by Karen Perry
‘Take it back!’ I scream at her, but she just keeps on laughing, and I see her big teeth flashing and want to smash them with a rock from the riverbed.
I don’t know where Luke or Katie is – they have faded away, leached out of this scene along with all the colour. There is only me and Cora and her toxic laughter touching every sore spot inside me so my insides are prickling from a thousand needles, alive with pain and fury. My mother and Father Murphy, humping, fucking. So wrong. So utterly and completely wrong. The sting of betrayal lashes me, flays me to the quick.
Slut. All day the word and its poison are seeping inside me, getting into my bloodstream, but it’s a silent passenger, and I’ve hardly felt its slow colonization. Even when I have my hands on her shoulders, pressing her down now into the water, even when I feel the emotion boiling in my temples and in my throat, I still don’t realize I’ve been taken over. That I’m not myself. All I want is to silence her. All I want is for her to stop saying that word. And even though she has stopped, even though she can’t say anything because I’m holding her down so hard while she thrashes and flails, still it’s not enough, because the word is out there now. She has sent it out there, screaming into the world.
I need her never to have uttered it. So I push her down with one hand and I bunch my other into a fist and I send it into her face again and again.
The water slows the speed at which my fist travels, so I exert even greater force, spread my fingers and scratch and claw at her face, as if I’m a wild animal.
Because, right then, I am.
I was.
Somehow by holding her under water and scraping at her face, as her thrashing dies away and her limbs grow still, it’s as if I can take the word back, take the act back, and erase it completely. That is all that matters.
And I do.
And the blood that’s released from her mouth, a ribbon of red, acts as her surrender.
But the word is still out there, so when my brother comes and pulls at my arms, screaming into my face, and I elbow him, it’s because I have to blot out the word. That is all that matters.
When Luke finally shakes me free and drags me to the bank, I’m hardly aware of him wading back into the water and pulling the girl out, of the moments while he drags her onto the bank with water streaming from her hair, her face scratched and bleeding, her mouth hanging open, her eyes staring up at the sky, and him screaming into her face – ‘Wake up!’ I watched it all as if from afar, as if it wasn’t happening to me but to somebody else. As if it was happening to the one I knew best – my brother.
To Luke.
And then Katie runs to us, crying and shaking. And I remember the panic. Luke’s shock, his anger. ‘Jesus, Nick, you killed her. She’s dead.’
How scared I am. Katie’s screams filling my ears.
‘Shut up, Katie!’ Luke shouts, and her screams subside.
‘What will we do?’ she says. ‘What’s going to happen? What’s Mam going to say? What’s …’ The questions spill out of her until Luke finally speaks.
‘Shut up!’ he says again, taking control. ‘We can’t leave her like this. If they find out what’s happened … what’s really happened, we’re dead …’
‘What do we do?’ Katie says again.
‘We have to cover it up,’ Luke says, suddenly sounding older.
We pull Cora back into the river. She’s heavier than I’d imagined, her body sinking quickly into the water, then coming back to the surface, strands of hair over her cut face.
Slowly, quietly, the three of us take her, pulling gently so she moves slowly through the river. Katie is crying and Luke snaps at her to stop snivelling. Already I feel myself retreating into my shell – where there is silence, where no one can touch me. Luke snaps at me, tells me to stop being so useless, says we need to bring her upriver to where the river widens, where a stray hippo might come and find her, or even a lion venturing to the banks might sniff her out. Here on the savannah, all manner of birds and mammals seek out flesh to consume – hyenas, vultures, marabou storks.
But when it comes to it, we don’t leave her out in the open waiting to be discovered. Instead, we cover her up. And he is gentle, my brother, as he lays her down on a muddy flat above the water’s surface, tucked into the lip of the bank. He takes care to make her comfortable. I know that sounds wrong. But he does.
Luke and Katie scramble about, bringing branches and sticks to cover the girl: cover Cora. Thinking back on it, I can’t quite believe they acted together without saying much to each other, as if they both knew they had to do this, as if our lives depended on it. A sudden movement, and Katie screams – the sound so loud it fills the air.
