by Fen Wilde
When the lift dings, she slips in with them, keeping close, like a shadow.
The client hasn’t followed her.
But the panic does. She runs out the revolving doors, her heart thrashing in her chest.
And runs straight into her mother.
50
Colombo, Sri Lanka – August 1977
Thirty-two-year-old Kandiah Coommaraswamy wakes up in excruciating pain.
It takes him some time to work out what is happening.
He remembers that he was walking home from work.
He works as an electrician and runs his own business. He loves his work. He loves being able to find a problem and fix it—the orderly nature of it. The way that every problem has a story that he can find and fix.
His skills are renowned around Colombo.
Over the past few weeks—since the riots had broken out—the Sinhalese government had started forcing him to work on army premises. The Tamil Tigers accused him of betraying his people. They threatened to kill him if he didn’t stop helping the army.
The army threatened to kill him if he did stop helping them.
He has spent the last week in hushed conversations with his family. They all know that whoever follows through on these threats is unlikely to stop at him. If he is in danger, so is his family.
Upeksha and Ravi, Kandiah and his family, Shehara and her family, and their mother are preparing to leave. They have paid so much money. False documents and a quick exit are not cheap. And though Ravi could show the appropriate qualifications and skills to secure permanent residency as a skilled migrant, they don’t have enough time. They need to leave now.
All this is irrelevant now, though, as Kandiah slowly comes to understand that his hands have been nailed to a road. He has been told of such stories, but never believed they were true. That the Sinhalese army use a railroad spike on dark mountain roads, leaving their victims the choice of tearing their hands off the road or being crushed by trucks that cannot see them in the dark.
How could it be true, because who would do such a thing to another human being?
Now, in the dark, he can hear laughter in the bushes, as the soldiers take bets on which he will choose.
51
Natalie and Upeksha stare at each other, both equally alarmed.
Upeksha casts a quick glance over Natalie’s person, then takes her elbow and directs her firmly down the street.
“My car is just down here,” she says, her voice low, her grip fierce.
She doesn’t let go of Natalie’s elbow until she has shunted her into the passenger seat, after which she slams the door shut. She walks briskly to the driver’s side and gets in, locking the car after her, businesslike and efficient.
Natalie continues to stare at her. Her heart is still pounding erratically, her breathing heavy. She can’t think. She can’t even put her seatbelt on. Upeksha reaches across her, buckling her in in one smooth motion, then starting the engine.
Without waiting for information or instructions, she starts driving toward Natalie’s flat.
After ten minutes of silence, Natalie’s brain starts to function again.
“Why are you here?” she asks, her voice uncertain. She means at the hotel, even though the very fact that they’re driving away from it is what has allowed the adrenaline to subside and the sense of imminent danger and the panic to pass.
“What happened?” Upeksha shoots back, her voice calm but firm.
Natalie just shrugs and stares out the window. As her system struggles to process the surge of adrenaline, she feels washed out. Astonishingly, she feels like crying. Again.
With Upeksha, that would absolutely never do.
With some effort, Natalie tries to focus.
Trying to claw back her way to herself, she kicks off her shoes and throws them into the backseat, along with her wig. She’s trying to emit defiance, but she’s shaking, and her mother can see it, despite her bravado. But she can’t yet make sense of what has just happened, let alone find words to try to share it with the one person who doesn’t like to be shared with. Who never wants to know.
Not without collapsing in a howling mess.
Natalie fights against her tears fiercely. It feels like self-protection—like life and death, almost. She doesn’t understand it, but vulnerability with Upeksha has never felt like a safe place. Her response is automatic.
“What happened?” Upeksha repeats, her voice harder this time. Steely, almost. “Something’s wrong. Don’t pretend. A mother knows.”
Natalie capitulates.
Later, she would think back over the conversation and feel confused by how much she shared. She might even laugh: an ugly, bitter laugh. Did you know all through my childhood? she might think to herself. What about through high school? What about through life?
But now, frightened and confused, she answers Upeksha’s questions.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I had a client there. I didn’t stay. That client...he looked…” Her words dry up, fade out. She can’t make sense of what is happening.
Because that client? He looked just like her boyfriend.
Disarmed by Upeksha’s sudden appearance of “wanting to know,” Natalie tells her all of it.
About Griffin not existing. About his phone being linked to a dead escort. And about her fleeing her booking just now because the client looked just like Griffin.
About her fear that she might be going mad.
You never give up hope entirely, it seems. Connection to her mother seems worth trying for, still. After all these years.
When her guard is down. When she feels vulnerable.
She’s not capable of thinking clearly. But when she mulls over it later, unsettled, it seems to her that some primal part of her still moved her toward connecting, still seemed to think it worth the risk. Still thought it was possible. It seemed right there, so close Natalie could feel her longing more strongly than she had felt it in thirty years.
