Only We Know (2 page)

The boy doesn’t look up, just stays
there, hugging his knees to his chest and staring into the water, a strange little smile
on his face.

‘Hello, lady!’ the girl next to
him shouts up.

Sally laughs at the salutation, and turns to
the girl – white blonde hair in bunches, two big square front teeth shining in their
newness, gaps on either side where the adult teeth are yet but stubs. A rabbitty face
busy with freckles, rounded cheeks. Her smile is open and warm but there is something
about her that Sally is unsure of. Gormless. That is the word she alights on. Something
in the girl’s eye that is dull and slow. ‘Not the full shilling,’ as
her father might have said.

‘What’s
your name?’ she asks brightly.

‘Cora.’

‘Hello, Cora.’

‘And she’s Amy.’

A jerked thumb indicates the presence of a
smaller girl hovering behind her. A tatty dress tucked into knickers, the same white
blond hair as her sister, but her eyes are sharper, the gaze more discerning. Sally
guesses this child is four or five.

‘Are you allowed to play here by the
river?’ she asks, wondering about the younger child, wary somehow of leaving her
in the care of the older girl.

‘Oh, yeah. Pops says it’s
fine.’

Sally glances behind the girl, up past the
bank of trees on the other side of the river. There is a clearing there, the vague
outline of some kind of house. Over the past few nights, they have seen the glow of a
campfire through the trees, smoke rising into the night. When they asked him about it,
Mackenzie had snorted dismissively. ‘Gypsies.’

Sally takes in these girls with their
washed-out dresses, dirty faces and feet, and feels a jab of uncertainty.

‘Where’s Katie?’ she
asks.

‘Here I am.’

The voice, directly behind her, causes Sally
to jump. She swings around, sees the girl sitting still in the shadows, sandalled feet
together, hands clasped around her knees, and those big round eyes, solemn and staring
up at her through the gloom.

‘What are you doing?’ Sally
asks, unreasonably sharp, but she is still recovering from the fright.

‘Nothing,’ Katie says, her eyes
fixed on Sally.

‘Well, it’s
time to go back to camp now,’ she says firmly.

‘Is Dad back yet?’ Luke
asks.

‘No. But he will be soon.’

‘Ten more minutes.’

‘Now.’

‘Aw, please, Mum,’ he says, a
plaintive whine in his voice. It strikes Sally forcefully that, for the first time in
days, he has addressed her as ‘Mum’. Something inside her falters.

‘All right, then.’

What’s the point in arguing anyway?
Best to leave them here playing, where they’re happily entertaining themselves,
than have them under her feet, whining and moaning and questioning her constantly about
when the others will return.

She scrambles up the bank, stops to take one
look back at them – Luke gliding through the water, Nicky turned to the girl with the
buck teeth, whispering something to her, Katie sitting and gazing down at them, still
and impassive. Sally watches them for no more than a minute, before turning away. And as
she steps back out into the blinding heat, feeling the dryness of the grass brushing her
ankles, she has no idea that this is the last time she will see them as innocent
children, the last time she will feel such uncompromising love. She doesn’t know
it yet, but in less than an hour, her whole life will have changed.

Everything is packed and ready now, but
still the others have not returned. Sally lies down again on the tarpaulin, resting on
her front, and tries to read her book. But the words blur on the page, sweat running
into her eyes; soon she gives up, rolls onto her back and closes her eyes.

She feels her body
swamped in heat, imagines herself as a tiny insect trapped beneath the searing gaze of
the African sun. Three years they have been here, and now that Ken is coming to the end
of his contract, a decision must be made. Do they return to Ireland or will he push to
extend his contract for another year? The boys are growing up and there is their
education to consider. There is also Sally’s own work in Kianda, and the growing
pull it has on her life. She thinks of the house back in Ireland, remote in the Wicklow
hills, each room crowded with inherited antiques, and tries to imagine going back there,
picking up where she had left off. Africa has changed her. She is not the same person as
the woman who kept house in those rooms. A door has been opened inside her and she fears
returning to Ireland will mean slamming it shut.

Tiredness pulls at her limbs, dragging her
towards sleep. She should go and fetch the children. Five more minutes, and she’ll
get up and go to the river.

A decision needs to be made – Ken will begin
to push her on it soon. The truth is, she had hoped to know by now, had thought that
somehow it would grow clear to her what she should do. But her thoughts are so muddy and
opaque. And there is another decision that pulls at her conscience – an ultimatum
delivered before they left for the Masai Mara, an ultimatum from someone else
entirely.

‘I have to know,’ the man had
said. ‘I can’t hang on here waiting for you for ever.’

The three days away on safari were supposed
to be spent in thinking it over. But somehow, whenever she has a quiet moment to
herself, the last thing she wants to do is think about it.

Sleep comes to her
then, swooping down and taking her; under the burning sun, she lets it all go – the
argument this morning, her decaying friendship, the ultimatum delivered, the indecision
and dread that she has been dogged by lately – all of it obliterated by the blanketing
darkness of sleep.

A scream.

The shrill note of terror.

It comes to her through her dream.
Instantly, she opens her eyes, squints under the glare of the sun, feels the tightness
of sunburn across her forehead and cheeks.

Another scream. She pulls herself up, head
heavy and swimming with sleep. She looks about her, confused, the searing knot of a
headache announcing itself at the back of her eyes.

Silence surrounds her. Only the gentle
hissing of a breeze through the grass, the click and hum of insects. Birds in the trees.
And yet the absence of any other sound strikes a chord of urgency within her. She cannot
hear the children now but, remembering the scream, her heart gives a sudden lurch of
fright. She knows it wasn’t imagined.

She stumbles to her feet, scans the empty
field, and turns towards the river. She moves swiftly, the ground hard and unforgiving
beneath the soles of her feet, propelled by a fear that has come alive inside her.

