Only We Know (35 page)

And with my words,
with the confession I make, there comes a hush – as if it’s not just the people
around me who are listening, but everything around us: the animals and birds and
insects, the dust on the ground, the limbs of the trees, the running water of the river,
other ghostly presences, all urging me on, accepting my words as a final testimony, so
that by the time I finish there’s a kind of awed silence.

Murphy looks relieved, as if he has finally
let out the tension he has been holding inside himself for a very long time – his body
goes limp. Lauren’s eyes are filled with pity. Only Mackenzie looks unmoved. The
butt of the gun is held tightly under his arm, his fingers supporting the barrel.

‘I don’t know why my mother said
anything about you, Mackenzie, I honestly don’t,’ I say, hoping to alleviate
the man’s grievance. ‘It was dishonest of her. It was wrong. But she’s
not here, and I can’t speak for the dead.’

His nostrils flare, and the edges of his
mouth pull into a kind of sneer. ‘Thirty years,’ he snarls. ‘Thirty
years, and this is all I can expect?’

‘I also have a confession.’
It’s Katie. Her voice is resolute, firm and clear. She looks to me – and
there’s support in her eyes. She straightens her back, suggesting a kind of
solidarity between us. ‘You see,’ she says, ‘in a way, I started
it.’

Her dark eyes are fixed on the water below,
staring back into the field of memory.

‘I was the one who told her. That day,
in the river, before it happened … Your mum came down to check on us. She told Luke he
wasn’t allowed in the river, and he argued with her until she gave in. Do you
remember?’

I think of my
mother, standing under the trees in her navy sundress, tiny white polka dots speckled
along the hem. ‘Yes,’ I say faintly, wiping the tears away with my
sleeve.

‘The younger sister, Amy, was sitting
alongside me, watching your mum and Luke talking. And after Sally left, Amy turned to me
and said: “Why doesn’t he like his mum?” And I said …’ she
falters, swallows hastily, then goes on ‘… I said, “He doesn’t like
her because she’s a slut.”’

The light swirls about us. The sky darkens.
My mind goes to the undergrowth, as if something there is watching, waiting for its
prey.

‘Cora was there too. She heard what I
said. And if I hadn’t said it, if I’d kept it to myself, then maybe, maybe
…’ Momentarily, she is overcome. But then she finds her voice again, more resolute
now. ‘I put the word into Cora’s mouth. She wasn’t trying to wound
anyone. She was simple, innocent. She had no understanding of what it meant. But when
she heard me say it, she just repeated it. That’s all. There was no intent. But
you couldn’t see, Nick, because of how mixed-up and vulnerable you were that day.
And I was the one who gave her the word so, you see, we were all to blame.’

She stops, biting her upper lip, fighting
tears. But she can’t hold them back and I watch the movement of her shoulders as
she cries silently. Even after this show of solidarity, I don’t offer any words of
comfort – I have none to give. Nor do I reach out to touch her. It’s as if some
canker has been taken from my body by the most awful medicine and now I can only stand
there, exhausted and spent.

Katie steps next to
me. She wipes the tears beneath her eyes and turns so that we are both facing Mack.
‘There – you have the truth now.’

Murphy raises his head, stops mumbling
whatever prayers he has been saying to himself, and looks to Mack, his two hands
clutching the shot-gun. I feel the defiance in him, the disgust. If he feels
disappointment in the confession he has longed for, if he feels that it is a frustrating
anti-climax, he doesn’t show it. The danger that has been rumbling inside him
seems to build into a crescendo as he takes a step towards me and I see the tremble of
anger passing through him.

‘The lies you people tell. Your
mother. You! You are just as bad as her! Letting other people take the blame for your
actions.’ Standing close to me now, I can smell the acrid stench of his
self-righteous indignation, see the danger of his intent in the curl of his lip.

‘Thirty years I have lived under the
lie your mother told. Thirty years.’ He whispers it, and within those hissed
words, I can feel the terrible weight of what he has suffered, and the longing within
him to face his accuser, to exact his revenge. But my mother is gone. There’s only
me now.

