by S. A. McEwen
To tell her what to do next.
Instead, his lips brush against hers. His other arm comes around her waist and pulls her into him firmly, one sharp, well-defined movement that is almost possessive. His kiss is soft and slow, just his lips, slightly parted, kissing her bottom lip and then her top lip. She’s used to men tasting her hastily, urgently, all about their needs, their desires. Griffin is teasing her. He wants her to want him. His kisses are perfection; it is Natalie who deepens the kiss, flicking her tongue along his upper lip, parting her lips wider, inviting him in. She wants his tongue, his fingers, his touch.
His everything.
But he holds it all back, continuing to tease her, running his fingers infuriatingly close to where she wants them and then pulling them away, starting again, the hint of a smile dancing around his lips, until she is beside herself and has to take back the lead. She pushes him backward, into the couch, then straddles him, fixing him with her own sexy stare.
At last she can feel some friction against her clit. In this moment the bulge in his pants is everything she can imagine ever wanting again. She curls her fingers into his hair, pulling his head back, looking down at him hungrily before lowering her mouth back to his, kissing him deeply. Grinding against him. Relishing his tongue.
Then he’s pushing her back gently. “Stand up,” he commands, and Natalie obeys without hesitation.
“Turn around. Put your hands on the table.”
Natalie obliges, the low coffee table leaving her arse out in front of Griffin. Slowly, he pushes up her skirt and peels down her panties. She can feel him spreading her lips, but he doesn’t touch her.
Eventually, what feels like hours later, she hears him groan.
“You’re so pretty down here,” he murmurs. “I want to look at you and lick you and fuck you all at once.”
Afterwards, they go to the gallery.
The Archibald works have been replaced by 19th-century watercolours.
Natalie feels at once bereft and relieved to not see Jack Charles. She doesn’t want to explain what he means to her, why she had been staring at him the way she had when Griffin first saw her. It’s hard to explain to white people, without sounding whiney or angry—neither of which are welcomed, Natalie has found. It’s hard for people to see it, if they just don’t. And usually, alongside a companion like Griffin, the incursions are limited. People don’t shout at her to go home you black cunt when she’s with a well-dressed white man.
What can you say, by way of explanation? That just last week, waiting in line at the bank, the teller called the white woman behind her in the queue. When Natalie had said politely, “Excuse me, I think I was next,” the woman had looked surprised. “Oh, I thought you two were together,” she’d said, indicating the elderly brown man who was being served by another teller. At a guess, Natalie would have said his heritage was Indian, not Sri Lankan.
The teller didn’t even have the self-awareness to look mortified.
Natalie had wanted to say, well surely then you would assume this white woman behind me is with that elderly white man over at that teller? But she had learnt a long time ago talking about race was almost always interpreted as aggression. She’d merely shook her head no, and approached the teller, her anger simmering lightly inside.
Would Griffin see that as racist? Natalie wonders. Assuming the only two brown people in the queue must be together. She doubts it. “Just a misunderstanding,” he might say. “Harmless mistake.”
Not that racist is a word she ever utters aloud, except to her parents, who refute its existence at every turn.
But what about the bomb squad at the airport, she could counter. Why am I picked, every time? “Coincidence,” people have said to her, before.
Or the insults on the street? “Bad eggs,” she has heard, countless times.
Natalie would like to say that these instances are so everyday that she doesn’t feel them anymore. That she can shrug them off.
That there are enough good people in her life that she can ignore the “bad eggs.”
But it’s simply not true. They add up, all these little incursions on your dignity, your self-worth.
Maybe they add up to despair, or depression, or suicide.
Or maybe they add up to rage.
That day, looking at the portrait of Jack Charles, Natalie’s mood had lent more toward confusion. It was as though she was trying to reach into something fundamental to understand it. The duplicity. The hypocrisy. That a culture could at once hold up Jack Charles—as they should, of course—but at the same time, turn a blind eye to refugees, to the poverty and racism and health gaps that plagued Aboriginal communities, to the scapegoating and fear-mongering of conservative politicians about whole races. African gangs, for God’s sake.
To the relentless, everyday incursions that she experienced.
Griffin had thought she looked ethereal.
She had really just felt betrayed.
8
At family lunch the next week, Natalie fidgets at the table, pushing her food around her plate, her stomach clenching with nerves.
“I have bad news,” she says.
She’s not worried about upsetting her parents.
She’s worried about them upsetting her.
“Grant Boyd is being released in a few days’ time. He’s moving into number seven.”
