Ruined

by Fen Wilde

  Still, she doesn’t pursue it. And though they don’t talk about the past again, Aunty She is happy to talk about recent visits to Sri Lanka, what it is like there, the things she loves and doesn’t love about it. In turn, she wants to be a part of Natalie’s life, accompanying her to the gallery, drawing out of her deep responses to different styles and subjects. She’s curious less about the art itself than what it means to her niece, and though she’s there on a solo holiday (“Uncle Pu had no interest in coming!” she laments), she sees Natalie at least every second day. She even sits with her in the park one afternoon, handing her cheese on biscuits as she sketches, the silence long and comfortable between them, the warm sun on their skin.

  By the time she leaves, Natalie feels nourished.

  It’s bittersweet, though, because it contrasts so starkly with how she usually feels after spending time with family. So as nourished as she feels, she is also left with a yearning greater than it was before.

  14

  Two Months Earlier – February 1, 2018

  The man is watching.

  Finally, it might be time.

  It has never taken this long before.

  He makes a mental note that Christmas is a bad time for sticking to routines. It’s been hard to find the right day. But he hasn’t rushed. Rushing is for losers. Rushing means mistakes.

  But also: his work is worth the wait.

  He watches the woman leave her apartment.

  A tingle of excitement starts in his groin.

  15

  “What do you think about children?” Griffin asks suddenly.

  Natalie jumps so much she sloshes her wine.

  They’re out at a fancy restaurant, enjoying nice wine, excellent views, and overpriced food. A waiter glides up to her with a fresh white napkin, surreptitious and silent.

  “Why?” she says faintly, the foetus they co-created hanging there between them, weighing her down.

  “Well, I guess I feel like there’s not much time left for me. I mean, I know there is physically speaking. But in terms of when I think it would be good, I suppose. I don’t want to be an old dad. And I’m guessing we’re similar ages. So I wondered what you thought about it. If it was on the cards for you.”

  Natalie shakes her head, looking down. She stills feels inexplicably sad about the baby. That it is gone, yes—but even more so because of the abnormalities. It feels tender and heartbreaking and fragile and…needy. Like that little being needed her love.

  “No. I’ve never wanted children. Not even when I was younger. It didn’t seem like something I would excel at.” Natalie looks back up, watching Griffin carefully.

  “I don’t think you have to excel. Isn’t ‘good enough’ the modern catchphrase?”

  “Well, I mightn’t scrape in with those accolades, either.” Natalie smiles ruefully and shrugs, resumes sipping her wine. “My parents were…different,” she says, her face neutral. “They were very focused on what they wanted for us, rather than what we needed. I feel like something got lost in the process. I just don’t feel very maternal or like I could cope with children. All their needs.”

  Griffin nods thoughtfully. “Okay,” he says, shrugging, picking up his fork.

  Natalie waits. For him to declare she’s not the right woman for him, for him to criticise her lack of womanliness, for him to list all the reasons she ought to want children, the way that most people do when she drops that news on them. Even strangers try to tell her that she doesn’t know her own mind, and that of course she wants them “deep down,” or that she’ll “regret it one day.”

  But Griffin moves on to another topic, as intense and interested in her thoughts on the next subject as ever.

  Eventually, she can’t help herself: “What about you? And children?”

  He finishes chewing his mouthful slowly.

  “I always thought I’d like to be a dad. It seems like what everyone does, you know? You have fun, you establish your career, you settle down and have a family. And if I was with someone who really wanted kids, I think I’d be into it. Excited, even. But it’s not a deal-breaker for me, if that’s what you’re wondering.” His eyes are very dark as he looks at her, and her heart starts thudding in her chest.

  She gulps a mouthful of wine and hastily looks away.

  Later, wandering the streets of Sydney CBD, Griffin continues to be a little too good to be true.

  He tells her about his childhood: He had grown up in a small country town outside of Melbourne. The type of rough country town that sneered at difference and punished it liberally. The type of place that Natalie would have enjoyed growing up in even less than where she did.

  There were no people of colour at his low-achieving public high school, and in the seventies and eighties he was still taught a curriculum that either omitted anything about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, or if it did mention them, referred to them as hostile and violent, and the First Fleet as brave heroes taming a wild, unknown land. It was only through his own passion for travel that he became truly educated about other cultures, including his own.

  It had been an embarrassing interaction with a passionate Irish backpacker that had set his education on the right path, her rage that he had no idea about Australia’s colonisation and treatment of Aboriginal people initially motivating only in as much as he wanted to sleep with her. But once he started reading he found he couldn’t stop.

  He spent his twenties travelling the world, working in bars, sleeping with backpackers. By the time he returned to Australia, he spoke four languages well enough to get by, had a business plan that made him very wealthy over the next decade, and was plagued by an unshakeable sense of despair.

  The world he had seen was beautiful beyond compare, and cruel beyond any comprehension.

