by S. A. McEwen
And for the first time in as long as she could remember, Natalie starts to cry.
38
The man is ready for the next one.
Usually, he leaves it for months between conquests.
But his appetite is growing.
And he’s decided on the perfect number six.
So perfect.
He messed up with Letitia.
He won’t mess up with Ivy.
He can’t afford to make another mistake.
She’s snobby, this one, he thinks. Charges eight-hundred dollars an hour! Fucking grandiose whore. Who does she think she is?
Well, he’ll teach her who she really is.
He’ll teach her the lesson that all these whores need to learn.
39
“I need to ask you something.”
Natalie is lying in bed with Griffin, where they seem to be spending most of their time.
After a week away, he’s basically hijacked her weekend again and kept her as naked as the temperature allows. He’s managed to even make naked cooking seem sexy.
“This is uncomfortable. But when Letitia died, the police asked about you. We’d only seen each other a couple of times, so I didn’t think it was relevant. But I gave them your name and number. And they called me later to say that you don’t exist in Australia. And the number is a burner phone. They weren’t concerned. You weren’t a person of interest. But I’d like to know about your name.”
“That’s why you asked about my birthday the other day.”
He doesn’t look cold, but he doesn’t look warm, either.
She can see his brain ticking over. Thinking about what to say, maybe?
Finally, he looks her in the eye and grimaces. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” he says, and Natalie’s heart jumps. The explanation. God, she hopes it is normal and valid and not completely insane.
“My family wasn’t quite the way I described it.” He pauses again, and Natalie waits, her body stiff, her heart in her mouth.
“My father was violent. My mother left with my sister and me when I was still in primary school. We changed our names. Well, our last name at least. To something nice and common. Edwards. The stuff about my mother was true. She was kind to everyone. We had nothing after we left, and she made us feel like we had the world. She taught me to look for the good in people, that everyone has something. And if you look first for the good things, you’ll be closer to people. Happier, too.”
Griffin looks wistful, his eyes faraway, torn between the loving memories and the loss of her.
“You really loved her.”
“Yes.” Griffin looks back at Natalie, and is silent for a while. Then he continues: “When she died, I was only just out of high school. We had nothing. I worked after school, and my sister had started doing some babysitting as well, but she was only fourteen. It wasn’t going to work.”
Griffin pauses again, clears his throat. He glances at Natalie sideways, his expression slightly odd. Natalie is certain he’s not being honest with her, or at least is holding something back.
“Mum had had a hard life. Everything she did, she did for us. To give us a better chance than she had. The stupid thing was, after she died, I found her sister. She wasn’t well-off, by any means, but she would have helped. I don’t know why Mum never asked her. Maybe she was too proud, maybe she was too ashamed. But she never made contact with her. I sent my sister to live with her to finish high school, and packed a bag and used the last of our money to buy a passport and a plane ticket. I didn’t come back to Australia for nearly ten years.”
Minutes tick by. Griffin looks lost in memories. He looks haunted, and troubled, and full of pain.
“I go by Griffin, but it’s not my birth name. I was named after my father. Not the same name, but similar. And I didn’t want any part of anything to do with him.”
“I’m sorry,” Natalie says softly. She feels full of tenderness, alongside a nagging guilt that she ever thought to mention his name to Detective Casey. This explains her uneasiness. Griffin was hiding something, but because it was painful and personal, not because he was a bad person in any way. A childhood like that certainly makes it understandable to smooth over a few rough edges. So maybe he put a little too much thought into the happy family narrative he told her; maybe the lies did come easily to him…but he’s probably repeated that story several hundred times, she tells herself.
She reaches for his hand, her heart bursting. But he pulls it away.
“I need to tell you something too,” Natalie says after a while, breathing deeply and slowly, trying to calm her pounding heart.
Griffin rolls back toward her, raising an eyebrow in a question, but the gesture is mechanical. He looks tired and defeated. Natalie wonders if now is the right time, but she goes ahead anyway.
“I should have told you earlier. I didn’t really expect us to get to this point…” Her voice trails off as she tries to pin down what this point actually is. A relationship? That’s in with a chance?
“That first time we met…I fell pregnant. I’ve never wanted children. Like I said, my family…I just don’t think I’d do a good enough job.”
Natalie rolls onto her back to stare at the ceiling. She just can’t look Griffin in the face right now.
“I was planning on having a termination. And at the last minute I had second thoughts. I asked to see the foetus. I heard its heartbeat.”
To her surprise, a tear trickles out of the corner of one eye, and she brushes it away impatiently.
“There was something wrong though. The doctor told me it wasn’t a viable foetus. That it would die anyway. And I was devastated. I still don’t really know why.”
Now fat, silent tears are rolling down Natalie’s cheeks. She still doesn’t look at Griffin, who gently reaches out for her this time. But she holds a hand up.
