Only We Know (24 page)

That night my sleep is broken. The cooling
air of the Masai Mara has got into my bones. Lauren stirs next to me. Her breathing is
laboured. We don’t talk. That can wait until morning.

When light finally breaks into the room,
Lauren pulls herself from the bed. She stretches before going into the bathroom.

As I swing my legs out and go to stand up,
it hits me – I feel as if I’m under water: a sucking noise in my ears.

‘Are you all right?’ Lauren
asks, when she comes out of the bathroom. She is clutching her towel in front of her,
frowning.

‘I don’t feel well.’

She comes forward, presses her hand to my
forehead. ‘You’re burning up.’

‘I’m fine,’ I say, needing
to get moving, to get away from this place. I reach the end of the bed and the room
swirls around me.

‘Nick, you’re sick. You may need
a doctor.’

‘I need paracetamol, that’s all.
And some water.’

‘I’ll find Karl – tell him we
won’t be able to leave today.’

‘No!’

My shout makes her draw back, startled.

‘No,’ I repeat, softer this
time, but still firm. This noise in my ears that started on the journey down here has
been
building to a crescendo, its whine
driving me to distraction. I can’t shake the feeling that until I leave this
place, until I start to put distance between me and the land where my brother now lies,
I will get no peace. I start to get dressed while Lauren looks in her bag, then hands me
some painkillers and a bottle of water. I knock them back and swallow hard.

‘We need to talk,’ she says
quietly.

‘I know we do. I know. But,
sweetheart, can’t it wait? I feel so strange. This noise in my ears …’

‘No, I don’t think it can wait,
Nick.’

Something sinks within me. I stop buttoning
my shirt, put my hands on my hips and try to steady myself, try to feel the floor
beneath my feet. My head is swimming with fever, water rushing through the channels
behind my ears, and even though I know she’s entitled to a decent explanation,
I’m not sure I have the energy to give it.

‘Nothing happened, Lauren. I promise
you. We talked – that’s it.’

She is frowning with frustration at herself,
at me, impatient. ‘You know what, Nick? I believe you. I do. You went to
Katie’s room, you talked, you fell asleep. Fine. If that’s what you say
happened, then I accept it.’

‘If you accept it why do you sound so
angry?’

‘You just don’t get it, do you?
You think this is just about sex. About fidelity. But the thing is this, Nick.’
She draws close, close enough for me to see the bright flecks of amber in her eyes.
‘
I
am your wife. That means that
I
should be the one you go
to when you need to talk.
I
should be the one you confide in.
I
should
be the one you turn to for understanding, or for comfort. Not her.’

I feel the stab of
each one of those
I
s and sit down on the bed. I am so tired of running from
this thing, from avoiding it, and now with the plains of the Masai Mara swarming outside
me, pressuring this room, trying to get inside my head, I cannot bear it.

‘There are some things I can’t
talk to you about, Lauren.’

‘What things?’ she asks, but I
can’t answer.

‘I see,’ she says, her voice icy
now. ‘So you can’t talk to me about it, but you can talk to her.’

I close my eyes, but that just makes the
whining noise worse. When I open them again, Lauren’s eyes are red and teary. My
mind’s on fire. There are too many things I can’t figure out right now. Too
many memories that clash.

A voice in my head is pushing me to tell
her, whispering to me:
Let her in
.

The room seems smaller now. There’s no
air. I get up, cross to the window and throw it open. I feel claustrophobic, breathless.
My hands are shaking and my head is full of a noise that sounds something like an
untuned radio.

When I turn back, she’s staring hard
at me, in a way she’s never looked at me before. It’s as if she’s
urging me to say something. And in that moment, it feels as if we could kill each other
or make love.

We do neither. Of course we don’t.

Instead, Lauren goes to the window and
stares out at the savannah beyond the hotel grounds. ‘This place. What it does to
people …’ she says enigmatically.

And finally the pressure that has been
building in me breaks, and I say what I have wanted to say but not allowed myself to do
so until now: ‘When I was eight, I watched
my brother kill a little girl. It happened here in the
river. I watched him hold that girl under the water until the life went out of her. I
watched him do it and I didn’t stop him. And Katie saw it too. That’s why I
went to her. That’s why I had to talk to her. That’s why I couldn’t
talk to you.’

