Only We Know (13 page)

‘He seems shifty,’ she says, and
feels again the push of her irritation. The way he had snubbed her, directing all his
comments to Jim as if she wasn’t even in the room. Occasionally, the conversation
had drifted into Kikulu and Sally, who cannot speak the language, could only stand by
and dumbly observe their exchange. Jim speaks it fluently, yet
carries the current of Irishness through his vowels and
inflections. She had shifted her weight from one foot to the other, arms crossed over
her chest, and Jim, noticing her impatience, had drawn the conversation back into
English. Once the arrangements were made and a fee settled on, the two men had shaken
hands. She had come forward to offer hers but he had nodded at her and stepped past her
out onto the street. Her anger had risen.

‘Listen,’ Jim says, trying to
sound reasonable, ‘he knows the road well, and 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.’

He’s right, but she doesn’t say
anything, watching silently as Mackenzie rounds a corner and disappears into the vast
clogged wasteland of the Kibera slums. Today, in the heat, the stench is worse than
ever. Sewage chugs through open channels and a lively commerce of shoe-repair and
laundry takes place outside steaming tin huts. Overhead, the sky is a dull white, with
heavy clouds, and the miasma of heat beats down oppressively.

Once, flying over Nairobi in a small
aeroplane, Sally had peered out of the tiny window to the sprawling slum below.

‘It’s like a great big smear of
shit on the landscape, isn’t it?’

This from her neighbour – a fellow passenger
she’d never met before. She’d glared at him, aghast and furious, but he had
stared past her, his deadened gaze fixed on the land below.

Sally’s is a familiar face in this
part of the slum, having been a fixture there for the best part of a year. She is well
practised now in suppressing any
feelings of revulsion that rise to greet the monstrous filth of the place. Sometimes it
seems to her that she is more at home among the alleyways of red-brown mud than she is
in the lush and verdant setting of Lavington – all those sanitised homes on the hill
with their intruder alarms and their guards, perimeter walls crowned with shards of
glass.

‘I suppose you’re right,’
she murmurs, pushing down on the uncertainty that keeps surfacing insistently.

Outside, Luke is kicking a plastic bottle
around with two local boys, who wear shoes that seem huge, their narrow stick legs
emerging from them and rising to swollen dark knees. Sally doesn’t know why he has
chosen to come with her today, instead of staying behind with the others. She suspects
it has something to do with the friendship that has sprung up between his younger
brother, Nick, and Helen’s daughter, Katie. Their alliance seems to have thrown
off-balance the bond that previously existed between her two sons. Sally feels
ambivalent towards the quiet, mousy girl. But to watch her beloved Nicky become
bewitched in his own quiet tender-hearted way has made her feel a kind of sadness that
she cannot account for, as if his growing affection for the girl is somehow diminishing
the love between mother and son.

Silly, she tells herself, as she watches
Luke duck beneath the arm of his opponent, eyes fixed on the makeshift ball. Ten years
old and already his body is becoming lean and rangy. Square shoulders, all the puppy fat
fallen away now, and in the past month she has noticed, with a degree of alarm, the
changes in her elder son’s face – a strengthening in his jaw, the lengthening of
his features – so that she can
glimpse the
adult face waiting for him. She does not want this boy to grow up – not yet. She is not
ready to let go. And yet what worries her most, what keeps her awake and staring at the
ceiling some nights, is the look that she has found him giving her lately when he thinks
she can’t see – a cold glance with a question in it, as if she’s on the cusp
of failing him and he is waiting expectantly for her to fall. Even now, this trip to
Kianda and Luke’s decision to accompany her, she cannot help but feel that he is
doing so not because he is bored, or because he feels estranged from the others, no: he
is there to keep an eye on her. For all his affected nonchalance, his refusal to look
her in the eye, still he won’t let her out of his sight.

‘You’re quiet today,’ Jim
remarks.

‘Am I?’

‘Unusually pensive.’

