Only We Know (19 page)

The way he says it, that faraway gaze, and
I’m back in that field again – the boys in shorts, knees scabby and scraped, Luke
restless and bored, turning towards the lea of the hill, saying: ‘Let’s go
to the river – see if those girls are there.’ The command in his voice, the
determination in his eye. Did I feel the faintest beat of indecision? I think I did, yet
I don’t trust my memories of that day – ragged and worn as they are.

‘I’ll never forget the night I
went to see them,’ Murphy says now. ‘It was the night before they left and I
was calling over to say goodbye. He came down the steps to me – Ken. I had never seen
anyone change so rapidly. The pale, hollow-eyed person that came forward to greet me.
And Sally, too, all the radiance gone out of her. I didn’t see the boys. And I
kept asking them why – why were they leaving
like this? What had happened to make them want to go so
suddenly? It was almost as if they were scared.’

‘They had birds – Nick and Luke – as
children,’ I say then, and he looks up at me sharply. ‘I remember a birdcage
hanging on their veranda. Two little sparrows. Do you remember?’

Confusion crosses his face and I watch him
carefully. I hadn’t intended to ask him this – I’m not even sure why I have.
A small bubble of suspicion, perhaps. My nervous state. Everyone’s a suspect. He
holds my gaze, confusion shifting to something else, a kind of understanding.

‘They were starlings, not
sparrows,’ he corrects me. ‘And, yes, I do remember them.’

The way he says it, patient, forbearing, as
if he’s seen it all before – people racked by grief and confusion – and the
generosity of his understanding make me hang my head, a rinse of shame going through me.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘It’s just –’

‘No need to explain. This must be
strange for you, coming back here. Under these unhappy circumstances.’

‘I keep thinking about him,’ I
say now. ‘Luke, going back to that derelict house, holing himself up in that
lonely place, and then …’ I can’t bring myself to say the words, emotion
catching in my throat.

He nods, then spreads his hands wide. While
his accent is a mixture of Irish with a peppering of South African, his gestures are
more Mediterranean – that Gallic shrug.

‘When something like this happens –
when someone we love takes his own life – we struggle to find a reason for it because it
is so tremendously difficult to think of him being in such pain that he couldn’t
see any way forward,
except the obliteration
of death. We keep asking ourselves, “Why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t
I notice he was in such pain? Why didn’t I do something?” It’s a
natural response. But, Katie,’ he says gently, ‘it’s a false path.
Don’t go down that road, girl. Don’t torture yourself. Luke had a lot of
problems – financial, emotional. He was not well. Whatever drove him to do what he did,
it came from inside himself, not from anywhere else.’

Despite myself, I can’t help but feel
disappointed with his response, priestly as it is.

I finish my drink, return my glass to the
table and thank him for his company.

‘You’re leaving?’ he asks,
as I pick up my bag, get to my feet.

‘Tell Nick I’m sorry, will
you?’

‘Of course.’

Just as I’m about to leave, I feel it
– the nudge of curiosity, of suspicion. I look at Murphy. ‘That night when you
went to see Sally and Ken, when you went to say goodbye, did they tell you what it was
that scared them? Did they tell you why they were leaving?’

If he is surprised by my question, he
doesn’t show it. Instead, he says, ‘No. They never did. Too scared or too
proud. And I’ve learned over the years that some secrets are not meant to be
shared. I do remember this, though. When I left them that night, and Ken walked me to
the door, I put out my hand to shake his, and all of a sudden he drew me into his
embrace. There was a ferocity in the way he clung to me that I’ve never been able
to forget.’

Something inside me falters at the thought
of Mr Yates, wild with anxiety, brought to the brink, and I have
an overwhelming desire to be outside, to breathe in real
air, not this purified oxygen. Murphy reaches out to steady me. His hand on my arm is so
big and strong that it makes me feel like a child again, and I don’t know whether
I like that or not.

‘Let him go, girl,’ he says, his
face old and tired. Then he withdraws his hand and sits back. I can hear his dry cough
all the way across the lobby until I am out on the street.

