Only We Know (28 page)

‘Please
don’t do this, Sal. Please don’t shut me out. Not after all I’ve done.
Not after the sacrifices I’ve made for you.’

‘Sacrifices?’ The word scratches
at her – a match to tinder.

‘Yes! I’ve made sacrifices.
I’ve broken my vows for you!’ His voice rises now. ‘Do you think that
was easy for me? Do you think I held them so lightly that breaking them was just a
casual thing, like slipping off a coat?’

His eyes flare with fury, the veins bulging
in his neck.

She thinks of all she knows about him: his
long struggle with his faith, arguments with his superiors, an endless battle between
stifling clerical duties and the pull of his earthly desires; and always that silent but
insistent pressure from his family back home in Ireland, the unspoken rule that he must
never shame them. She’d known it was wrong from the moment it started – a terrible
sin – but somehow the wrongness seemed to stir her desire, a jolt that went straight to
her groin the first time she opened herself to his embrace. And now, in this garden
filling with darkness, she feels at once how reckless she has been, how naïve, to think
she would not have to pay for what she has done, that there would not come a time of
reckoning.

His grip around her wrists tightens.

She pulls her arms free, takes a step back.
She says nothing. Taken by a cold anger, she backs away, turns to the steps.

Furious at her silence, he shouts after her:
‘For Christ’s sake, woman, what do I have to do?’

A movement of wings catches her eyes.
Flutterings
from the cage on the veranda:
the birds on their perch, witnesses to this unravelling.

She has a sudden flashback to an afternoon
at the start of things between them. He had come to the house, the cage in the back of
his car, a gift for the boys. Two birds with bright plumage – petrol-blue feathers and
orange breasts, twittering, black eyes gleaming like brightly polished seeds.

How many times has she allowed him in her
house? In her bed? With a sudden glare of clarity, she sees the foolishness of her
behaviour – the immense selfishness of it – and all the destruction it has wreaked. In
this darkening house, a home she will soon leave, each member of her family is nursing a
wound that she has, somehow, inflicted.

She casts one last look at Jim, then goes to
the cage, opens the little door and reaches in with both hands. She catches one bird and
releases it, followed swiftly by the other. They take to the wing at once, fluttering
briefly about the veranda before powering their way high above the roof and disappearing
into the darkness.

She does not look at him, does not want to
see the pain crossing his face. Instead, she goes into the house, closing the door
softly behind her.

Light breaks through the darkness.
It’s fleeting at first, glimpsed through gritty eyes, a fog in my head keeping me
under. But something pulls me towards it. Dark silhouettes announce themselves as trees.
The long knotted hair of some demon woman reveals itself as a hanging vine. The coil of
roots in the ground beneath me presses into my flesh. Ragged breathing, stones embedded
in my cheek. A smell like decay rising from the earth. Shadows deepen, the light becomes
true and clear, the slow creep of reality trying to break through.

Voices then. Someone saying,
She’s
had a fall
. The metallic taste of blood in my mouth. My tongue, swollen and
thick, like a foreign object. The chirrup of insects, the nearby swish of water as some
unseen creature launches itself into the river. The river. Something sparks in memory.
Then another voice,
Let’s get her to the car.

Hands under my arms then – the shock of
human contact. I’m on my feet, held up by strangers I can’t see, yet I can
feel their blocky presence against me. Feet stumble and drag along the ground. Roots,
like ancient fingers in the soil. My head lolls – I can’t seem to hold it up. A
pain blooming deep within my ears. Feet stumbling over rocks, floundering, trying and
failing to gain purchase. We break clear of the trees and, Jesus, how the light cuts
through me, the backs of my eyelids singing with hurt.

I can’t get a
handle on my bearings. The pain, like a heavy stone in my head, making me stupid. Long
shadows and the nip of cool air. Early morning, then. Still, it’s too bright, I
can hardly stand to open my eyes to it. Lungs working like a wheezy organ. A thought
surfaces:
I might have died out there
. Grit and red clay on the ground in
front of me. Then the jarring sight of a dusty wheel. Everything is distorted. The creak
of a car door scraping through my head.

