Only We Know (32 page)

‘What is it you want?’ I repeat,
despite the driver’s presence, his dark frown. My tone is hard and insistent,
seeking to cut through the infuriating vacancy in Murphy’s voice and eyes.

His gaze is on Nick, concerned, loving, like
that of an anxious parent. ‘For too long I’ve stood by and watched Nick
suffer,’ he says, ‘pushing down the past, thinking it can be obliterated.
But something like that is too big to be squashed. It’s like a tumour. It grows
silently in the dark.’

There’s a drumming pulse of blood
behind my eyes. The hard sun beats down from above and I long for the rain – I can
almost taste it. The driver has taken steps towards me, the gun at his side. He is so
close that I can smell his sweat.

‘When a man is facing his own
mortality, he feels a great need to put things right.’

I look at Murphy, the gaunt features, the
boniness of his face and wrists, the yellowness at the edges of his eyes, and I see it
all at once: the lurking shadow of Death that stalks him. How had I not noticed it
before?

‘I wanted to put things right,’
Murphy says again, his face pained. ‘All these fractured lives. The ripples sent
out by this terrible thing. I knew somehow that if we all came here together, back to
this place, if we brought it out into the open, it would draw out the poison and the
healing process might start.’

‘A catharsis?’ I say, and I
can’t keep the sneer from my voice.

He goes to answer but is interrupted by the
driver.

‘Enough of
this talk!’ Words spoken right into my ear, the heat of his breath on my neck.

He indicates with the gun that we are to
move down through the field. Down to where the black boughs lean towards the creek.

‘Please, Mack,’ Murphy says, his
voice weary.

‘No!’ The word fired out.
‘No more talk! Move!’

Something passes over the priest’s
face then – a flash of irritation. He lets it go, nodding peaceably, that remoteness
coming over him again. He turns away from his companion and walks with his hands behind
his back, his eyes on the ground in front of his feet. I almost want to laugh at his
foolishness: to think that he could control this man, this loose cannon.

But the laugh doesn’t bubble up.
It’s swallowed in the acid of fear churning in my stomach. We walk through the
field in an odd procession – funereal, except there isn’t a body, yet. The dry
grass prickles underfoot, the earth hard and unforgiving, pain travelling up the backs
of my calves. Ahead of me, Nick walks with a pensive air, the blood on his T-shirt a
shocking reminder. I cannot fathom what thoughts are passing through his head. Lauren
catches up with him, reaches for his arm, but he pulls away from her savagely.

‘Please, Nick –’

He cuts across her: ‘You knew about
this? You were in on it?’

‘It’s not like that,’ she
says, urgency in her voice as she hurries to keep up with him. ‘There wasn’t
supposed to be any violence. I would never have agreed if I’d known –’

‘I don’t understand you,’
he goes on. ‘I don’t know who you are.’

‘I’m
the same person, Nick. I’m your wife –’

‘You’re a stranger, Lauren. A
phoney.’

‘No!’

‘Tell me this. Was any of it real,
what we had between us?’

‘Of course!’

‘What was your plan? To get close to
me and then, when my defences were lowered, you’d strike?’

‘I love you, Nick, you’ve got to
believe –’

‘Love! Honestly, I don’t know
what that is any more.’

The contours of the land are changing,
dipping as we get closer. I can hear the swish and movement of water now. My pulse
quickens.

‘I was trying to help you. The way
you’ve changed since Luke killed himself … it frightened me.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me about
your mother? About your sisters? Why did I have to find out like this?’

I can see her searching for words, the
regret visible in her. ‘I wanted to tell you myself. I kept waiting for the right
moment, but it never seemed to come. And then things got serious between us so quickly
and I was frightened that, if I told you, you wouldn’t want me any
more.’

‘You lied to me –’

‘I didn’t mean to! I
didn’t want to, but it got so that things were so complicated and messy, I just
didn’t know how. And when Murphy said there was a way I could help you, a way we
could bring the truth out into the open, I thought it might be a way of letting go of
this secret. Because I hated keeping it from you, Nick.’

He stops, looks her square in the face.
There is naked disappointment in his gaze, such surprise and hurt that it is as if all
his beliefs have been kicked out of him.

