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 in 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.
She stopped what she was doing, looked down at the T-shirt in her hand. ‘For a long time,’ she said quietly, putting it into her bag.
‘From when we first met?’
‘From before. I sought you out …’
‘You sought me out?’
Her eyes were gentle and full of pity. ‘Yes, Nick. My mom told me something of what had happened … I became so curious about her other life, her life in Africa, her husband here, my sisters, that I asked more questions,’ she said, speaking faster now, her voice low but urgent, as if she were reliving an exciting episode in her life. ‘But the answers only fuelled my desire to know more. Instead of satisfying my curiosity, what my mom told me only fed it. Even before she heard of her husband’s death here, I’d planned to come to Kenya, to study, to visit his house and see his grave …’
‘Unlike Amy?’
‘Amy never wanted to return. She prefers to leave things in the past. She’s married to a dentist in Ohio, has two children, and that’s her life … Funny how things work out.’
‘And me? How did you know I was living in Nairobi?’
‘Father Murphy told me. He told my mother her husband had died, so when I arrived in Kenya, I came to him and gradually he told me about you, your brother and your parents,’ she says. She’s taking her time, choosing her words carefully. ‘And knowing that you were living in the same city only made me curious. Murphy told me you were a musician – he even told me what club you played in.’
Her eyes light up and she smiles, but then the seriousness returns to her features. ‘And when we talked, I still couldn’t believe that you were the person I had been told about … I didn’t know that I would fall for you, Nick. I didn’t want to, but it happened.’
I thought of a night, not long after we’d met, that we’d spent lying together in each other’s arms, the night air bearing down heavily, how I’d felt so utterly at peace with this woman, as if for the first time in my life I could be myself without apology or pretence. And even though I had known her only a few weeks, already I was sure that what I felt for her – the love that had blown up inside me – would last my whole life.
I remember thinking that there was no way I could tell her what had happened back then. So I kept it secret.
When I told her about myself, living here as a youngster, returning to Ireland, then travelling and coming back, I remember how still she was in my arms, as if she was holding her breath.
I thought at the time that it was the attentive awe of new love.
Little did I know it was because of what she knew about me. How dangerous that must have felt to her … how utterly strange to be held by the hands that had done that terrible thing.
‘So why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you say something?’
‘I was afraid,’ she said, sitting down on the bed now, knowing it couldn’t be avoided any longer.
‘Of what?’
Her brow furrowed with consternation, and I saw her struggle, for a moment, with her thoughts.
‘I felt so strongly about you. Even then, I knew you’d had something to do with Cora’s death. And to know this thing about you – that you were there when Cora was killed – it was so huge, so difficult to fathom. And I didn’t want to believe it – I really didn’t,’ she said. ‘I knew it was true but I persuaded myself that it didn’t matter. That what happened was in the past – that you were only a boy then, too young to know or be motivated by any real malice.’ She steadied herself. ‘I told myself it had happened so long ago – before I was even born – that what’s done is done. I made a decision that I was going to try not to let the past get between us.’
I nodded and remained standing, but inside I was starting to collapse.
‘It’s late,’ she said then. ‘I’d better go.’
I watched her get to her feet, pull her bag to her and zip it closed. Something in me rose against her leaving and I had to stop myself barricading the door, refusing to let her go. But I knew she had moved on and I couldn’t blame her.
She leaned in and kissed me briefly on the cheek – not the mouth – and it seemed dismissive, somehow final. Then she passed me, and before she reached the stairs, she stopped at the piano, touched the lid. ‘It’s closed,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you playing?’
‘No.’
‘But why not?’
How to explain it? That my hands no longer worked – that I no longer trusted them? That since they had been the conduit of the memory in the river that day, they had seemed filled with brackish water, lifeless. Sometimes I caught myself looking down at them as if they were not my own. The hands that had taken the life of a young girl.
But I didn’t say any of that to Lauren, although I think somehow she understood.
‘Take care of yourself, Nick,’ she said, then descended the stairs and left.
Karl finishes his coffee and places the cup on the table:
‘Let’s go out tonight,’ he says, looking at his watch. ‘I have to go now, but I’ll stop by at, say, seven thirty. It’ll be good to get out.’
It’s not a question and, despite my reluctance, I know he’ll insist.
‘Goodbye, my friend,’ I say.
He grins at me. ‘See you later.’
It was Karl who finally tracked Murphy down to a small hospice outside the city, during those first weeks when I was barely holding it together.
‘How did you find him?’ I asked Karl.
‘Persistence,’ he replied.
I took down the address from Karl, fired up the motorbike and drove to where the graffiti spreads like wildfire.