Next thing I know I’m sitting in a
car. Legs stretched out and aching in the foot-well. A bottle of water in my hands, a
voice telling me to drink, but I’m so weak and the bottle is so heavy. Water in my
mouth, cutting across the dried membranes of my lips and teeth and tongue. I might cry,
I feel so fucking grateful. A shiver that comes up from my bones. My heart a dull thud
in my chest.
More
, the voice instructs, and I feel the water reaching down
towards the dryness in my throat, the parched plains of my insides.

The thump of a door closing. Low voices in
conversation outside. I tilt my head to see but the pain comes in my ear like a swarm of
black flies, and I hold myself still. Close my eyes, feel sleep coming.

Movement wakes me. The jolt of the car
going over a pothole. The landscape a smear of colour seen through a windshield speckled
with dirt. My head feels heavy and dull with sleep, but the pain has subsided. My
breathing has calmed. A mess of filth rises up over my feet and ankles, the tideline
skirting the legs of my jeans. The car bumps over uneven roads; the dream-catcher
dangling from the rear-view mirror jumps and spins with each bump.

‘You’re
awake,’ Lauren says.

She drives with a committed air, both hands
on the steering-wheel, her eyes narrowed on the road ahead.

I try to say something, but all that emerges
is a strangled croak. She glances across. ‘You shouldn’t try to
speak,’ she tells me. ‘There’s more water. You should
drink.’

It is warm and tastes of plastic. I drink as
much as I can, but I’m starting to feel strange again – thinned out and stretched,
the water sloshing inside me, like seawater in a cave. Part of me craves a cigarette,
yet the thought of dry smoke curling around my insides makes me nauseous. We drive
across land that is spartan and bare, save the occasional acacia tree or thorn bush, the
grassy scrubs in clumps over the dusty plain. No sign of civilization.

It hurts to speak, but I manage to ask where
we’re going.

‘You shouldn’t talk,’ she
says again. ‘You’ve had a shock.’

And all at once I’m back by the river,
something stirring behind me, turning to the darkness, and that sudden wash of violence
breaking over me, like a wave. I squeeze my eyes shut against the memory, queasy.

Opening my eyes, I see a sticker on the
dashboard in front of me – an anti-nuclear sign in black and white – and a tatty fringe
in a colour that was probably once red but now has faded to rust. The steering-wheel is
covered with a greyish wool. It’s like someone has tried to soften the contours of
this pile of junk, make it homely. The car squeaks and groans over the uneven surface,
the springs beneath my seat jumping enthusiastically, adding to my nausea.

‘The hotel,’ I say.

‘Soon,’ she says.

Over one wrist, she
wears a band of cheap bracelets – leather ties and plastic beads in orange and
turquoise. They wend their way up her arm, which is tanned against the deep purple of
her open-necked blouse, a tie-dyed blue skirt stretching down over her knees. Her feet
on the pedals are brown and strong, as if she has spent her whole life barefoot or in
flip-flops. This is the first time we have been alone together and I’m not sure
how I feel about that. I draw my gaze away and stare out of the window.

A heat haze lies heavily on the land
blurring it. Inside the car, it is hot and oppressive. No air-con in this rust-bucket. I
lean my head against the window and allow myself to become distracted by the dancing
dream-catcher, its beads and feathers hopping around crazily.

‘My father used to have rosary beads
hanging from his rear-view mirror,’ I say. My tone is dreamy, calm, almost dazed
by the heat, the fatigue left in the wake of all that adrenalin.

‘Where is he?’ she asks, and I
tell her he’s dead. My mother too. My voice coming back to me.

‘Just like Nick’s
parents,’ she says.

She looks across at me, a levelling stare,
and adds: ‘Something else you two have in common.’

