by Karen Perry
‘Come on,’ Lauren says, pulling me to her and sensing my unease. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
12. Katie
Funny the things you let slip when you’ve a few drinks inside you.
I’ve been to several funerals in my time, and at each and every one, no matter how tragic or shocking the loss, there always comes a moment afterwards when people have had a couple of drinks and the cold grief of the graveside seems to have been dispelled somewhat by talk, reminiscence, the closeness of the relatives and friends who remain, the bond that you feel in the aftermath, a moment when it seems okay, that the grief will be bearable, that life goes on. It’s like a held breath that is now released. A relaxation that creeps in around the mourners.
I’m sitting alone in the lounge, cradling a drink in my hands. Scattered around the room are various groupings of mourners, as well as other guests at this luxury safari lodge. Outside, the dusk is gathering over the savannah, night creatures sending out their chatter and calls, their twilight song. Behind me, a conversation is happening. Julia and the priest are sitting together and he is talking to her in steady tones, much as he did with me yesterday when we were in Nairobi and I was a blathering mess. Julia is more held together, but I have seen a slump come over her in the last hour – tiredness or defeat, I can’t be sure which. The slightest of slurs in Murphy’s speech gives him away, and he’s speaking a little too loudly, taking on the dull, lecturing tone that older men sometimes employ when they’ve had one too many and rediscover the importance of their own thoughts and experience.
‘It was the right thing to do, Julia.’
‘I know, Father.’
‘The right thing. And Luke was always one for doing the right thing. For setting things straight.’
‘Unfinished business.’
‘Exactly. My point exactly, Julia. It was unfinished business. He wanted to return to make things right. And I knew it,’ he tells her now. ‘I knew it the moment Sally told me they were leaving.’
I sit up a little in my seat.
‘I knew that it was not right. For the boys, for their future. To run away like that. It felt like … like leaving a frayed end flying in the wind.’
‘They were only children,’ Julia says.
Her words are a douse of cold water. She knows.
‘Only children,’ he repeats. ‘I said to Sally that it was a mistake. And to Ken. The night they were leaving I told him. I said: “You’re only going to make them feel guilty if you take them away like this.”’ A deadening sigh. ‘Didn’t listen. Didn’t want to know.’
‘They were scared. It was natural.’
‘But I knew. I knew it wasn’t over. Some things are too big to run from. Some things draw you back. It could have been different for them, Julia. For those boys. It could have been different …’
His words drift into a melancholy silence. But I don’t feel melancholy. I feel alert, more awake and present than I have done in weeks.
A shadow moves in the doorway. I see it, and Murphy does too, because he gets to his feet, an awkward, lumbering movement, and I hear him tell Julia that someone’s waiting for him, someone he must speak to. I watch him walk towards the door, an old man, tired, drunk, with a myriad private griefs and troubles.
So he did know. He knew all along. Yet he lied to me about it, and I can’t figure out why.
My eyes follow him across the room until he has gone and all that remains of him is the suspicion he has aroused within me.
True to his word, Reilly calls. It’s late. I sit on the steps to the terrace, the phone pressed to my ear. Light thrown from the hotel reaches across the gravelled drive to the lawn. Beyond that, the contours of the trees and bushes become blurred, the gloom turning to darkness. Reilly’s voice sounds distant, a hush of air between us, like a third party listening.
‘How was it?’ he asks gently, and I tell him about the gathering by the riverbank, the sun setting, the scattering of the ashes. I tell him how, afterwards, we had come back to the hotel for a meal that was silent and subdued, as if we were all laid low with exhaustion and spent emotion.
I’ve left the others in the lounge, huddled in groups around low tables, the noise growing as the night comes on and the alcohol does its thing. Nick is at the piano, bent over the keys, slow blues numbers played with a soft hand an undercurrent to all the talk that surrounds him. He doesn’t lift his head, his attention on the music, and it crosses my mind that he’s hiding behind it, playing one tune after another as a means of protecting himself, keeping everyone at bay. And I am out here, talking to Reilly, the low chatter of nocturnal insects rising up from the garden and the plains beyond.
‘Well, it’s over now,’ he says, and I say, yes, it is.
Straight away, he catches it. ‘What is it, Katie? You sound strange.’
‘I don’t know. I just expected to feel different, once it was done.’
‘How so?’
‘Like I would feel some kind of an ending. Relief, I suppose.’
The air still holds the heaviness of the day’s heat. It’s there in every indrawn breath. Somewhere out in the darkness, Luke has returned to the earth.
‘You need to sleep,’ Reilly suggests. ‘Perhaps in the morning you’ll feel that relief.’
‘Perhaps …’
But I know it isn’t true. For years now I have been living my life as though what happened to me in Africa was over – a closed book. Our secret is out there now. There are others who know. Julia. Murphy. Who else? But also I know that I can no longer look away, that no matter how long I wait, it’s not going to pass. I knew it from the moment I stood in the glow of the red sunset, watching Nick open his hand to release his brother onto the breeze.
‘Remember the bird I was sent?’
‘Of course.’
‘I think whoever sent it is here.’
