by Fen Wilde
She just smiles politely.
“Let me finish that shoulder rub,” she says, kicking off her shoes.
“Are you a fancy whore, too?” Andrew asks, eyeing the red soles. He’s looked at enough adverts to know which shoes the pricey girls wear.
Still, he doesn’t protest as she walks behind him, her head held high, graceful in her movements. He’s done a few lines, and can’t bring himself to give two fucks about basically anything. She can pay him to rub his shoulders if she wants to, the silly cunt.
She places one hand lightly on his shoulder, and hands him some expensive champagne, purchased on the way. She makes sure to flash the label at him, knowing instinctively that men like this don’t refuse drugs or booze. Then she massages his shoulders firmly and confidently as he sips at it, emanating a calm peacefulness, which he enjoys, despite himself.
He doesn’t notice the cheap, functional handbag slung over her shoulder, at odds with her glamourous hair and shoes, the champagne, her stately demeanour.
Inside it, all she carries are a knife, some unlabelled tablets, and a few plastic bags.
57
Colombo, Sri Lanka – August 1977
It’s a miracle, but they are all there.
Huddled in the dark, with only the clothes on their backs, they are hustled onto a boat in the dark. They have spent their combined life savings to be smuggled to India while they await falsified documents to travel on to Australia.
They have been told that a place has been arranged for them to stay at until the documents arrive.
It turns out to be some sheets of corrugated roofing strung up in a corner of a street.
They have no money, no contacts, no support.
They don’t speak of what they left behind.
They wait for the smugglers to return.
They never do.
58
Settled on the floor opposite Natalie, Griffin takes a deep breath.
“When my mum left my dad, my brother was helping him fix the tractor, and he refused to come with us to school. Mum was never allowed to drive the ute, but my father had broken my nose. Mum used it as an excuse to drive into town, to take me to the doctor. But she left the ute near the doctor’s and got us on a train. We went to Sydney and never went back.”
Griffin is silent for a while.
“I can’t imagine my brother had a very nice time with my father. When Brian—that’s my father—realised she’d left him, he would have taken it out on the nearest thing weaker than him. And I can’t imagine how Andrew must have felt, being left behind. I do know how much it hurt my mother. I found her crying nearly every day for months.”
Natalie is staring at Griffin, shocked.
It’s a whole other world of family pain that she can’t even begin to wrap her head around.
“Mum saved money and paid someone to go and get him, but it took ages. She was too scared to go anywhere near Dad herself. So he was there with Dad, just the two of them, for maybe two or three years. He was a very angry boy by the time he came to live with us. But he came. He stayed. Mum bent over backwards trying to make it right. But of course, she couldn’t. How could you? That’s a long time to feel abandoned. No matter what she said to him, she left him behind and it meant he was different to us. He’d experienced horrors we didn’t want to even try to imagine.”
Griffin pauses for a long time. The air grows heavy between them.
“What then?” Natalie whispers eventually. There’s something else, she can feel it. Rolling and boiling like a rebel wave that’s going to dump you so badly you’ll be shitting sand for weeks.
Griffin clears his throat.
“We had no money. Mum hadn’t worked barely ever, and only on the farm since she’d married Brian. So that’s why…” he looks at her pleadingly, but she doesn’t get it. “I’m so sorry I walked out on you after you told me about escorting. My mother worked in a brothel. That’s how we survived. But she also died working. And it was just too much. I just needed some air. I didn’t want to...I couldn’t…” And then he sobs, a wracking, painful, inhuman noise. But as Natalie moves toward him, to comfort him, a golf ball in her throat, her phone rings.
“Detective Casey,” she answers, her voice anguished. One hand on Griffin’s knee.
She gives the detective the hotel and room number where she met “Brody,” but she still doesn’t quite know why. “He’s using Griffin’s real name. And driver’s license, I think,” she tells her, but shakes her head at Griffin in confusion. But all Detective Casey says is “I’ll be in touch,” leaving the phone beeping in her ear.
“Why are you worried about Andrew?” Natalie asks, confused. “You think he’s dangerous?”
“He gave me this phone. Said he’d got a new, better one, and I might as well use it while I saw to getting mine repaired. I’d just told him I’d dropped mine in the loo. They couldn’t fix mine, and I’ve just kept using it. I keep meaning to get a new Smartphone, but it’s never really been a priority. So he had the phone when the other escort was called. It’s not much, but Detective Casey wanted to follow it up. And—”
Griffin stops, frowns. A look of agony crosses his face.
“And he hates sex workers,” he says softly, finally, his face anguished. “He abused Mum about it until the day she died.”
59
Upeksha – Linfield, 2018
After Natalie stormed out of their lounge room that day, Upeksha thought, once again, about survival.
She had thought a lot about survival, for a while.
What one might do to preserve life.
She and Ravi fled, changed their names, and cut all ties to their homeland. To preserve life.
