Only We Know (34 page)

Then, straight as an arrow, it comes at me –
another image – writhing limbs, an entanglement – Luke whispering in my ear at dead of
night: ‘They were humping – do you know what that means? Climbing on the back of
her, his thing in hers, like the dogs we saw on the street. I saw them.’

The mouldy smell of the tent against my
face, smoke from the campfire beyond, the murmuring of the adults, the rise and fall of
Katie’s breathing from her sleeping bag on the other side of Luke. All of it comes
back to me now. My mother. The priest. A boiling mass of wrongness. It stirs inside me
as it did all those years ago, and with it the great swell of anger.

That girl’s face – freckles on her
nose, new front teeth, a stupid grin: I see it again and feel an overwhelming desire to
crush it.

‘Nick,’ Katie says desperately.
‘You must remember?’

‘No!’ I say wildly.

The ‘no’ is not a denial and I
think she knows this: she says nothing. It’s the need I have for it all to stop –
to hold back the flood of memory, not the false memory I have lived with all these
years, but the horrible reality of truth.

‘Please,’ I say to her.
‘No more.’

I look up, see the trees and sky, feel my
brain rocking in
my skull, and a sinking in
my chest, as if everything inside me is on the verge of collapse. Mack steps back, lifts
the shot-gun and blows on the rifle-sights. The butt is stained with my blood.
Instinctively, I brush my fingertips over the cut on my cheek and feel it sting.

‘Is he going to confess?’ Mack
barks at Murphy.

Murphy clasps his hands but says
nothing.

I remember the first day we scampered down
here to explore as children, while our parents set up camp. The three of us perched on
this bank peering down into the murky waters, the river dark, Katie asking: ‘Do
you think there’s anything dangerous in there?’

Why is that memory so clear, while the one
event I need to recall remains swathed in a cloud of forgetting?

Fear, I suppose, but I detect anger too,
anger for allowing myself to forget, and for creating a false memory to rely on, as if
it could in some way dispel whatever guilt I’m feeling.

The water is still and cool in the dappled
shade. Mack is still bristling, clutching the shot-gun, but at this moment I don’t
care. The water draws me to it. I lean forward and dip my hands into it, watch the
surface break and settle, forming its own silence around the stillness of my hands.
Everything slows right down – the beating of my heart, the furious trajectory of my
thoughts, my laboured breathing. And it is then – right then – that it begins.

The memory starts in my hands. Just as when
I sit at the piano and feel my fingers reaching for the music, so it comes to me now: I
feel the coolness of water about my hands and watch it tracing a line around my wrists,
feel the faint pull of surface tension, and this time when I look
down, I see again my hands as they were when I was a boy –
smaller, smoother, without the coarse hairs that sprout from my forearms. I see those
hands, the veins thin and blue, hands that hold a girl under water, the water cold and
heavy, and in a sudden uncertain shimmer of memory, I trace the hand to its arm, and
from the arm to the shoulder, from the shoulder to the neck and from the neck to the
head.

It could be either of us. Me or Luke. Of
course it could. We’re brothers. We’re made of the same stuff, the same
muscle and sinew, the same blood.

And yet.

And yet this time what comes back to me is
not what I remembered in the hotel room only a few hours ago, or what I’ve been
telling myself for a lifetime, but something else – something more frightening than the
calamity that has for years shaken me. I feel it in my hands, the way the water holds
them, as if they’re trapped, and something pulses along my veins – the ghostly
flicker of an old rage and how it was sparked to life that day in the water. I sense the
pull of truth in it and, despite my fear, I remain still and in the moment, because I
know the importance of it now.

I am standing in the river, shivering. Luke
is shouting at Katie. Amy has left and he wants Katie to take her place. I can hear the
urgency in his voice although his words come intermittently, water having leaked into my
inner ear. I watch him moving towards the bank, towards Katie, but she is refusing to
come in.

Then Cora snickers. I look at her, the grin
on her face. She is low down in the water, so low only her head and her
hands are above the surface. Through her open mouth she is
taking in water, then spitting it out, grinning all the while. I don’t like her
much and don’t want her as my partner. Her and her stupid laugh – hak-hak-hak,
like something’s stuck in her throat.