I can sense him stiffening, his attention pricked, and I tell him about the anonymous post slipped under the door of my hotel room in Nairobi. Pictures of drownings. All those limbs plastered with wet clothes, chalky-white skin, hair like weed. I leave out the part about Cora.
‘Jesus,’ he breathes, and I can picture him sitting there, one hand squeezing his temples. ‘Did you bring them to the police?’
‘No.’
‘Katie! For God’s sake, this isn’t a joke!’
‘It’s not that I think it’s a joke. I am taking it seriously. But I just don’t think that’s the right avenue to go down. I want to find out myself –’
‘How? What exactly are you planning on doing?’
I pause, take a breath. The truth is I don’t have a plan. The truth is that this thing requires something other than logic or reason. I need to feel my way through it, trust my instincts to lead me to the truth. I close my eyes, hear Murphy’s voice in my head: Let him go, girl. Feel the clawing of suspicion, of something close to dislike.
‘The charity,’ I say to Reilly now, opening my eyes. ‘ALIVE. Have you had a chance to do some digging?’
‘Yes – I was coming to that. Turns out there are big problems. That accountant that Luke Yates had go over the books, he unearthed a huge hole. Unexplained disappearance of funds. From what I’ve heard, the accountant was urging a criminal investigation, but Luke was resistant. He even wanted the whole thing wound up.’
‘Do you think the priest is involved?’
He exhales noisily, with irritation, and when he speaks again his voice is lowered. ‘I don’t know. But right now, we can’t rule him out.’
I can feel the suspicion inside me – the instinct that leads me to distrust, to doubt, to question. Every good journalist has it. The kernel of suspicion has been inside me since the moment Murphy took my hand in his, that searching gaze passing over my face, since he kept hold of my hand a second too long and said: I remember you.
Down in the garden amid the topiary and the grottoes, I glimpse the glow of a tiny red light in the darkness, then watch it disappear. The tang of cigarette s
moke in the air. I train my eyes on it, the darkness composing itself into shadows, silhouettes. The bluish glow of a white shirt.
‘I wish I could be there with you,’ Reilly tells me, and I can’t help but smile.
Even from this distance, I feel the warmth and safety of his presence, the depths of his voice, the goodness that seems to be at the very core of him.
‘When I get home, let’s go for a long walk, you and me,’ I say.
‘I’d like that.’
‘Let’s go somewhere that we can take the air and talk.’
‘I’ll take you to Dún Laoghaire – the West Pier. The East Pier seems a little too refined for us.’
‘Reilly,’ I say then, a sudden urgency that I find hard to understand or explain building in me, ‘there are things I haven’t told you … things I’ve done …’
‘Katie, love,’ he says gently. ‘There’ll be time enough to lay bare our souls.’
Behind me, the music keeps on and on, a swarm of conversation rising above it. I put my phone away, get to my feet, but instead of returning to the others, I step away from the terrace, and move down into the darkness of the garden.
It’s quiet out here, the only sounds the chatter and call of night-life hidden in the dark foliage of the garden and, beyond it, the long grass of the savannah. The river flows along the edges of the estate, the grounds sweeping down to its banks where black trees loom large and scrubby bushes form a ragged perimeter. There’s no light here, and as I advance, shapes begin to define themselves, the contours of a path like an animal track snaking through the undergrowth. My footfall is slow, deliberate: I’m anxious not to disturb, not to draw attention to myself. An animal advancing on its prey.
Two figures, near the river’s edge. One short and stocky, skin as dark as the night. The other tall and white, the bluish glow of his shirt. From this distance, I can make out the stooped form of the priest, pushing his face close to the other man’s, articulating his point in sharp bursts of language. Kikulu or Swahili, I don’t know. Guttural sounds, sharp clicks of the tongue, whatever it is he is saying is animated, almost wild except for the whispered hold he keeps on it. Hands gesticulating, a question asked, while the other man leans back against something – a post? a tree? – staring ahead, refusing to make eye-contact with Murphy, smoking in a way that suggests the casualness is false. Here, in the shadows, observing the exchange, I can feel the charge in the air between them. Murphy is agitated: he shakes his head, baffled, then drops it briefly, large hands cupping his face. The short man – his friend? – steps forward, puts a hand to the priest’s shoulder, says something low, his intonation softened with concern, yet his voice is hard around the edges. There is something familiar about him that causes my heart to thrum.
I move a little closer now, painfully aware of each crackle of grass beneath my feet, every dislodged stone. Almost upon them now, I find myself holding my breath, listening to the words coming out of the man – the stranger – an urgent throatiness coating the silence, like a layer of grease.
‘No, no, no,’ Murphy says emphatically. ‘That was not what I wanted!’
The other man continues in his own language, persistence in his tone. I try to make out his face, but it’s so dark. Small eyes, flat features, a broad nose, deep lines running to the corners of an unsmiling mouth.
Sudden movement – a creature in the undergrowth; a gasp of surprise. The talking stops. Everything grows still, and in the silence that surrounds me, I feel the nudge of fear. They have seen me. The stillness in their pose tells me as much. Instinct tells me to turn away, to run, yet there is an itch in my brain – a question that demands an answer. I take a step towards them.