‘Father,’ I said, entering the small yellow-tinted, acrid-smelling ward.
He was lying on a narrow bed, his head propped on a pillow, a thin white sheet covering his shrunken, skeletal frame. His eyes were half open, sunk deep into his skull. ‘Nick,’ he said. ‘Nick, you came.’
‘You didn’t make it easy,’ I said, sitting down on the wicker chair next to the bed.
‘I’m so sorry, Nick. I didn’t want to cause anyone any more trouble.’
‘No trouble, Father.’
‘There’s not long for me now, Nick,’ he said, in a frail whisper.
‘I want to thank you,’ I said.
Instead of answering, he waved a hand.
‘You saved my life, Father. By the river. I thought he was going to pull the trigger.’
‘I think you called me an iconoclast once.’
‘But not an arms-carrying one.’
He smiled faintly. ‘Funny the things you do. Things you never expect of yourself. Perhaps God has a sense of humour after all.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘It was something a friend gave me after the office was broken into one time. A small pistol for security reasons. For show, really. I never kept the thing loaded,’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘I’m not even sure why I took it with me to the Masai Mara. But that day something told me I should.’
‘You had no idea you would have to use it?’
‘No,’ he croaked.
I remembered his hand trembling, the pistol wavering as he took aim and told Mack to put his own gun down.
‘My fear was that I would have to pull the trigger …’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘It was enough to have the gun,’ he said, looking past me. ‘It turned him away.’
‘Enough to scare him, yes,’ I said. ‘It was a brave thing to do, Father.’
‘Call me Jim.’
‘I’m very grateful, Jim.’
My mind turned again to that day, and the moment when Mack looked at Murphy, the pistol held tightly in his shaking hand, the slow spread of a smile crossing Mack’s face – the sight of a priest with a gun ridiculous to him. He gave a hollow laugh, and realized, perhaps, that he could never exact his revenge, because I was not Sally. I was just a substitute – a poor one at that – and killing me would not satisfy his desire for justice. He lowered the shotgun and turned away from us, the rain coming down heavily, hitting the trees and the surface of the river, pelting the land and all who stood there. I saw the defeated slump in his shoulders, the fight gone out of him. One last look back at us, water streaming over his face, before he disappeared into the trees. I never saw him again.
Murphy coughed and reached for a glass of water.
‘Let me,’ I said. I picked up the glass and offered it to his parched lips. He sipped a little water, some of which dribbled onto his chin.
I took a napkin from his bedside table and wiped his mouth gently. He breathed in deeply and sank further into the bed.
‘I don’t have much energy,’ he said.
I took his hand in mine and we sat there for a time, neither of us saying anything, the ceiling fan turning in steady revolutions as the traffic streamed by outside.
‘May I ask for your forgiveness, Nicholas?’ he asked.
‘What for, Jim?’
‘For any pain I’ve caused you over the years.’
I didn’t need to say anything. Murphy’s eyes closed, and when he had fallen asleep, I left. It was later that night when I got the call to say he had passed away.
Another funeral. This time in a cemetery next to the hospice: me and Karl, dozens of locals from Kianda, clergy and aid workers gathered with the hospice staff to say farewell to Father Murphy.
In the months that follow, life falls into a pattern. I go to the office every day, sifting through documents, trying to understand the accounting nightmare, negotiating with the banks, attempting to bring calm and order to the situation. It does not come naturally to me, this line of business, but I can dig my heels in and be diligent when I have to, and something deep within me is driving me to do this.
When I am alone in the office, and the street outside has fallen quiet, I sometimes catch myself engrossed in these lists of figures, and it comes as such a surprise to me, that I wonder what my father would make of me now. Dad, the prudent accountant, and me, his renegade son. I can’t even call myself a musician any more. The piano lid remains closed.
I find that, as the days go on, a sense of nervous excitement builds within me in the hope that Lauren might call. And she does – every so often. Our relationship has changed and there is a maturity to it, in the sense that we are no longer wide-eyed innocents. But, still, I have to be realistic. Lauren is back in America. A reconciliation is unlikely, and I wish her well, though I find it hard to let go.
One day shortly before the start of the rainy season, Julia rings. It’s been a long time since I heard her voice, but I recognize it. The Dublin accent, the mellow tones.
‘It’s good to hear you,’ I say.
‘And you.’ Her voice is quieter, calmer than before, suggesting she has accepted Luke’s death and is in the process of moving on. ‘I thought you’d like to know,’ she says, ‘that the house – your parents’ home – is finally going to be demolished.’
‘Oh.’ The news takes me by surprise.
‘The builder went bust, as you know,’ she explains. ‘The bank has sold it on to another developer.’