He is seated at his desk, his wide shoulders
stooped forward. A big man, in the small, cramped office he appears awkward, a kind of
balled-up energy rolling around inside him seeking an outlet. He doesn’t look like
a priest: a wooden cross on a thin leather strap around his neck is the only visible
sign of his vocation. She cannot imagine him bent in silent prayer. What was it she had
said to him once? That he bore hardly any resemblance to a man of the cloth, unless you
were to count John the Baptist.

‘It’s this trip to the Masai
Mara,’ she tells him. ‘I feel uneasy about it.’

‘How come?’

‘I don’t know, really. I suppose
because I feel like I’m being forced into it.’

‘By whom?’

‘Ken.’

He keeps his gaze fixed on her, waiting. His
eyes are bright blue, disarming sometimes in the way they seem to convey a troubled
history. And yet Sally knows there are deep wells of goodness within the man.

‘We had a row last night,’ she
admits, turning towards the wall as if to examine the notice-board behind him. ‘He
says that Helen and Katie have stayed too long. He thinks that Helen is running
away.’

‘What do you think?’

She shrugs, surprised by the sudden tears
that spring to her eyes. Blinking them away, she swallows hard and thinks of all the
hours she has spent with her friend, the two of them poring over the hole at the centre
of Helen and Michael’s marriage, re-examining the details of every harsh word
spoken, every bitter little dispute, the various slights and dismissals. She can feel
Jim watching her, sitting back in his chair, thumbs ruminatively circling each
other.

‘He accused me of meddling in their
marriage,’ she says softly.

Jim sighs, then says, his voice low and soft
with understanding, ‘You’re a good person, Sally. You care about your
friend. Whatever you may have done, your intentions were good.’

She thinks about this, briefly contemplating
that word ‘good’. It is a word more easily associated with him, she thinks,
than with her. His goodness seems to have been fostered not within the cool, lofty
spaces of churches but to have grown from the rich, loamy earth of his people –
generations that have farmed the land of County Antrim stretching back as far as the
Elizabethan plantations – as if the richness of the soil
that bred him has nurtured within him a great desire to draw
life from the arid lands of this blighted place.

‘She’s running away,’ Ken
had said the night before. It was not the first time they had discussed it.

In a whisper that carried across the
darkness of their bedroom, he had urged her yet again to send Helen home.

‘This can’t go on,’ he had
told her, a rare snap of anger in his voice as she’d held her body tightly away
from him, feeling the unwelcome heat of his breath. The anger was brought about not by
Helen’s continued presence, but by Sally’s refusal. Moments before, he had
reached across the crumpled sheets of their bed and, instinctively, she had drawn
away.

‘Christ almighty, Sally!’ he had
hissed. ‘How long is this going to go on?’

‘It’s not a good time
–’

‘It’s never a bloody good time.
Not since she arrived.’

Slamming his head back into the pillow, she
had felt his fury rising and whipping around the room in faster revolutions than the
lazy whirr of the ceiling fan above them.

‘Since they came into this house, we
haven’t made love once. Not once! It’s like you don’t want me to touch
you –’

‘That’s
not true.’

‘Like she’s infected you with
the poison seeping from the unhappiness of her own marriage.’

‘It’s not like that.’

‘Then what is it? Please, tell
me.’

‘I’m tired, that’s all.
Entertaining the boys and Katie, talking things over with Helen, listening to what
she’s been through …’

‘What she’s been through,’
he repeated scornfully. ‘She’s a spoiled brat, throwing a
tantrum.’

‘That’s not true! She’s
been so miserable, so depressed. You’ve no idea –’

‘She’s acting like a bloody
adolescent!’

‘She’ll hear you!’

‘I don’t bloody care! This is my
house.’

But the warning seemed to calm him, or
quieten him anyway. For a while neither of them spoke.

Then, before he turned away from her in the
darkness, he said: ‘Michael’s not a bad man, Sally. He’s just dull,
and she knew that when she married him. Enough is enough. They need to go
home.’

The lingering ghost of that conversation
stays with her now as she examines the noticeboard in front of her, feels the sweat on
her back, the heat beating down through the flimsy roof. She feels fragile after the
row, shaky inside – all of it is happening too fast. And then the phone call from Ken at
the office this morning, telling her he had rung the airline, everything was arranged
…

Jim is on his feet now, standing beside her,
his hands in his pockets, and she can feel him looking at her.