‘You killed that girl,’ he says
to me now, and we are so close that I can feel the heat of his breath on my face.
‘You killed her. Not me. So tell me this: why is it that I’m the one who has
had to pay for it?’

I know that whatever I say is not going to
be enough. I can also tell from the way his shoulders are set that he wants more than a
confession, some form of restitution that Murphy had not reckoned on. And I have an idea
of what it is … and I’m ready.

The clouds are low
and thick and dark above us. There’s a dense and moving beauty to them as if the
heavens have something to say about all of this and the only way to express it is
through the elemental movement above us. Yes, the clouds are heavy and beautiful,
threatening at the same time to burst at any minute.

Lauren looks to me, and the distance seems
to grow between us. Is this the woman who had said she would share her life with me no
more than a few weeks ago? Her eyes say it all: they are reflective, sad. There is
something within them – not forgiveness, but understanding. I think of all the time she
knew who I was and feel a wave of shame wash over me. Now, more than anything, I want
her
forgiveness.

Whatever prayers Murphy wanted to say to
bless this cursed place cannot absolve me. Within those ancient invocations, there can
be only a cold comfort, the comfort of finality, captured in the fateful cadences that
have been spoken over and over again, year after year, to an unseen God.

A crack above us and rain comes down in
warm, heavy bursts. I want it to pound me into the earth and wash me clean away.

Then Mack raises the shotgun slowly to my
head, so that I’m staring down the barrel and beyond it to Mack’s deadly
gaze, ready now.

There will be no prayers after all.

I see again the fleeing figure of Amy, a
shadow from the past, race across the riverbank. I see, too, the vacant eyes of Cora
beneath the water looking straight into mine – not with anger or malice, but with a
simple lack of understanding – asking not
stop
, but
why
.

Why?

‘Give me one good reason why I
shouldn’t kill you,’ Mack says calmly, his aim fixed and sure.

The trees around me seem to close in and out
like a terrible wing-beat. The grey sky rushes towards me and contracts; the river in my
wavering mind appears to break its banks. Murphy’s eyes open wide, Katie says
something I can’t make out, and Lauren is transfixed. It feels, too, as if other
presences have gathered here, finally, to witness the end.

‘One good reason,’ Mack says
again.

I watch his finger tighten on the trigger.
Silence around us. Listening ghosts.

‘No,’ I tell him, and close my
eyes. ‘I can’t think of any.’

A light rap on the door. I know who it is:
Karl.

He has been coming every day, stopping by to
help. I think he knows that without him I would crack.

This morning, he is supportive and
business-like.

‘Tord Gustavsen,’ he says,
holding up a disc. ‘Can I put it on?’

‘Be my guest,’ I say, and he
kneels down to the stereo. Soon enough the gentle jazz piano comes on, something to
soothe the troubled mind.

‘I’ll brew the coffee,’ he
says then. And I’m grateful again for his kind ministrations.

‘Strong,’ I call after him, as
he enters the kitchen.

‘Would I brew anything but strong
coffee?’ he calls back.

I start to place Lauren’s things in
the first box. Some books to begin with – in they go, one after another.

I can smell the coffee brewing, hear the
drip of the filter. So many times I’ve smelt the same rich roast and heard the
same comforting sound, but that was when it was me who was making the coffee and Lauren
was waiting, chatting to me about her research or her colleagues at the university.

Karl returns with two mugs of steaming
coffee. ‘Now, what’s the order of the day?’

‘Boxes.’ I point and he
nods.

Karl has been a good friend. Over the past
couple of weeks I’ve made several fairly serious attempts to drink
myself to death. If it wasn’t for
Karl, perhaps I would have succeeded. He came to my aid, nursing me like I was his own
child, denying me booze and forcing various teas down my throat. ‘Swallow it,
brother,’ he would say gently. ‘It will do you good.’

And if he noticed the terrible despair his
use of the word ‘brother’ brought out in me, he never let on. In many ways,
I owe my life to him.