Kandiah tore his hands off the road and walked several miles, blood dripping from his mangled fingers, his mind unable to compute the level of horror he had experienced. To preserve life.
The Tamil Tigers strapped bombs to themselves to take out high-profile targets. Others fought with cyanide capsules around their necks.
To preserve a way of life, perhaps.
There were other things they did, to preserve life.
She and Ravi never talk about them.
When new “helpers” came, to their slum shelter on the streets of India, Upeksha had no doubt that they were part of the same group of “helpers” who had abandoned them there. Who else would have known where to find them and what they needed?
Another helper offering salvation—for the right price.
When they’d said they had no money, he’d looked slyly at Upeksha. The youngest, the prettiest of the group.
“She could work for us, for a few weeks,” he’d said, leering. “While you wait for the documents to be prepared.”
They didn’t have any other options. He’d said it would cover food for the family as well, and proper lodgings. Upeksha had agreed. Terrified for her baby. Shehara had tried to take her place, but the man was adamant. They wanted Upeksha.
The rest of the family couldn’t look at her the day she was led away.
That man had been her first client, and an almost daily visitor after that.
He had also been the one who drove them to the airport, seven weeks later. All of them thinner, sicker, and more broken than they were before.
The food and lodgings promised had barely been enough to keep them alive.
Upeksha had waited until the whole family were out of the car.
The driver leered at her in the rear-vision mirror. She had moved to get out of the car, but from under her clothes pulled a large knife that she had stolen from the house they’d kept her family in. Upeksha had only been reunited with them that morning.
She drew the blade across his neck, with all the strength afforded her by helplessness and rage.
It was harder than she had anticipated. She was pregnant, weak, and sick.
It was a stupid thing to do. As soon as she started the motion, she realised that. She suddenly saw all the ways that it could go wrong. The
danger that she’d put her family in.
Her baby.
But she had thought about it so often.
She had tested the blade that morning as they ate their mouthfuls of stale bread.
It was easier in her imagination. One quick slice. A silent, painful death.
Stupid. How easily he could have stopped their departure if she had failed to at least incapacitate him. He could have screamed. Someone could have caught them, stopped them from boarding their flight, oh so easily.
But she hadn’t thought about that.
All she had thought was that she needed something. Some line in the sand.
Some way of stating her non-acceptance of this method. Of her fate.
Of the fate of all the other women who might come after her.
But he didn’t call out or chase them. So she must have hurt him badly enough.
She never knew if she killed him. She tells herself that she did, sometimes, when she wakes with nightmares.
It allows her breathing to settle, and her to get back to sleep.
It allows her to get on with her life.
60
Natalie and Griffin are still sitting on the kitchen floor, holding hands, when the detective calls them.
She conveys the news in a matter-of-fact manner. Though she prefaces it with condolences, she is clearly not expecting the news to be upsetting.
They have found a deceased Caucasian male at the hotel room Natalie provided. The license he is carrying is out of date, and shows a picture that Detective Casey believes is indeed Griffin, though the likeness is obvious between the two men.
The name on it says Brody Allen Pierce.
She needs Natalie to go to the station to make a statement.
Later, when the police have finished at the crime scene, she’ll need Griffin to go to the morgue to identify the body.
They agree, but stay seated on the floor after the call ends.
Just staring at each other.
61
In his last moments, Andrew was thinking about his mother.
When she first arrived in Sydney, she rented a room from a leery old man in Kings Cross.
Far, far away from Brian and fists and fear, Catelyn had found the work that desperate women always find.
She worked as much as she was able while the children were in school. It was rough work. Dangerous, with few support options. But she worked hard, and she put her kids to bed every night herself.
And she loved them.
She loved them hugely.
Fiercely, protectively.
Guiltily.
She gave them enough love for three children, and a day didn’t go by when she didn’t feel the third child’s absence in her whole body. Like a knife.
When the three of them curled up to sleep together, her joining them in the early hours of the morning—the kids way too old now to all sleep in the same bed, but she couldn’t afford anything more than the one bedroom apartment—she missed his small body with a yearning that was like dying a little, all over again, every night.
By the time she tried to tell him this, though, he was no longer a little boy.
His body was no longer small.
Working on the farm full-time—having dropped out of school to help when Catelyn left—resulted in a solid, well-defined physique, which was somehow even more menacing on an eleven-year-old boy.
Living with Brian resulted in a closed-off, hardened, angry soul, which was even more so.
Catelyn tried to reach him, to pull him into their world of softness and laughter, despite the scarcity—she had spent years saving money, to send for him. She paid a trusted colleague cash. She paced endlessly for the entire time she waited.
She was gobsmacked that he came.
Andrew never knew it, but she was terrified that he would be firmly his father’s son, and pass their location on to Brian, to come for them and take—or kill—them all.