‘She moved!’ Katie says, pointing at the bank, at Cora, and we all turn and stare.
Luke goes to her, touches her, and I feel the breath I’m holding in my chest grow large and sore, pushing at my ribs as I wait for her to move again, to sit up and grin at us, to tell us it was all a joke, all part of the game, and that she, Cora, is the ultimate winner.
Luke reaches for her arm, and it falls by her side, hand plunging into the water with a splash, and Katie screams again. This time, Luke swings around and pushes her, and she falls into the river. ‘Shut up! Just shut the fuck up, would you?’
Then he turns. His face is white, eyes blistering with a look I’ve never seen before. For just a moment, I don’t know him. I don’t recognize my brother. I stand in the water as Luke throws the last handful of leaves and dirt over the girl’s outstretched hand. Then the three of us wait for somebody to say something. But there is no sermon, no word of comfort. There is only one word and it comes from Luke: ‘Quick!’ He grabs my hand, waking me from my catatonic state, and we run.
We ran – Luke and I – Katie coming after us, the wind filling my ears with a strange silence, pushing any words I looked for further into me, further than I knew was possible – and still we kept running.
It’s like I’ve stumbled onto a hidden place, a place I had known about for years, but denied to myself existed, a place where all of these memories waited. I have pushed the rusty gate to this secret garden and walked in. But no flowers grow here. There is only decay.
Shouting. Urgent, arguing voices. I’m back. Only now do I realize I’m crying, that I’ve been lost in a reverie while the others have waited for me to remember. But they haven’t just waited, they’ve been arguing. Mack must have been recounting his grievances for Katie, detailing his litany of bad luck, his lost job, his lost family, his time in jail, and she has listened, I can tell, but is wary of him, suspicious, and defiant, too, in the way she is standing up to him because now he is ordering her about, pointing the gun recklessly to where he wants her to stand and she is saying: ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’
Lauren reaches for my hand, but I pull away. My hands have killed a child. How can I ever let anyone hold them again? I try to explain, but the words are swallowed by the heaving sob that comes out of me. There, on the banks of the river, I stand as I did when I was a child, but I’m not a child any more. I turn to Mack: ‘You want my confession? Well, here it is.’
His face tightens, eyes squinting, and still he holds the gun high, keeps it pointed at me. But he’s listening now, waiting to hear. And so are the others, because I’m telling them too, as I let it all out.
And with my words, with the confession I make, there comes a hush – as if it’s not just the people around me who are listening, but everything around us: the animals and birds and insects, the dust on the ground, the limbs of the trees, the running water of the river, other ghostly presences, all urging me on, accepting my words as a final testimony, so that by the time I finish there’s a kind of awed silence.
Murphy looks relieved, as if he has finally let out the tension he has been holding inside himself for a very long time – his body goes limp. Lauren’s eyes are filled with pity. Only Mackenzie looks unmoved. The butt of the gun is held tightly under his arm, his fingers supporting the barrel.
‘I don’t know why my mother said anything about you, Mackenzie, I honestly don’t,’ I say, hoping to alleviate the man’s grievance. ‘It was dishonest of her. It was wrong. But she’s not here, and I can’t speak for the dead.’
His nostrils flare, and the edges of his mouth pull into a kind of sneer. ‘Thirty years,’ he snarls. ‘Thirty years, and this is all I can expect?’
‘I also have a confession.’ It’s Katie. Her voice is resolute, firm and clear. She looks to me – and there’s support in her eyes. She straightens her back, suggesting a kind of solidarity between us. ‘You see,’ she says, ‘in a way, I started it.’
Her dark eyes are fixed on the water below, staring back into the field of memory.
‘I was the one who told her. That day, in the river, before it happened … Your mum came down to check on us. She told Luke he wasn’t allowed in the river, and he argued with her until she gave in. Do you remember?’