Maybe this time, her whole being seemed to be screaming at her. Trying to catapult her into her mother’s arms, and some imagined blissful comfort she might find there. Being taken care of by her mother.
But Upeksha is businesslike. She asks for some details, and to see a photo of Griffin. Natalie only has a couple of poorly executed selfies, the same ones she sent to Burns. She has no idea why her mother needs to see a picture. But she feels too overwhelmed to resist or try to figure it out.
Upeksha drops her at home without reassurances, without looking after her, and without even touching her.
She does tell her matter-of-factly to stop seeing strange men in unknown places as she drives away.
52
Before she has even set her bag down, let alone has time to process what just happened, there’s demanding knocking at her door.
Natalie freezes.
Did someone just watch her come home?
But Griffin’s manly voice carries through the door.
“Babe, are you there? We need to talk.”
Yes. We do, thinks Natalie. But she can’t think clearly.
Brown escorts are being murdered.
Your phone can be linked to them.
A man who looked like you just booked a date with me.
“Hon?”
For some reason, the endearment grates on Natalie. While she’s wondering about being attacked and murdered, Griffin gets to play happy partners. It all seems ludicrous and unfair.
Sliding down the door, Natalie sits on the floor and calls him on her mobile.
“Hon?” he says again, this time into his phone. “What’s going on? Can I come in?”
“No,” says Natalie. At least this is one sensible decision she can make. “Let’s talk like this.”
“Oh.” Griffin is silent for a moment. “Is something wrong? I mean I know I left. It’s unforgivable. I want to say sorry. In person. To your face.”
“Did Detective Casey get in touch with you?”
Silence.
The space drags on between them.
Natalie doesn’t know exactly what to ask, so she doesn’t ask anything.
“Yes. It’s not what you think,” he says, rushed, suddenly. “There’s some things I need to tell you. About...escorts. My past.”
“Jesus Christ. Please tell me you haven’t murdered anybody.”
“Ivy! Jesus! How can you ask me that?”
“Gosh. I don’t know. You don’t legally seem to exist in Australia and you haven’t volunteered your real name. Your phone has been linked to dead women. And I just had someone try to book me who bore a remarkable resemblance to you. What the fuck am I supposed to think? What would you think if you were in my shoes? Cause Jesus. Fuck. To be honest, I can’t even comprehend this mess let alone come up with a coherent response to it. All I know is something is wrong and you’re at the centre of it. I’d like to keep a locked door between us for a while.”
More silence on the other side of the door.
Then: “Ivy. This client. What did he say his name was?”
Natalie wipes tears angrily from her eyes. She feels overwhelmed and hurt and worried and confused.
What was her mother even doing at that hotel?
The word drops into her mind out of nowhere.
Longing.
What’s she’s feeling is longing, she realises. Longing for everything to be normal, and for Griffin to just be her sexy boyfriend, and for being open with people not to cause so much grief, so much chaos.
Then Griffin, more urgently, leaning against the solid door between them: “Ivy! This client! What was his name?!”
“Brody,” Natalie sniffles, defeated. She feels so tired.
She just wants to lie down. Right there, in front of the door.
Lie down, and close her eyes, and never have to worry about any of this ever, ever again.
It’s like her body is mutinying, just when she needs to work everything out. Just when she needs to be alert and on guard. Mentally agile.
Is this a form of resistance? she wonders, her thoughts sluggish. Opting out?
She slides down a little further. She lets her eyes droop.
Right now, she’s safe. She could just rest for ten minutes. Just five, even.
Is this what being emotional looks like? she wonders. All your purpose and energy diverted into something so pointless and obscure?
She wishes she’d never laid eyes on Griffin. Her life was going along just fine before him.
But just as she is agreeing with herself that, yes, it would be ok just to close her eyes for a minute or two, just to rest for the barest of minutes, she hears a resounding click.
And feels the door push in against her with more force than she is ready to push back against in her lethargic, dispirited state.
53
The man walks out of the hotel, agitated.
He paces outside for several minutes, frowning and cursing.
He is sure that Ivy could not have recognised him. He doesn’t know what just happened.
He’s angry that his plan has been derailed at the first act.
In his mind, he goes back over every time he has seen Ivy. There’s not one glance in his direction, not a flash of suspicion in any of his memories.
He doesn’t take well to his plans being upended.
Impulsively, he goes back to his room. He’s got cash; he’s got a nice hotel room for the night. Though he works a mediocre job and hasn’t had a promotion in ten years, he is excellent at living cheaply so he can splurge when it suits him.
He’s damn well going to make some use of it.
He books the cheapest girls he can find, all four of them.
He’s already splurged far too much on the lush room, to convey to Ivy that he is the ideal client—rich as well as kind.
Some shitty cheap white girls can at least suck his dick while he works out what to do next.
