Only We Know (30 page)

Murphy nods to him, but the man makes no
sign. He simply spits whatever stalk he’s been chewing onto the ground and climbs
into the driver’s seat.

I get into the back and Murphy takes the
passenger seat. He says something to the driver, who turns on the ignition, and we pull
away with a stutter.

‘Tell me, Murphy,’ I say, my
head pounding. ‘What’s happened to her?’ My voice sounds shaky and
tense – it’s full of the same unnerving echoes it contained when I asked all those
questions after hearing of Luke’s disappearance.

‘I don’t
know the details, Nick, but it sounds like she had some kind of fall,’ Murphy says
slowly, keeping his eyes on the road while the car travels at a steady speed.

I stare out at the land around us. The
houses have fallen away, and there is only the wide expanse of the plains, broken here
and there by a clump of trees, a scrub of bush. The road is narrow and dusty – a track
the car rattles and lurches over. We’re the only vehicle for miles. I don’t
know exactly where we are and my brain’s sucked dry and addled with memories I
don’t want to relive.

The driver lights up and smoke from his
cigarette wafts through the car. A silence comes over us as we travel further inland –
it reminds me of the silence of waking alone in a small hut on the outskirts of a
nomadic village in Mozambique, in the years before I met Lauren, a thread of raindrops
falling onto my face as dawn broke, the village quiet, the wildlife about to stir.

A moment of beforeness, like the one into
which my tears fell after my dad had said to me, one night in Wicklow: ‘It’s
not your fault. You were only a child.’

I had woken up from a nightmare and cried
out in fright. He came to my bedroom door. I was shaking with fear.

‘What is it? A bad dream?’

I nodded and told him what I had dreamed,
told him about the river again.

He came to my bed, sat down. He didn’t
want to hear the details of the dream: he had stopped asking by this stage what had
actually happened. He only asked us to forget. ‘It was an accident,’ he
said, ‘time now to put it behind you,’ all the while rubbing my back and
calming me until I finally fell asleep again.

I’ve tried,
Dad. I’ve tried to put it behind me, to push it down, to forget, but it catches
up. It won’t let me alone.

There’s only me and Katie left from
that time, and now that she’s in trouble, hurt somehow, I’m filled again
with a paralysing fear, and my mind rushes to what might have happened to her. Could she
have walked down the wrong street and met a renegade militia, been overtaken by the
heat, consumed some heady cocktail of alcohol and prescription medication, all to stave
off the awful time we are having by being back in what is to us a blighted spot?

My hands shake as they do before I go on
stage. ‘I hope she’s okay,’ I say, but no one answers.

We drive on in silence. I peer out of the
window. The landscape unfolds before us, the same undulating vastness – we’re in
the middle of nowhere. Then, after some time, the car slows with a judder. The driver
takes the cigarette from his mouth.

‘Look,’ he says, pointing, his
voice deep and gravelly. ‘Two lions.’

I can’t help thinking that
there’s a glimmer of recognition in his eyes: a challenge, even.

Beneath the branches of a large acacia tree
two young lions are resting, sheltering from the sun. They eye us with threatening
curiosity, the paw of one lying on the head of the other. The two are so close in size
and age they could be brothers, and the way they shift about with such ease and grace
only hides their power.

‘Why have we stopped?’ Murphy
asks, agitated.

‘To watch the lions,’ the driver
answers gruffly.

One of the animals moves towards us,
watching us closely to see what we might do, padding with slow,
deliberate steps – a ferocious strength in its limbs. They
seem relaxed, but they are aware of everything around them. They are predators, after
all, and later today, in all likelihood, they will kill. And with that thought comes the
image of us on safari all those years ago: we’re in the van, my dad has his arm
around me and I can feel the heat of his body against my face as I lean into him.
‘Look,’ he says, pointing to a lion in the distance chasing down a hyena.
The van races after them and I throw my arms around his waist and hold on for dear life.
As quickly as it arrives, the image fades: my dad’s wild smile vanishing with
it.

We’re closer to the lions here than
I’d thought. If they decided to take an interest in us, we could be in real
danger: the car might not start quickly enough, they could attack and, as predators,
they would show no mercy.

