by Karen Perry
He offers me the weakest of smiles. ‘A foolish dream. That’s all.’
I can feel Nick looking at me, and when I turn to him, his face has darkened, something twisting inside him.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘You knew about them?’ he asks. ‘You knew about him and my mother?’
‘Your mother!’ Mackenzie exclaims. ‘Don’t talk to us about your mother!’ The way he says the word makes it sound like an obscenity.
Nick is not listening to him. Instead, he is staring hard at me, an unspoken accusation of betrayal, an accusation that confuses me.
‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘We all did. Even you.’
‘What?’ he says, as he reels backwards.
‘You don’t remember?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘When we were here before as kids? What Luke told you in the tent that night? You really don’t remember?’
I know the answer from the blankness of his expression. He could be a small boy again, the way he stands with that dazed look on his face.
‘When we were coming down here the first time,’ I begin, ‘all those years ago, don’t you remember how sulky Luke was? So quiet and withdrawn?’
That’s the first thing I remember of it: Luke’s sourness in the van during that long, difficult journey. For three days, he kept it up, staring glassy-eyed out of the window during the safari, refusing to react at the sighting of lions, elephants or hippos.
‘It drove your parents crazy. All through those days we spent here, he didn’t speak to your mother – he would hardly even look at her. Your father lost the plot with him one day. You really don’t remember?’
He is staring at me wide-eyed, utterly bewildered. I can feel Mackenzie’s growing impatience. He holds the gun in two hands now. Still I go on.
‘On the last night, we were in our tent, the three of us, supposed to be asleep, but really we were eavesdropping, spying on the adults. They had gathered around the campfire. Your father had a guitar and he took it out, began playing some fast-tempo folksong, lots of yelping and rude lyrics. Your mother got up and began to dance.’
I remember it so clearly, the sway of Sally Yates’s hips, the curving line of her body caught in the light of the campfire, the glow of her cheeks and the private look that came over her face as if she were dancing for herself alone and not for anyone else’s pleasure. I was mesmerized. I must have said something then, some breathy and admiring comment, something foolish, because Luke snorted. ‘Her?’ he said, his lip pulled back in a sneer. ‘She’s a slut.’
That word hit me like a slap to the face. To hear him say it about his own mother. But before I could react, Nick had sprung upon his brother, sitting on his chest, catching Luke’s neck in the vice-like grip of his knees. ‘Take it back!’ he shouted. ‘Take it back, or I’ll kill you!’
They scuffled for a few minutes, pulling and kicking and screaming at each other, until their dad came into the tent and dragged them apart. Two mutinous boys, refusing to say what they’d been fighting about.
When he had gone, the three of us got into our sleeping bags. I turned my face away and tried to sleep. But in the quiet of the dark, I heard Luke whispering to his brother, and even though I couldn’t hear the words, I knew what he was saying. I had seen Sally Yates with the man in her bedroom. I fell asleep that night to the sounds of the crickets clicking in the dark and of a small boy weeping.
‘You really can’t remember?’ I ask Nick, but he’s moving backwards, his hand going up to his head, and I can’t tell if this is because the memory is leaking back to him, or if he is reeling from the blow to his head.
‘Nick,’ Murphy says, and goes towards him, but Nick shakes his head violently.
‘Stay away from me,’ he says, his voice low, but the threat is within it.
‘I’m sorry, Nick. I truly am. That’s what this day is about. It’s about atonement. I’ve paid for my sins for a lifetime now,’ he says, his voice cracking.
As Murphy moves towards him, Nick takes a step forward and strikes him cleanly in the jaw with his right fist. Murphy reels backwards, stumbling over the rocks, loses his footing, then slips and falls into the water, his face white with shock.
Nick is breathing heavily, for all the world as if he’s going to wade into the river just to strike him again. But he doesn’t.
A noise behind us, the switching sound of a bullet sliding into the chamber. I turn to see Mackenzie, the butt of the gun hard against his shoulder, one eye closed, the other staring down the barrel of the gun. Lauren holds her hands to her mouth. Nick straightens slowly, raising his hands in surrender. ‘Please,’ he says. ‘Please don’t shoot.’
