Only We Know (29 page)

‘Oh, God,’ I say, the jolt
ripping through me. It is as though the whole field is tilting, as if I could lose my
footing at any minute and go hurtling down to the river and see again the skinny ankles
dangling above me in the dappled shade of those ancient trees.

Lauren is close to me now and I can tell
from the look on her face – patient and inquisitive – that she understands that I know
where she has brought me. What I don’t know is why.

‘Oh, God,’ I say again, as the
tears come quickly.

In the bright sunlight, I shudder, trying to
dispel the memory. The air seems to carry the poison of the blighted thing that happened
here. I can hardly breathe, as if I’m crouched in the shadowy chamber of the past
– the cramped, airless room that should remain sealed for ever.

‘Nick brought
you here?’ I say, disbelief seeping into my tone.

And I do find it hard to believe – that he
would want to open the lid of the past for anyone, even his wife. To bring her to this
place and show her the site where all of our innocence was lost seems too painful to
contemplate, like tearing the wound open.

‘Nick?’ she asks, but it is
hardly a question. There is no puzzlement in her voice. ‘No. It wasn’t
Nick.’

‘Then who?’

‘My mother told me about this
place.’

Something is nudging at the edge of my
consciousness – some hidden and crucial truth that is close to my grasp, yet still it
eludes me.

‘Your mother? I don’t
understand.’

Her face is clear of all expression – a
deep, concentrated gaze. ‘They lived just over there.’ With one hand, she
gestures to a place beyond the copse, a place I cannot see.

Something slips in my mind then, the sudden
slide of truth falling into place.

‘Those little girls,’ I say,
understanding now.

‘Yes,’ she answers, nodding
slowly. ‘My sisters.’

I bend over, my legs suddenly weak, clasping
my thighs to steady myself. Some part of me – some cold, dark part – had always known I
would come back to this place. Things like that don’t just go away. For years now
– almost a lifetime – I have been kidding myself that I could keep it there, locked away
in the past. But the hard, honest part of me knew that one day it would jump up and bite
me.

I look up at Lauren, standing in the sun, so
cool and untouched.

‘Does he know?
Nick?’

A shadow crosses her face. ‘Not yet.
But he will soon.’

I stand up straight and look her full in the
face. ‘How could you keep something like that from him?’

‘I don’t expect you to
understand,’ she says coldly, but there is defiance in her tone. ‘It’s
not an easy thing to explain to someone.’ Her voice tapers off, her gaze drifting
to the distant trees, some private thought taking her over.

‘I don’t remember you,’ I
tell her.

She turns back, gives me a sharp look.
‘I wasn’t born when it happened.’

A quiver of heat in the air. We stand there,
regarding each other. Across the distance, I feel the stirring of nerves inside her –
the build-up of all these emotions, all this information, the welling up of her story
inside her. And now that it comes to it, now that she has me here, in this place, her
captive audience, I sense she feels the nudge of stage-fright. But then, finding her
voice, she says: ‘After what happened to Cora, my mother left here. Took Amy with
her. Left her husband and got on a plane back to the States, a place she’d sworn
never to return to. But I guess when you’re hit hard by something, home takes on a
different meaning.’

She pauses briefly, before going on.

‘She met my father not long after she
returned. They weren’t exactly love’s young dream, but it’s not like
that for everyone, is it? My dad says she cured him of his loneliness, and in return he
offered her protection, the security of home. My brother Daniel was born not long after
they got together, and I followed some time after that.’

‘Did you know about Cora – about what
happened here?’

‘Not for
years. My dad treated us all the same – me, Dan, Amy. I assumed Amy was his. I think
even she forgot after a while that he wasn’t her real father. She was so young
when it happened. And my mother never said anything.’

‘When did you find out?’

‘When I was in high school. I got it
into my head that I wanted a passport – some stupid notion of travelling the world
although, up to that point, I’d barely been outside the state. I went looking
among my mom’s things and found her marriage certificate. Only my dad’s name
wasn’t on it. Some guy I’d never heard of – the marriage dating from years
back. That was when I found out that my mom and dad weren’t actually married to
each other and that my mom had this husband living in the back of beyond in Africa. That
my sister was actually my half-sister.’

