Only We Know

by Karen Perry

  I think about this, then say: ‘No. I’m not surprised.’

  He looks at me properly then and holds me there for a moment, nodding slightly in understanding. Of course he would seek me out. After all, we’re the only ones left. And I feel them crowding around us in this room – the ghosts of the others: my parents, as well as his, Cora, and now Luke …

  ‘It’s strange,’ he says, ‘but ever since it happened – ever since I found Luke – I’ve felt this overwhelming need to talk.’

  He peers at me to see if I get the oddness of that statement, and I do. Of course I do.

  ‘But I’ve never been very good with words,’ he goes on. ‘It seems the only person I can talk to about it is you.’

  ‘You can tell me anything, Nicky,’ I say quietly.

  ‘I wanted to tell you about what happened when I found him – Luke.’

  I push myself back so that the pillows are behind me, my feet crossed at the ankles, whiskey cradled in my lap, listening.

  ‘It took so long for them to come. The guards, the ambulance. It seemed to take for ever. And what do you do while you wait? It must have taken them half an hour to get there, and all that time I’m supposed to just leave him there, hanging from a beam?’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘At first, we went outside, stood by the car, trying to pull ourselves together. Then I called Julia.’

  ‘That must have been hard.’

  ‘The worst phone call of my life.’

  ‘How did she take it?’

  He shrugs, trying not to make a big deal of it. Still, I can imagine the shout of fright she gave, the distress and denial within it.

  ‘After the phone call, I got a bit panicky. The guards were so long and I started worrying that Julia would take it into her head to come down. Just the thought of her seeing Luke hanging there like that –’ He breaks off, drinks some whiskey.

  ‘I got worried that I’d imagined it, which sounds ridiculous, but I started to think all kinds of crazy shit, like I would go back into that house and he wouldn’t be there, or that maybe there’d still been some scrap of life left in his body when we’d found him but instead of checking we’d just assumed and maybe now it was too late.’

  I tap a cigarette out of the box and offer one to him.

  ‘So, I find myself racing back into that house and up the stairs, but he’s still there and from the colour of his face, the swelling and bruising and just the sheer stillness of him, I knew he was dead. But somehow … somehow I couldn’t leave him like that. It was so undignified. And I know I should have waited for the cops, but it just got so I couldn’t stand to think of him staying up there one second longer. I kept imagining my father’s face were he to walk into the room and see Luke like that, even though the man has been dead for the last decade.’

  His voice, husky from cigarettes and booze and lack of sleep, cracks, and I see the tremor in his hand as he brings the cigarette to his lips. He holds the smoke inside him for a beat, then releases a plume of it into the air.

  ‘So I cut him down.’

  The words sound hollow and forlorn and, for a moment, they sit there between us.

  ‘I took him down and laid him on the floor, then covered him up with my jacket.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Lauren was there. At first, she stood back and watched as I laid him down. But then she knelt next to him and very gently, very tenderly, as if he were just asleep and she didn’t want to wake him, she started straightening his limbs, like she was trying to make him more comfortable or something, brushing the hair off his face, holding his hand. I stood there watching her do this and it occurred to me that she had never met Luke before, that this was the first and only time she would see him, and when I looked at his ruined face, swollen and distorted – gruesome, even – all the life and the charm and the humour fled from it, I felt this surge of anger rise up in me, this fury at her, at Lauren, my wife, for handling him in this delicate, intimate way, like she had known him for ever when really he was a stranger to her, and always would be, so I said something to her, something terrible. I said … I said …’

  ‘Don’t, Nick. Please don’t.’ I’m shocked at all this talk gushing out of him and swirling around us, and even though I’m glad he can confide in me, I don’t want to hear the thing he said to his wife. But he says it anyway.

  ‘I said: “Take your fucking hands off him, Lauren.”’

  It sits there pulsing between us – the wrongness of it, the violence of that word, spoken in that space, the room that held the recent dead as well as the ghosts of the others. My thoughts go to that girl in the airport lounge with her straw-coloured hair and her carefree manner. He might as well have slapped her face.