‘When?’
‘I understand that the sale has already gone through and planning permission has been applied for. The word is that the bulldozers will be in before the summer.’
‘I’ll have to come over,’ I say instinctively.
I hear her draw breath in surprise, and the truth is, I’ve surprised myself.
‘Are you sure you want to?’ she asks gently. ‘That house holds so many memories – good and bad.’
‘I think I need to, Julia.’
And so I make the arrangements, book the flights, and find myself, once again, in the chill climate that is Dublin.
Everything is familiar. And everything is different. I feel older returning. I know I am, but this time I feel much older. As if my youth has passed me by. I may not be middle-aged, but my youth is gone. It’s not just the lines about my eyes, or the way the clothes hang on my body, it’s the slight stiffness that has grown into my joints, the weariness of my movements.
Before I go to the house, there is someone I must meet.
At a café on Dawson Street, she is waiting for me. I see her at the back, her chin resting on her hand, the ghost of a smile on her face as she watches me negotiating tables and waiters wearing long linen aprons. When I finally reach her, she gets to her feet and, without saying anything, I hold my arms open for her and feel her come into my embrace. For a moment, I just hold her there, my eyes closed, thinking: This is what it feels like to come home.
She pulls back to look at me. ‘Nick,’ she says happily.
‘It’s good to see you, Kay.’
As I take my seat opposite, my eyes pass over her and notice the changes. She seems stronger somehow, as if she’s been working out, making herself fit. The shadows under her eyes have faded and youth has come back to her face. She’s cut her hair short, a cropped bob that skims the line of her jaw, and its sharpness suits her, sitting well with the crisp white shirt she wears, the minimal jewellery. I take in these changes, and wonder if there’s a new love in her life. But I don’t ask.
Instead we talk about the house that’s to be demolished, and when I skirt around her questions as to how I feel about it, she takes the hint and backs off.
‘Where are you staying?’
‘I’m at Julia’s,’ I say, and watch her eyebrows shoot up in surprise. ‘I know, I know, but what can I say? She offered, and I’m broke after the flights, so …’ She laughs, and I go on, serious now: ‘Besides, it felt like the right thing to do.’
‘And how is Julia?’
‘She’s okay. Still upset obviously, but better than I expected.’
In fact, Julia has been something of a revelation. She has surprised everyone with the way she has taken on Luke’s business debts, tackling his arrears, battling tooth and nail against repossession.
‘So what about you?’ I ask. ‘What about your shining career?’
She rolls her eyes and looks down at her cup. It’s coffee today – not a whiff of alcohol between us – and judging by Katie’s fresh-faced appearance, my guess is that lately she’s cleaned up her life. Not once in the hour we spend together does she duck outside for a smoke.
‘It’s fine,’ she says, and heaves a dramatic sigh. Then, flashing me a smile, she says: ‘I’m working on a – a little sideline.’
‘Oh?’
‘A book about the financial crisis.’
‘Really?’
She shrugs, then grins. ‘Everyone else is doing it. I figured I’d throw my hat into the ring.’
She says it casually, but I can tell that she’s excited about her book, enlivened by it.
For the rest of the time, we talk around the edges of what happened – I tell her about Murphy, about the work in Kianda, what I’m doing now.
‘And Mackenzie?’ she asks.
‘There’s neither sight nor sound of him. Perhaps he’s gone back to his own village.’
She considers what I have said, looks at me with concern and says, ‘But aren’t you afraid he’ll come back and seek you out?’
I think back to those fearful eyes, the hesitant retreat of the man, his pride broken, his anger misdirected, his disappointment evident in the way he carried himself away from us that day … how he skulked off into the wilderness. And so I say, with little reservation: ‘No, I don’t think Mackenzie will be coming back.’
It seems that neither of us can bring ourselves to discuss what actually happened by the river. Nonetheless, an understanding has crept into our conversation – the sense that we have forgiven each other, even if we aren’t all the way to forgiving ourselves.
As the hour draws to a close, and Katie looks at her watch, I realize I probably won’t see her again – not for a very long time – and despite the joy I have felt in her company during this brief visit, or maybe because of it, I can’t help the wave of sadness that surges over me as she prepares to leave.
‘Have you heard from Lauren?’ she asks.
It’s a question I’ve been waiting for. Only the other day, Lauren had rung me and there was a nervous urgency to her words. She wanted to know how I’d feel about her coming back to Nairobi. She said where she was just didn’t seem like home. What did I think? Was it a crazy idea?
I had tried to remain calm. I had tried not to read too much into what she might have been suggesting. So what I told her was this: ‘I don’t think it’s a crazy idea, Lauren. Not at all.’