She wants to tell him the rest. The escorting. The loneliness. She feels so close to him in this moment. She believes he can hear it; that he will be compassionate, not judgemental. That he will hold space for her, rather than edge away from all her mess.
In a way, though, she’s just desperate to know. To find out, for once and for all, whether this relationship has legs. Failing to acknowledge that sharing something so vulnerable and personal might better be done from a place of trust than a desire to “find out” if there’s any point to a relationship—that one undermines the other, in fact.
So recklessly, rather than thoughtfully, she says, “There’s more.” Taking a few steadying breaths, she rolls back toward him.
This part, she does want to see his face for.
“My work. It’s fairly confronting for most people. I’m trained as a lawyer, but I left law a long time ago. Now I do something else. Something that makes me happy and suits my life and is a good choice, not a bad choice, even though most people try to tell me otherwise. But it can be upsetting for people, and I’m prepared for the possibility that you may not wish to continue seeing me after learning this. So before I say it, I want to say that I understand that. And that I’m happy to answer any questions, for as long as it takes.
“So…I’m an escort. I’ve been doing it for years. And I want you to know that to me, it’s just a job—”
Natalie is watching Griffin closely. What passes across a person’s face in that first second is usually more telling than what they say in the minutes or days afterwards. She’s seen disgust, contempt, even rage. She’s also seen compassion, condescension—invariably followed by some kind of “saviour” monologue.
She doesn’t want to see any of these things on Griffin’s face right now. Not if their relationship is to have any hope of surviving at all.
To his credit, she doesn’t see anything of this nature. What she does see is a stabbing flash of pain. And before she even knows what is happening he has rolled out of her bed, grabbed his bundle of clothes, and headed for the door.
40
“I have bad news.”
&nbs
p; Still reeling from Griffin’s wordless departure, Natalie doesn’t think she wants to hear what the detective has to say.
She can’t believe she could lie there, crying about their lost baby, and he could still react so badly to her being an escort that it didn’t even warrant words.
The pain she feels at his leaving her is so intense she can barely answer the detective.
This is why trusting people is utter bullshit, she thinks to herself.
“I went back over the phone records from the earlier murders.” Detective Casey doesn’t wait for an answer anyway. “That number you gave me for your boyfriend. It was used to contact one of the deceased escorts. The third one to be killed. Not close to her death. But still—I’d like to have a chat with this Griffin. Do you know where I can find him?”
The rest of the day passes in a blur.
After telling Detective Casey where Griffin usually stayed when in Sydney, she hung up and contemplated whether it felt worse that, despite her certainty that he is not, the police are now considering her boyfriend a person of interest relating to serial killings of WOC escorts, or that her boyfriend seemed to think she didn’t even warrant a single word after sharing two sensitive and hugely vulnerable things with him.
Boyfriend! Oh God. Natalie startles at how easily the title slipped in to her thoughts.
So much for opening herself up to love.
Maybe I’m not built for love, she thinks to herself, the familiar emptiness closing in around her.
She doesn’t cry.
She doesn’t despair.
She just lies down, and feels very, very tired.
Hours later, Natalie wakes up from a nap, groggy and confused.
It’s the most ridiculous dichotomy—either her boyfriend is a police suspect, or he’s just frigging wonderful but has rejected her on the very grounds she always used as a reason to avoid relationships herself.
But through the haze, one thing is abundantly clear to her.
She doesn’t wish she wasn’t an escort.
She doesn’t regret a single day of her career.
In fact, if anything she’s proud of it. Not just that she sees people who would otherwise never know intimacy—clients with physical disabilities, intellectual disabilities, crucifying shyness. She rejects wholeheartedly the idea that that’s “good” sex work as opposed to “bad” sex work, such as seeing married men or younger men or old men or even fucking irritating, unpleasant, conservative men, who can manage to insult her work choices even as they avail themselves of her services.
Maybe it’s her avoidance of intimate relationships and connections that make it seem so normal, but she just doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. It’s just a job. A well-paid job, an emotionally and physically labour-intensive job, frankly a terribly boring, repetitive job, most of the time.
She wonders if it would be so terrible if her parents knew. It’s not like they were a well of support and acceptance anyway. Perhaps what mattered was less their response, and more how she approached things. Perhaps if they were going to reject her anyway, she could learn to speak her truth, regardless of the outcome?
Noting that she’s possibly delirious, having not eaten anything at all, all day and having been battered by all the emotional turmoil she usually avoids, she nevertheless feels strangely light and hopeful.
Opening up to Griffin has made her realise a few things. Mainly, that even though he left, she’s still okay. She’s hurting, and confused, and scared—but somehow, it’s opened up the possibility of a new way of being in the world.
She scoops up her keys, and heads down to her car.
It’s only later that she realises she forgot her wallet—and more importantly, her phone.
41
Natalie arrives at her parents’ house unannounced.