The silence seems to deepen, to gather
density as the dark clutch of trees looms in front of her.

A voice whispers in her head.

The boys
, it says.

And then it starts,
the stream of frightening possibilities – a fall, a broken limb, a gashed head, a
snake-bite – all of it running through her as she pounds a ragged path through the bush.
The silence seems to roar around her now, and a warning voice sounds in her head, a
voice that tells her to hold steady, to steel herself for whatever is to come.

Another scream – this time from the opposite
bank – stops her in her tracks.

And it comes to Sally then, with a striking
clarity, an insight so clear that she knows it to be true.

The river.

A child under water.

Momentarily the fear drains away as she
reels from the impact, coldness flushing through her body. It lasts but a second. Then,
she starts to run.

It starts with the pictures.

A Thursday morning, much like any other in
the office, three of us standing around Reilly’s desk shooting the breeze while we
wait for the deputy editor to arrive. The others are giving me flak on account of my
appearance – last night’s make-up slipping off my face, my hair still spiky with
grips, the collapsed up-do that I haven’t yet brushed out. I’m feeling like
I’m only half present. The other half of me is biding my time until I can get back
to my desk, finish writing my piece, then high-tail it home to my apartment for a shower
and a long sleep.

Colm from Legal says: ‘Jesus, Katie,
the smell of booze off you would knock out a horse.’

Beside him Peter sniggers and I smile
sweetly. ‘Just doing my job, boys. Sacrificing my sobriety for the scoop, you know
how it is.’

And he says, no, he doesn’t, but
it’s all fine, really, despite the pain searing my temples and the weariness
rising up my legs, like mercury in a thermometer. I’ve been here before. And then
Reilly arrives, clearly harassed, as if he has something important to tell us. He sits
in his chair, throws the pictures onto his desk and says: ‘Get a load of
these.’

The four of us lean in to peer at them and
straight away I feel it start.

Pictures of a dead
girl floating in a swimming-pool.

‘They just came in,’ Reilly
tells us. A death at a party in the early hours of the morning. Drink, drugs, a bunch of
students, a game that got out of hand.

Peter is spreading them out now so that they
cover half of the desk. The water so clear. The girl, only a teenager, her hair fanning
out in the water.

‘Some sicko at the party took these
with his phone,’ Reilly explains.

‘We can’t print them,’
Colm says emphatically. ‘There’s no way.’

‘So fucking ghoulish,’ Peter
whispers, with an air of fascination. His eyes are soaking them up.

‘Her parents probably haven’t
even identified her body yet, and here we are staring at these,’ Colm says,
disgusted.

‘We can’t print them, but
there’s a story nonetheless,’ Reilly insists, ‘about camera phones and
the lack of morality governing their use.’

He’s directing his comments at all of
us. I’m listening to him, but I can’t drag my attention away from the
pictures. The creamy whiteness of her skin, the reddish cloud of hair spreading in the
water. Clothes sticking to her limbs. Her body half turned as if in a slow farewell.
Eyes open and unseeing, her mouth frozen into an O of surprise. I imagine all the water
leaking into her, filling her, swelling her lungs to bursting point.

Someone says my name.

But I stare at the pictures, transfixed. Not
a bubble of air. Just the stillness of that girl beneath a film of water. I look at her
and feel the change come over me, that tender
place deep inside me prodded with a stick. My toughness
vaporizes in a puff of steam.

‘Katie?’ Reilly says again, but
I don’t look at him. I don’t look at any of them.

I reach down and grab my bag, urgency
consuming me as I stumble away from the death spread on that desk. Without saying a
word, I run from them, not stopping until I reach the lift.

I head out onto the grey blandness of
Talbot Street, cross the road, without glancing left or right, and go straight into the
pub.

‘Whiskey,’ I say to the barman,
fumbling for change in my purse.

‘Powers or Jameson?’ he asks,
his face betraying neither surprise nor judgement. It’s not even midday.

‘Jameson.’

It’s that kind of pub, walls adorned
with framed mirrors and dusty trinkets, horse-racing on the telly, a smell of damp
clothing in the air. No matter how early in the day, there’s always some solo
drinker in here, hunched morosely over a pint. I take my drink to a quiet corner and
wait for my nerves to calm. Nausea stirs in the pit of my stomach and it has nothing to
do with my hangover. That girl in the water. A cold shiver goes straight to the soft
spot inside me. I close my eyes and wait for it to pass, urging myself to get a
grip.

I can feel it coming over me. The
tightening, like a belt, around my neck. Every time something like this happens, I feel
the belt tightening by a notch. Like when I heard that Ken Yates had been killed in a
car crash all those
years ago – a notch. And
Sally’s funeral last year – another notch. With each little piece of news from the
past that trickles through – another notch.

Most of the time, I don’t feel it –
the vice about my neck. But then something will happen, like those pictures just now,
coming out of nowhere, pictures of a girl and a tragedy completely unrelated to me.
That’s when I feel the tentacles of the past reaching out to grasp me so that I
can’t breathe, as if I’m the one under water. Only a few weeks ago, in this
very pub, I’d felt the belt tighten.

I remember the night vividly. I was sitting
with some of the other hacks, a quick pint after work having turned into a session, the
telly on in the background. Someone said: ‘Here, turn that up, will you?’ I
swivelled in my seat to see the screen, and there was Luke Yates making an impassioned
plea to the general public from the sofa of a TV talk-show. Among a panel of
entrepreneurs, economists and other talking heads, discussing the downturn in the
economy and how we as a nation needed to encourage growth instead of austerity, Luke
seemed to be going off-script as he urged the viewers to stop focusing on their own
misery, and start looking further afield to see what real suffering was like.