But I’m not ready to discuss the possibility of a reconciliation between Lauren and me, not with Katie, not yet.
‘We’ve been in touch from time to time,’ I say. ‘We’re still talking …’ I leave it at that and my tone suggests, I think, that that’s as far as I want to go with it.
Her phone buzzes and she reads the incoming text. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she says. ‘I’d love to stay longer, but someone’s waiting for me.’ Her eyes go to her phone. The tenderness she cannot hide confirms my suspicions. A man.
We hug, but I sense the hurry within her now, the desire not to linger, and I remember that, like me, she was never one for goodbyes.
This place has large windows running the length of one wall, and as I wait to pay the bill, I see Katie walk past, her arm looped through a man’s. He’s older – and from the way he is leaning in towards her, I can tell he is listening intently to what she is saying. As they disappear from view, I briefly wonder about him, about what she’s telling him, about what words they whisper when they turn to each other at dead of night.
Another taxi then, another journey home, through Dundrum, up Ballinteer, to Ticknock, Three Rock, and further on up the Dublin mountains and into Wicklow. The place names reel off like a prayer of sorts.
The greenness is electrifying. It seeps from the fields into my vision. I have known another kind of landscape, ever changing, with dust-bowls and savannahs, wildebeest and lions, paupers and kings, but here I am again in the docile port of Dublin, and the question I have asked myself many times since that day in Nairobi is: how do you rub out an event like that from your life – or how did I?
The obvious answer is that it must be some kind of survival mechanism, a way of coping. Well, that’s what I’ve told myself, and that all those years of inarticulate silence somehow sucked the memory out of me, how my time in the trenches of the minor keys mutated in my mind what had happened so that I misremembered.
I’m sure we all do it to some degree, but with me it was not a small thing. I was not denying maltreatment or some misdemeanour for which I was responsible but the most serious sin of all: the taking of another’s life. Thou shalt not kill, we learned in school. Thou shalt not …
Slowly, like chinks of light flooding a cave, I had begun to see part of the picture of what happened. I have slowly come to accept the facts. And what am I left with now? Fragments, echoes, dreams, but also the realization that home is not a place. Home is a state of mind; it is the most honest state of mind where we face ourselves and accept who we are, no matter what.
There is no real way to atone for what I did but I do what I can. My work in Kianda, for a start – it’s a sort of penance, I suppose, something to make amends. If there is a way to make up for one’s sins, it could be by helping others. But I don’t think there is a way to atone properly, not in this life, not for what I did. I think we toil and sin until the end. And that is all.
The car pulls up higher into the hills and closer to the house, and there, sooner than I reckon, I see it, its modest facade, its rendered exterior, grey, mottled, unassuming. It is, in other words, how I remember it. My heart lurches. I’m relieved, you see, that I recognize the place.
After everything that has happened, after the uncertainty of my mind, I worried that what I knew as home, once upon a time, was something else and would be so different from what I knew that I would be thrown into the depths again and not even know it.
I pay the driver and watch him leave. The grass is overgrown; of course it is. The fence is rusted. The gate does not creak. It does not open at all.
I climb over. In my mind’s eye, I can see Lauren that day, pushing the back door open. No need to do that today. The front door has toppled and is lying at the threshold.
Some young rebel has been in with a can of paint and decorated the walls with graffiti. But there are no words. Images, squiggles, who knows what – intelligible only to the initiated. For all I know the graffiti says: stay out, or condemned – either of which would be suitable, either of which could be right.
The hallway is a mess. The kitchen too. I teeter on the threshold to the living room. The stippled ceiling. The shadowy squares on the paintwork that marks the places where paintings once hung. It’s obvious others have been through this house – squatters, developers, prospective buyers – their footprints staining the floors, their disregard and rubbish littering what was once a family home.
I remember one Christmas dressing the tree with Luke in this very room. My parents watching, amused but distant. It’s amazing that one place can hold such memories: my mother bringing dry toast to my bedside as I stayed home from school, hanging onto the banisters when I had whooping cough, my father falling asleep with a bottle of whiskey at the kitchen table. I have to take it as real, even in the light of what I remember in Nairobi.
I walk towards the stairs, place my hand on the rail and shiver. Up there is where I cut Luke down. And as I make my way towards it, I feel myself drawn upwards, so that when I finally stand in that empty room, I feel no ill will, no unhappy presence, only the sharpness of a breeze blowing through the cracks in the broken windows, only the fresh air of the hills, and what it says to me is forgiveness.
I wasn’t sure what I would feel coming back. But now I’m glad I have. It feels like the right thing to do, to say goodbye once and for all to those memories.