Mackenzie says nothing, just stares at him.
My heart is beating hard now. This is when it starts, I think. Everything stills in this moment. A tremor in Nick’s hands, his fear palpable.
‘What do you want from me?’ he asks then.
A simple answer: ‘Your confession.’
The gun is held in place, ready to fire.
‘It was a game,’ Nick stammers. ‘It was just a game. A stupid game that went wrong.’
He pauses, waits for some reaction, and Mack’s voice, cool and dry: ‘More.’
‘Okay. Okay,’ Nick says, his voice quivering, something wild in his eyes. ‘Four of us in the water – two teams. Whichever team stayed under longer was the winner. We played for ages – until my lungs hurt and there was a pain in my head, like my skull was too tight. I wanted to stop, but Luke wouldn’t have it. He had to win, you see. He always had to win.’
A hush has come over the trees and the water. Murphy glances at me, sees the pain in my face. I am straining towards Nick, every fibre of my being fixed on the words coming out of his mouth.
‘I was so tired. I wanted to stop, but Luke …’ He trails off, and I can tell he is back there on that day, the trees closing in around him.
‘More!’ Mack commands, his voice snapping Nick out of it.
When he continues he sounds rattled and scared. He is telling us now how the teams were paired up – Nick with the younger sister, Amy, Luke with Cora – and I am on the riverbank, the others waist deep in the water, hands gripped tightly, that wild intake of breath before the sudden plunge. I think of those pairings, and something jars. I look closely at Nick.
‘I told him I’d had enough, that I wanted to go back to the camp. “One more go,” he said, “just one more, and then we’re quits.”’
Lauren has her arms crossed, listening intently to the words spoken about Cora – the sister she never knew. And as he tells the story, Nick’s voice grows more forceful. He is propelled by something inside him to keep going to the end.
‘That time – that last time – when I came up for air, I could see her hand waving. Cora’s hand. She was still under. He was holding her down. He always had to win, you see?’
His voice breaks, and I feel a great sadness coming over us, pouring down through the trees, emerging from the murky waters of the river.
It’s not just sadness I feel, but a growing frustration – it builds within me, frustration that is fast becoming a kind of anger.
‘He held her down and I did nothing,’ he says again. ‘I was so tired, and I didn’t realize … I watched my brother as he killed that girl and I did nothing, and for that, I am truly and profoundly –’
‘No!’ I shout. The word ricochets off the trees.
My hand is covering my mouth, but it’s too late. They are all looking at me now as I feel the words swelling inside me.
‘I need to do this, Katie,’ Nick tells me. ‘I have to make this right.’
‘No, Nick! Just stop! Christ, would you just stop? All these years, all this time, and still you persist with this?’ I put my hands to my head, feel the pain there, made worse by Nick’s stare, blank and infuriating.
‘I’m telling the truth,’ he says.
‘No!’ I say again, lower, more serious, my hands in fists by my
sides. ‘Oh, God, you don’t know, do you? You really don’t remember.’
Nick stops. Murphy raises his head and looks at the sky, sees the clouds scudding high above us. Lauren and Mackenzie, both watchful and still. And she is here too: Cora. Her ghostly presence high in the trees above, waiting.
‘Luke was with Amy,’ I say.
Lauren looks at me sharply.
‘I was sitting on the bank,’ I go on. ‘I sat there and watched. I saw you, Nick. You were with Cora.’
‘No,’ he says quietly, and there is a tug of resistance, an understandable reluctance to face the stark, cold truth.
‘Luke didn’t kill that girl. He didn’t hold her under. It was you, Nick,’ I say softly. ‘It was you.’
18. Nick
I want it to stop. All of it. The wave of words coming at me, followed by another and another, an endless series of crashing waves, filling my ears with their bass roar.
Katie opens her mouth and they come tumbling out at me – it was you, it was you, it was you – and I want it only to stop.