‘And Cora?’

She pauses. I watch her carefully.

‘Yeah. That came out too.’

Concentration clouds her face.

‘There were times while we were
growing up when my mother would be so totally absorbed in her own sorrow that she was
hardly able to get through the day. It wasn’t all the time – but still.
She’d go through these phases of turning inwards. It wasn’t just that she
got depressed – it went so much deeper than that. Like she was infected with sorrow. It
was in the meat and bones of her.’

The rippling of the grasses has stopped, the
air around us grown still. There’s an ache in the back of my head, a trickle going
down my neck that makes me worry about the wound. I cannot break my attention, though,
riveted by her account.

‘From the
time I was a small child, I knew that she was not like other people’s moms – she
was broken in a way that couldn’t ever be fixed.’

‘I can’t imagine what that must
have been like.’

‘No. I don’t suppose you
can.’

Her tone is hard and pointed, and I feel the
threat in it. But she seems to lift herself, and her voice when it comes again seems
matter-of-fact.

‘It was weird for a while, but we
carried on. I finished high school, started in college, but it was always in the back of
my mind – this curiosity. About Kenya, about this other sister, about this whole other
life my mother had lived.’

‘Is that why you came here?’

She nods, fiddling with a stem of grass she
has picked.

‘My mother got a letter one day,
informing her of her husband’s death. Strange news for her after all those years –
something and nothing, you know?’

‘And that’s when you decided to
come here.’

‘I needed to see for
myself.’

‘And the letter your mother
received?’

‘Father Murphy sent it.’

‘Murphy? But how did he
know?’

She seems to consider my question and, as
she does, her gaze drifts upwards.

‘Rain is coming,’ she tells
me.

Following the line of her vision, I see a
swathe of iron-grey cloud, ponderous but approaching fast from the horizon.
There’s a weakness in my legs now, a pounding at the base of my skull. ‘We
should go back to the car.’

‘No,’ she says firmly.
‘Follow me.’

We move quickly. Rain in this part of the
world comes
swiftly, clouds scudding across
the sky or moving in great bulky masses, crowding out the sun and dumping rain on the
parched earth below. As we walk, I try to take in all that she has told me, but in truth
it seems too vast to contemplate. Instead I consider her marriage, the schism at the
very heart of it – the pull she must feel between her love for her husband and the pain
of her family history. How has she managed to conceal it? To see your husband every day
and know that the great sorrow that laid your mother low was his responsibility. The
straightness of her back, the relaxed set of her shoulders, you would never think that
such conflict might exist inside her.

She leads me down towards the trees, along
the jagged edge of the river. Under that dark canopy of leaves, there is coolness. I
shiver, which has more to do with memory than the dip in temperature. Despite myself, I
peer up into the boughs, hoping to see what? That little girl perched on the edge of a
branch, swinging her feet and grinning down? With a flash of startling clarity, I see
her smile, the gap where her tooth had fallen out, the bright white square of a brand
new adult tooth next to it. But the memory fades and I’m staring at an empty
branch, hearing the rustle and shush of leaves overhead, the lonely sound of moving
water.

On the other side of the stream, a dirt
track leads up a sharp incline and, breaking clear of the trees, I find myself in
another field, smaller this time, where a hut stands – a low, squat thing – no more than
three metres squared, with a flat roof, a curtained window and flimsy door. The type of
hut you see in the townships and villages, makeshift and poor. There’s a weathered
look about it, paint peeling at the edges, a strip of felt coming away from the
roof.

‘This is
where he lived?’ I ask, and she nods, running her eyes over the poverty of the
place.

I want to ask did he die here, but the words
stop in my throat. Perhaps it’s because I’m weakened by what happened last
night, or perhaps it’s because of the distrust that bubbles between us, but I
experience a rush of fear at the thought of being alone with her. There is nowhere out
here I can run to, no nearby house or village, no one, apart from the animals that stalk
in the surrounding plains, to hear me scream.