And for the first time in my life, I can rightly say I’m looking forward. There may yet be a fresh start for me – that’s how it feels right now.
I have this thought, even with the stark fact confronting me of where I am: this is the place where I cut Luke down. I can’t ignore it. My gaze comes back to it again and again. How I cut him down.
I can’t help but put the questions to the empty room, to my brother if he’s listening: ‘Why, Luke? Why did you do it?
‘Not because of me, I hope.’
I walk to the window – the boards have all been taken down – and look out past the garden and the fields to the city sprawl. I’ve been here long enough. I’m not sad. It’s time to say goodbye. I love you all, I want to say: to the shadows, to the ghosts, to every echo of this old and lovely place.
All my worry about where to be has been shadow-play and nonsense. Maybe there is only one home, one resting place. It is, after all, where we all end up. My mother and father are there. Murphy is there. My brother too.
Before I turn to leave, I whisper one final prayer to the place we once lived. I say to myself, to the house, to whoever is listening: ‘Lord, have mercy on my soul and on those who have gone before. Wait for me.’
It starts with the pictures.
A Thursday morning, much like any other in the office, three of us standing around Reilly’s desk shooting the breeze while we wait for the deputy editor to arrive. The others are giving me flak on account of my appearance – last night’s make-up slipping off my face, my hair still spiky with grips, the collapsed up-do that I haven’t yet brushed out. I’m feeling like I’m only half present. The other half of me is biding my time until I can get back to my desk, finish writing my piece, then high-tail it home to my apartment for a shower and a long sleep.
Colm from Legal says: ‘Jesus, Katie, the smell of booze off you would knock out a horse.’
Beside him Peter sniggers and I smile sweetly. ‘Just doing my job, boys. Sacrificing my sobriety for the scoop, you know how it is.’
And he says, no, he doesn’t, but it’s all fine, really, despite the pain searing my temples and the weariness rising up my legs, like mercury in a thermometer. I’ve been here before. And then Reilly arrives, clearly harassed, as if he has something important to tell us. He sits in his chair, throws the pictures onto his desk and says: ‘Get a load of these.’
The four of us lean in to peer at them and straight away I feel it start.
Pictures of a dead girl floating in a swimming-pool.
‘They just came in,’ Reilly tells us. A death at a party in the early hours of the morning. Drink, drugs, a bunch of students, a game that got out of hand.
Peter is spreading them out now so that they cover half of the desk. The water so clear. The girl, only a teenager, her hair fanning out in the water.
‘Some sicko at the party took these with his phone,’ Reilly explains.
‘We can’t print them,’ Colm says emphatically. ‘There’s no way.’
‘So fucking ghoulish,’ Peter whispers, with an air of fascination. His eyes are soaking them up.
‘Her parents probably haven’t even identified her body yet, and here we are staring at these,’ Colm says, disgusted.
‘We can’t print them, but there’s a story nonetheless,’ Reilly insists, ‘about camera phones and the lack of morality governing their use.’
He’s directing his comments at all of us. I’m listening to him, but I can’t drag my attention away from the pictures. The creamy whiteness of her skin, the reddish cloud of hair spreading in the water. Clothes sticking to her limbs. Her body half turned as if in a slow farewell. Eyes open and unseeing, her mouth frozen into an O of surprise. I imagine all the water leaking into her, filling her, swelling her lungs to bursting point.
Someone says my name.
But I stare at the pictures, transfixed. Not a bubble of air. Just the stillness of that girl beneath a film of water. I look at her and feel the change come over me, that tender place deep inside me prodded with a stick. My toughness vaporizes in a puff of steam.
‘Katie?’ Reilly says again, but I don’t look at him. I don’t look at any of them.
I reach down and grab my bag, urgency consuming me as I stumble away from the death spread on that desk. Without saying a word, I run from them, not stopping until I reach the lift.
I head out onto the grey blandness of Talbot Street, cross the road, without glancing left or right, and go straight into the pub.
‘Whiskey,’ I say to the barman, fumbling for change in my purse.
‘Powers or Jameson?’ he asks, his face betraying neither surprise nor judgement. It’s not even midday.
‘Jameson.’
It’s that kind of pub, walls adorned with framed mirrors and dusty trinkets, horse-racing on the telly, a smell of damp clothing in the air. No matter how early in the day, there’s always some solo drinker in here, hunched morosely over a pint. I take my drink to a quiet corner and wait for my nerves to calm. Nausea stirs in the pit of my stomach and it has nothing to do with my hangover. That girl in the water. A cold shiver goes straight to the soft spot inside me. I close my eyes and wait for it to pass, urging myself to get a grip.