‘All these years, you’ve persisted with this version of events,’ she says. ‘And I, like a fool, went along with it because I cared for you, Nick. At some level I understood that this was what you needed to do to cope. But now I see how wrong that was. A massive mistake.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I ask her, bewildered and afraid.
She’s talking now of a time when we were students, some rare occasion when we spoke of what we had done that summer, and how startled she was by the account I’d given, the shock it had triggered within her.
‘You’re not a bad person, Nick. You have a good heart, I know. But you were a child. And you were so upset that day. I suppose I’ve blamed Luke, and your mother, and him,’ she says, glancing at Murphy, but I can’t bring myself to look at him, or the others. Instead I stand stock still, hardly blinking, waiting for the terrible pressure in my head to ease.
‘But the truth is we’re all to blame for what happened that day,’ Katie says, her hands held out, talking to me, but to Lauren too, wanting to share something with her of what happened to her half-sister.
‘But, Nick, it wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t part of the game. It was your anger that did it. An anger she tapped into, not knowing how raw you were, how shocked to the bone over what Luke had told you. She didn’t know it. She was an innocent. It was frightening to watch and frightening to remember, but you have to try, Nicky – you have to try to remember – because the anger that came out of you that day, it killed a little girl.’
I have a strange feeling of vertigo, as if the world is tilting, as if I’m back in the water, my footing unsure as the riverbed sways and pulls away from underneath me. I need to anchor myself, find a way of rooting my thoughts, saving myself from this dizzying doubt. Instinctively, I look to Murphy.
He stands at the edge of things, thin, withered, shoulders slumped in weariness or defeat. Mack, beside him, is a panther waiting to pounce, the shot-gun an extension of his arm, while Lauren looks at me with pity in her eyes. All four of them, expectant.
I try to remember, but it’s so dark in the river, the water murky with the mud stirred up by our presence in it. Hidden rocks slippery beneath my feet. The shock of movement, the feathery brush of something against my ankle – a fish or some water-borne creature nipping at my heels.
I can see Luke standing with his hands on his hips, shoulders squared, his desire to win pulsing through the water. And that girl – her square face pale under the trees, a spray of freckles on her upper arms, hair in bunches that made her seem younger than she was, her nose wrinkling as she grinned – mischief in her laughing look, mischief that masked the vacancy in her understanding.
Still it’s all so unclear. Was she standing beside Luke? The grin she gave me – her stuttering laugh. I remember it with a sudden push of irritation.
Then, straight as an arrow, it comes at me – another image – writhing limbs, an entanglement – Luke whispering in my ear at dead of night: ‘They were humping – do you know what that means? Climbing on the back of her, his thing in hers, like the dogs we saw on the street. I saw them.’
The mouldy smell of the tent against my face, smoke from the campfire beyond, the murmuring of the adults, the rise and fall of Katie’s breathing from her sleeping bag on the other side of Luke. All of it comes back to me now. My mother. The priest. A boiling mass of wrongness. It stirs inside me as it did all those years ago, and with it the great swell of anger.
That girl’s face – freckles on her nose, new front teeth, a stupid grin: I see it again and feel an overwhelming desire to crush it.
‘Nick,’ Katie says desperately. ‘You must remember?’
‘No!’ I say wildly.
The ‘no’ is not a denial and I think she knows this: she says nothing. It’s the need I have for it all to stop – to hold back the flood of memory, not the false memory I have lived with all these years, but the horrible reality of truth.
‘Please,’ I say to her. ‘No more.’
I look up, see the trees and sky, feel my brain rocking in my skull, and a sinking in my chest, as if everything inside me is on the verge of collapse. Mack steps back, lifts the shot-gun and blows on the rifle-sights. The butt is stained with my blood. Instinctively, I brush my fingertips over the cut on my cheek and feel it sting.
‘Is he going to confess?’ Mack barks at Murphy.
Murphy clasps his hands but says nothing.
I remember the first day we scampered down here to explore as children, while our parents set up camp. The three of us perched on this bank peering down into the murky waters, the river dark, Katie asking: ‘Do you think there’s anything dangerous in there?’
