I suppose I should write it all out here, although I’m not sure I have the strength or the energy to go over it all again. Thinking about those days – still so recent, but a lifetime ago as well – makes me break out in a cold sweat. Melbourne feels haunted; the streets, the apartment, the bars and cafés – I can’t picture any of them without remembering him. That’s why, when I left him, I had to leave the city, too.
Mark and I lived in Fitzroy North in a bright, spacious two-bedroom apartment a few blocks from busy Brunswick Street. I can still hear the raucous laughter from the streets below, feel the dizzying warmth of the sun slanting through the bedroom skylight in the morning, stirring me from groggy slumber, the pair of us waking to the inevitable hangover. The smell of Mark beside me in bed: tobacco, aftershave and sweat-slicked skin.
In the beginning, I loved it there; the noise, the excitement, the constant feeling that something was happening and that I had to be a part of it. And yet I was never fully part of anything, as I was tethered to my past, and to Mark.
A country girl at heart, I spent many summers on my parents’ prosperous vineyard estate, but, after they disappeared, the city became my adopted home. I had to escape somewhere, and those endless city nights, the frenzied crusade for pleasure, drowned out my dark thoughts. As I got caught up in my new world, the memory of those long, hot days in the vineyards picking grapes, my hair in golden braids, Mum and Dad drinking wine in the tasting parlour, grew fuzzy around the edges.
Mark never could have afforded the place we lived in, but I had my inheritance and my government disability payments, so I paid for both of us. I was only sixteen at the time, so everything had to be in Mark’s name. Aunty Anne took some convincing, but, bless her, for all her big talk, she could never quite bring herself to say no to her poor orphaned niece.
Mark was twenty-seven back then and, when we first met, he said I was too young for him. But I figured he didn’t really mean it; he thought that’s what he was supposed to say, because he was always staring at me. I felt like he was trying to see under my clothes. Sometimes there’d be a glint of something – possessiveness, I suspect now – but it didn’t occur to me to be frightened back then.
I met him at my group counselling session – the one I forced myself out of my self-made prison to attend. I was there for trauma-related anxiety and depression, following my parents’ disappearance, and he was there for drug addiction. That should have rung alarm bells, but, in a strange way, it’s like I was looking for exactly that – something new, something dangerous. Something to make me forget.
We weren’t in the same group, but I saw him standing alone under a street light during a break one evening, the tips of his eyelashes illuminated by the fluorescent glow, smoke rising above his head in a dirty-white cloud. It made me think of something from an old movie, something sinister yet romantic.
He greeted me with a nod and offered me a cigarette. We smoked in silence, but I could feel his eyes on me, awareness prickling over my skin. It was a stimulus and I craved distraction – any distraction. This became our routine until one night when he asked me if I wanted to hang out with him and his friends later and I said yes. I didn’t even hesitate. There was something in Mark. Something I was drawn to, that spoke to a need.
I found out he was moving to the city and needed a flatmate and, as I was desperate to move out from Aunty Anne’s, where I’d been since everything happened, and be somewhere new, I figured it was perfect timing. Doctor Sarah had been telling me to try new things, meet new people – and although I was scared, I wanted to try.
One sticky summer evening, just after my seventeenth birthday, we were lounging on beanbags in the new apartment watching fireworks explode over the city. Mark offered me a puff on the joint he was smoking and I was feeling depressed and bored, so I didn’t turn it down. We shared the joint and, as it was my first time, I was completely high after only a few puffs. I remember rolling around giggling, then starting to feel weird and tingly and then freaking out that someone was in the apartment.
Mark took me in his arms and spoke in soft, calm tones. His hands were stroking my hair and his breath was hot against my ear and then his lips were on my skin and soon we were kissing, our mouths fusing, hot and wet, his chest pressed against mine, his arms strong and hard under my hands. My mind kept whirring, wondering why it was happening, if it was because I was high, or was it Mark, and did this mean we’d end up together, or was it just because I was there?