I can feel it coming over me. The tightening, like a belt, around my neck. Every time something like this happens, I feel the belt tightening by a notch. Like when I heard that Ken Yates had been killed in a car crash all those years ago – a notch. And Sally’s funeral last year – another notch. With each little piece of news from the past that trickles through – another notch.
Most of the time, I don’t feel it – the vice about my neck. But then something will happen, like those pictures just now, coming out of nowhere, pictures of a girl and a tragedy completely unrelated to me. That’s when I feel the tentacles of the past reaching out to grasp me so that I can’t breathe, as if I’m the one under water. Only a few weeks ago, in this very pub, I’d felt the belt tighten.
I remember the night vividly. I was sitting with some of the other hacks, a quick pint after work having turned into a session, the telly on in the background. Someone said: ‘Here, turn that up, will you?’ I swivelled in my seat to see the screen, and there was Luke Yates making an impassioned plea to the general public from the sofa of a TV talk-show. Among a panel of entrepreneurs, economists and other talking heads, discussing the downturn in the economy and how we as a nation needed to encourage growth instead of austerity, Luke seemed to be going off-script as he urged the viewers to stop focusing on their own misery, and start looking further afield to see what real suffering was like.
‘This country has always punched above its weight,’ he said. ‘In terms of international standing, in terms of international aid, we have never turned our backs on those whose need is greater than ours. Generations of Irish people have given to help the poor of other countries – from the Trocaire boxes during Lent, to Live Aid, and well before that. When it comes to putting our hands in our pockets to help our fellow man, this country has not been found wanting. But now the storm clouds have gathered, and the bogeymen are here, the IMF, the Troika, and all we talk about is austerity, budget cuts, mortgage arrears, job losses. Fear has taken hold of Ireland. All around me I see people turning in on themselves. And the worst thing about the fear is what it does to us as a nation. It makes us insular. We no longer look out, we seek to protect ourselves, batten down the hatches and hold on to what we’ve got. To hell with everyone else. The fear extinguishes our generosity, it suppresses our collective conscience, it makes us hard, mean and grasping and that, to my mind, is not who we are. That is not who the Irish are.’
On and on he went. The host and some of the others on the panel interjected with talk of job losses and creeping poverty, but Luke would not be silenced.
‘Jaysus, he’s getting a bit worked up,’ someone said.
And it was true. I could see the colour rising in his face as he leaned forward in the seat, barely able to contain himself. Where had it come from, his passion, his social conscience? Like those around me, I’d had no inkling he held such strong principles or beliefs. As I watched, I noticed something else. Everyone had fallen silent. The whole pub was watching: pints were left untouched, each drinker’s attention arrested by the man on the screen, with his smart suit and his media-friendly features, pounding the table and berating us for our failings, urging us not to allow this depression to change our fundamental values, not to allow our human decency to crack under the strain. The studio audience had fallen silent, too, and I had a sudden flash of memory: Luke as a boy, waist deep in the river, vines hanging down from the trees overhead. I felt it then as I watched him up there on the screen – the tightening about my throat – which was strange, because we hardly knew each other now, not really.
He finished what he was saying and there was a pause. Into the brief silence, a man at the bar raised his pint to the telly. ‘Hear, hear.’ As the studio audience broke into applause, people around me raised their glasses, nodding, and for the rest of the night, it was all anyone could talk about.
The next day, the airwaves were clogged with news of Luke and his Late Late Show performance. The papers were full of it. Unlike some stories that have a brief moment, then fade from the public consciousness, this one seemed to stick. It was no surprise when word came down from the editor-in-chief that someone had to write a profile of Luke for the paper. I just hadn’t realized the job would fall to me.
I finish my drink, pick up my bag and go out into the afternoon sun. The rain has cleared and I have the half-formed intention of taking a walk along the canal, knowing that the fresh air and exercise will help clear my thoughts. Instead I sit at a picnic table outside the Barge and email the office, telling them I’ve gone home, sick. After that I switch off my phone and spend the afternoon sipping Coronas and eavesdropping on the conversation at the next table, until the shadows start to lengthen and the air grows chilly. Reggae drifts down from an open window nearby, with traffic noise rising from the streets beyond.
This time yesterday I was applying make-up and pinning up my hair, a red dress laid out on the bed, with an evening bag containing my invitation. A fund-raiser at the Morrison. Not something I desperately wanted to go to, but Luke would be there, with some others I was supposed to be researching. It was out of duty more than pleasure that I headed into the city.
