Only We Know (25 page)

I gasp for air, swallow hard, then fall,
dizzy onto the riverbank. My mouth has water in it and I sound like I’m
gurgling.

Luke calls the next round ‘the
finals’. ‘Is everybody ready?’ he says.

We nod and he counts us in again and we all
go down, the water covering our heads. Amy and I stay down until she wriggles and
struggles. I let go of her hand, pop up, and she pops out of the water after me. I
don’t like holding Amy’s hand when she starts to wriggle like that.

Luke and Cora are
still under water. Cora is trying to come up for air. Luke is holding her.

Overhead, a hawk swoops and turns. It glides
through the air effortlessly. Sometimes I wish I could fly. There’s a stillness in
the air, and time seems to have stopped. But something does not feel right.

I’m counting: ‘Thirty-one,
thirty-two …’

‘Luke,’ I shout, walking through
the water. I’m scared now.

My ears are full of water. I can’t
make out anything except that hollow sound, like the ghostly wind when a shell is
pressed against your ear.

Maybe there’s nothing to hear anyway.
Maybe all there is is silence.

Because the girl is still under the water.
Like a rag doll, she floats on the surface, face down.

She starts to turn a little in the water.
I’m waiting for her to lift her head, spray water from her mouth and say: ‘I
tricked you.’

I’m waiting for her to move in any
other way. But she doesn’t. Luke looks at me and there is blood coming from his
nose. He reaches for the girl and she turns in the water, a swathe of blood reaching
across her face.

He takes her in his arms. She’s limp,
her arms draped on each side of her, her face losing more colour, her mouth puckered,
her eyes open.

Luke doesn’t look like himself. He
looks like someone else. He doesn’t look like my brother any more, but someone
older. His eyes are like stunned, frozen stars.

‘Help me,’ he says, but I
can’t move. He pulls Cora through the water and lays her on the riverbank.

Why won’t she
sit up? I think. I’m still in the water. I’m shivering now. I want to say:
‘Stop play-acting.’

But I can’t say anything.

I want to say: ‘Luke, let’s not
play this game any more.’ I want to say: ‘Let’s never play this game
again, Luke.’

‘Luke, can you hear me?’

Luke is kneeling by Cora’s side and
pushing on her chest, up and down. He is frantic and afraid.

Her struggle and the terror she must have
felt at the end are not captured in her body or in her eyes. Instead, her pale blue eyes
look like they have seen Heaven.

Katie is crying out now as she scrambles
towards us. Amy is nowhere to be seen.

Katie’s eyes are large and afraid. My
head fills with noise. I’m standing in the water, shivering.

Luke is pressing his mouth to Cora’s –
breathing into her.

The trees are crowding around us, black and
silent.

Then we are moving through the water – me,
Luke and Katie – pulling, dragging. The river water is rolling down my back, beginning
to dry in the heat. Something passes over my hand; it’s Cora’s hair, like
weed, floating beneath the surface as we take her upriver. Her wrist is gripped in both
my hands. I cry out, letting go of her arm, watching it float away to her side.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ Luke
shouts.

What happens then? Shouts and murmurs. Luke
saying, ‘Keep a lookout.’ Branches gathered – sticks, leaves, twigs. Slowly,
Cora becomes hidden from view. A bird shrieks high in the branches. Movement on the bank
and Katie screams. She’s standing in the water, her eyes enormous,
hands over her mouth. My head is filled
with noise. I cannot hear what anyone is saying. I can only hear the sound of water
rushing upward. She screams again, and Luke swings around, shoves her back hard so that
she loses her footing, falls into the water. He turns back to the bank, his face hot and
white with fury, finishes the task. Something moves on the other side of the river –
Katie glances downstream. Then Luke is grabbing me by the wrist, pulling me so hard I
lose my footing, bare feet scrabbling in the dirt, but still he keeps pulling. Katie is
by my side and now all three of us are running.

Later, my dad asks us a hundred questions,
and then another hundred.

‘Tell me,’ he says, ‘as
clearly as you can,
exactly
what happened.’

Was this before or after the police came? I
can’t be sure. But I can’t say a word. Something is stopping my throat.

‘We were playing,’ Luke
says.

‘And then?’

‘We started this game.’

‘What game?’

‘Just a game.’

My dad has never hit us, but I feel the
great rage within him and the will-power it takes to stop himself shaking Luke or
lashing out at me when I won’t speak.

‘What happened to the other
girl?’ Luke asks.

‘What?’

‘The other one? Amy?’

Dad tries to stay calm, but he keeps asking
question after question. The hours that pass are blurred and
indistinct. Some things puncture the vagueness. The
policeman’s height – he might be the tallest man I’ve ever seen. I hear my
dad say the word ‘accident’. Sitting in the police station, picking at the
scab on my knee. My fingers still white and wrinkled from the river. The station is
bare. Mum fidgets, biting her thumbnail, sits close beside me. My father writes out our
statements; we sign. A swimming accident. Children unsupervised. The declarations are
witnessed.

I have a strange feeling there was no
morgue. The girl may have rested on a pallet in the back room of that station.

The policeman holds out his massive hands.
‘A tragic accident,’ he says, and sighs.

He closes his eyes.

I imagine that when he opens them, he wishes
us gone.

The long drive back to Nairobi – not a word
spoken.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ is my
dad’s plaintive refrain. He says it over and over and over again; late into the
night, all night, every night for the rest of our lives.

Mum cries and cries.

That night, back in our house in Lavington,
we are sent to bed. Katie’s bed remains empty. Tonight she sleeps in her
mother’s room. I can’t imagine sleeping ever again. I am afraid to go to
sleep. Afraid that if I close my eyes, the only thing I will see is the water, its silty
murkiness and the girl’s eyes wavering, staring back at me.