  His parents had been rough around the edges, but possessed boundless love and kindness. Everyone was treated with respect in their family, from the garbage truck drivers to the fancily dressed ladies behind the glass in the bank, where they went every week to deposit a dollar or two into the kids’ savings accounts on their way to the library.

  Everyone was treated as valuable, but children in particular were treated with reverence.

  So when Griffin saw starving children in Rwanda, or children fleeing violence in Syria, then held in offshore detention by Australian governments for years at a time, sewing their lips together in protest, his heart was bruised in a way he felt he would never recover from.

  He probably wouldn’t be able to articulate it well, he said, but when he saw Ivy that day in the gallery, staring at Jack Charles, the expression on her face spoke directly to his heart. There was something in her demeanour that left a lump in his throat. And while he’d never had a problem approaching women ever his whole life long, somehow he felt too emotional at that moment to speak to her.

  Seeing her again the next day had indeed felt like a sign to him.

  His words wash over Natalie, comforting and intimate. She starts to dare to think she could lean toward him.

  That perhaps she might be able to trust him.

  That being with him might be okay.

  More than that: that closeness to someone might be worth it, even.

  However, just as Natalie starts to feel this opening, this blossoming in her chest, her mother rings.

  Fucking universe, she thinks.

  She hesitates, then puts her phone away.

  So she doesn’t learn about the dead black girl found in the park near her parents’ house for another whole day.

  16

  Natalie rolls over and curls into Griffin, still half asleep.

  A delicious dinner, followed by hours of sex—the type of sex that you only have when you’ve just met someone and you wake each other up all night just to touch each other again. And again.

  And on top of all that, cuddles against his delicious chest in the morning.

  And yet, she still feels uneasy.

  The perfection of him is hard to bel
ieve.

  He sees me, she had thought to herself the previous night, astounded. Grateful.

  But this morning, it all seems far too good to be true.

  She doesn’t understand that sometimes experiencing something different to what is familiar makes it feel wrong…even when it is what has been missing all along. As a child, she never learnt how to be vulnerable and rely on others. Somehow, she knew that it was critically important to her parents that she be “okay.” That she not need too much or ask for too much or show too much vulnerability.

  So Griffin looking at her and sharing himself with her and trying to see who she is, is so unfamiliar that it feels catastrophically wrong.

  In an intellectual way, Natalie understands parts of that. She’d read as much as she could about the conflict in Sri Lanka. She’d read up on intergenerational trauma and had made some sort of peace with how her parents had parented her. Given what they’d likely experienced.

  In some ways, she knows that they did the best they could.

  But their best wasn’t good enough for her. She didn’t get what she needed to thrive. And it was hard to pin down. You couldn’t form a narrative around it that was linear and neat, where A led to B which resulted in C. Trauma was slippery like that. It wasn’t a complete memory, stored with all the others. Terror and fear and silence in parents manifest themselves in children in complex and insidious ways. Ways that Natalie did not understand and could not articulate. They manifested in her body, emerged in her dreams, played out in her habits. Habits the unaware might consider quirks, something charming. But they were not quirks and they were not charming. To Natalie, they felt more like insanities.

  So it was hard to tell herself a story that made sense. My parents were traumatised and weren’t emotionally available to me as a child, so I find it hard to trust in relationships, is probably as far as she could take it, if pushed on the subject.

  So now, lying beside Griffin, she feels the strong discomfort that comes with vulnerability—of opening yourself up to another human being. But she feels it in her body as something being wrong. She feels it as danger. So she lies there, overcome by the desire to flee, unable to link this instinct with the intellectual idea that it’s simply unfamiliar to her to experience intimacy. To let her walls down, even a little. To not shut someone out.

  However, she doesn’t get a chance to flee, or to untangle these feelings and thus decide to stay. She’s pulled out of this process by her phone ringing.

  It’s only quarter past seven in the morning.

  Natalie frowns and reaches over to her bedside table.

  Upeksha, again.

  She declines the call, frowning. But a minute later when the phone rings again— her frown deepening in the interim—she hastily answers it.

  Griffin, woken by the ringing and Natalie pulling out of his embrace, watches as her face falls.

  “No, no,” she whispers. “It can’t be.” But he can tell from her expression that it is.

  “Let me call her. Let me google. I’ll call you back.”

  Shakily, Natalie goes and gets her laptop, slipping back into bed, still naked. She looks stunned, and moves slowly.

  “Ivy?” Griffin asks softly. He looks like he wants to help, but is not sure what is happening.

  Natalie taps into the keyboard. She doesn’t look up at him.

  She pulls up a story on the ABC’s website.

  And there she is.

  Letitia.

  Smiling.

  Stunning.

  Reported dead.

  17

  The picture is a couple years old. Natalie recognises it from Letitia’s bedroom. It’s a picture of her at a university pub crawl, one night when she’d just made new friends in a new city. Letitia’s smile is wide, her eyes laughing. Her hair is shorter, framing her face neatly. She looks young and carefree.

