Only We Know (18 page)

‘This is wrong. All of this. It is so
wrong,’ I say, unable to hold back any longer.

Julia’s back stiffens. Behind, her
mother and sister turn around.

‘This isn’t Luke. William
Cowper? Seriously? I’m pretty sure he’d never heard of the bloke.’

‘Nick, please.’

‘Not him or any other
eighteenth-century poet. This isn’t right, Julia … It’s a sham.’

I’ve said the words and they
can’t be taken back.

For a moment, Julia holds herself so still,
her face unreadable, that I can’t be sure if she’s going to burst into tears
or hit me. She does neither. Instead, she speaks to me in a low voice that is pulsing
with anger.

‘A sham? You can call it that, but to
me it is trying to put a little bit of dignity to this whole mess. You can say that it
isn’t what Luke would have wanted, you can stand around
with your hands in your pockets, like some moody teenager –
and I really couldn’t give a damn. Because this is what
I
want, Nick.
This is what I need. To claw back a little bit of dignity for myself.’

Julia’s eyes are wild with the rage
and the injustice that has been done to her and I feel myself drawing back, mumbling an
apology, ashamed of my outburst, burning with regret.

‘Of course I’ll say the
poem,’ I tell her, but I’m speaking to her back as she has turned away from
me, scorn coming off her in waves.

I look at the piece of paper in my shaking
hands, try to pull myself together, and from the printed words that crawl around the
page, these two lines break free and catch my eye:

I read those words and all at once I’m
back there, water up to my waist, the sun beating down overhead, and that girl’s
hair spreading out like weed in the water – and it’s so real that I can feel it,
soft and weighty in my hands. A voice in my head, Katie’s, screaming: ‘Stop!
Stop! You’ve got to stop him!’

‘Nick?’

Lauren’s touch is gentle but I nearly
jump out of my skin.

Her eyes are round with concern. ‘You
look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

She takes my arm, turns me to the door.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘It’s about to begin.’

It happens on the morning of the memorial
service.

An envelope slid beneath the door of my
hotel room.

Blinking away sleep and bleary with a
headache that feels like a hangover, I pad across the floor barefoot, stoop to pick it
up. A brown envelope, innocuous enough, until I turn it over in my hands, see my name
scrawled in the same blue marker and feel a lurch of recognition that comes straight
from my stomach. The dead bird. I’d almost forgotten. Sweat on my upper lip, I
open it and glance inside, try to ready myself for whatever it is I will find.

A bunch of documents. Printouts from the
internet. I place each one on my bed, covering it with images of drownings. Milky white
limbs submerged in water, faces still and open-mouthed beneath the surface. Some are
blurry and indistinct; others have a shocking clarity. Standing in my underwear in that
unfamiliar hotel room, poring over each page, each image, then dropping it onto the bed
with the rest. Fear and confusion washing through me, like a cocktail that is getting me
loaded in a way I don’t like. My mind teems with thoughts, each one clambering
over the last: who uploads this stuff to the internet? Who looks for it? Who are all
these people whose death masks are tossed about from one server to another? And, of
course, the question that overrides all others: who is sending me this?

I think of the day in the office, the
pictures of that girl
in the swimming pool,
hair spreading out in water, and for a moment it distracts me – I’m even heartened
a little, thinking that this has nothing to do with me and what happened in the river
that day. That this is about some sicko with a mobile phone who’s pissed off that
we wouldn’t print his ghoulish shots of a dead girl and has decided to take out
his bile on me. For just a moment, I can almost convince myself that this, the dead
bird, these pictures, all of it is the handiwork of some nasty little wanker with his
own personal agenda. For a moment I convince myself that I am still safe.

Then I turn to the last page and my
convictions desert me. I hold it in my hand, feel the belt around my throat.

This one is different from the others. It
hasn’t been gleaned from the internet. A photocopy of an old newspaper clipping.
Details of a gruesome find on the banks of a river. A picture of a girl grinning at a
camera, the kind of school photo that stood on sideboards in homes throughout my
childhood: big front teeth, a rabbitty face. Seeing that face again, after all these
years, sends a jolt right through me, and I realize I’m standing straight and
still as a stick, every muscle and sinew alive with tension. I can hardly feel my hands,
my feet. Nerve endings prickle like a rash over my skin. That face grinning out at me
from beyond the grave. Her name printed in black and white: Cora Gordon. Until now, I
never knew her surname. I had never thought to find it out.