I think of my mother, standing under the trees in her navy sundress, tiny white polka dots speckled along the hem. ‘Yes,’ I say faintly, wiping the tears away with my sleeve.
‘The younger sister, Amy, was sitting alongside me, watching your mum and Luke talking. And after Sally left, Amy turned to me and said: “Why doesn’t he like his mum?” And I said …’ she falters, swallows hastily, then goes on ‘… I said, “He doesn’t like her because she’s a slut.”’
The light swirls about us. The sky darkens. My mind goes to the undergrowth, as if something there is watching, waiting for its prey.
‘Cora was there too. She heard what I said. And if I hadn’t said it, if I’d kept it to myself, then maybe, maybe …’ Momentarily, she is overcome. But then she finds her voice again, more resolute now. ‘I put the word into Cora’s mouth. She wasn’t trying to wound anyone. She was simple, innocent. She had no understanding of what it meant. But when she heard me say it, she just repeated it. That’s all. There was no intent. But you couldn’t see, Nick, because of how mixed-up and vulnerable you were that day. And I was the one who gave her the word so, you see, we were all to blame.’
She stops, biting her upper lip, fighting tears. But she can’t hold them back and I watch the movement of her shoulders as she cries silently. Even after this show of solidarity, I don’t offer any words of comfort – I have none to give. Nor do I reach out to touch her. It’s as if some canker has been taken from my body by the most awful medicine and now I can only stand there, exhausted and spent.
Katie steps next to me. She wipes the tears beneath her eyes and turns so that we are both facing Mack. ‘There – you have the truth now.’
Murphy raises his head, stops mumbling whatever prayers he has been saying to himself, and looks to Mack, his two hands clutching the shot-gun. I feel the defiance in him, the disgust. If he feels disappointment in the confession he has longed for, if he feels that it is a frustrating anti-climax, he doesn’t show it. The danger that has been rumbling inside him seems to build into a crescendo as he takes a step towards me and I see the tremble of anger passing through him.
‘The lies you people tell. Your mother. You! You are just as bad as her! Letting other people take the blame for your actions.’ Standing close to me now, I can smell the acrid stench of his self-righteous indignation, see the danger of his intent in the curl of his lip.
‘Thirty years I have lived under the lie your mother told. Thirty years.’ He whispers it, and within those hissed words, I can feel the terrible weight of what he has suffered, and the longing within him to face his accuser, to exact his revenge. But my mother is gone. There’s only me now.
‘You killed that girl,’ he says to me now, and we are so close that I can feel the heat of his breath on my face. ‘You killed her. Not me. So tell me this: why is it that I’m the one who has had to pay for it?’
I know that whatever I say is not going to be enough. I can also tell from the way his shoulders are set that he wants more than a confession, some form of restitution that Murphy had not reckoned on. And I have an idea of what it is … and I’m ready.
The clouds are low and thick and dark above us. There’s a dense and moving beauty to them as if the heavens have something to say about all of this and the only way to express it is through the elemental movement above us. Yes, the clouds are heavy and beautiful, threatening at the same time to burst at any minute.
Lauren looks to me, and the distance seems to grow between us. Is this the woman who had said she would share her life with me no more than a few weeks ago? Her eyes say it all: they are reflective, sad. There is something within them – not forgiveness, but understanding. I think of all the time she knew who I was and feel a wave of shame wash over me. Now, more than anything, I want her forgiveness.
Whatever prayers Murphy wanted to say to bless this cursed place cannot absolve me. Within those ancient invocations, there can be only a cold comfort, the comfort of finality, captured in the fateful cadences that have been spoken over and over again, year after year, to an unseen God.
A crack above us and rain comes down in warm, heavy bursts. I want it to pound me into the earth and wash me clean away.
Then Mack raises the shotgun slowly to my head, so that I’m staring down the barrel and beyond it to Mack’s deadly gaze, ready now.
There will be no prayers after all.