  There is not a lot of information.

  Twenty-three-year-old engineering student Evelyn Weber was last seen on Thursday, February 1st at around 8 a.m. She is believed to have been travelling to Linfield to visit friends. Police are not releasing any details of the case but are treating it as a homicide. Anyone with information is urged to call Crime Stoppers on...

  Natalie feels numb.

  She doesn’t know why her friend would be visiting her parents.

  She doesn’t know why anyone would kill her, either. Escorting has its share of dangers, but she was making a social visit, not working, if her mother is correct about her destination.

  Is it a coincidence that she had just told Letitia about Grant Boyd?

  Is it a coincidence that Grant Boyd has just been released?

  “It’s her,” Natalie says, her mother picking up on the first ring. Her voice is lifeless. She feels sicker than she has ever felt in her life.

  “I don’t know,” she says after a pause. “Maybe she just went by Letitia. Maybe she liked it better.” Another pause. “I’m coming over.”

  Natalie ends the call and stares at Griffin blankly. She can’t actually compute that this is happening. Walls are clanging shut all around her heart.

  She doesn’t feel like crying.

  She feels like killing somebody.

  18

  Ravi and Upeksha are staring at the television, side by side, their backs unnaturally straight.

  Natalie gently takes the remote from her father’s hand and mutes it. She sits opposite them, where she can’t even see the screen.

  Alex isn’t there, and Natalie can’t hear any evidence of him.

  “Where’s Alex?” she asks softly.

  “Playing computer games in his room,” Ravi tells her. “We gave him some extra time so we could watch and decide what to do.”

  “You haven’t spoken to the police?” Natalie is surprised. She had thought, as good Australian citizens, that that would have been the first thing that they would do. Before even calling her, perhaps.

  “We weren’t sure…” Upeksha’s voice trails off. “The different name…”

  “When was she meant to come here?”

  “Thursday for lunch. Such a lovely girl. She had sent us the most beautiful thank-you card for having her for Christmas. And emailed us a recipe she thought we would like. From her mother! Such a thoughtful girl. We invited her to lunch and she accepted…”

  Natalie is dumbfounded. Firstly that they were touched by receiving a Jamaican recipe—she supposed that was what it was—but mostly that Letitia hadn’t mentioned the lunch date.

  Was that strange, befriending her parents?

  “You should call the police. Crime Stoppers. That number.”

  Ravi nods. He has already written it down, the pad and pen resting precariously on his knees, which are squeezed tightly together. He reaches for his phone and keys in the number.

  Natalie and Upeksha stare at each other.

  Still, Natalie can’t cry.

  She is too full of rage. Already, she’s convinced herself that Grant Boyd is responsible.

  She imagines Letitia walking up their neat, all-white street from the bus stop on the main road (she had resisted getting a car, content to utilise the public transport system, even to see clients in the suburbs).

  She imagines her long black hair, her glossy, velvety skin.

  Her white teeth and her big smile.

  She imagines Grant Boyd, seeing her out the window. Or driving past her in his ute, perhaps.

  She can’t imagine what happens next. Her mind won’t go there, can’t.

  She sits stiffly in her chair, her father’s words faint in her ears.

  “…on her way here for lunch…never turned up…thought she got caught up…young people these days…thought she got a better offer….we’re just the parents of her friend…”

  Though they’re expecting it, the knock on the front door shortly afterwards startles all three of them.

  Natalie jumps up before her parents have the chance. She opens the door to two men in plain clothes. They show her the
ir badges, and she ushers them into the living room.

  They ask lots of questions, directed at her parents.

  Natalie keeps tuning them out, her thoughts jerking around erratically.

  She can’t bear the thought of Letitia being gone.

  Her laughter, her down-to-earth attitude. Her understanding.

  The way she lit up a room.

  The way she just got it.

  Natalie can’t imagine she’ll find someone like her ever again.

  But more than her own sense of loss and grief and rage: she can’t bear the thought of what Letitia endured before her death.

  “How did you meet Evelyn?” It takes Natalie a moment to realise that the question is addressed to her.

  “Through the student newspaper. She interviewed me,” she lies.

  She will have to tell them the truth. But right now, she doesn’t want them to dismiss this as a sex job gone wrong.

  “Did you know her as Letitia as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s interesting…” one of the detectives tells her, cocking his head slightly. “You see, no one else has mentioned that. You three are the only ones.”

  Natalie frowns. She probably looks like she finds this information confusing, but she’s frowning at them for chasing the wrong lead. She knows that once they learn how Letitia earnt all the money that is no doubt sitting in her bank account, they will quickly lose interest in the case.

  A dead hooker is of little interest to anyone.

  A dead black hooker? Well. She almost certainly “brought it on herself.”

  “Was she raped?” she asks, suddenly. She wants to change their line of thinking, but she also needs to know, in the horrible way that you know it will make it worse, but you kid yourself that the answer you’re hoping for, however unlikely, holds the possibility of making it better.