  We sit in silence for what seems a long time. I close my eyes, listen to the hum of the city outside, hear it breathe in and out like a living being.

  Nick says, ‘I had the stupidest thought on the way here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That if either of the Yates brothers was going to take their lives, it should have been me.’

  I sit up. ‘Nick, you shouldn’t say that.’

  He sits across from me, briefly returning my gaze, and I can feel the heat in it. He reaches for the bottle, his hand shaking. Catching me watching, he lowers his hand to his lap, stares at it, as if it’s a foreign object. But then his face seems to warm a little and he holds up his hand to me, shows me his palm.

  ‘Remember, Kay?’

  The scar there – a white ridge of hard skin among the map of lines. I feel my answering smile and hold up my hand. ‘I remember,’ I say.

  We regard each other fondly, and the old twinge comes back, the twinge that suggests what might have been but never was.

  His mood shifts again, another thought coming at him, nudging away the momentary peace. ‘Something else I can’t get out of my head. It was something the guards wanted to know, or one particular detective. There, after they’d arrived and I’d made a formal identification of the body, he asked me who had cut the knot.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because,’ and it seems he is quoting from memory, ‘because if you cut a victim down, you’re supposed to cut above the knot. That’s what he told me.’

  ‘And they told you this at the house … right after?’

  ‘Right there and then. It preserves the rope for Forensics if you cut above the knot, you see. Cutting below ruins it. This guy – the detective – he said if the marks around the neck, the bruising, if they follow the same pattern as the ridges in the rope, well and good. I asked what’s good about that, Kay. You know what he said?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He said, “Then we know it was suicide, plain and simple.”’

  ‘Plain and simple, huh?’

  For a moment, his face remains the same – eyes a little too bright, though his gaze is fixed and inward-looking. Then his expression begins to change. The slow understanding of how passionate he had become, how wild his words had been, breaks through into his consciousness. He gives me a look that seems half apologetic, half resentful. Before my eyes, he is closing in on himself.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ I say to him. ‘Julia. Do you think she knows?’

  His expression changes, becomes quizzical. ‘About the three of us? About what we did?’ He stares down at his hands. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘Do you think Luke told her?’

  He shrugs, mumbles: ‘She was his wife. He could have.’

  ‘Have you told Lauren?’

  His eyes flash in a way that tells me I’ve overstepped the mark.

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to –’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  A prickly silence sits between us, and instinct tells me to let it be, but curiosity wins out.

  ‘What about Murphy? Do you think he knows? He was close to your mum. Perhaps she –’

  ‘Jesus, Katie! Nobody knows but us – okay? Remember the rule? Not a soul. You can’t tel
l anyone. Right?’

  ‘Okay,’ I say gently, reaching forward to touch his arm, and he exhales deeply, rocking forward on the bed.

  ‘Sorry. It’s just … I’m so tired,’ he says, even though I know there is much more to it than that.

  My phone rings, interrupting the silence. He glances at it with irritation but tells me I should answer it. Then, catching himself, he explains: ‘It’s my tinnitus,’ he explains. ‘Noises – electronic noises – make it worse.’ His eyes are full of injury and apology and I feel a pang of sympathy for him.

  ‘I’ll take it outside.’

  In the corridor, I speak to Reilly in hushed tones. I fill him in as best I can, pitching my voice at an approximation of calm and restraint so that he won’t worry about me. I almost tell him about the envelope, about the picture of Cora, but somehow telling him seems too hard, complicated and somehow forbidden – like breaking the rule that was made so many years ago. You can’t tell anyone. Still, before he rings off, he tells me he’ll call again tomorrow, and I find myself smiling at his thoughtfulness, his concern.

  When I push the door open, I can hear the regular sound of Nick’s breathing. He’s lying on his side, his head on the pillow. I stand for a moment, watching him sleep. Then I put my phone back on the nightstand and go to the window where I draw the heavy curtains, blocking out the evening sun so that only the gentle burr of light from the bathroom falls onto the bedroom floor.