But someone had.

The fear is in the room with me now, like
something crouching on top of the wardrobe, casting its malignant gaze down on me,
watching for my reaction. The belt at
my
neck is cinched to strangling point. The paper trembles in my hands. For a moment, I
can’t move, but neither can I look away, appalled by what has been sent to me. And
I think of my other gift from this anonymous correspondent – the little bird – and I
cannot deny the connection. Those birds on the veranda. The fluttering of their tiny
wings. Two little sparrows.

Someone knows. Someone has found out.

By the time I reach the Safari Club, the
service has already begun. Beyond the bright noise of the lobby, I join the others and
sit in the hush of the heavily air-conditioned room, trying to bring my breathing under
control. The priest stands at a lectern beside an ostentatious floral display, holding
forth on the mysteries of life and death. He wears an open-necked white shirt, no sign
of a collar. He hardly looks like a priest at all. I sit on a fold-out chair, the
plastic hot at the backs of my thighs, wearing yesterday’s clothes, feeling chilly
and strange and jumpy as a cat. Tanya glances across at me – an enquiry in her gaze –
and all at once, my suspicions are aroused. What does she know? Why is she looking at
me? I stare at my knees, push down the paranoia that keeps rising inside.

Still, it’s there. Fear cementing in
my gut, lodging itself within me. I’d felt it at the Meridian, pressed against the
desk, wild with the urgency of my fear, the stream of words coming out of me, the
receptionist telling me to slow down, to calm myself, getting to her feet and leading me
to a private office as if I was a child, and all the while I’m telling her about
this envelope that was slid beneath my door in the night, demanding to know who
delivered it,
babbling about my room number,
my privacy, my personal safety, all the while my voice rising on an arc of panic that
her patient responses could not seem to assuage. She didn’t know who had put it
under my door; there was nothing in the book about any delivery for me. She would check
with the night desk later to see what they remembered. Everything she said was
reasonable and steady, but all the time I stood there feeling thin and light with
nothing to anchor me.

The priest continues to talk and I try to
keep up but it’s so difficult with this pain in my guts and all these people in
the room I barely know. I see Julia, her head bent, shoulders stiff with tension, and I
think of her narrowed eyes as she looked at me that morning on the beach, the coldness
in her voice when she said
You and those boys
… Could she be the one? No, of
course not, I tell myself. She’s hardly going to post a dead bird to her own
husband, surely. For all her
froideur
, I can sense that there was love between
them and that her sadness is genuine.

There’s no one here I can trust.
Except Nick. But Nick has his back to me, and I feel how closed off he is, locked in his
own orb of grief.

When the priest gets to the part about Luke
being reunited with his parents in Heaven, I get a kind of floating feeling, as if my
heart is beating somewhere outside my chest. The anxiety that has taken hold of me –
it’s like I’m nine years old again, waking in the night to see my
father’s face, bleary with sleep and love and fear, saying: ‘This will pass,
Katie.’ The waters closing over my head. His eyes seeking out some shadow of the
dream that troubled me. ‘Good things lie further down the road – I promise
you.’
And after he’d left,
I’d try to stay awake, everything in me working to keep sleep at bay, fearful of
those dark waters coming over me again, the heaviness in my chest, as if I
couldn’t breathe. Now, in this room, even though I’m wide awake, the dream
has returned, and I feel again the water sucking at my limbs, the black boughs of the
trees above me drooping down into the river.

I need a cigarette. I need a drink. Nick
takes his place at the lectern and recites a poem, staring hard at the sheet of paper,
his voice so low I have to strain to hear him. A jar full of ashes stands on a plinth.
Within it lie fragments of hard fibres. All that remains of a life. The three of us,
back here again. The belt so tight now I can scarcely breathe. My chair scrapes the
floor as I get to my feet, eyes following me, but I don’t turn back. Through the
doorway quickly, into a room carpeted with close-clipped green nylon, like fake grass,
the walls busy with twisting vines and hanging fruit. The music of a string quartet
seeps through hidden speakers. I take a glass of juice and knock it back, feel the skin
stretched tight across my face, nerves prickling through my skull and hair. The ceremony
has ended and others have started filing in. Someone brushes against me and I spring
away, as if I’ve been shot, my bag falling to the floor. Bending to pick it up, I
can feel my legs trembling, and I can’t tell if that’s from the fear
crawling around inside me, or from thinking of Luke, what’s left of him in that
jar. It hits me then: he isn’t coming back. Ever. My bag on the floor becomes a
blur.