‘Luke!’ I shout. ‘Just
leave her! Let’s go!’

‘No!’ comes the furious
reply.

‘Aw, come on. I’m
freezing!’

I can see Katie stirring on the bank, her
eyes darting between us.

He’s shouting at her again, and I
can’t hear what he’s saying – the water in my ears makes a sucking noise and
I try to shake it out. Movement behind me, that girl and her rabbitty teeth, spitting
out water, saying something I don’t quite catch.

I turn to her. ‘What did you
say?’

Her eyes, round and staring above the water,
a smirk on her face.

‘Your
mum’s a slut,’ she says, her mouth opening in a gaping smile of delight.

‘Shut your mouth,’ I say
quietly.

‘Slut,’ she says, lowering her
mouth into the water.

‘Take it back.’

She bobs up, the word on her lips again.
‘Slut, slut, slut.’

‘I said take it back,’ I say, my
voice louder now.

She gives me the full beam of her moronic
smile and submerges her whole head. I’m left staring at the place where the water
ripples and grows still, until she bursts from it in a spurting upward movement, and
screams with delight: ‘Slut! Slut! Slut!’

‘Shut up!’ I roar. ‘Shut
the fuck up!’

‘Your mum’s a slut! Your
mum’s a slut!’ she says, in her sing-song voice, and I reach out to grab her
but she backs away.

I spring after her, driven by rage, lose my
footing and fall into the water. When I emerge, gasping, she is standing, laughing her
stupid laugh – hak-hak-hak! – and I lunge for her again. I grab a fistful of hair,
bunched behind her ear. I yank on it hard, and she gives a little cry, then starts
laughing again.

‘Take it back!’ I scream at her,
but she just keeps on laughing, and I see her big teeth flashing and want to smash them
with a rock from the riverbed.

I don’t know where Luke or Katie is –
they have faded away, leached out of this scene along with all the colour. There is only
me and Cora and her toxic laughter touching every sore spot inside me so my insides are
prickling from a thousand needles, alive with pain and fury. My mother and Father
Murphy, humping, fucking. So wrong. So utterly and completely wrong. The sting of
betrayal lashes me, flays me to the quick.

Slut.
All day the word and its
poison are seeping inside me, getting into my bloodstream, but it’s a silent
passenger, and I’ve hardly felt its slow colonization. Even when I have my hands
on her shoulders, pressing her down now into the water, even when I feel the emotion
boiling in my temples and in my throat, I still don’t realize I’ve been
taken over. That I’m not myself. All I want is to silence her. All I want is for
her to stop saying that word. And even though she has stopped, even though she
can’t say anything because I’m holding her down so hard while she thrashes
and flails, still it’s not enough, because the word is
out there now. She has sent it out there, screaming into the
world.

I need her never to have uttered it. So I
push her down with one hand and I bunch my other into a fist and I send it into her face
again and again.

The water slows the speed at which my fist
travels, so I exert even greater force, spread my fingers and scratch and claw at her
face, as if I’m a wild animal.

Because, right then, I am.

I was.

Somehow by holding her under water and
scraping at her face, as her thrashing dies away and her limbs grow still, it’s as
if I can take the word back, take the act back, and erase it completely. That is all
that matters.

And I do.

And the blood that’s released from her
mouth, a ribbon of red, acts as her surrender.

But the word is still out there, so when my
brother comes and pulls at my arms, screaming into my face, and I elbow him, it’s
because I have to blot out the word. That is all that matters.

When Luke finally shakes me free and drags
me to the bank, I’m hardly aware of him wading back into the water and pulling the
girl out, of the moments while he drags her onto the bank with water streaming from her
hair, her face scratched and bleeding, her mouth hanging open, her eyes staring up at
the sky, and him screaming into her face – ‘Wake up!’ I watched it all as if
from afar, as if it wasn’t happening to me but to somebody else. As if it was
happening to the one I knew best – my brother.

To Luke.

And then Katie runs
to us, crying and shaking. And I remember the panic. Luke’s shock, his anger.
‘Jesus, Nick, you killed her. She’s dead.’

How scared I am. Katie’s screams
filling my ears.