We watch them for a time, in silence, the
driver blowing out one mouthful of smoke after another. His nonchalance is infuriating –
Katie’s hurt, and he’s admiring the wildlife. Then one of the lions comes
closer to the car. That’s close enough, I think. Time to reverse, time to drive
off. But the driver does nothing and the lion lifts his front paw onto the bonnet and
raises himself up and onto it. The car creaks and sweat trickles down my brow into my
eyes. I want to tell the driver to start the engine, but the words catch in my
throat.

The lion peers lazily at us. Even Murphy
seems rattled.

‘Mack …’ he says nervously.

But Mack doesn’t answer him. Instead
he turns to see my reaction, as if I am the one who has spoken his name. He smiles, his
gaze resting on me, and I can’t help thinking
that he’s enjoying how I’m shifting in my seat –
frightened and defenceless.

And as he turns to me, something passes
between us – an acknowledgement of sorts. He smiles again, but there’s nothing
joyful about it. ‘You know me now, don’t you?’ he says.

It hits me then. ‘It’s
you,’ I say, and just like that I can see myself on tiptoe all those years ago
peering through the window of the van watching a younger Mack sleeping, his cap pulled
over his eyes, his arms lying slack by his sides, his mouth open – the rise and fall of
his chest steady and deep. Luke coming up behind me, peeping into the van as well, then
falling back and laughing at the state of the driver. I can still hear his mischievous
chuckle – the rat-tat-tat of it tapping out its tune in my inner ear, like a little
drum-beat.

The lion on the car is approached by the
other, which begins to circle us.

‘Murphy,’ I lean over to whisper
in his ear, ‘ask your driver to get us out of here.’

‘Mackenzie, time to go,’ Murphy
says. But Mackenzie does not start the car.

‘You know him well?’ I ask
Murphy.

‘I know him from years ago,’
Murphy says a little distractedly. ‘He’s one of my lieutenants – a wayward
lieutenant.’

His words fill the car, but he is staring
out of the window with a kind of wistful inattention, none of the purpose and focus he
normally commands. Sweat forms over my lip and the dryness in my mouth is chronic. The
humming in my ears starts again.

I think of when I
went to visit him in his office only the other day: his irritation on the phone, his
annoyance and distraction were the same as they are now.

‘Why wayward?’ I ask, despite
myself.

The second lion comes to Murphy’s door
and pushes its head against it, shaking the car.

Murphy says something to Mackenzie in his
language, which I’m not supposed to understand. He turns to me. ‘Mack has a
habit of taking things into his own hands. He has a problem sometimes with authority,
with not doing what he is told.’

Mack grunts back, ‘I do what you tell
me to do.’

‘But not now?’ Murphy says.

The driver gives him a hard, serious
stare.

‘Mackenzie has had his fair share of
injustice, his fair share of misery. I shouldn’t be so hard on him,’ Murphy
says.

My heart starts to beat a little faster.
‘What do you mean?’ I say, but Murphy doesn’t answer.

The lion on the bonnet lets himself down and
walks to my side of the car. I can feel it rubbing its haunches against the car’s
panelling; I can hear its heavy breathing.

‘I remember you,’ the driver
says coldly, ‘and your family. They complain. They don’t want Mackenzie to
drive.’

‘History, Mack. Ancient
history,’ Murphy says.

‘Look, maybe you should start the car,
Mackenzie,’ I say. ‘We’ve seen enough of the lions and it’s time
we got going. Katie’s hurt, for Christ’s sake.’

He swings around to me, his voice leaden
with fury: ‘You dare to tell me what to do? You? After what you have
done?’

‘Me?’ I say.

‘I lost
everything because of you – my job, my family, my home …’

‘Because of me?’ I don’t
understand.

‘My life was ruined because of you and
your family.’ His voice is filled with bitterness. ‘I lost my job. I lost my
family.’ He spits the tiny stub of a cigarette from his cracked lips onto the
floor of the car.

‘It was very unfortunate,’
Murphy says. ‘Very sad. Everything that happened …’

‘I had a family to provide for. Mouths
to feed. So when I lost my job, my family went hungry. You understand?’ he says,
raising his voice, but he’s not looking for understanding. That’s not what
his tone suggests at all. He’s looking for someone to blame.