Back at my hotel, I’m told there is
no news about the envelope delivered in the night, but my bag has shown up. I go to my
room, shower and dress. Just shedding the clothes I’ve been walking around in for
the past two days is a relief. Afterwards I sit quietly, sipping a beer from the
mini-bar and smoking my way through a carton of Marlboro Lights. The beer has an
industrial taste that is something like guilt. The afternoon light falls in blocks on
the carpet. The room is in disarray: clothes spill from the open suitcase. My phone has
been ringing on and off for the last hour but I don’t answer it. I’ve left
it on the bedside table where it continues to give the occasional bleat. I’m still
jumpy as hell, my mind growing tired from the endless tracks it keeps going down. The
newspaper clipping of Cora’s death, the images of drownings. The birds. I think of
Luke – ‘My past is coming back to haunt me’ – and feel the slow creep of
terror at the thought that keeps surfacing:
Someone knows
.

A knock at the door. I nearly jump out of
the chair. I peer through the spy-hole, then open up, eager to see him, knowing somehow
that he is the only one I can turn to about this – all of this.

Nick steps into the
room and straight away I say: ‘Someone knows.’

I put a hand to my mouth, turn from him as
he closes the door and walk towards the window.

‘Someone’s been sending me
things – threats, I suppose. A kind of coded message. I kept thinking it had something
to do with work, but now I know it can’t, it just can’t. Pictures, newspaper
clippings and worse …’

The words peter out as I turn to him.
He’s standing, staring at the generic brown furniture, but I can see how blank his
gaze is, how stunned he is by his grief. The expression on his face: as if he’s
just witnessed an accident. Blood on the road. He hasn’t heard a word I’ve
said.

He sits on the bed and lowers his head into
his hands. From within that cupped space I hear his voice, low and choked, saying:
‘I’m so fucked, Katie.’

He lets his hands drop and I see the tears
on his face. His vulnerability – I can’t help but think of the dark-haired boy
Murphy described as I sit next to him, my arm going instinctively around him, pulling
him towards me. Just for a moment, I forget my panic. ‘You need to sleep,’ I
say.

‘I need a drink,’ he replies,
pulling a bottle of whiskey from his jacket pocket and making a sound that is supposed
to be a laugh but comes out strangled and strange.

I take it from him, and go to the mini-bar
for glasses.

‘I’m going to nip down the hall
for ice,’ I tell him, the thrum of my pulse alive in my ears. ‘Back in two
ticks.’

He smiles drowsily at the floor as I close
the door behind me.

At the ice machine, I stand with my arms
folded over my chest, silently furious with myself for letting him in –
into my room, into my thoughts. I can feel how deeply lodged
within me he is and always has been.

When we were children, he felt like a
brother to me. Later, when we were students, on the cusp of adulthood, that same
closeness was there, but it had become compromised. As our friendship rekindled and came
alive again, I felt the subtle lacing of new threads of feeling between us. The young
man he had grown into had echoes of the brother I’d remembered him to be: the
shyness, the dark hair shadowing his face, the fierce goodness inside him – and the
music. Of course, the music. But there was something else that I couldn’t help but
be drawn towards: a sadness that lay just beyond the corners of his smile, and I could
tell that he, too, felt lost and bewildered and distrustful of his place in the
world.

And there was the problem of sex, the
complication of attraction between two people with an already tangled past, two people
with self-inflicted scars on their palms that marked them for ever as siblings. My
friends in college could not seem to understand the friendship between me and Nick.
‘When are you two going to get together?’ they would ask me, and I would
laugh and protest that I just didn’t feel that way about him, hoping they
wouldn’t see through me.

Then one night at a party, we ended up alone
in a room together. It was late, the party well past its prime, and the crowd had
dropped away, just a few stragglers occupying dim corners of the house. We sat on a bed
and talked, and in the whispered darkness we returned to that field in our childhood. We
went back to the river. Once only, I listened to him reliving it – what had been done;
the parts we had
all played in it, Nick,
Luke and I. And I listened to his account of it with a kind of slow-burning shock,
afraid to speak, afraid that if I said anything he would stop, clam up, return to his
habitual silence. But what he said confused and frightened me. It made me wary of my own
memories, casting them all in doubt.