By the time I arrived the party was in full flow, well-dressed and -groomed bodies pressing against each other, imbibing champagne, waitresses in starched white shirts and aprons passing among them with trays of canapés. All of us crammed together in a room on the top floor of a hotel, the windows giving onto the roofs, spires and cranes that punctuated the city’s skyline. Luke and Julia Yates, the glamorous couple, were in the midst of the throng, and I watched them from afar: their practised smiles, the way they worked the room together, in a carefully choreographed routine, their sheen of confidence and privilege. I felt a creeping sense of envy. No, not envy. Rather, it was as though I was confronted with a mirror reflection of myself: a thirty-seven-year-old woman with nothing of permanence in her life. No husband, no children, no home of her own. An apartment she rents – just another in a long list of places she has tried and failed to make into a home. Her job the one constant in her life that keeps her tethered to the earth. There have been times lately when she’s felt that sense of displacement nudging into her work. Even in the office, where she feels safe, she is still in danger of slipping off.
I kept my smile bright, and made my way through the crowd, escaping onto the terrace for air, to suck oxygen back into my body and try to calm the shaking in my hands. I sipped my champagne and felt fury curdle within me, fury at myself. Why had I come to this party? How on earth did I think I might fit in here? At this stage of my life I should know by now when to leave well enough alone.
‘Penny for your thoughts.’
I turned. He was standing outside the glass doors. He closed them behind him so that the noise of the party was contained, and I watched as he came towards me, grinning. My heart was beating fast as he approached. Neat and unruffled in his black tuxedo, hair smoothed off his handsome face, he had a glass of champagne in each hand and offered one to me. ‘Looks like you’re running dry.’
The air had done nothing to dispel my unease. Luke smiled but I couldn’t make out whether it was genuine or just that he was better than me at covering up his discomfort.
‘I was waiting for you to come and say hello,’ he added.
‘You could have come over to me,’ I said, defensive.
‘True.’ He stood alongside me and looked out across the city.
‘I had the feeling we were studiously avoiding one another, Katie.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
And yet I felt the pull between us, and knew he felt it too, just as I knew he was equally aware of the past, which threatened every contact between us. Even the most casual encounter seemed charged with fear, regret or some other elusive emotion.
‘I didn’t think you’d be here,’ he said. ‘After our last conversation, I thought you’d keep your distance.’
His tone, initially jokey, had softened. We were standing together as the last of the sunset cast the roofs of Dublin in a soft glow. I saw the glint of gold on his finger, and watched his hand move to cover my own.
He left it where it was and I made no attempt to move mine. Further down the terrace, a group of smokers were sharing a joke. Their laughter reached us as we stood on the balcony, the shadows deepening in the streets below.
‘It sounded like it might be fun.’
‘You don’t look like you’re having fun, Katie.’
‘But what about you?’ I said, slipping my hand out from under his. ‘The golden boy. The man of the moment.’
A flash of disappointment crossed his face. Then he laughed and made a swatting gesture, as if to bat my words away. It was hard to fathom. At one moment he was a businessman who’d had a couple of lucky breaks. At the next he had been catapulted into an exalted position – man of the people, champion of the masses, his finger on the public pulse. All it had taken was one high-profile interview on national television. The right words spoken at the right time.
‘So where will it all lead?’ I asked, watching him over the rim of my champagne flute. ‘Leinster House? A seat in government? Or how about the presidency? You know, I can see you and Julia settling into life in the Phoenix Park.’
I was joking, of course: there was too much in Luke’s past for him to pull off a successful political career.
‘Jesus, Katie, come off it!’ He laughed. ‘Politics isn’t my bag, you know that.’
But there was something in the way he said it that made me look closely at him. Faint shadows under his eyes, tension in the way he held himself. I wondered whether he had bitten off more than he could chew. But before I could ask him about it, he said, ‘I heard from Nick.’
His brother.
‘Oh?’
‘He rang a few days ago, out of the blue.’
Anxiety stirred in the pit of my stomach.
‘Is he still in Nairobi?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded, then said, ‘Did you know he’s getting married?’
My mouth went dry.
‘An American he met over there, apparently. Another hippie drop-out by the sound of it. They’ve known each other about five minutes.’ He drank some champagne. ‘The wedding is tomorrow.’
Before I could answer, there was movement behind us. The glass door opened and someone came out. Luke instantly drew away from me.
‘Christ, it’s hot in there,’ the man exclaimed, coming towards us and giving Luke a friendly slap on the shoulder. I recognized him at once – Damien Rourke, a self-made multi-millionaire who still resembled a rumpled grocer. He had taken a white hankie from his pocket and was mopping his brow with it, before turning his attention to me. ‘You, is it?’ he asked, in an unfriendly way.
I had once penned a not, entirely, flattering piece about him. ‘In the flesh.’
‘Still writing for that rag, are you?’ he asked, with a grin.