  I turn off the air-conditioning, the silence in the room like a sudden intrusion. But then I lie down next to him, turning so that my back is to his, close enough to feel his body warmth, my legs curled up and my hands beneath the pillow, the way I used to lie when I was a little girl. And for the first time in such a long time, I feel a kind of peace. The fear inside me leaves – like a moth drawn to a light in another room – as we lie there in the shadows, Nick and I. For a while, I listen to the steady rise and fall of his breathing. Then I close my eyes and sleep.

  11. Nick

  We meet in the dark, load the truck and set off without a word. It’s going to be a long trek to the Masai Mara. Karl’s driving. I’ve got the passenger seat. Lauren has the back to herself. She stares out of the window watching the light begin to break on the horizon.

  Karl hums to himself, hands me a flask and says: ‘Open that for me, will you?’

  I unscrew the top and the smell of hot coffee wafts through the truck.

  ‘Help yourself,’ Karl says.

  ‘Lauren?’ I say, turning to her.

  ‘No, thanks,’ she says without looking at me.

  Soon, we are out of the city and onto the wide roads where the tar is chipped and uneven, no markings visible.

  The truck hits a rock on the road. ‘Christ,’ Karl says. ‘I hope this pile of junk makes it.’

  The vehicle is battered. The springs poke through the seats. The steel is rusting, the joints creaking. It is, as my dad would have said, ‘banjaxed’, creaking like it might fall apart at any minute. But the truth is that, despite the vehicle, there’s no one I’d rather travel alongside on this difficult journey than Karl.

  ‘Thanks for doing this,’ I tell him, and he grins at me before turning his attention back to the road. He drives hunched forward, leaning on the steering-wheel, occasionally tapping out whatever rhythm is travelling through his head.

  ‘Couldn’t have you two doing this on your own, could I?’ he says.

  I stare at the road in front of me, think about where I’m going back to, and hear it begin, the distant whining deep within my inner ear.

  We drive for long stretches without talking. Much of the land is arid scrub, a harsh frontier where people eke out a living. The poverty of Kenya is immense, its scale almost supernatural, but now as light touches it and the truck trundles along, I find that there is something calming about the terrain’s roughness, the lack of refinement and the heady soundscape it holds. As Nairobi disappears behind us and we go deeper into the country, I settle back in the seat and allow my mind to slip into a sort of numbness, giving myself over to the journey ahead of us.

  I can see Lauren’s reflection in the side-mirror. She seems distant, as if she is mulling something over in her mind, her eyes fixed on the passing landscape. Her quiet determination reminds me of a time some months ago, before we were married, when she travelled to Mara on a field trip of sorts, but when she came back, she seemed subdued, troubled for days, but wouldn’t tell me why. She got over it, and I forgot about it, but now she has the same air of disaffection, the same sullen inwardness.

  She looks tired. I want to tell her to close her eyes and rest, but I don’t. I’m afraid if I say anything to her it will only end in an argument and I’m not sure I can cope with that right now. Everything seems shaky today, so I bide my time.

  I had left Katie’s room before dawn broke, sneaking out of her hotel like a thief in the night. Outside, the streets were eerily quiet, the weather uncertain and cool; even in the darkness, I could see large clouds grouping on the horizon. A stray dog nosing its way through a bag of rubbish looked up at me warily before returning to its pitiful business. As I walked home in the pre-dawn darkness, a melody entered my head: Dexter Gordon playing ‘Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry’. It has been turning in my mind ever since, and with it the words: who cut the knot? Who cut the knot?

  As the truck judders and bumps along a particularly battered stretch of road, I feel my head emptying of everything except those words, going around and around in my head like they would on a scratched record.

  Hours pass, the sun rising high above us. Karl decides to stop for lunch at a place he knows.

  ‘The food’s not great,’ he says, ‘but it’ll do.’

