Only We Know (15 page)

Something about Reilly, how safe he makes me
feel when I’m with him, the way he’s looking at me now with a mixture of
interest and concern, reminds me of my father,
and all at once I’m back in my parents’ kitchen,
a weekend home from university, my father frying bacon, and I’m saying to him
casually: ‘Guess who I bumped into the other day? Nick Yates.’ The way his
back, curved then in middle age but still elegant, had seemed to stiffen at the name.
But I pressed on brightly, telling him about my new friendship, feigning an ease I
didn’t feel, pressured as I was by his unspoken anxiety. He didn’t say
anything at the time. But later, when the weekend was over and he was dropping me back
to the station to catch my train, he reached out to grab my wrist before I climbed out
of the car, an urgency in his voice and a warning in his eye as he said: ‘Stay
away from that boy now, Katie. He’s no good for you.’ And that was the last
we ever spoke of it.

Now, with my coffee cooling in front of me,
and a voice on the Tannoy announcing the boarding of another flight, I say to Reilly:
‘I’m frightened about going back there.’

His eyes flicker over my face. ‘What
happened, Katie?’

‘We were just kids. We’d been
playing. But then … something terrible …’

Reilly’s mouth bunches into a pensive
pout and I hear him exhaling. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

I feel the pull of him there, and in one way
it would be so easy to tell him, the relief of just letting it out. ‘No,’ I
say quickly, wishing I hadn’t brought it up.

Still, I can’t help but feel the creep
of sadness now. ‘What I don’t get is why he wants to go back there,’ I
say. ‘Why would Luke Yates want his remains scattered over the one place on earth
that this awful thing in his life happened?’

‘To atone?’ Reilly suggests.

‘Maybe.’

But the unease remains. It stays with me as
I gather my belongings and, with Reilly to accompany me, make my way towards the
security gates. As we reach the barrier, I stop. ‘When someone’s remains are
flown to a different country, do you think they’re packed in the luggage hold with
all the suitcases and golf-bags?’

Reilly doesn’t answer. Instead he
takes my shoulders and leans in to kiss my forehead. I feel the brush of his beard and
with it comes a lurch of fear, like a foreshadowing of something unseen but terrible. I
want to hold on to him then and keep him close. But he draws back and gives me a smile
of reassurance. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he says then, and I can feel his
eyes on me, watching me as I make my way up the queue, until I’m through the
barrier and lost from sight.

By the time the plane touches down on the
runway at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport my head is pounding. I have spent the
entire flight hiding in my seat, painfully aware of the others on this plane – Nick,
Lauren, Julia. I tried to work, reading over the notes I’d made following the
autopsy report, but the words kept stringing together –
alcohol and narcotics in the
bloodstream, evidence of self-strangulation, bruising, the bursting of blood
vessels, traumas to the body
. Reading it made me feel restless, uncontained,
the stirring of some deep-buried emotion inside me. After touchdown, I look outside and
see the night sky purple and green where the floodlights colour the air. My limbs ache
from the journey. As I come down the steps and breathe in the diesel fumes polluting the
soft African
night breeze, the tension in my
body is morphing into some kind of swamping fatigue. All I want now is to get to my
hotel room and collapse into bed.

Standing at a distance from the rest, I
watch as one by one the others collect their luggage from the carousel and wander off to
find taxis to wherever they are staying. No one makes any attempt to speak to me – not
even Nick – which only compounds my loneliness on what is already a solitary journey.
Nick and Lauren have their own home somewhere in the city. I picture a bohemian
apartment in an old colonial house, rotating fans and hardwood furniture, framed posters
and ethnic prints, a cocktail bar in one corner, a piano in the other.

I can’t help but sneak a glance at her
– Nick’s wife. There’s something very easy in her manner, the relaxed way
she holds herself, the casual flick of her hair, as if she’s blissfully unaware of
her own power, her own beauty. I wonder what Sally Yates would have made of her, this
blonde creature – shockingly young, as if she’s barely out of school. Looking at
her, after the long, difficult flight, I feel old. Old, wasted and unfulfilled.