‘A girl’s gotta make a living somehow.’
He snorted, and the conversation moved on. For a while, we talked about politics and the economics of the European crisis. A ribbon of grey cloud hung above the horizon as the sun dipped low. I tried not to glance too much at Luke, conscious of his quiet confidence and the contours of his handsome face. Nick’s getting married. Nick: dark hair falling over his forehead, that introspective gaze and the shy smile, as if something funny or touching had just occurred to him that he didn’t wish to share.
I smiled and nodded along with the conversation, sipped from my glass, all the while feeling numb and telling myself there was no reason why this news of Nick should get to me in this way.
Now, as I sit drinking another Corona, watching the swans gliding along the canal, I think of Nick and try to imagine him waiting at the top of the aisle for some nameless, faceless woman. There had been a bond between us once, Nick and me – I have the scar to prove it. Yet we’re strangers now. I have the urge to text him, to tell him that I’m happy for him, though that doesn’t come anywhere close to describing the emotion passing through me.
Get a grip, I tell myself sternly. Don’t indulge yourself with this maudlin bullshit. I get up from my seat and leave my half-empty beer bottle. Walking briskly back towards the city, I pull my jacket about me, crossing my arms over my chest, as if a cold wind is blowing, even though it’s still warm and, although night has fallen, there’s barely the whisper of a breeze coming off the canal.
I climb into bed and fall into a sleep that feels like oblivion.
When I wake to the sound of someone banging on my apartment’s front door, it feels like the middle of the night. I get up and go to open it, my head still swimming with fatigue. Reilly’s familiar bulk stands under the halo of light cast by the bare bulb above his head.
‘Reilly? What is it? What are you doing here?’
‘I tried calling but your phone is switched off.’
‘It’s the middle of the night, for Chrissakes!’
‘It’s eight a.m., Katie,’ he says, a wrinkle of concern in his voice. ‘Are you okay? I can’t say you look it.’
‘I’m fine,’ I reply, embarrassed now, pulling my robe tight around me.
‘You didn’t come back to the office yesterday.’
‘I was sick.’
I turn away and let him follow me into the flat, hear him closing the door, before he joins me in the kitchen. I flick on the coffee machine, then rest my head on the counter, feeling the ache that stretches from my temples to the small of my back.
I can feel him watching me, so I straighten and busy myself with making coffee because, even though I like him, it feels strange to have Reilly in my kitchen. He’s unlike most of the men who have witnessed me making morning coffee in my bathrobe. Thick hair the colour of oatmeal, a reddish tinge to his beard, which fails to hide the deep lines on either side of his mouth, or the amusement that animates his face. Black leather jacket, grey shirt, faded blue jeans – the hack’s uniform: all of it out of place on him, somehow. I like to imagine that when Reilly goes home, he dons a smoking jacket and velvet slippers.
He accepts a mug of coffee, then casts his eyes around my apartment. It’s all pitiful enough – two rooms painted in pastel shades, a galley kitchen and a bathroom the size of a cupboard, books stacked precariously against the wall and house-plants at different stages of decay. This has been home to me for the past four months, two rooms in a three-storey Edwardian red-brick villa, its façade tired and unloved, in the heart of Dublin.
‘When did you start doing house-calls, Reilly?’
‘You’re my first patient.’
‘Lucky me.’
‘I was worried, Katie. The way you left yesterday –’
‘I was sick …’
He fixes me with a look that reminds me suddenly and painfully of my father.
‘Listen, Katie,’ he says, his voice lowered. ‘What happened yesterday … We were all appalled, repulsed by the thought of some sicko trying to squeeze a few quid from us for pictures of a corpse. But you … you were white as a sheet. And while the rest of us were discussing it, you bolted from the room, hardly stopping to pick up your bag. Eddie at the door said he’d never seen anyone take off out of there and across into Mother Kelly’s as fast.’ He pauses. ‘But, they were just pictures, Katie. And not the worst you’ve seen. You’re a tough cookie. Why did they upset you so much?’
I couldn’t tell him. It would mean peeling away all the layers until we got to the one dark place I didn’t ever want to shine a light on. ‘Listen, Reilly,’ I say. ‘I appreciate your concern, really I do. But I’m fine. Honestly.’
He looks at me in that considering way of his. ‘There’s something else,’ he says. ‘Luke Yates.’
The way he says it makes the words dry up inside me. I see the hesitation on his face and it sends a jolt of alarm right through me.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘You haven’t heard.’ A statement, not a question.
‘Tell me.’ My heart is pounding.
‘I’m sorry to do this, Katie,’ he says softly, ‘but Luke Yates is dead.’