I don’t remember wanting to sleep with him, but I must have, because he hated men who tricked girls into sex. It was okay, or so I thought. I remember him on top of me and feeling a sharp pain, over and over. Afterwards, he told me I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever met and that he’d been holding back for ages because he thought I was too young. He’d been waiting for me to turn seventeen, because then, as his birthday wasn’t until later in the year, it was like it was only ten years between us, which was nothing, really. I was still trying to understand how things with Mark had gone so far so quickly; I couldn’t piece together the details. But I had got myself into it, and when he told me about his past – how his older brother had committed suicide when he was a kid, how at five years old he’d found him hanging in the shed – I was struck with all-consuming pity. I could see a deep sadness in him, something that spoke to my own pain. And he seemed to want to be together so intensely, I felt like I was already in too deep. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
We had fun together, for a while. Mark introduced me to vodka and the odd MDMA cap or line of coke, and it felt good. It was just the distraction I’d been looking for. It made me forget myself. I started not showing up for school and then dropping out completely. All I cared about was escaping – quieting my troubled mind with beautiful numbness.
We hadn’t been together long when Mark convinced me I didn’t need to keep seeing Doctor Sarah. ‘If I’m making you so happy,’ he’d say, ‘what do you need her for? Aren’t I enough?’
After I cancelled my last scheduled appointment, I didn’t go back to Doctor Sarah for nearly three years.
Looking back, it’s so easy to see what was coming. Mark could be anything he needed to be to control me. Attentive or distant. Complimentary or cruel. Cocky or meek. Playing the victim. It was dizzying, addictive. I convinced myself I didn’t want ‘safe’ or ‘predictable’ – who’d want that when you could have spontaneous and thrilling?
But it was exhausting, too. He was using me up, my energy, my sanity. Day by day, piece by piece.
Sometimes memories of the three years that followed come to me in sensory waves, transporting me back. One cool autumn evening, Mark and I drunkenly weaving our way home from the club, me swaying in heels, the weight of his arm on my shoulder. Losing my balance, the sound of glass splintering as I drop a bottle of wine. His breath, sour in my face, his voice snarling ‘stupid, clumsy bitch!’ Later, the crunch of his fist going through the plasterboard wall, the dull thwack of his knuckles on my temple. The bright white spots dancing, the crimson when I shut my eyes.
After a friend’s party, when I’d spoken to a guy too long, light shining in my face – a torch, he’s shining a torch on me. I’m naked, I’d been undressing when he stormed in, drunk and high. He’s waving the torch in my face, ‘You think you’re so fucking hot, don’t you? You think you’re better than me. Look at you, you fucking slut. Who’d want you?’ And the mirror gleaming, catching the light as he turns it towards me. I see my pale, stricken face, my exposed body, eyes full of fear. I don’t recognise myself.
Another night, on my knees in the hallway. ‘Look what you’ve done,’ he says as blood and mucus drip from my chin. I’ve been throwing up again. It’s bad this time. Alcohol poisoning, I think. His face is pinched and white, a mask of fury. ‘You’re as low as a dog. Only a dog would do something like that.’ And he points to the floor, where my blood has stained the cream carpet, as though I’ve deliberately soiled it.
The tim
es like that, when he didn’t actually hit me, were the worst. I can see his eyes; hard, yet lit as if by sparks. My shame fuelling his perverse pleasure. It felt like I was being punished for something, but I never understood what. I must have done something to deserve it. That’s how I felt, and that’s what I ended up believing.
I was easy to blame, being as troubled and lost as I was. I figured bad things were meant to happen to me. There was something in me that beckoned them. And he helped me to believe it because, apparently, I was the one who started it. I don’t remember anything like that, although there was this one night – I can see myself now, ranting hysterically, hitting at his chest, screaming for him to stop. Stop doing drugs, stop lying, stop stealing from me, stop dealing, just STOP. And I was so, so loud, so out of my mind, that it scares me to remember myself that way.