There’s masking tape on the floor
beside me, but I’m reluctant to start sealing any boxes yet – the gesture feels
too final. Besides, it’s not clear where Lauren wants me to send them. It seems
she hasn’t settled on one place. She is visiting her mother in Michigan, she has
told me, but isn’t planning to stay there.

I bought the masking tape at the shop across
the street. Life goes on in all its frantic mayhem – but not in the still space the
apartment has become. The delivery truck still stops outside the bar downstairs each
week with a screech. The street vendors gather, call out and do their business, and the
bar below maintains its custom – a steady tide of people coming and going. There remains
a military presence throughout the city.

Everything is, in many ways, as it was. Life
goes on.

That’s what I have to tell myself.
That’s what Karl says.

And yet how can it?

‘How can I help?’ Karl asks, and
I tell him that we’ll just have to go through as much as we can.

It is already two months since Lauren left
for the States. Part of me wanted to beg her to come back to me, but the other part –
the better part – knew she needed time away from me to think about us. When she
came to Nairobi to get some of her things,
I pulled myself together for the few hours she was here, tried to make a show of
decency, of sobriety, so that we could talk, if nothing else.

I remember leaning against the door-frame,
hands in my pockets, watching her silently travelling around our bedroom, putting things
into the holdall open on the bed. I watched the careful movements of her hands, the
grace with which her body moved, her composure and self-possession amazing to me while I
could barely hold myself together.

We hadn’t talked about things – not to
any real or meaningful extent – and there were so many questions I had for her, so many
wonderings and confusions, that it was hard to know how to start, and I was fearful of
approaching it, as if the first thing I put to her would lead to a great unravelling. In
the end, it all came down to one question: ‘How long have you known?’ I
asked.

She stopped what she was doing, looked down
at the T-shirt in her hand. ‘For a long time,’ she said quietly, putting it
into her bag.

‘From when we first met?’

‘From before. I sought you out
…’

‘You sought me out?’

Her eyes were gentle and full of pity.
‘Yes, Nick. My mom told me something of what had happened … I became so curious
about her other life, her life in Africa, her husband here, my sisters, that I asked
more questions,’ she said, speaking faster now, her voice low but urgent, as if
she were reliving an exciting episode in her life. ‘But the answers only fuelled
my desire to know more. Instead of
satisfying my curiosity, what my mom told me only fed it.
Even before she heard of her husband’s death here, I’d planned to come to
Kenya, to study, to visit his house and see his grave …’

‘Unlike Amy?’

‘Amy never wanted to return. She
prefers to leave things in the past. She’s married to a dentist in Ohio, has two
children, and that’s her life … Funny how things work out.’

‘And me? How did you know I was living
in Nairobi?’

‘Father Murphy told me. He told my
mother her husband had died, so when I arrived in Kenya, I came to him and gradually he
told me about you, your brother and your parents,’ she says. She’s taking
her time, choosing her words carefully. ‘And knowing that you were living in the
same city only made me curious. Murphy told me you were a musician – he even told me
what club you played in.’

Her eyes light up and she smiles, but then
the seriousness returns to her features. ‘And when we talked, I still
couldn’t believe that you were the person I had been told about … I didn’t
know that I would fall for you, Nick. I didn’t want to, but it
happened.’

I thought of a night, not long after
we’d met, that we’d spent lying together in each other’s arms, the
night air bearing down heavily, how I’d felt so utterly at peace with this woman,
as if for the first time in my life I could be myself without apology or pretence. And
even though I had known her only a few weeks, already I was sure that what I felt for
her – the love that had blown up inside me – would last my whole life.

I remember thinking
that there was no way I could tell her what had happened back then. So I kept it
secret.

When I told her about myself, living here as
a youngster, returning to Ireland, then travelling and coming back, I remember how still
she was in my arms, as if she was holding her breath.

I thought at the time that it was the
attentive awe of new love.

Little did I know it was because of what she
knew about me. How dangerous that must have felt to her … how utterly strange to be held
by the hands that had done that terrible thing.

‘So why didn’t you tell me? Why
didn’t you say something?’