She reaches for the handle, opens the door
and steps inside. Turning to me, her face is in shadow. ‘Are you coming
up?’

I hang back, hesitant now.

She shrugs. ‘It’s your
choice.’

But I have no choice. I need to know.

I hurry up after her, into the tiny confined
space, and she closes the door behind me.

For a moment, I stand there, adjusting to
the dimness after the glare of the afternoon sun. A musty scent invades my nostrils, the
smell of too much living inside too small a space. Curtains are drawn over the window
and below them I see the gatherings of a rudimentary kitchen – a tiny fridge tilted at
an angle, a one-ring burner on a Formica-topped table, condiments sitting in neat order
alongside stacked plates and a thin clustering of cups. Behind me, I am aware of a
narrow bed pushed against a wall. A blue plastic basket hangs from a hook, spilling over
with clothes, sleeves dangling down, like ghostly forms.

Lauren says nothing, and I can see that her
face has changed. She is regarding me with an expression so grave
and intense that it feels threatening. All the danger that
has been hovering at the edges of our contact comes flooding into this room.

‘There,’ she says then, pointing
to the wall behind me, and loath as I am to turn my back to her, I do as she asks.

I draw in my breath.

Over the bed, plastered the full length of
the wall, are a mass of paintings and photographs. They crowd the entire space as if
each one is fighting for supremacy. Blonde girls, hair in bunches, grin down at us,
caught in the bleached light of a 1970s summer. Polka-dot dresses in the long grass. A
blue swimsuit, a chubby arm holding a crab aloft. A woman with the same white-blonde
hair, sunburned face running to tan, teeth slightly crooked, staring back at the camera,
a baby held to her shoulder. I look at that baby and see the tenderness of her bald head
touching her mother’s cheek, so real that I can almost smell the newness of her
scalp. But it is the paintings that bring the tightness across my chest: a child’s
artwork, great big daubs of gaudy colours on paper that seems to crackle with age. The
whole wall is taken up with them, in varying degrees of ability and imagination. On the
bed, I see a gathering of toys – dolls and teddy bears, soft bunnies and Barbies with
raggedy hair. Something about the way they sit tells me they have been carefully
arranged. All of it – the paintings, the photographs, the dolls – preserved as if time
had stopped on the day she died. In that one small space, the child’s life has
been carefully sealed in aspic. I stand there, taking it all in, the enormity of it. I
am observing far more than just pictures and keepsakes. I am beholding a life’s
work. I am staring obsession in the face. And when I turn
to Lauren, her gaze seems empty, as if she has seen this
room so many times, she has become inured to it.

‘He even kept her clothes,’ she
says, in a deadened tone.

‘But why?’ I ask, and turn with
a sweeping gesture that encompasses the whole room.

‘He lost the only thing that mattered
to him. He needed to fill the emptiness.’

Something seems to heave within me – a kind
of dread. I want to know what happened. I want to understand, and I don’t know if
it’s being in that room with its ghosts, or the lingering memory of violence from
last night, but I feel afraid. I can sense the danger.

Just then there is a screech of brakes, then
the slam of a car door.

Lauren goes to the window and peers behind
the curtain.

In a voice that betrays no emotion, she
says: ‘They’re here.’

‘Is it Lauren?’ I ask Father
Murphy. I see worry in his eyes; his face is drawn and haggard.

I think about what I told her then, about
what Luke did, and my ears fill with a noisy clamour.

‘It’s Katie, she’s been
hurt,’ he says, leading me down the hotel stairs and into the lobby.

‘She’s been hurt? But how? What
happened?’ I ask, stalling on the steps to the hotel.

‘There’s no time for
explanations. Please just come. I’ll take you to her,’ he says, guiding me
to the car.

The windows are rolled down and the back
door is open. A man with a black leather cap is leaning against the bonnet. He watches
us approach with a lazy indifference. There’s something about him I recognize, a
local, perhaps, but I can’t think how I know him or where from.