I see again the fleeing figure of Amy, a shadow from the past, race across the riverbank. I see, too, the vacant eyes of Cora beneath the water looking straight into mine – not with anger or malice, but with a simple lack of understanding – asking not stop, but why.
Why?
‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you,’ Mack says calmly, his aim fixed and sure.
The trees around me seem to close in and out like a terrible wing-beat. The grey sky rushes towards me and contracts; the river in my wavering mind appears to break its banks. Murphy’s eyes open wide, Katie says something I can’t make out, and Lauren is transfixed. It feels, too, as if other presences have gathered here, finally, to witness the end.
‘One good reason,’ Mack says again.
I watch his finger tighten on the trigger. Silence around us. Listening ghosts.
‘No,’ I tell him, and close my eyes. ‘I can’t think of any.’
AFTERWORD
Nick
A light rap on the door. I know who it is: Karl.
He has been coming every day, stopping by to help. I think he knows that without him I would crack.
This morning, he is supportive and business-like.
‘Tord Gustavsen,’ he says, holding up a disc. ‘Can I put it on?’
‘Be my guest,’ I say, and he kneels down to the stereo. Soon enough the gentle jazz piano comes on, something to soothe the troubled mind.
‘I’ll brew the coffee,’ he says then. And I’m grateful again for his kind ministrations.
‘Strong,’ I call after him, as he enters the kitchen.
‘Would I brew anything but strong coffee?’ he calls back.
I start to place Lauren’s things in the first box. Some books to begin with – in they go, one after another.
I can smell the coffee brewing, hear the drip of the filter. So many times I’ve smelt the same rich roast and heard the same comforting sound, but that was when it was me who was making the coffee and Lauren was waiting, chatting to me about her research or her colleagues at the university.
Karl returns with two mugs of steaming coffee. ‘Now, what’s the order of the day?’
‘Boxes.’ I point and he nods.
Karl has been a good friend. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve made several fairly serious attempts to drink myself to death. If it wasn’t for Karl, perhaps I would have succeeded. He came to my aid, nursing me like I was his own child, denying me booze and forcing various teas down my throat. ‘Swallow it, brother,’ he would say gently. ‘It will do you good.’
And if he noticed the terrible despair his use of the word ‘brother’ brought out i
n me, he never let on. In many ways, I owe my life to him.
There’s masking tape on the floor beside me, but I’m reluctant to start sealing any boxes yet – the gesture feels too final. Besides, it’s not clear where Lauren wants me to send them. It seems she hasn’t settled on one place. She is visiting her mother in Michigan, she has told me, but isn’t planning to stay there.
I bought the masking tape at the shop across the street. Life goes on in all its frantic mayhem – but not in the still space the apartment has become. The delivery truck still stops outside the bar downstairs each week with a screech. The street vendors gather, call out and do their business, and the bar below maintains its custom – a steady tide of people coming and going. There remains a military presence throughout the city.
Everything is, in many ways, as it was. Life goes on.
That’s what I have to tell myself. That’s what Karl says.
And yet how can it?
‘How can I help?’ Karl asks, and I tell him that we’ll just have to go through as much as we can.
It is already two months since Lauren left for the States. Part of me wanted to beg her to come back to me, but the other part – the better part – knew she needed time away from me to think about us. When she came to Nairobi to get some of her things, I pulled myself together for the few hours she was here, tried to make a show of decency, of sobriety, so that we could talk, if nothing else.
I remember leaning against the door-frame, hands in my pockets, watching her silently travelling around our bedroom, putting things into the holdall open on the bed. I watched the careful movements of her hands, the grace with which her body moved, her composure and self-possession amazing to me while I could barely hold myself together.
We hadn’t talked about things – not to any real or meaningful extent – and there were so many questions I had for her, so many wonderings and confusions, that it was hard to know how to start, and I was fearful of approaching it, as if the first thing I put to her would lead to a great unravelling. In the end, it all came down to one question: ‘How long have you known?’ I asked.