  The place he brings us to – a long flat building with large windows, blue paint peeling off the walls, concrete floors giving it an industrial feel – is more like a school canteen than a restaurant. The three of us queue at a counter, then take our trays and sit at one of the long trestle tables that stretch out across the room. The place is already filling up – the faces here predominantly white and Asian, tourists heading west to go on safari. The food – a stew with a gristly meat that we guess is goat, served in mismatched bowls – is better than I expected. Lauren dips bread into the gravy, but doesn’t touch the meat. She drinks her Coke and hardly says a word.

  When she goes to use the bathroom, Karl says: ‘Everything okay between you guys?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I say.

  ‘She was worried about you. You should have called her,’ he says.

  ‘I did call her. She knew where I was.’

  A call to tell her that I had gone to Katie to talk because I’d felt I had to. A call in which I had said to my wife: You do trust me, don’t you? She had said yes, and I had told her I loved her. But now, I can’t help but feel naïve and stupid, even a little reckless.

  He raises an eyebrow. ‘Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe you shouldn’t have told her where you were.’

  We climb back into the truck, a little weary, but eager to be on our way.

  ‘How long to go until we’re there?’ I ask.

  ‘A few more hours,’ Karl says, letting the handbrake down with some effort.

  The roads are bad. So bad in places, we have to take the hard shoulder. Nairobi is already a distant memory. The landscape ahead of us rolls on and on. Shanty towns – anonymous, without a name or a mark on any map – appear out of nowhere. They seem makeshift, fragile, prone to quick evacuation. The truck rattles and shakes. It hits one pothole after another. Farmers and animals watch us pass with a lazy indifference.

  Lauren shifts in her seat, but remains awake. Her anger has a slow-burning flame.

  ‘Why were you gone so long?’ she had asked, when I finally got back this morning.

  A whispered conversation in our bedroom, Karl waiting in the living room, sipping coffee on the sofa.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lauren. We talked and then I fell asleep.’

  ‘You fell a
sleep?’ Disbelief in her voice.

  ‘Nothing happened … You believe me, don’t you? We just talked, that’s all.’

  She held my gaze, her eye fixed on me with suspicion, and then, in a quiet voice, she said: ‘If you say so.’ Turning away, she reached for her holdall and stuffed the last of her clothes into it. There was something savage about her movements, something that seemed completely alien to her usual grace and self-possession, and I could see how rattled she was. I searched for something to say to her – something to dispel her suspicion.

  ‘Katie and I are old friends, Lauren. We go way back,’ I began.

  Lauren didn’t answer. Behind her, the bed sheets were tousled, but I could tell she hadn’t slept. Her face was drawn and worried. She didn’t ask any other questions. There was no interrogation. Just a steely, implacable silence.

  ‘Maybe you should get changed,’ she said quietly, and I heard the coolness in her tone. ‘Karl’s been here for almost an hour. We need to get going.’

  I knew that it was not finished between us – this row, if you could call it that. But how could I explain why I went to Katie? How could I explain the inextricable bonds that exist between me, Luke and her? How could I explain that I needed to understand why my brother had done this and that the only person who might help me was Katie? My apology did not seem enough. And because I was so dog-tired and we had a whole day ahead of us, sitting in a hot truck, I couldn’t trust myself to start explaining something that confounded me – the thing that sits in the very depths of my past, beating like a black heart.

  Before we get into the truck, I say: ‘Lauren … I want you to know how sorry I am.’

  ‘Nick, this is hard for me too. It’s not just about you and your brother.’

  I don’t know what she means. Besides, she says no more. She simply climbs into the back seat and stares at the clouds overhead, and I see that she is containing her disappointment. Saving it. It feels like a form of torture. Her rage would be more welcome than this. She is pensive, her brow furrowed at the glaring sun, her eyes squinting up at a lone single-engine aeroplane passing high above us. She is biding her time, and I find myself waiting too, while the words Who cut the knot? Who cut the knot? trip through my head, forming a music all of their own, haunting the passageways of my inner ear.