‘Shut up, Katie!’ Luke shouts,
and her screams subside.

‘What will we do?’ she says.
‘What’s going to happen? What’s Mam going to say? What’s
…’ The questions spill out of her until Luke finally speaks.

‘Shut up!’ he says again, taking
control. ‘We can’t leave her like this. If they find out what’s
happened … what’s really happened, we’re dead …’

‘What do we do?’ Katie says
again.

‘We have to cover it up,’ Luke
says, suddenly sounding older.

We pull Cora back into the river.
She’s heavier than I’d imagined, her body sinking quickly into the water,
then coming back to the surface, strands of hair over her cut face.

Slowly, quietly, the three of us take her,
pulling gently so she moves slowly through the river. Katie is crying and Luke snaps at
her to stop snivelling. Already I feel myself retreating into my shell – where there is
silence, where no one can touch me. Luke snaps at me, tells me to stop being so useless,
says we need to bring her upriver to where the river widens, where a stray hippo might
come and find her, or even a lion venturing to the banks might sniff her out. Here on
the savannah, all manner of birds and mammals seek out flesh to consume – hyenas,
vultures, marabou storks.

But when it comes to it, we don’t
leave her out in the open waiting to be discovered. Instead, we cover her up.
And he is gentle, my brother, as he lays
her down on a muddy flat above the water’s surface, tucked into the lip of the
bank. He takes care to make her comfortable. I know that sounds wrong. But he does.

Luke and Katie scramble about, bringing
branches and sticks to cover the girl: cover Cora. Thinking back on it, I can’t
quite believe they acted together without saying much to each other, as if they both
knew they had to do this, as if our lives depended on it. A sudden movement, and Katie
screams – the sound so loud it fills the air.

‘She moved!’ Katie says,
pointing at the bank, at Cora, and we all turn and stare.

Luke goes to her, touches her, and I feel
the breath I’m holding in my chest grow large and sore, pushing at my ribs as I
wait for her to move again, to sit up and grin at us, to tell us it was all a joke, all
part of the game, and that she, Cora, is the ultimate winner.

Luke reaches for her arm, and it falls by
her side, hand plunging into the water with a splash, and Katie screams again. This
time, Luke swings around and pushes her, and she falls into the river. ‘Shut up!
Just shut the fuck up, would you?’

Then he turns. His face is white, eyes
blistering with a look I’ve never seen before. For just a moment, I don’t
know him. I don’t recognize my brother. I stand in the water as Luke throws the
last handful of leaves and dirt over the girl’s outstretched hand. Then the three
of us wait for somebody to say something. But there is no sermon, no word of comfort.
There is only one word and it comes from Luke: ‘Quick!’ He grabs my hand,
waking me from my catatonic state, and we run.

We ran – Luke and I
– Katie coming after us, the wind filling my ears with a strange silence, pushing any
words I looked for further into me, further than I knew was possible – and still we kept
running.

It’s like I’ve stumbled onto a
hidden place, a place I had known about for years, but denied to myself existed, a place
where all of these memories waited. I have pushed the rusty gate to this secret garden
and walked in. But no flowers grow here. There is only decay.

Shouting. Urgent, arguing voices. I’m
back. Only now do I realize I’m crying, that I’ve been lost in a reverie
while the others have waited for me to remember. But they haven’t just waited,
they’ve been arguing. Mack must have been recounting his grievances for Katie,
detailing his litany of bad luck, his lost job, his lost family, his time in jail, and
she has listened, I can tell, but is wary of him, suspicious, and defiant, too, in the
way she is standing up to him because now he is ordering her about, pointing the gun
recklessly to where he wants her to stand and she is saying: ‘You can’t tell
me what to do.’

Lauren reaches for my hand, but I pull away.
My hands have killed a child. How can I ever let anyone hold them again? I try to
explain, but the words are swallowed by the heaving sob that comes out of me. There, on
the banks of the river, I stand as I did when I was a child, but I’m not a child
any more. I turn to Mack: ‘You want my confession? Well, here it is.’

His face tightens, eyes squinting, and still
he holds the gun high, keeps it pointed at me. But he’s listening now, waiting to
hear. And so are the others, because I’m telling them too, as I let it all
out.