Why is that memory so clear, while the one event I need to recall remains swathed in a cloud of forgetting?
Fear, I suppose, but I detect anger too, anger for allowing myself to forget, and for creating a false memory to rely on, as if it could in some way dispel whatever guilt I’m feeling.
The water is still and cool in the dappled shade. Mack is still bristling, clutching the shot-gun, but at this moment I don’t care. The water draws me to it. I lean forward and dip my hands into it, watch the surface break and settle, forming its own silence around the stillness of my hands. Everything slows right down – the beating of my heart, the furious trajectory of my thoughts, my laboured breathing. And it is then – right then – that it begins.
The memory starts in my hands. Just as when I sit at the piano and feel my fingers reaching for the music, so it comes to me now: I feel the coolness of water about my hands and watch it tracing a line around my wrists, feel the faint pull of surface tension, and this time when I look down, I see again my hands as they were when I was a boy – smaller, smoother, without the coarse hairs that sprout from my forearms. I see those hands, the veins thin and blue, hands that hold a girl under water, the water cold and heavy, and in a sudden uncertain shimmer of memory, I trace the hand to its arm, and from the arm to the shoulder, from the shoulder to the neck and from the neck to the head.
It could be either of us. Me or Luke. Of course it could. We’re brothers. We’re made of the same stuff, the same muscle and sinew, the same blood.
And yet.
And yet this time what comes back to me is not what I remembered in the hotel room only a few hours ago, or what I’ve been telling myself for a lifetime, but something else – something more frightening than the calamity that has for years shaken me. I feel it in my hands, the way the water holds them, as if they’re trapped, and something pulses along my veins – the ghostly flicker of an old rage and how it was sparked to life that day in the water. I sense the pull of truth in it and, despite my fear, I remain still and in the moment, because I know the importance of it now.
I am standing in the river, shivering. Luke is shouting at Katie. Amy has left and he wants Katie to take her place. I can hear the urgency in his voice although his words come intermittent
ly, water having leaked into my inner ear. I watch him moving towards the bank, towards Katie, but she is refusing to come in.
Then Cora snickers. I look at her, the grin on her face. She is low down in the water, so low only her head and her hands are above the surface. Through her open mouth she is taking in water, then spitting it out, grinning all the while. I don’t like her much and don’t want her as my partner. Her and her stupid laugh – hak-hak-hak, like something’s stuck in her throat.
‘Luke!’ I shout. ‘Just leave her! Let’s go!’
‘No!’ comes the furious reply.
‘Aw, come on. I’m freezing!’
I can see Katie stirring on the bank, her eyes darting between us.
He’s shouting at her again, and I can’t hear what he’s saying – the water in my ears makes a sucking noise and I try to shake it out. Movement behind me, that girl and her rabbitty teeth, spitting out water, saying something I don’t quite catch.
I turn to her. ‘What did you say?’
Her eyes, round and staring above the water, a smirk on her face.
‘Your mum’s a slut,’ she says, her mouth opening in a gaping smile of delight.
‘Shut your mouth,’ I say quietly.
‘Slut,’ she says, lowering her mouth into the water.
‘Take it back.’
She bobs up, the word on her lips again. ‘Slut, slut, slut.’
‘I said take it back,’ I say, my voice louder now.
She gives me the full beam of her moronic smile and submerges her whole head. I’m left staring at the place where the water ripples and grows still, until she bursts from it in a spurting upward movement, and screams with delight: ‘Slut! Slut! Slut!’
‘Shut up!’ I roar. ‘Shut the fuck up!’
‘Your mum’s a slut! Your mum’s a slut!’ she says, in her sing-song voice, and I reach out to grab her but she backs away.
I spring after her, driven by rage, lose my footing and fall into the water. When I emerge, gasping, she is standing, laughing her stupid laugh – hak-hak-hak! – and I lunge for her again. I grab a fistful of hair, bunched behind her ear. I yank on it hard, and she gives a little cry, then starts laughing again.