But she’d also spent years growing strong and resourceful. She had enough back-up plans to sink a small boat.
She tried to reach him with love and light. With her whole heart. Up against three years of guilt and pain and suffering, on both their shoulders.
But he was unreachable, and hovered around the outside of their lives in a darkness and coldness that permeated their tiny flat.
He called her a “whore,” like he knew what it meant.
But he stayed with them.
He went back to school.
He was angry. But he was safe, she told herself, every night when she came home and looked at them. Together at last.
She knew he wasn’t safe from what was inside him. Entrenched there through what he had endured. But she didn’t know how to fix that except with love. Consistent, relentless, enormous love.
She couldn’t think about it too deeply. Instinctively, she knew that to delve into that would kill her.
Because she left him.
And he never forgot it.
The drugs the woman had dissolved in his champagne made Andrew so sleepy, he didn’t even notice her slipping a plastic bag over his head.
She’s standing behind him where he lounges in the chair, slumped down in it, already starting to slide off it to the floor.
Everything is heavy and strange and slow.
In his mind, he sees Catelyn smiling at him, even as he insulted her.
“I’m so sorry,” she’s whispering, her long, soft hair tickling his face. “I love you,” she’s saying, the light dancing in her eyes, and her smile, which never falters.
“I love you I love you I love you.”
He’s never stopped hating her. Hating women. Hating whores. But in those last moments, as he drifts into unconsciousness, he feels an overwhelming urge to stroke her face. To curl into her arms. To smell her hair.
In death, he might love her more than he ever allowed himself to in life.
62
Upeksha – Linfield, 2018
In Andrew’s last moments, Upeksha had been thinking about her mother, too.
Kandiah had spared her the details. He could not speak the details. Not of what happened to their family, or what happened to him. Though they could make a guess, from looking at his hands.
He had never been able to work as an electrician again.
There was a time in her life when it would have been unthinkable to Upeksha that she was capable of killing somebody.
Even when she started following Natalie—after that day when Natalie declared that someone was killing her colleagues—she hadn’t been thinking of killing anybody. Just being there. Being near.
But in truth, Upeksha never stopped thinking about life versus death.
What she might do to protect her family.
What she had done to protect her family.
Not her country—she doesn’t understand that concept at all. She would not sacrifice her life for a Tamil state.
But for her family…that was another matter.
The day Alex was hurt, she was too late.
She was too immersed in fear. Of being discovered, and being sent back.
But the war is over now.
And she had not survived this far to let her children die.
She didn’t have a plan, or a strategy, or even any conviction that she would be enough.
She hadn’t even intended to go back to the hotel until Natalie showed her the photo of Griffin.
She hadn’t missed a beat. But upon seeing that picture, her plans changed.
Though it was clearly a different man, the likeness was undeniable to the man Upeksha had seen near the bus stop the day that Letitia was supposed to come for lunch.
Upeksha had been coming back from the shops. She’d wanted fresh produce to cook Letitia something special. Whatever Natalie thought about her prejudice against skin colours, Upeksha was thrilled to meet her daughter’s friend. Letitia seemed just like the sort of friend every woman needed.
Upeksha wanted to embrace her, to adopt he
r. To make her one of the family.
She had no idea that that would be the last thing that Natalie would appreciate.
Weighed down with fresh produce, Upeksha had carefully exited the bus, lifting her shopping cart down each step painstakingly. She did not want any produce crushed or bruised.
The bus had been late, and Upeksha had cursed, and wished she had let Ravi drive her. But she enjoyed shopping by herself. The orderliness of everything she needed, in neat rows at her fingertips. The cool shopping centres. The purposefulness of the (mainly women) shoppers.
Now, she was late. The meat was already cooking, but Letitia would be arriving in half an hour. She would barely have time to get the bread and vegetables on before Letitia knocked on the door.
She only noticed the man because he was staring at her over his shoulder, twisting awkwardly, as she carefully descended from the bus, with an expression that unsettled her. It was dislike, certainly, and that was unusual enough around here. Their suburb was middle class and well-behaved. Everybody was friendly, but kept largely to themselves. Open hostility was rare enough these days to stand out.
There was no way a brown teenager would be abused in her street anymore.
But it wasn’t even that. It was that he had driven away immediately after, but then she had seen him drive past and stare at her again just a few minutes later, heading directly back to where he had just been.
Upeksha felt uneasy.
So many years had passed.
And since the attack on Alex, nothing untoward had ever happened to her. Nothing with any consequences, that is.
Sure, there were obscenities shouted now and then. She was overlooked or underserviced. But nothing that was going to hurt her.
Nothing that was going to kill her.
Nevertheless, Upeksha was still hyper vigilant to the expression on men’s faces when they looked at her. Fifteen-hour days in a grimy Indian sex shop, terrified for the life of her baby, had taught her to pick up on those that might want to hurt her versus those that just wanted to have sex.
