen?
She packs away the tents, stacks the neat
bundles alongside their bags, and looks around for any stray belongings. There is still
no sign of the others.
Shouts erupt from the trees down by the
river – yelps of joy and delight, alongside sounds of taunting. Helen’s words come
back at her –
You’ll keep an eye on Katie, won’t you?
She feels a
small stab of guilt. The shouts draw her on, as does the need to get out of the
sun’s glare.
Even here, under the shade of the acacias,
it’s still hot as hell. Sweat beads on her brow and she wipes it away with the
back of her forearm, looks down into the gloom, her eyes adjusting to the sudden
plunging loss of sunlight. A great whoop of delight catches her off guard – shrieked out
through the shadows, it causes her to step back involuntarily – followed by a deep
splash. She looks down into the water, sees it ripple and rock in the half-light, before
Luke’s blond head emerges, then his naked torso. His skin glistens, and when she
calls to him, for just an instant she
sees
unabashed glee on his face before the mask comes down, extinguishing the glittering
light of his joy.
‘What?’ he asks sullenly.
‘I told you not to go into the
river,’ she says.
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘Luke, I did. It’s not
safe.’
‘You said to be careful, and we are.
But you never said not to go in.’
She hesitates – a fatal mistake. He lowers
himself back into the water, keeping his eyes locked on her, challenging her.
‘Where’s Nicky?’ she
asks.
‘There.’ She follows the
direction of his outstretched arm, sees the dark hair of her younger son a little way
down. He is crouched among the shallows, and there are two girls with him, but neither
is Katie.
‘Hello,’ she says tentatively,
feeling her way carefully down to the bank. ‘I see you’ve made new friends,
Nicky.’