Julia takes her bag and catches my eye. She,
I’m sure, will not be staying at Nick and Lauren’s, more like at the Hilton
or the Safari Club. Drowning her sorrows in South African wine, and being comforted by
her mother and sister. As for me, I’ve booked a single room at the Meridian. For
the price I’m paying, my expectations are pretty low.

A single unclaimed suitcase rides the
carousel with a grim determination. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I say, under my
breath. My bag, it would appear, has been lost.

After an hour of wrangling and form-filling,
I find
myself riding in a taxi towards
Nairobi’s Central Business District. The driver signals he doesn’t mind so I
smoke cigarette after cigarette and feel myself grow calm as I blow smoke out of the
open window and watch as we pass through one more roundabout onto another unlit street,
scrubby black bushes running alongside the road. An eerie feeling comes over me at being
back here. As if I’m entering a place that is out of bounds. It’s almost
thirty years since I set foot in Kenya. I was, after all, only a child back then.

Just Mam and me. ‘The two
girls,’ she’d said, creating an ally of me. Dad was back in Ireland, still
shaken by my mother’s announcement. ‘We’re leaving,’ she had
told him, her head held aloft in a challenging way, and then, recanting, she had added:
‘For a while, anyway.’ It was odd to be so far away from him. I remember
feeling frightened that we might not go back, that this time Mam really meant it, but I
also recall feeling unable to say so to her. She was so wound up – a tightly coiled
spring. It didn’t feel like we were going on holiday; nor was it like an
adventure. It felt like something illicit and shameful, and the whole time we were away,
I couldn’t shake the thought that something terrible would happen to my dad in our
absence. Like he was going to get knocked over by a car or something. Lying awake in bed
during those hot nights away, I thought of all the ways he might die in our absence and
that it would be our fault, mine and Mam’s, for leaving him. I never suspected
that the terrible thing would happen to me.

Gradually, the black bushes peter out.
Buildings sprout at the sides of the roads, lit now by streetlamps. Road signs appear
and the buildings grow larger and more dense.
Soon enough, the taxi pulls up outside the Meridian, with
its large impersonal façade. I pay my fare, get out wearily and go through the
hotel’s doors.

It’s late when I find my room. I look
down from my window at the street below; horns honking and the whine of engines reaches
me on the eighth floor and restlessness takes hold of me. It’s too late to go out
wandering, but I don’t want to be alone, so I go back downstairs to the sports bar
that flanks the lobby.

The place is loud with voices and the
clinking of glasses. Muzak is piped through speakers. I’m looking for a quiet
corner to hide, when my eyes alight on a young woman darkly dressed, hair pulled back to
show a face that is small and pretty, a woman who is regarding me with suspicion. I know
who she is – her picture was in one of the tabloids after Luke’s death, part of a
montage of various shots of the women in his life. In the caption under Tanya
Clarke’s photograph, some sub-editor had added the caption ‘Stalwart
assistant’. Before I approach her, I wonder how she feels about being pinned under
that label and then, as I step towards her, I see a hint of something in her that I
recognize – loneliness, desperation. My spirits rise a little at the glimpse of an
opening.

‘Can I join you?’ I ask,
indicating the empty chair, and she shrugs, saying, ‘It’s a free
country,’ in a nonchalant manner, but her flickering eyes betray her.

A lounge boy passes and I order a club soda
for me and a refill for Tanya, who is beginning to thaw a little – vodka and tonic.

‘To steady the nerves,’ she says
quietly. ‘Long flights make me anxious. I always need a drink after them
…’

I take in her glossy
brown hair, her perfectly manicured nails, her correct posture. But there is tiredness
in the set of her shoulders, a kind of bewilderment at the edges of her gaze. And I feel
her looking at me too, her eyes passing over me, and I imagine how tired and dishevelled
I must appear. We exchange some small-talk about the flight, about the hotel. But Tanya
also exudes a kind of practical ability, a hyper-organised professionalism, that tells
me she’s not one for chit-chat, so I launch right in.

‘It must have been a shock to see
yourself in the paper the other day,’ I say.

‘My sudden leap to stardom,’ she
says drily, as our drinks arrive.

I watch her adding the tonic to her glass,
giving it a brisk stir, then bringing it to her lips. ‘From what I hear, Luke
relied heavily on you.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I still
can’t believe he’s gone.’