I shift uncomfortably in my seat. My head
hurts. There’s a lump at the back of my skull from the force of the blow. I put my
fingers to it, a tentative exploration of injured flesh, the sharpness of a graze.
Taking my hand away, I see dried blood caught beneath my fingernails. Suddenly it feels
like we’ve wandered far from the town.

‘Where are we?’ I ask, as she
drives off the road onto a track that is barely passable.

It is now that the
thought occurs to me: finding me by the river was no accident. She meant to bring me to
this place.

‘Sit tight,’ she says, with an
air of calm authority. ‘We’re almost there.’

She parks the car and gets out, slamming
the door behind her. It disturbs the peace, and a flock of birds rises, twittering, from
a nearby tree, swooping in a broken cloud and passing over the long grasses to the field
beyond. Once they have settled on new branches, the air falls silent again.

I sit in the car watching. Something is
holding me back. I’m not sure I want to be alone out here but, for all my
reservations about her, curiosity pushes me to follow. Gingerly, I get out of the car.
There’s a murmur in my ears, and the landscape around me seems shimmery,
indistinct.

‘Come on,’ Lauren says, finding
a narrow track through the long grass and beginning along it, not looking back to see if
I’m following.

The heat hangs thickly around us, like
something viscous you have to wade through. Soon enough, I’m perspiring through my
clothes, thin as they are, legs like rubber, beads of sweat running down into my eyes.
Lauren pauses once to tie her hair back in a messy knot at the nape of her neck.
Otherwise, she seems unperturbed, pushing on with a silent determination. We don’t
speak as we walk. All my energy is required to keep pace with her. As I follow her up
the track, I consider what I know of her and realize it isn’t much. Every time
Nick spoke of her, I had the impression that his knowledge of her is almost as limited
as mine and confined to certain things. Even I can see the romance in that.

‘You and
Nick,’ I say, once her pace slows enough for me to walk alongside her. ‘How
did you meet?’

A little smile, one hand reaching out to
touch the tips of the long grasses as we pass through.

‘I sought him out.’

‘You did?’

‘I heard about a guy who was playing
jazz piano in a bar in downtown Nairobi.’ She shrugs, as if that’s
explanation enough.

‘From what Nick says, you hardly knew
each other five minutes before you got hitched.’

A puckering of skin between her eyebrows –
the tiniest frown before it’s smoothed away.

‘For some people, love comes quickly.
Especially if they’re not afraid of it.’

She glances at me in a way that I
don’t like and I stop. ‘Why have you brought me here, Lauren?’

But she keeps going, never once breaking her
stride. ‘It’s this way,’ she calls over her shoulder and, to my
annoyance, I find myself hurrying to catch up.

We reach a clearing, and I realize that the
track has been leading us slowly uphill. Now we stand on the lip of a wide field that
ripples with long grass, dipping down to a copse at the side where dark trees clump
together along the perimeter and birds call from the leafy black boughs.

I stop, hands on hips, and look around me.
Lauren has continued into the field, but I stay where I am. There is something about
this place, something familiar.

There is a bald patch of land at the side
where it seems as though the grass has been burned away. A structure of one sort or
another once stood there. Slowly now, with
caution, I move into the field in Lauren’s wake. She
has come to the middle, and stands there in the full sun, idly swatting flies from her
face. From the ground around us I hear the low murmur and rustling of insects. I glance
at the surrounding lands where the grass grows waist-high and could easily conceal a
creeping predator. This nervousness is not new. I have felt it before.

With a jolt I look down to the copse,
bending subtly towards a river that I cannot see yet I know is there. The bald strip of
land is where we pitched our tents. Here, in the grass, Sally Yates lay sunning herself.
And down there, where the dark trees bend in towards one another and the water bubbles
beneath, that was where we went to play, where the game took shape, where those little
girls stood knee-deep in that brown water, grinning up at us with curiosity.