Ravi and Upeksha are composed. If they feel anything, they don’t show it. Both look down at their food with great interest.
“He served his time. We have nothing but best wishes for that boy. Don’t worry about us, Natalie.”
Natalie clenches her jaw, tries not to grind her teeth. “He’s been in and out of jail on assault charges his whole life. He’s a racist little shit—”
Here her mother cuts her off sharply. “Natalie. Language.” Her voice and her eyes are sharp. She glances at Alex meaningfully.
Natalie glances at Alex meaningfully, too.
“He’s hurt you before. He might hurt you again,” she says quietly, but her shoulders slump. She’s defeated already. The united front of her parents’ forgiveness, their placid acceptance is more than she can bear. Certainly more than she can fight against and hope to achieve anything.
She pushes her plate away. And takes some satisfaction in it being her turn to stare at her food, her resistance to her parents’ stance every bit as wilful as their resistance to hers.
9
That evening, Natalie tries to forget about her parents with a friend.
“I’ve deferred next year,” Letitia announces, brushing crumbs off her hands to toss her long, black hair over her shoulder.
Letitia is the only sex worker who Natalie has ever invited to her apartment.
She’s the only one that she really talks to, if truth be told. What started out as a mentoring type of role has evolved into a robust friendship.
Natalie stops on her way over to the couch with their drinks, midway across the room.
Letitia doesn’t notice, and digs back in to the cheese laid out on the coffee table. A vase of vibrant, fresh hydrangeas glows a deep blue next to the cheese.
“Why?” Natalie asks, trying not to sound motherly and disapproving, though that is exactly what she feels. Letitia is far too young to be deciding to only escort.
“I’m having too much fun, earning too much money, and I just want to enjoy myself for a while. I would never have dreamed of visiting London before now, ever!” she declares happily, extending an arm for the fancy Riesling Natalie is not handing over. She is still standing in the middle of the room, dismayed.
“But you need a fall-back plan. This industry can change on a dime. You don’t want to be left without skills or with gaps in your resume.”
“It’s just for a year. I want to buy a house and travel as much as I can. Then I’ll settle back down and become an engineer, don’t worry.”
As much as she tries not to, Natalie feels protective toward the woman. They’ve only known each other for a year, with Letitia em
ailing “Ivy” to ask for some tips about starting escorting. She was struggling to manage her studies and her finances, and like many students before her, looked to the oldest profession in the world to help her along. I was top of my class in school, and I’m loving engineering, she had written, and it seems ridiculous that STILL, the most money I can earn is from my body. But why the hell not? I like sex, and I feel like I could do this. I’d love to talk to you about it, if it’s not too much to ask.
It had actually been too much to ask. Natalie had turned down similar requests before, or quoted newbies a mentoring rate that soon saw them scurrying in the other direction, slinking around ebook websites for a “how-to” guide for one hundredth of the price. But Letitia had skin colour on her side; Natalie felt a responsibility to help her. To guide her not just as an escort, but as an escort of colour. To alert her to the differences. To make sure she was okay.
It was the most maternal she had ever felt.
“Okay, well…” Natalie sits down, takes a sip of her wine. She’s come to value their catch-ups as much, if not more than Letitia, who by now knows the ropes and has settled in to sex work for the long haul. New women start all the time; most of them don’t last. The work is hard, and it’s not for everyone. It takes a certain type of warmth coupled with a capacity for disconnection—a difficult combination to pull off, to not be damaged by it. “Just make sure you have other skills to fall back on. Make some money, make some good investments, but have a plan to fall back on for if you get sick of it. You’re too young to have your perceptions of men tainted forever.”
It’s not that Natalie meets bad men.
It’s that she meets such ordinary ones.
Kind, respectable, thoughtful ones. Most often, married, lying, cheating ones. They’re so everyday it’s terrifying.
Is that why I haven’t replied to Griffin again? she wonders. All that travel. He’s almost certainly got an escort on speed dial in every city. She’s seen it too many times to believe anyone doesn’t do it. And she knows that that is unreasonable—but that’s the cost of sex work, for her.
Not trusting any man.
She doesn’t take on board Eloise’s little insights—that perhaps this is not about men at all. That sex work might be a simple explanation that Natalie gives herself and others for avoiding intimacy, when the problem had actually existed long before sex was work in Natalie’s life.
“How are your folks?” Letitia asks, and Natalie grimaces.
“The same.”
“I thought they were sweet.”