‘You must miss him.’

‘The office is so quiet now. I’m
not sure what’s going to happen.’

‘Will you stay on?’

‘I don’t think so. It just
wouldn’t be the same.’

I can see that she’s anxious, her
hands fidgeting, and I know that she wants to talk but is wary of taking me into her
confidence. ‘You must have been close – you and Luke?’

‘Oh, yes! He was great. I’d have
done anything for him.’ She catches me looking, and sits a little straighter in
her seat. ‘It’s not what you’re thinking. Luke wasn’t like that
– I mean, he was very charming, flirtatious even.
He loved the company of women but he would never take
advantage.’

I wonder, not for the first time, whether
she was a little in love with Luke Yates.

‘Anyway,’ she says brusquely, as
if she feels she’s said too much, ‘he’s dead now.’

I sense her closing down. Her drink is
almost finished and so is mine, and the way she is shifting in her chair tells me she
will leave soon.

‘Are you going to the Masai Mara after
the ceremony tomorrow?’ I ask, and she nods.

‘I’ve never been,’ she
adds. ‘Funny, because it’s a place I’ve always wanted to go. I just
never thought it would be under these circumstances.’

‘I’ve been,’ I say.
‘With Luke.’

She looks at me, surprised, and I catch the
gleam of interest in her eye.

‘It was when we were kids. His family
were living out here – his dad had a job with the World Bank, and his mother was doing
aid work of some kind or another.’

‘You came out for a visit?’

‘Sort of.’ Then, leaning forward
to create a conspiratorial circle of two, I say: ‘My mother ran away from my
father, you see. She took me with her and we fled to Kenya.’

Tanya’s eyes widen. ‘Why
Kenya?’

‘Luke’s mother and mine had been
friends since childhood.’

‘How long did you stay?’

‘Most of the summer. I’ve no
real memory of Nairobi. But I remember the Masai Mara. We spent our last few days
there.’

‘It must have
been amazing.’

‘Yes,’ I say carefully.
‘Yes, it was.’

Carefully, because of the dangerous tangle
of emotions those memories pull on. Carefully, because the joy of the trip was
extinguished by all that followed.

‘We all went,’ I go on, not sure
why I’m telling her this now, but propelled by some need to let the story out. To
let it out so that I can let it go. ‘Even Luke’s dad. Six of us and the
driver crammed into a HiAce van that seemed held together with rope and prayer, bumping
and rattling over the worst road in Kenya down to the Rift Valley.’

How hot it had been in that van. The smell
of sweat mingling with the peppery scent of the driver’s tobacco. My bare knees
knocking against Luke’s and Nick’s. I had lost the argument for a window
seat, my mother snapping at me, afraid I might cause a scene. All that long afternoon,
Nick kept pinching me, trying to make me squeal, tears coming to my eyes as I bit down
the shriek that I knew would only annoy my mother more. Luke sat in a prickly silence,
keeping his gaze fixed on the countryside flashing by, his expression unreadable.

The excitement at the first sighting of a
zebra went a long way to alleviate my tiredness and discomfort. Then the sudden
appearance of giraffes languorously tugging leaves off tall trees only yards from the
road seemed to carry us through the last long hour of that journey.

‘How long did you stay
there?’

‘Three nights. Then, on the last
morning, when we were due to leave, our driver turned up drunk. He had been drinking all
night with the Masai, and when the adults saw the state he was in, they hit the
roof.’

I have a vivid
memory of my mother throwing her hands up in a gesture of exasperation before turning
her back on the others and walking away.

‘After a while, someone decided a new
driver needed to be found so my mother and Mr Yates went off to the nearest village to
look for one. The rest of us were left to wait.’

Sally Yates was sunbathing and the driver
had gone to the van to sleep it off. We children sloped down towards the river. In my
mind’s eye, I can see it – the stillness of the tall grass, yellow against the
black clump of bushes and thorn trees that flanked the narrow stream; the low droop of
branches, not a breeze whispering through the trees. No movement at all, but the sound
of those girls on the other side, laughing. I hear their voices in my head and instantly
draw back from the memory.

‘So what happened?’ Tanya asks,
pulling me back into the present.