I trace the grain in the wood of the beams
above my bed. I follow its meandering, circling, maze-like paths as it leads me out of
where I am. Luke, on the other hand, has
hidden himself beneath his bedclothes, buried himself
completely. From downstairs, the adults’ voices rise. Katie’s mum is
frantic, a shrill note of fear in hers.

‘We need to leave here,’ she
says. ‘In the morning, first thing. The risk is too great. Please, Ken.’

My father’s voice is low, calm, yet he
sounds different now, taken by a new seriousness. He urges Helen to remain calm, but she
is well beyond that.

‘Control myself? A child was killed!
How can we possibly stay here?’

My mum makes inarticulate objections, which
end up sounding like a series of buts.

‘Do what you want, Sally,’ Helen
says sharply. ‘But Katie and I are leaving. My God, I wish we’d never
come!’

The argument continues through the night. I
keep my eyes closed tight. In the darkness, as I drift in and out of consciousness, I
think I can hear, from under his blanket, Luke counting again, his voice fragile:
‘Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two …’

Katie’s mother goes to her room. I
hear them whispering and know that Katie is awake but I can’t make out what they
are saying.

My parents stay downstairs, talking. I hear
the murmur of their voices mingling, kept low.

‘A tragic accident.’ My
dad’s voice. ‘That’s what the man said.’

‘Yes, but the other one. The smaller
one. The way he was looking at us …’

‘Sally.’

‘If we had had more time … If
we’d just come up with something clearer, something more solid …’

Dad says something
then, something indistinct and muffled.

Mum’s voice, prickly with fear:
‘I don’t know, Ken. I just wish we could be sure.’

I’m counting now in my head.
I’ve taken over from Luke, who has fallen silent. He might be asleep. Either way I
keep counting, as if counting is a kind of prayer, lulling me to sleep.

The memory fades.

I hear a car rev its engine outside. I open
my eyes and see dust floating through the air. I lift myself from the bed, stand and
walk to the window of the room. Outside, a shimmer of heat is rising in the distance. In
it, the world wavers, like some kind of mirage. My limbs are leaden. I walk back to the
bed, ready to fall onto it, but hear footsteps hurrying down the corridor towards my
room.

And then comes the frantic knocking on the
door. I turn.

‘Nick? Are you there? Open
up!’

I struggle to the door, fling it open with
my last ounce of strength and there before me is Murphy – sweating and wild-eyed.

‘Something’s happened,’ he
says, reaching for me. ‘There’s been an accident. You need to come with me
now.’

The scream. She cannot shake the scream
from her memory. It keeps coming back to her, unannounced and unwanted.

That last scream, different from the others.
And she knew from it, before she ever got to the river, that it was not a child’s
voice. The sharpness of the note, the depth of it, spoke to something primal within her,
the burning point of motherhood, and she recognized the distress within it and that was
the thing that made her run, breathless and ragged, feet slapping the dry earth hard,
all the way to the river. That was when she saw her – a woman standing up to her hips in
water, turning about frantically to scan the surface, the riverbank, the surrounding
trees. She saw the heave in the woman’s chest, the craning of her neck, features
stretched in desperation, in her hand green ribbons, and from her mouth, the one name
called over and over in a shrill note of panic. Behind her on the banks, skulking in the
shadow of the trees, the little girl, the younger of the two, watched Sally with solemn
eyes.

‘Everything has changed,’ she
tells Jim.

They are sitting outside a café near her
home in Lavington – plastic tables, scalloped parasols protecting them from the
sun’s glare, cans of Coke sweating in the heat.

‘Not everything,’ he says.
He’s holding her hand,
kneading her
fingers and knuckles, and she feels the pressure of his touch. ‘We’re still
the same – you and me.’

Conscious that they’re in a public
place, she withdraws her hand from his, glances around at the other diners.

After that, he sits in injured silence for a
while, ferocity in his gaze.

Before the Masai Mara, before
the
thing
, he had pressed her into making a decision. An ultimatum delivered: me or
him. She had come close to leaving her husband.

Now, her focus is on containing this
thing
. She cannot even bring herself to give a name to what happened. Nor
can she tell him about it – not properly. The details she has given him are vague,
sketchy. Even telling him that much feels like a betrayal. She looks to him for
reassurance, for distraction, but even when she’s with him, she’s reliving
it in her head. The woman’s scream of fright. The solemn gaze of that little girl
watching her from the other side of the river. The rise in her gorge of fear for her own
children as she began to search for them, adding their names to the air in her own clear
note of fear. She had tried to engage the other mother, asked her about the boys, about
Katie, but the woman was well beyond that, had burrowed deep into her own fear. She held
the green ribbons to her chest, sobs coming between the cries of her daughter’s
name. The woman wading through the water, and Sally running along the bank, searching
through the trees, through the long grass of the field beyond, the pressure building in
her chest, a prayer running through her head:
Not the boys, please, God, not the
boys
.

She doesn’t tell this to Jim. She
doesn’t tell him much at all. Their meeting feels flat, a little desperate,
cursory too,
and when she tells him she has
to go, the injured look he gives her tears at her a little.

She gets on her bicycle to leave, and he
makes her promise not to forsake what they have but to hold on to it, to feel the
strength and depth of his love and it will carry her through this difficult time.

‘Promise me,’ he says, with an
urgency that unsettles her.

But Sally knows that promises – after what
has happened – can no longer be made or honoured.

The cycle home is mainly uphill and Sally
feels it in the muscles of her thighs, staring at the blurred strip of clay road ahead
of her under the glare of the afternoon sun. By the time she reaches home, she has
sweated through her clothes and feels dizzy from the heat of the day and her meeting
with Jim.