Lauren looks at me, but says nothing. She
turns, takes her bag, and leaves. The door falls shut heavily behind her.

I sit on the bed again, hang my head in my
hands. My whole body is shaking.

I realize I may have lost her. The look on
her face, the fear that had entered her eye. I never told her I loved her. I never said
I was sorry it had happened – that it was the greatest regret of my life. I am amazed at
my own recklessness – that I would gamble with our happiness like that, take such a
foolish risk and tell her what we had done. I stare at my hands and see the dirt around
my fingernails, the reddish arcs of dust beneath them, and I think of my hand going into
that urn, the coolness of the ash, and feel a sudden panic. Quickly now, I get to my
feet and rush for the door, feeling the spinning as if my brain is floating in
water.

I’ll find her, I’ll tell her I
love her. I’ll tell her that what happened when I was a child was awful, too awful
for me to think about, to look at. But I will open up to her about it, if that’s
what she wants, I will tell her what happened, confess my part in it, but then we would
put it behind us, lock it away in the past, push it back down there into the dark,
return it to its place in the shady waters, where it belongs.

But my legs buckle and my hands drop from
the
door-handle. They’re too weak.
I’m too weak even to open the door.

I stumble to the bed, sit down on its edge
and hold my head. I’m dizzy and nauseous and the world seems to be spinning in
furious revolutions. The sweat is cold on my forehead. I wipe it with a shaking hand,
close my eyes and try to steady myself. As I breathe in and out, it comes back to me
then, like a half-forgotten melody my father might once have hummed, the day it all
happened.

‘We’re going down to the
river,’ Luke says.

‘Really?’ I ask.

‘Mum says it’s okay.’

Dad has gone looking for another driver.
Katie’s mum has gone with him. She’s in a huff, Katie says. Luke says
she’s ‘distraught’. It makes me think of the word
‘drought’, and the dry expanse of desert we crossed with our parents only
months before. I thought I’d seen a pool of water on that trip. But my dad called
it a mirage. It’s when you see something that isn’t really there.

‘Come on,’ Luke says.
‘Let’s go.’

The three of us run into the undergrowth
towards the river. Luke is ahead and Katie comes streaming by me. We run through the
high grass and, after several minutes, stop to catch our breath and take stock. From
where we are, I can see the van we came in, but not the driver. He’s asleep in the
front seat.

The grass scratches and tickles us as we run
through it. Luke is singing a song of nonsense and I’m smiling broadly into the
rushing wind. Then, as the muddy smell of the river rises, we see her – Cora.

She’s sitting in a tree, her feet
dangling over the river.
She has blonde hair
tied in green-ribboned bunches. She’s talking, not to another person but to
herself. The closer we get, I realize she’s not talking but singing quietly. It
sounds to me like some kind of lullaby.

One hand clutches the bough she’s
sitting on, the other a green-leafed branch, which she is sweeping this way and that. I
wonder what her song is, or where she imagines herself to be. I can almost make out the
words as they leave her lips in gentle plosives.

Her younger sister, Amy, is crouched on the
riverbank, entranced by a game of her own. When Luke arrives first, panting, it looks
like he’ll startle the girls, but he doesn’t. They turn and gaze at him as
if they’ve been expecting him, as if we’re all grown-ups and he is some
gentleman caller.

I wave, like we’re old friends, not
kids who’ve only known each other a short time. Yesterday we found them here by
the river, and together the five of us had splashed around at the water’s edge
until the sun dipped low and our dad came down and called to us back to camp, it was
getting late.

Luke walks to the riverbank and kicks
stones, digs his hands into his pockets and looks from one girl to the other. Then he
pulls off his T-shirt and walks into the water.

I follow, but Katie stays where she is, at a
distance. The water is cool and clear, not cold. It feels good to put my toes into it.
The water tickles. Cora jumps down from the tree – she follows us to the water,
giggling. The girls wear dresses. One is pink, the other green. They are sitting by the
water now with sticks and are making spells.

Luke asks if they’re witches and they
laugh.