‘What is it, Sal?’ he asks
carefully. ‘You seem troubled.’

She holds herself still, keeping her eyes on
the wall.

‘Ken says this trip to the Masai Mara
is our goodbye to them. He booked the flights – they leave the day after we come
back.’

‘Ah.’ For a moment he says
nothing, and she can feel him watching her. Something is rising inside her.

His voice, soft in a way that goes right to
the sore spot, says: ‘They were never going to stay here for ever, Sally. And
surely you wouldn’t want them to.’

‘It’s the way he did it!’
she blurts out, suddenly upset.
‘Making the decision with absolutely no regard for what I want, let alone what
Helen wants! Do you know he rang Michael this morning? Told him we’re sending his
wife back to him. Those were the exact words he used! Like Helen was lost property – a
piece of baggage! And dragging me into it. He hasn’t a clue, not a bloody
clue!’

Her voice breaks, emotion lodged in her
throat, tears clawing around her eyes.

He doesn’t say anything, but she feels
his arm going around her back, the firmness of his hand on her shoulder holding her
against him, holding her firm and still, as they wait for this wave to pass.

‘Foolish,’ she says, admonishing
herself, a furious shake of her head.

‘Ah, now …’

Then, in a softer voice, she says,
‘He’s made up his mind, Jim – about his contract. He’s going to turn
down their offer. He wants us to go back to Ireland.’

She lowers her head, feels the flutter of
panic. She could explain it to Jim and he would understand, but not Ken. He would react
with disbelief if she told him that the woman he lived with, the wife who could throw a
perfect dinner party, who could be serene in the face of her children’s tantrums,
who could be warm and welcoming to her husband when he came home from work in the
evening, was a fake – a hollow vessel. That it was all exterior, for show, and
underneath there was nothing, only a wisp of uncertainty floating in an empty space. How
when she had come to Kenya, she had felt something change inside her, felt her senses
respond in a different way: smells became more intense, colours were deeper and more
vibrant, her
sense of taste became
heightened. And these were not the only senses to awaken.

‘Sometimes I feel like I can’t
stay with him another minute …’

She takes a breath, the emotion brought
under control, feels his arm fall away from her and, half turning towards him, she sees
her son standing in the doorway. He is holding her bag and staring at her, his face a
blank in the shadows, eyes wide with shock and hurt, as if he’s been slapped.

‘Luke,’ she says, but he is
already turning away, letting her bag drop to the ground.

She thinks of what she said – words spoken
against his father – and is filled with remorse.

Jim says something now but she doesn’t
hear it, doesn’t respond. She watches her son walk swiftly across to the other
boys, hunkering down on the stoop next to them, his expression furious and deeply
private, and thinks of what she will say to him, how best to explain it.

As the evening shadows come on, the air
clogs with cooking smells. Back in Lavington, the lawn-sprinkler will be turned off now.
Jamil will be going through the house switching on the lights, Nick and Katie grumbling
about dinner. She feels flattened beneath the weight of her responsibilities and the
evening ahead.

‘I’d better go,’ she tells
Jim, and stops to smile briefly, before stepping out to tell Luke it’s time to
head back.

Their journey home is subdued, neither of
them wanting to talk. Climbing the steps to the house, Sally hears the twittering of a
pair of starlings. Their cage hangs from the
beam that runs between the carved posts of the veranda. She
listens to them absently, her gaze unseeing. Cloaked in grime, the dirt of the slums
clinging to her, the need to cleanse outweighs her desire to greet her younger son, so
she hurries upstairs, the cooking smells from the kitchen already filling the house,
anticipating the jets of hot water with a kind of hunger. After her shower, when she
comes back into the bedroom to dress, she is surprised to find her husband waiting for
her. Sitting back on the bed, legs crossed at the ankles, he sips his drink, then draws
her attention to the glass he has brought for her and left on the dresser.

‘You’re home early,’ Sally
remarks, as she takes her gin and tonic, and picks out clothes to wear for dinner.