‘Driving was a good job. But I lost
everything,’ he says, through gritted teeth, his anger escalating. Even if Murphy
has given him some work recently, it’s obvious he hasn’t let go of what
happened to him.

‘They came for me … they arrested
me.’

‘Arrested?’ I say, the word
hitting me like a gut-punch.

‘Yes,’ he says, squinting harder
at me, ‘arrested me for the death of a girl who drowned!’

‘You mean …’

‘The police came for me late at night.
They took me to the station, kept me awake until morning, told lies to me … They said I
had killed her. I said, “How?”’

His voice is forlorn, his tone bordering on
hysteria, his jabbing finger coming at me again and again, each time with greater
force.

‘They said, down by the river … down
by the river, because I wanted to do bad things to her. I said,
“No!”’

His ‘no’
is wild-eyed, his hands reaching out to me, beseeching, threatening.

Now he straightens his back, leans towards
me, lowers his gravelly tone to an even deeper bass register: ‘I said, “Who
says I do such things? Who says I went down to the river?”’

His face comes close to mine. I can smell
the stale tobacco, and last night’s putrid alcohol on his breath. ‘They say
you, your mother, Nick. They say she said so.’ His eyes are so wild and his anger
so palpable, I want to run from the car. But I can’t. Not with the lions out
there. ‘They say your
mother
,’ he repeats, his eyes bulging out of
his head, his breath threatening to suffocate me.

He nearly shrieks in pain, grits his teeth.
‘My wife came to visit me in jail. She said to me: “What have you
done?” I told her, “I have done nothing wrong, nothing,”’ he
exclaims, shaking his finger in front of my face again and again. ‘I told her,
“I am innocent.”’

Years of pent-up fury are finding their
voice, seeming to embolden him to the point that he’s going to jump into the back
seat and attack me. ‘When I am finally released, my family is gone. I have no job.
No one will give me a job – no one will give a job to a driver to take white folk around
Mara when they think he has killed a little white girl.’

His stare is so intense that I can tell he
has lived with this awful truth for many years and it has been gnawing away at him,
literally eating him up inside.

I look to Murphy for help, but what he has
to say is of little use to me: ‘It seems Mackenzie was wrongly
implicated.’

‘One year and seventy-two days in
prison before they
dropped the case. One of
my children died while I was there,’ Mack says, saliva gathering at the corners of
his mouth, his voice cracking.

Murphy lowers his head.

‘All because of you,’ Mack says,
continuing to jab a finger at me. ‘You know how many years I had been driving the
safari van?’

I say nothing.

‘Five years. Five. Never once did I
have a problem over those five years. Not until you and your family complained. Not
until that girl died, not until you all fled, not until your mother said to the police
that it was me. Do you know what it is like in a Kenyan prison? Do you know what they do
to child-killers there?’

With the lions lurking and Mack squinting at
me, the fear is peeling off me in waves. That this man has spent time in jail for
something Luke did, for something I was involved in, for something my mother accused him
of, makes me weak with shame.

‘Enough,’ says Murphy.
‘Please. Apportioning blame is not going to change anything.’

Mackenzie turns back to the front windscreen
and lights another cigarette; he’s not dropping the subject, I sense, just taking
a break, weighing up what to do, his eyes on the big cats outside, staring them down to
gain some kind of manic strength from their very presence.

Murphy coughs violently, rubs his temples.
I’m desperate for him to take control of this man and his anger, but he’s so
tired that what he says has nothing to do with Mackenzie losing his job or going to jail
or whether my family had anything to do with it.

‘Do you
remember the starlings, Nick? The ones in the cage?’

‘Yes, I do,’ I say, hoping to
win him back onside so that he can protect me in some way.

‘I gave them to you – a gift for each
of you, a bird for both of Sally’s boys. Superb Starlings, they were
called.’

He smiles then, a private smile at his own
recollection, and the uncomfortable thought comes to me that maybe Katie isn’t
hurt. Maybe this is not about her, but about me – that Mackenzie and Murphy are
colluding in some way. The light strikes my eyes in a way that makes me think of the
moment I stepped into my parents’ bedroom to see Luke dangling from the end of a
rope. I shiver.