How long did we talk that night? Hours,
perhaps. The whole house silent around us as if we were the only two people left. And as
the granular light of dawn crept across the sky, the talking stopped, and it was just
the two of us lying on that bed. I knew from the measured way he was breathing, holding
himself so carefully still, that he wasn’t asleep. And I, too, feigned stillness,
yet every inch of me was waiting, poised for what might happen between us. All it would
have taken was for one of us to reach out, for one to turn towards the other. And yet
neither of us moved. You see, it was in the room with us now – that thing from the past.
Summoned like a spirit through all the talk, and it seemed to lie alongside us, that
dead girl like a third party. I felt her presence and knew he did too, and it occurred
to me then that it would always be like that between us. That no matter how close we
grew to each other, she would always be there, holding us apart.

And now, as the ice tumbles into the bucket,
I feel her again. Walking back to my room, I’m so aware of those old emotions
stalking me, waiting for my guard to come down and my good intentions to crumble.

Nick is sitting on the bed when I return,
reaching to put the phone down.

‘I hope you
don’t mind,’ he says. ‘I just wanted to call Lauren.’

‘Of course.’

We perch on either side of the bed, sipping
our drinks, awkward in each other’s company. He is the first to speak.

‘You must be surprised to see
me.’

I think about this, then say: ‘No.
I’m not surprised.’

He looks at me properly then and holds me
there for a moment, nodding slightly in understanding. Of course he would seek me out.
After all, we’re the only ones left. And I feel them crowding around us in this
room – the ghosts of the others: my parents, as well as his, Cora, and now Luke …

‘It’s strange,’ he says,
‘but ever since it happened – ever since I found Luke – I’ve felt this
overwhelming need to talk.’

He peers at me to see if I get the oddness
of that statement, and I do. Of course I do.

‘But I’ve never been very good
with words,’ he goes on. ‘It seems the only person I can talk to about it is
you.’

‘You can tell me anything,
Nicky,’ I say quietly.

‘I wanted to tell you about what
happened when I found him – Luke.’

I push myself back so that the pillows are
behind me, my feet crossed at the ankles, whiskey cradled in my lap, listening.

‘It took so long for them to come. The
guards, the ambulance. It seemed to take for ever. And what do you do while you wait? It
must have taken them half an hour to get there, and all that time I’m supposed to
just leave him there, hanging from a beam?’

‘What did you
do?’

‘At first, we went outside, stood by
the car, trying to pull ourselves together. Then I called Julia.’

‘That must have been hard.’

‘The worst phone call of my
life.’

‘How did she take it?’

He shrugs, trying not to make a big deal of
it. Still, I can imagine the shout of fright she gave, the distress and denial within
it.

‘After the phone call, I got a bit
panicky. The guards were so long and I started worrying that Julia would take it into
her head to come down. Just the thought of her seeing Luke hanging there like that
–’ He breaks off, drinks some whiskey.

‘I got worried that I’d imagined
it, which sounds ridiculous, but I started to think all kinds of crazy shit, like I
would go back into that house and he wouldn’t be there, or that maybe
there’d still been some scrap of life left in his body when we’d found him
but instead of checking we’d just assumed and maybe now it was too
late.’

I tap a cigarette out of the box and offer
one to him.

‘So, I find myself racing back into
that house and up the stairs, but he’s still there and from the colour of his
face, the swelling and bruising and just the sheer stillness of him, I knew he was dead.
But somehow … somehow I couldn’t leave him like that. It was so undignified. And I
know I should have waited for the cops, but it just got so I couldn’t stand to
think of him staying up there one second longer. I kept imagining my father’s face
were he to walk into the room and see Luke like that, even though the man has been dead
for the last decade.’

His voice, husky
from cigarettes and booze and lack of sleep, cracks, and I see the tremor in his hand as
he brings the cigarette to his lips. He holds the smoke inside him for a beat, then
releases a plume of it into the air.