‘Is it
deep?’ Luke says, pointing into the water.

Cora shrugs. He dives straight in and the
girls gasp. When he emerges, his smile is broad and the water trickles down his
face.

‘There might be crocodiles!’
Katie shouts.

‘It’s not even cold,’ Luke
says. He waves to her. ‘Come on in,’ he hollers, but she doesn’t
budge.

I want to follow him – it’s so hot and
the river is begging me to come in – but Katie’s caution holds me back. I hunker
down in the shadows, scan the surface of the water for the stealthy glide of a ridged
back. One of the sisters crosses the river – Amy, the younger one. She inches her way
towards me, staring at me with curiosity.

Mum comes to check on us, her form a
silhouette against the white light beyond the trees. Hands on her hips, she hollers at
Luke, but he won’t come out of the water, even though she tells him to. I’m
not sure if she can see me in the shadows. I’m not sure I want her to.

After she goes, I follow his lead and dive
in. We jump on each other’s backs and splash. Cora has moved closer to us: she
wades into the water, and before we know it, we’re all splashing each other.

‘Where are your folks?’ Luke
says, and she laughs.

‘Folks?’ she says, and giggles
again.

‘Parents?’ Luke clarifies.

She keeps laughing. Apparently there is no
answer to this question, or, where they are from, parents are hilarious creatures, or
perhaps they don’t exist at all. I run out of the water to pull Katie in, but she
shrieks and I leave her be. Then Luke asks me to count as he plunges his head into the
water.

‘Now your
turn,’ he says.

After several attempts, it looks like
there’s going to be only one winner. I can’t beat Luke, but Cora – she might
even be older than him, she’s certainly lankier and longer – says:
Let me
try
. Then it’s my turn again, but Luke has an idea. ‘Stay down
longer, I’ll assist,’ he says, using one of the grown-up words he has
acquired from our parents. He holds his hands over my head and mumbles something that
sounds, as I submerge my head beneath the cool water, like a prayer, like something the
priest would say at mass as he passes his hands over the congregation, not
Body of
Christ
,
not
Take away the sins of the world
, but something more
garbled: an underwater sermon of sorts.

The game has no name. The game is the game.
The game is pulling and pushing and laughing. And taking turns. It’s my turn next.
I take a deep breath and look upward. I take such a big breath, my mouth wide open, I
think I’m going to swallow the whole of the blue sky.

‘Okay. Now teams,’ Luke says.
‘One boy, one girl. Hold hands and stand over there,’ he tells me and Amy,
and I take her hand and we walk down into the water, like Luke and I did at the pool our
dad brought us to in Dublin. That was when we lived in Ireland. We now live in Africa.
Luke says we’re Africans now. In the swimming pool in Dublin, you have to wear
goggles and the chlorine makes your skin crawl and rashes appear, like red maps, and
drive you crazy with how they itch. But there’s no chlorine in the water here and
I can keep my eyes open, wide open. I think I could be a fish or an underwater creature
of some sort.

I’m counting in my head. I could be
weightless, floating
in outer space. I pull
Amy’s hand and we go down into the depths, my legs giving way until it’s
deep. Then Amy pulls on my hand and we pop out of the water without a drop of air to
spare.

The water sprays from my mouth in a
fountain. Amy laughs. Her hand is small in mine, and soft like dough. I feel like I can
hold my breath for ever. Cora is brave too. She can hold her breath for longer. Is that
because she’s older than me? ‘No,’ Luke says. ‘It’s
because she’s brave.’

Katie is walking in circles, talking to
herself, sometimes stopping to watch, sometimes with her head down. She’ll get
dizzy walking in circles, I think.

But I’m getting tired. Luke says:
‘Another game.’

The sun gets hotter. We play until my lungs
hurt. I’m thirsty too. I want to go back to the camp. Maybe Dad’s back now.
Maybe he’s found a new driver. I look for Mum from the water. I can’t see
her. I wish she’d come to get us. I’m not sure where Amy’s parents
are. I haven’t seen them. For all I know, they don’t exist.

Luke says, ‘One more game.’ But
I don’t want to. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘You might win this
time.’