She doesn’t so much as glance at number seven on her way past. Grant Boyd has been forgotten amidst more pressing worries.
The curtain in the living room of his house flickers briefly as she pulls into her parents’ driveway, but Natalie doesn’t notice.
She doesn’t notice the figure standing behind it, looking out.
She’s focused on one thing only. Carried on by the fury and the energy of the desperately wounded, she careens into her parents’ living room, determined to either demand all their love and acceptance and support right this minute, or relinquish it forever.
Upeksha looks up from the couch, startled. Unbridled hostility or demands are not how things are attended to in her house. And Natalie has clearly got all her weapons drawn. Rather than the travel allowing them to dissipate, she’s ruminated the whole drive there, her feelings of anger only growing.
“Grant is an arsehole,” she howls, fists clenched, teeth grinding as soon as they meet again after the first angry words escape her lips. “You never stood up for us! You never fought for us! People treated us like shit. No one else was brown. No one wanted us to be brown! Not even you.”
Ravi has glided into the room, his small frame and trim figure not making a sound on the carpet as he approaches.
“That’s enough, Natalie,” he says quietly. “You’re upset. Go home.”
“Yes! I’m upset! You’re supposed to comfort me! Support me! Something! Not push me away because you don’t want to feel anything yourself. It’s your job! You’ve always opted out of it! Like you signed up for only half the parenting responsibilities. Keep them alive! That’s all you bothered with. Not help them feel loved!”
On some level, she knows this approach will not achieve even close to her aims—confrontation means uncertain outcomes, and uncertain outcomes feel risky to her parents. But she can’t help herself. It’s all suddenly too much. Letitia. Grant. Racism. Griffin. She wants to blame someone who she can have some impact on.
Oddly, it’s not suspicion around Griffin and his burner phone and nonexistence that frightens or hurts her. What stings is his defection following her showing him something of herself, being vulnerable. Even while she can see that the pain is survivable, and that she stands by her choices in a way she’s never really been forced to before—by someone outright rejecting them—she’s still angry with him for responding this way. She feels almost like she could be devastated, and he didn’t know that she wouldn’t be devastated, so his behaviour is hurtful and awful and unforgivable.
To not even speak.
Coupled with the resentment that has been eating away at her about her parents for forever means that they are the perfect target to vent all her rage upon.
“I will not go home!” she screams, whirling on her father, a finger stabbing at the air. But just as quickly as it came on, the fire goes out of her. Her shoulders slump, her pointing finger dangling uncertainly for a moment, then falling to her side.
“I’m an escort,” she says quietly, looking first her mother, then her father in the eyes. “Letitia was an escort. That’s how we met. And someone is killing brown escorts. Five so far. The police are even interviewing my boyfriend. So you see? You can’t pretend I’m not brown. You can’t pretend I’m not part of this. And don’t you dare tell me the solution is to change myself. Make my world smaller. Give up my job. I like my job and no racist, murderous arsehole is going to take it away from me. I’ll skin him alive if he so much as tries.”
With this—pulling herself up to her full height—she gives her parents one last defiant glare before sweeping back out the front door, her visit a whirlwind in every sense of the phrase.
She spun in, she spun out.
At high speed, at high volume.
And left devastation in her wake.
Ravi and Upeksha stare after her in silent shock.
Post-confession, Natalie drives around in some kind of stunned disbelief.
It doesn’t occur to her that “coming out” to her parents, as a truly proud thing to do, might have worked better if she’d stayed to answer questions and convey her pride in her work and her community. Leaving with a giant cymbal crash could
be read as defiance, or it could be read as shame.
But she doesn’t think about these things. To Natalie, all that matters is that she has spoken some kind of truth to her parents, who are not—and have never been—receptive to it. Maybe it marks a turning point of some kind in their relationship. Or maybe it’s meaningless on that front. But she’s done something. Something on her terms.
She feels both bad and good.
Hopeful and crushed.
Restored and ruined.
It’s hard to change the dance you do with your folks, no matter how hard you try.
It’s late by the time she heads home.
If you asked her, she wouldn’t have been able to tell you where she went or what she did. Whether someone followed her, or no one did.
If anyone had questioned her about how she felt—driving around with a killer hunting escorts of colour, with a boyfriend under suspicion, and without her phone—all she would have said was tired.
She felt very, very, very tired.
She wasn’t watching out for any danger at all.
She paid no attention to anything except the blur of family-related memories that clashed and chimed and pushed and pulled her in all sorts of directions.
Left her breathless and shaky.
It’s bigger than stating she’s an escort, and bigger than at last—decades later—telling them how she felt as a brown child, then a brown adolescent in their world.
It’s stepping out of line. It’s doing what is right for her. It’s exhilarating, and terrifying. Because once you take that leap, the dance changes.
And sometimes your partner no longer wants to dance with you at all.
42
Back in Linfield, Ravi and Upeksha glance at each other.