And then there was That Night. The turning point. But I’m not ready to talk about that yet.
You’d think I’d remember where I got the worst of my injuries – a raised scar on my chest that looks like the work of a small blade – but I don’t. What I remember is the humiliation, the shame, the fear and isolation.
There are different forms of abuse, you see. Doctor Sarah says that kind of abuse, the psychological kind, can be more damaging than physical violence. It’s harder to see coming, can be so insidious, so incremental, that it’s easier to tell yourself you’re imagining it than it is to see what’s really happening.
I never believed it was abuse until the end. Mark got worse just before I left. I’ll never know if it was the real him or just his drug abuse getting out of control, fucking with his mind, turning him from a sad, angry person into a psychotic one. He was so paranoid, thinking everyone – including me – was out to get him.
At two a.m. one night in early September, just over three months ago now, I grabbed the overnight bag I’d stashed in the cupboard while Mark was passed out, hailed a taxi and went to Aunty Anne’s. She didn’t say a word when I arrived. I stepped into her arms with a strangled sob and she just held me, listened as I told her fragments of the story, brought me endless cups of tea. She made up my old room and I knew without her saying it that I was free to stay as long as I wanted.
I spent a week holed up in that room, staring at the peeling paint on the ceiling. The collection of books, posters and stuffed animals seemed then to belong to a different person, a version of myself I no longer recognised. Like a childhood friend I’d outgrown. The rose-petal wallpaper and smiling stuffed toys that I once found so comforting now seemed to be mocking me, not oblivious but apathetic to the fear I felt in my bones. Everything felt unbalanced, wrong. Yet I was too afraid to leave my room, too afraid of what lay in wait beyond those four walls.
My fears weren’t unfounded. Mark came a couple of times, making his threats, even after Uncle John threw him out on his back. I knew I couldn’t stay there. Not when he knew where I was.
I managed to muster the energy to change my phone number and only gave it to the people I trusted. It was a shock to realise how shallow that pool of people had become: Aunty Anne, Uncle John and Cat. There was no one else. No friendships to show for the years I’d spent with Mark, no one who cared enough to wonder whether I was okay.
Cat came. Of course she did. Aunty Anne called her, told her just enough, and it wasn’t long before I heard a familiar knock on my bedroom door. Rap-rap-rap. Rap!
I remember the shame of having to tell her the dirty, rotten truth. Having to admit she was right. But Cat’s calm, no-nonsense care was just what I needed. She didn’t dwell, didn’t say she’d told me so. She let me speak but didn’t let me steep in my misery. This is our chance, she said. This is our chance to do what we’ve always wanted and get out of this dump. Start again. In Sydney, by the beach, the way we used to dream.
So we did it. Or Cat did it, I should say, and I willingly followed. Barely two weeks later, we were piling ourselves and our luggage into a coach, exuberant and terrified, waving goodbye to Aunty Anne as she stood on the porch, a hanky pressed to her mouth. I don’t know what she was feeling, whether she was fighting tears or some other emotion. Aunty Anne’s thoughts were rarely unknown, but her feelings were always a mystery.
Doctor Sarah dealt out her rules, of course. As did my aunt. But they both trusted Cat. They knew she knew my story, had my back, and would take care of things. Of me.
And so here we are. Starting over. Away from Mark and everything that happened in Melbourne.
Sometimes, still, the guilt slithers in. The seeds he sowed grow inside me. It’s all my fault – I’m useless and selfish. I shouldn’t have left him. I think of busy Brunswick Street, of the apartment, of those crazy nights and lazy days, the salty tang of fear. I can almost feel the permanent brick in my gut, the waiting and wondering, the rotting from the inside. What will he do next?
I think of those moments when he trusted me enough to let his mask slip, and I saw what no one had ever seen. Something small, startled. Something decaying slowly, eroding what remained of the good in him. Because there’s good in everyone. Isn’t there?
