Ruined

by Fen Wilde

  Then she braces herself for lunch.

  Family lunches have been quiet affairs since Letitia’s death.

  Natalie obediently eats everything Upeksha piles in front of her. Though she has no appetite, and feels sick with nerves most of the time, in her state of vulnerability she reverts to a childlike self, dutiful and subdued.

  The gap between her thoughts and feelings, and her mother’s understanding of her, feels wider than it ever has.

  After lunch, she lies on Alex’s bed, watching him through half-closed eyes.

  She can hear her mother hovering at the bottom of the stairs, distressed that Natalie is in his bedroom again, but averse to calling her out of there even on a pretence, and upsetting Alex.

  “Does it ever bother you?” Natalie asks, against her better judgement. She hasn’t had a serious conversation with Alex since the brain injury. Like everyone else, she’s tiptoed around him, not wanting to upset him. Not really fully understanding how his brain worked anymore.

  Suddenly, she regrets treating him like a child for all these years. He was still in there, somewhere, her calm and steady brother. For a while, she’d tried to talk to him as she normally would, but it only ever confused or angered him. She gave up easily, she thinks now. She didn’t work at it, like Upeksha did with all the other strategies she applied, day in, day out.

  “They never stood up for you. They never so much as said a bad word about Grant. They never batted an eyelid about the whole fucking thing.” The bitterness in her voice startles her. She knows she feels that way; she is surprised by her lack of control around her brother. If she wants to try harder to reach her brother, this is probably not the topic to start with. But she can’t stop the anger seeping out.

  Alex looks up from the figurine he is playing idly with at his desk. His face is thoughtful, but he doesn’t respond. And Natalie can’t help herself; she just wants to talk. Talk to someone like her, who might get it. Sans Letitia, Alex’s silence is like an invitation, a warm cup of milk before bed. Her words keep oozing out of her, hot and thick and sticky.

  “They never wanted us to be brown. They try and try and try to be white, and they weren’t there for us when anything happened that acknowledged our heritage. I felt invisible, not cared for by them. I know they loved us. I know they did their best. But it just wasn’t fucking good enough. All these years later, I can’t let anyone in. I don’t trust that anyone will see me for myself and still care about me, and yes I do fucking well blame them. Kids need to feel that their true selves are seen and loved, bloody childhood development 101, how did they miss that memo? Why did they even have us if they hated brown people so much?”

  Alex is gazing at her steadily now. It’s Natalie who drops her eyes, not because she sees any judgement there, but because she wants to talk into a vacuum. She doesn’t want anything reflected back.

  “I never have relationships. I never trust that anyone will stick around. And our parents didn’t even leave us! They just didn’t make me feel like I was worthy, just as I was. Which was brown. They still don’t want to know me! You know, I once asked them…I told them that there was more to me than what I shared at these goddamn family lunches. That I wanted to be closer to them. That I could share more of my life with them. I wanted to try to bridge that gap. See if, after all these years, they might see me and love me and we might have a fucking normal parent-daughter relationship. And do you know what they said? They went off, and conferred, and came back and said, ‘No thanks. We like things how they are.’ Can you believe that? They want to just have these polite conversations about superficial things and they don’t care who I am underneath that. And it’s horrible and hurtful and painful and I keep coming back every two weeks, why? Even I don’t know why. Why do I still come here?”

  At that, Natalie flicks her eyes back to Alex’s. She’s not upset. Getting emotional is not something that occurs for Natalie. She’s almost clinical, like someone studying this bizarreness from a place of detachment and curiosity. Look at this interesting phenomenon! Let’s have a little look at that! Poke it with a stick, maybe!

  Alex is quiet and still, a rare state for him. His silence is like a warm embrace. Natalie falls into it with more words.

  “I’ve been seeing this guy. Griffin. He’s lovely and thoughtful and kind and handsome. But I’ve been worrying that he’s a serial killer. Because of a sentence he said. And I want to kill Grant. I want to kill him for what he did to you, for his casual, evil stupidity that cost you so much. I want him to be a serial killer, Letitia’s killer, so I can fucking kill him. I want someone else to feel persecuted and out of place. Picked on. Ruined. I think I’m going insane. Sometimes, I want to kill our parents, too.”

  Until she says it, Natalie didn’t even know that this was true, but in that moment she knows that it is the case. Not because she hates them, but because she can’t reach them. They’re her people, and they should “get it,” but they don’t. And the pain the separation causes feels as huge as murder.

  For the second time since Letitia’s death, she catches a glimpse of just how alone she feels.

  “He’s just the face of it,” Alex says quietly, and Natalie stops, her mouth half open, another fierce spiel halted in her throat. She stares at Alex in surprise.

  “It won’t help,” he goes on, his eyes steady on hers. “He’s just one person. You won’t feel better. The world won’t be a better place.”

  Natalie swallows her surprise, leaps at the chance this conversation seems to offer her: normalcy, with Alex.

  “I will feel better,” she says, stubbornly. “The world will be a slightly better place.”

  “It won’t help you,” Alex says, shaking his head slightly, his gaze intense. “You didn’t get the love you needed from our parents. You can keep that cycle going. Of fear, of scarcity. Being so afraid of love that you strangle it whenever it comes near you. Or you can open yourself up to love. That’s the antidote.”

  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.

  “M
y 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.”

  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.