‘You spoke to
him about me like that? You went behind my back? Lauren –’ He breaks off and still
there is pain in all he has left unspoken. Lauren glances behind her, catches me
looking, and I am ashamed for being a witness, listening in on this most private
exchange, the breaking of something that was precious and intimate between them.

It lasts but a moment, and then the gunman
barks a command and we do as he says and march towards our fate.

This is how it happens. This is what comes
in advance of the headlines screaming of bodies found by a river, the lurid details of
bullet wounds and carnage, an inventory of the dead, analysis of an execution. Photos of
the victims from a time before, when they had no knowledge of the terror that lay ahead.
I think of Reilly hunched over his desk, trying to choose a picture of me to print, and
in that moment what I feel is not fear but a strange sorrow. I see the trees
looming.

I always knew it would come to this. Deep
down, I knew that we couldn’t get away with it. You find ways of coping, ways of
forgetting. You bury yourself in work, striving to be successful, wealthy and powerful.
You engage in philanthropy, in charitable works, as if that might alleviate the guilt.
Or you run away, explore the four corners of the world in an endless quest for meaning.
You look for temporary solutions to deaden the memory – alcohol, drugs and a string of
ill-advised romances. Or you let that memory become a black hole, a vacuum within your
soul. But you know – deep down, you can’t escape it – that one day there will come
a time of reckoning.

Murphy stops. He has reached the river.

We stand there, watching his back, the droop
of heavy
shoulders, the deliberate way he
steps out onto a rock in the water, then straightens.

The blue knotted rope hangs from a branch
high above. Unnerving to see it still there. I remember the hut and all it contained –
that mausoleum, a shrine to the dead. The colour of the rope, although faded with time,
is still vivid in the shadows, the frayed ends, a slight sway from a passing breeze. It
makes me think of Luke and his own lonely end. I blink the thought away.

Somewhere above us, a bird flutters in the
branches. A breeze reaches us briefly, then dies away. The only sound is the flow of the
river, until it builds inside me again, the need to know, a question bubbling to the
surface.

‘What about the birds, Murphy?

He turns to me. Something in his face
changes.

Nick looks up sharply.

‘It was you, wasn’t it? You sent
those dead birds.’

‘Birds?’ Nick says.

‘No,’ Murphy says, but his face
tells me that this is not wholly true. ‘That wasn’t me.’

His eyes dart to Mack, whose jaw tightens,
then lifts defiantly. There isn’t a jot of apology or regret in his face.

‘You?’ I say, addressing him for
the first time. ‘Why? I don’t understand.’

‘It was a sign, a message,’ he
says, in a strident voice. ‘A calling.’

I laugh suddenly, but feel the thump of fear
inside. The way he is looking at me – so cold, so committed to his own path, his own
truth. It’s fascinating and deeply unnerving.

‘The starlings,’ Nick says to
Murphy, confusion clearing from his gaze. ‘The ones you gave me and
Luke.’

‘A gift for
each of you,’ he answers quietly. ‘One for each of Sally’s
boys.’ He lowers his head, puts a hand to his temples as if in pain. There follows
a moment of silence. Above us, the wind wafts lazily through the trees. ‘Sometimes
things happen,’ he says, ‘things that make us stop in our tracks, make us
sit up and take notice. Things so unusual that they make us believe there must be a God
and that this is his signature. Some months back such a thing happened to me.’ He
swallows hard, and looks at us in turn, but when he speaks, he is addressing Nick alone
and the rest of us are spectators. ‘I was sitting in my office in Kianda when a
man came rushing in. He was agitated, very worked up, telling me that I needed to come
quickly, that something terrible was happening. I didn’t want to know. Not on that
particular day – a hard day for me. That morning, I had received my prognosis and it
wasn’t good. An inoperable tumour, a ticking clock. So there I was, sitting in a
pool of self-pity, shocked, angry, fearful, when this man came and told me that there
were birds falling from the sky. Reluctantly, I went with him to a patch of scrubland
where rubbish was piled high and there I saw it, birds, dozens of them, maybe even a
hundred, lying dead upon the mound as if they had been shot down in a flurry of
bullets.’