54
Colombo, Sri Lanka – August 1977
Kandiah does not remember making a decision.
Perhaps, with the sound of the trucks approaching in the darkness, a bodily instinct to survive took over conscious thought.
Somehow, he finds his way home. Which is surprising, as his mind is not functioning. He cannot remember any part of the journey, or how long it took.
His mother has been killed, and is nailed to the wall in the kitchen.
The rest of his family are nowhere to be seen.
In the living area, Ravi’s family lie scattered amidst pools of sticky, half-dried blood. His two younger sisters. His mother and father. Kandiah remembers they were coming on the day the families were to leave.
Kandiah does not know what day it is. He does not know how long he was held by the Sinhalese army, or how long he was on the road before he came to. But he has nothing else to do but to head to the place the families had agreed to meet to leave Sri Lanka. They were to be smuggled by boat to India while they wait for their false documents to be processed, so they can all move to Australia.
Before he leaves, Kandiah tries to get his mother down from the wall, but his fingers are too mangled.
He tries and tries, to give her this one last dignity. But eventually, he has to give up.
Crying silently, he stumbles out into the night.
55
It takes a few moments for Natalie’s brain to catch up with what her body is detecting.
Griffin, in her flat. Somehow. Breaking into her flat.
Despite her exhaustion, she scrabbles away from the door, but her body feels heavy and sluggish. She makes a lunge toward the kitchen—knives, she’s thinking—but Griffin is already above her.
Fuck it, she thinks, feeling the heat from his body. Maybe death is better than this fucking nonsense anyway. She huddles in a ball at his feet, barely daring to look at him. But Griffin is leaning over her, concern and some degree of panic in his eyes.
“Brody?” he’s asking her, searching her eyes. “BRODY?”
Confused, Natalie at last pulls herself up to sitting, Griffin holding her elbow almost tenderly.
“You know him?” she asks. “You’re related?”
Griffin shakes his head.
“Brody is me. That’s my real name.” He searches her eyes for a moment, hesitating. Then: “I think you might have met my brother.”
“You never mentioned a brother,” Natalie says, frowning. “Only a sister.”
“It’s complicated. I’ll explain later. We need to—”
“No. Now,” Natalie says, leaning away from him, feeling like she might vomit again. What were the chances of your partner’s brother booking you? Like, a million to one? Or, not an issue for people in normal relationships where your partner gives you their fucking real name, so you might recognise a family member before accepting the booking?
The irony of Griffin still calling her Ivy has escaped her, though, to be fair, she had attempted to explain it.
“We should call that detective,” Griffin pleads, grabbing Natalie’s hands. “I promise I’ll explain everything. But we should call her now, while he might still be at the hotel.”
Natalie hesitates for a second, and then nods. She finds the number in her phone and hits the call button, handing it to Griffin. She doesn’t even know what she’s meant to tell Casey.
Griffin puts the phone to his ear. “What’s the room and hotel?” he asks Natalie, concentrating, focused. He looks handsome and in control, despite his urgency. Natalie realises that she is trusting him, without even making a clear decision to do so. But she goes—like so many times before—with her gut.
“Oh shit. It’s in my phone.” She gestures for him to give it back, but he holds a hand up. A moment later, he leaves a rushed message for the detective, asking her to call him urgently, that his brother is using his name and may still be a hotel in the CBD. Then he gives Natalie back the phone to find the room number.
Once she relays it to him, they stare at each other.
“From the start,�
� Natalie says. She is watching him warily, but in that three minutes, something has changed. She couldn’t articulate what it was—the concern in his eyes as he helped her to sit up? His tenderness toward her, even as he takes control of the situation so efficiently and decisively?—but she knows, without a doubt, that her physical safety is not at risk from this man. She believed it before, but she trusts it absolutely now.
She takes a deep breath, and waits.
56
When the knock comes on the door, three of the working girls are still servicing the man.
Massaging his shoulders, stroking his ego, performing in front of him. He sends one of them to answer the door, thinking it’s the fourth girl coming back, now ready to perform natural oral, which she initially refused and he’d kicked her out, snatching his money back and towering over her threateningly.
But the woman accompanying Alice or Annie, or whatever her name is, back into the room is older.
Browner.
Andrew’s lips curl in distaste.
But she waves a wad of fifty-dollar notes around and smiles at him, composed and confident, like she knows what needs to happen and somehow making the man feel calmer, less erratic.
“I’ll pay you to send these girls away,” she says. “I have a proposition for you.”
“I don’t want to fuck your dirty old brown cunt,” he sneers back, but he reaches for the money, and the other girls scurry out of the room.
“Leave some lingerie,” the woman tells them curtly. “Consider it my payment for your early mark.”
“You’re not going to fit your fat arse into their clothes, grandma,” Andrew taunts her, but his dick is getting hard again thinking about what he might be able to make her do. To humiliate her.
