Only We Know Read Free Page A

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 tenderplace 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 thoseyears 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