I suppose it doesn’t matter. Mark, and my life with him, is in the past, and there’s no going back. Melbourne is haunted now. Every street, every bar, every café. The ghosts of Mark and me are everywhere.
Chapter Six
‘Mary.’
My fingers dig into the pillow and a groan escapes.
‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary.’
I open my eyes to a room full of shadows, my heart thundering. There’s a low whisper somewhere nearby.
Shhhhhhh. Shhhhhh.
Is someone whispering? Is it the waves?
A scream pierces the air, followed by a thud.
I lunge for the lamp switch, and yellow light spills into the room. Jaunty shadows paint the walls, but there’s no one here.
‘You dumb, fucking bitch! This is the last time!’
‘Fuck you, you don’t even care! You never did!’
The voices are coming from outside. It’s the couple upstairs, fighting again. They must be on the balcony.
I sigh with relief, but my heart is still racing and my mouth is dry. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and tiptoe out the door. The clock on the microwave reads 03:30 as I creep through the fragrant summer darkness into the kitchen. I could wait until my vision adjusts, but I’m dying for water, so I slide my hand along the hallway wall until my fingertips find the switch. Fluorescent lights blink to life and it’s a moment before I can see.
Rachel stands in front of me.
With a shout I stumble backwards, the small of my back slamming into the countertop. ‘Ow. Sorry, I … I didn’t think anyone …’ I stop. There’s something funny about the way Rachel’s standing. And her expression. She’s hunched over the counter, both hands flat on its surface, staring into what would have been darkness before I turned on the light. ‘Rachel?’
She remains silent, staring ahead. A strange chill creeps through me.
‘Rachel? It’s just me, Mary.’
She cocks her head, those golden-hazel eyes meeting mine, but they’re blank. Unseeing.
I take a step backwards. Then something changes. I can’t explain it. It’s like there was a film over Rachel’s eyes, and now it’s peeling back and they’re clear again. She’s looking, not through me, but at me.
‘Hey.’ She smiles, blinks. She stares down at her hands, still pressed flat to the counter, and pulls them away as though she’s been burned. She puts them behind her back, turns to me, smiles wider. ‘Just, uh … came to get some water.’
‘Right, yeah. Me too.’ If I knew her better, I’d make some joke, tell her she was out of it like a zombie. I’d ask her if she was sleepwalking, whether that’s something she does sometimes. I’d make sure she’s okay. But we only met two days ago, this is her first night here, and ingrained social etiquette overrules. I say nothing.
‘Did I disturb you?’ Her pretty smile is still in place, but there’s something in her e
xpression. Worry? I can’t help but notice the network of blood vessels in the whites of her eyes, like fine red cobwebs, and the dark circles beneath.
‘No! No, you’re fine. I’m just thirsty.’ I quickly grab a couple of glasses from the washing-up rack and fill them at the sink. I hand one to Rachel.
It’s as if the gesture vanquishes Rachel’s strange mood. Her eyes shine as she takes the glass. ‘Thanks.’
‘Sure.’ I shrug, looking away, feeling like I should say something more, but what?
Muffled shouts sound from outside and Rachel glances towards the balcony doors. She purses her lips. ‘Are they always like that?’
I mirror her expression. ‘Often, yes, unfortunately.’
Rachel sighs softly. She turns to me, and the way the light hits her eyes makes them gleam. ‘Are you okay? After the other day, I mean. I got the feeling something really bad happened.’
‘Oh. No … well. It’s nothing, honestly.’
There’s the sound of a door banging, more muffled shouts. Someone crying, pleading.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Rachel looks so sincere. I’m touched that she would remember.
‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘Sorry, um … I’d just rather try to forget about it.’
She tilts her head to one side and smiles. ‘I know the feeling.’ She pauses, not taking her eyes off me. ‘Well, night … roomie.’ Her smile widens, as though she’s pleased with the idea, and she steps close to me, her arm brushing mine. Her hair smells flowery, feminine. She pauses – or do I imagine that? – before stepping past.
The New Girl Page 3