He pauses, a frown of concentration on his
face.

‘But they hadn’t been shot,
those tiny starlings, some of them still flapping pitifully, as death overcame them.
“They fell from the sky,” Hamisi said. He was wild-eyed in amazement.
“They just dropped from the sky. Like rain.” He looked at me as if I could
interpret what had happened.

‘Various reasons were put forward,
that they had been
attacked by hawks and in
their panic had flown into a tree or building, or that they had feasted on grain or
plants that had been treated with a pesticide that had poisoned them. We went over the
mound, picking up these tiny feathered bodies, and all at once I thought of
Sally.’

‘My mother?’ Nick says
sharply.

‘The starlings I had given you. She
set them free – it was the night she broke with me.’ And I see it happening:
something shutting down behind his face, a hardness coming over him. But then he seems
to shake himself. ‘I picked up a couple of those little birds from the mound, and
took them back with me to the office. I don’t know what I intended to do with
them. Nothing, I suppose. I went back there, laid them on my desk and took out a bottle
of whiskey. I felt … I felt overcome. It was all too much – the cancer, and all these
memories of Sally filling me. And that was when Mackenzie came.’

He looks across to where his companion
stands under the shadow of dark foliage, the gun in his hands, his expression
unreadable.

Murphy lets out a puff of air and I can see
how close he is to coming undone, the toll this is taking on him. He glances up at the
sky peeping through the leaves and blinks away sudden tears, then gives me a watery
smile. ‘They say things happen in threes, don’t they?’ A stab at
humour, but the smile dies on his face. When he speaks again, his voice is low, wistful
with memory. ‘I hadn’t seen Mack in over twenty years. Isn’t that
right, my friend? Both of us adrift, wrestling with our own demons. But by the time
Mackenzie stepped back in through my door that day, I had pulled myself together,
reassembled my life into some sort of
order.
I had my work, and with ALIVE I had a goal, a sense of purpose. Sally was dead, but I
was managing to cope. At least, I thought I was …’

He drifts for a moment, then addresses his
next words to Mackenzie. ‘We must have talked all night, until the whiskey was
gone and the dawn had broken. No one there to hear us but the birds on the desk. One of
those rare conversations full of confessions and doubts and broken dreams. I told him
about Sally. About what we had shared. I told him about the starlings I had given her
boys, the ones she had set free. I told him about ALIVE and the work we’d done
together. I told him about the boys – about Luke and Nick – about what they had done.
And I told him what little I knew of you, Katie, from what Sally had told me. I told him
all about how your lives had carried on after that day by the river. I told him all of
this in good faith, not knowing …’

His voice breaks a little then. Mackenzie
stares at him, impassive. Still I can feel the jittery presence of nerves beneath the
calm exterior, the sense that at any moment he could explode.

‘We talked of our various
disappointments,’ Murphy continues, ‘the ways in which our lives had gone
off-course, our challenges, our regrets. I do believe that I confessed more to you on
that one night, my friend, than I have done in a lifetime to my confessor. It was a long
dark night of the soul, wouldn’t you say, Mack? For both of us. But now … now, I
realize, I said too much.’ He looks at Mackenzie, his eyes narrowing. ‘I
didn’t know … your dark heart.’

The air around us seems to hum with moisture
and heat.
A muggy blanket pulling at my
limbs, creeping into my lungs. I can see the sweat on Mackenzie’s face, droplets
glinting in the light, one tracking down his cheek, like a tear. But he is not crying.
His expression is of quiet fury, eyes fixed on the priest.

‘You and your words,’ he says,
so softly it’s almost inaudible. There is something menacing in his stillness that
frightens me more than when he was shouting, threatening us with the gun. An eerie quiet
fills the space around and between us – a slinking animal rubbing its hide against our
rigid bodies. ‘I have not come so far for this.’

‘You came here for the truth,’
Murphy says.

‘A debt must be paid for that
girl’s death. And I, too, am owed for all that I have lost.’

His eyes go to Nick, who stares at the
river, a frown hovering on his face.

‘Now it is my turn to be
priest,’ he says darkly. ‘You will give me your confession.’