‘Here, let me,’ a voice
says.

There’s a hand under my elbow, and
I’m being steered to a chair in the lobby, gulping in lungfuls of air, tears
streaming down my face. I’m vaguely
aware of him, this person, the steadiness of his hand as he sits me down, the calm of
his voice as he tells me to wait there. Faces of strangers in the lobby turn to me now
as the grief flies from me, as if my chest has opened and hundreds of birds come
screeching out.

‘Here,’ the voice says, and I
look down at the brown hand extending from a white shirtsleeve, holding out a glass
containing an amber-coloured liquid.

I don’t ask what it is. I close my
eyes and fling my head back, feeling the warmth of the drink flooding my throat. Almost
a month of abstinence is thrown away in a heartbeat.

‘That will help,’ he says, and I
open my eyes to him.

Murphy. The priest.

He sits opposite me. In his own hands he
cradles a matching glass. Now he raises it so that it’s almost level with his
eyes: he looks like he needs it as much as I do.

‘I have a rule about this sort of
thing. Delay your first drink of the day until after the sun has set.’ He glances
past me to the glass doors that open onto a sun-soaked driveway. Then his eyes meet mine
and I see the humour in them. ‘I make exceptions for funerals.’

He sips his drink and my nerves begin to
calm a little. He keeps a steady watch on me, his eyes frank and appealing. Large hands
make his glass seem very small. There is a weariness about him, a premature hunch of the
shoulders, wrinkles running through his skin as though he has absorbed all the sins of
all the confessions he has ever heard: a lived-in face to rival Beckett’s. Over
his nose and cheeks runs a network of broken capillaries – a drinker’s face.

I look again at the
whiskey in the glass. ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him. ‘It’s not
like me to fall apart in public.’

‘Oh?’

‘I prefer to do my crying alone in an
empty room.’

‘What a lonely image,’ he
remarks, a frown shadowing his brow. Then he spreads his hands in a gesture of
understanding. ‘This is a memorial service. Tears are to be expected.’

‘I’m Katie,’ I say,
smiling to cover my embarrassment and offering my hand. As he takes it, I surprise
myself with how shy I feel. His is a searching gaze, and he holds my hand for a second
too long, as though trying to get the measure of me.

‘Katie. I remember you.’

‘You do?’

‘And your mother. Helen, wasn’t
it?’

‘You knew my mother?’

‘Just a little. We met once or twice
when you were here.’

‘Oh.’

‘You’re like her, you know.
About the eyes, I see it – the same interested gaze.’ Then, changing the subject,
he says: ‘It was good of you to come all this way.’

‘I couldn’t not,’ I tell
him, and sense the push of truth in those words.

‘Are you travelling south tomorrow
with the rest of us?’

‘I’ve come this far,
haven’t I? May as well see it through.’ I try to sound nonchalant, as if the
thought of going back doesn’t scare the hell out of me.

‘Good.’ He smiles and nods his
approval, breathing deeply, his hand going to his chest.

‘Beats me why he wanted all this,
though,’ I say.

‘Why is
that?’

‘I don’t understand why
he’d want to come back to a place he hasn’t been to in thirty-odd
years.’

‘Perhaps it was where he was
happiest.’

I cast him a doubtful look.

He leans back in his chair, an expansive
gesture, and says: ‘I remember them – the Yateses – when they first came out here.
You couldn’t help but notice such an attractive family – beautiful, I would go so
far as to say. The mother – now, she was something. Oozed class. He had it too, Ken, a
kind of muscular charm, a sense of great capability. And then those two fine boys – so
vital and engaging. Something so optimistic about that family. It was like being in the
presence of sunshine. They thrived here in Africa. Such a shame, when they left …’
His eyes film with a kind of sadness.