Murphy’s companion appears older now that I approach. He carries with him a faint air of menace. His eyes – small, obsidian, flashing in the moonlight – stir something within me.
‘Did you follow me?’ Murphy asks, and I turn to him. There are white bristles all over his chin, bags under his eyes; any trace of kindness has been chased away.
‘Yes.’
He nods and looks me up and down.
‘Why did you lie to me, Father?’
‘Lie to you?’
‘You know what happened. You know what we did. So why did you lie about it?’
Still he says nothing, his gaze hardening.
‘I don’t think you’ve been altogether straight with me, Murphy.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Dead birds. Pictures of drowned girls. Threats. Luke, too. I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.’
A hunch, that’s all. The insistent voice of instinct that speaks up now tells me he knows, he must do. I think of Reilly and what he said, feel the hardening crust of distrust.
He holds my gaze for just a moment, and when he breaks it, a small self-deprecating smile comes over his wizened features. He seems to give himself a little shake as if to shrug off this unpleasantness. And it is this gesture, this one small shudder, that triggers it. All at once I’m hurtling back through time, brought forcefully to a moment in my childhood when I stood behind a door and observed an argument. I had forgotten it completely, as if my mind had tipped it out onto a floor and left it. But now I know it was there all along, lurking in the shadows.
‘I remember you,’ I tell Murphy now, and he raises his head, his attention snagged by the seriousness of my tone, the grain of something remembered. ‘I saw you. That day in the house, with Sally.’
Close my eyes, and I’m back there. Eight years old, awkward and out of place in that house where I don’t belong, seeking a pocket of coolness in those dim rooms, the window shutters closed against the battering heat of the noonday sun. Where were the others? My mother, the boys and their father? I have no idea. That part of the memory has been lost. What remains, though, is so breathtakingly clear that I can see everything in sharp focus – the dark wooden furniture, the striped ticking of the bed-covers, the lazy revolution of a ceiling fan, my feet hot and dusty in the red sandals I disliked, and the sway of Sally Yates’s skirt as he grabbed hold of her arm and pulled her back to him. Behind the door I held my breath, all too aware that I shouldn’t be there, shouldn’t be watching, and although I didn’t fully understand what it was I was a witness to, I had the sense that it was something clandestine, forbidden even. The whispering presence of a man in a bedroom that wasn’t his own. His grip on Sally’s arm, the way he pulled her to him, then letting go of her arm, his hand moving to her hip. I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t hear his words, but I heard something in the tone – an insistence, a firmness of purpose. And while he spoke, she didn’t look at him, just stood there staring at the floor, as if waiting for him to finish, enduring the clasp of his hand and his river of words until the moment he released her and she could get away. The shake of her dark hair then as she vigorously denied whatever it was that he put to her. And when she spoke, her voice came out fractured with emotion.
‘No,’ she told him. ‘You know I can’t, so stop asking. Don’t you know it only makes this harder?’
His wheedling tone again, the pull of his hand moving her body closer to him so that she was trapped in his embrace. Briefly, the fight went out of her and I felt a lurch of fear or dread as she seemed to lean into him, her head resting on his shoulder, her arms loosely about his waist. In my head I felt the words flowing: oh, no, oh, no, oh, no. Standing there, unable to pull my gaze away, I felt the order of things changing. Sweat in my sandals, my heart beating wildly, I felt the tumult of that change come over me. I don’t know why it affected me in that way. After all, she was not my mother. But standing there in the shadows, my eyes fixed on them through the narrow crack between the door and its frame, I felt something slipping away from me and it made me afraid.
She straightened, pulling herself from his embrace with a kind of determined ferocity, and when she spoke to him, the tears had gone from her voice, and her tone was upset, accusatory.
‘Don’t you t
hink I would if I could?’
She moved so swiftly that I had no time to react. The door pulled back, her face as she saw me changed into a mask of anger and fright. ‘Katie! What are you doing?’
I looked up at her, at the features I had once thought so beautiful, contracting now around her suspicion, and the tears welled up inside me, with the powerful need to run.
Just a glance at him was all I got. It was enough, though. His eyes, small and blue, flashing reproach at me. And then the little smile to himself as he looked down at the floor, his hands going into his pockets, and that little shake of his shoulders – the shudder repeated now, almost thirty years later – as I turned from them both, the rubber soles of my sandals slapping all the way along the tiled floor and out into the sunshine.
‘It was you,’ I say to Murphy now, all of it falling into place. ‘You were the one Luke spoke of. You were the one he told Nick about.’
He doesn’t respond, keeps his eyes narrowed, his gaze fixed determinedly on the trees behind me.
‘You and Sally Yates. I saw you together that day in the house. Before we left for the safari. You were arguing.’
It must have happened shortly before we left for the Masai Mara so there was no opportunity for her to confront me again, find out what I had seen or heard.
‘Did my mother know about it?’ I ask Murphy now. ‘Did Ken? Did they know you two were having an affair?’
‘Enough!’ he hisses, his anger surfacing. He holds up his hand, but I see that it’s shaking.
He fixes me with a baleful look but all I see in that moment is a dry, withered old man trapped in the wasteland of his own grievances, bitterness and regrets.