Letitia had dropped by with some lingerie she had borrowed for a photo shoot, at a time when Ravi and Upeksha were having a cup of tea at Natalie’s. It was unusual enough that they visited her (“We haven’t seen your place for years!” they’d said, wearing down her resolve to keep them at bay), but Letitia dropping in at the same time was a one in a million chance. She’d passed her off as a law student, interviewing her for a paper. At the time Natalie was supposedly trading the stock market, but if her parents noticed this, they didn’t mention it.
“They are sweet. Unless you’re their daughter, and acting a little too aware of your skin colour.”
“Fair enough,” Letitia laughs, a deep, throaty laugh that vibrates the air between them. She’s all woman, not a trace of self-consciousness in her. “What else is happening?”
For a moment, Natalie considers confiding in her about Grant. But she’s still feeling hollow following the conversation with her parents. It’s not even that they don’t want to stab him a little, the way that Natalie does. It’s that they’re not on her team. She wants to live in a world where she belongs, regardless of her skin colour. Her parents try to belong by rejecting their skin colour, without seeming to care that that means rejecting her too.
Instead, Natalie tells Letitia about Griffin. Her unusual burn of desire when she looked at him. Her mistrust.
“This is what a relationship looks like as a hooker.” She grins wryly. “Doubt and misgivings.”
“It doesn’t have to,” Letitia counters. “What’s the worst that could happen? Why not just give it a go?”
“There are too many ways it’s likely to fail. He probably uses escorts. He probably won’t like me being an escort. And besides those two doozies…I was never very good at relationships anyway. Intimacy, compromise. Erghhh.” Natalie shudders with distaste.
She puts her wine down, torn, yet again, about the baby.
She has another appointment. This time for a surgical abortion.
She’s eleven weeks pregnant.
Walking Letitia to the ground floor exit later, Natalie remains engrossed in their conversation.
Neither of them notice the figure hunched low in the front seat of the car across the road, dark glasses hiding his eyes, which are staring straight at them.
They hug—a firm, tight hug with meaning. Then Letitia walks out of the automatic doors and turns toward the bus stop. Natalie watches her retreating back, her heart clenching a little.
Letitia might be the closest she has allowed anyone to get to her in a very long time.
10
“Can I see it?”
It’s an odd request, Natalie knows. She’s fasted. She’s taken the drugs. She’s in her surgical gown, waiting to be wheeled into theatre.
And suddenly she wants to see the little creature growing inside her.
The nurse looks at her with something close to irritation, just for a second. “Of course,” she says, her tone falsely kind and concerned, a complete mismatch to the initial flash of scorn she had not managed to hide.
Natalie imagines she’s thinking, who books a termination then has second thoughts? Then Natalie thinks she’s probably just annoyed at the administrative delay it will result in—not judging her personally, not judging her choices. Because it’s a big decision, right? Surely lots of people struggle with it?
She has to wait a long time. It feels like hours, but maybe it’s not. Everything seems to be moving in slow motion. It’s the anxiety overlaying this choice, this action.
Just say this is my only chance to have a baby?
Finally, a young, energetic doctor bounces into the room.
“You want us to check the foetus?” she asks, indicating two nurses who have followed her into the room. She grabs Natalie’s chart off the end of the bed and starts skimming it. “These guys will take you to the ultrasound. I’ll be along in about ten minutes; we’ll have a look at how things are going.”
Natalie opens her mouth to correct her, but she’s already bounced back out, her competence and confidence radiating from her, her ponytail swinging.
Natalie wishes she had a friend with her to hold her hand.
When the doctor returns, warning her about the coldness of the lubrication she smears across her still-flat stomach, Natalie tries again.
“I’m booked for a termination. I just wanted to see it.”
The doctor’s air of confidence falters a little.
“You’re having second thoughts about the procedure.”
“Yes. No. I’m not sure.”
She’s in the private ward of the North Shore Private Hospital. It might be unusual, but the doctor recovers quickly.
“Of course. Let’s have a look.”
She adjusts the screen so that Natalie can see it, and presses the ultrasound wand into her stomach. At first there is nothing, and the doctor moves the wand around, pressing hard. It’s uncomfortable, and Natalie grimaces.
“There!” The doctor says at last. “Listen.” She turns a few knobs, and thudding fills Natalie’s ears. There’s something perverse about it: the loudness in the small room.
Held up so piercingly against the purpose of her visit.
In that sound, Natalie hears so much life.
“There’s the head,” the doctor indicates a white blob, the screen black and streaky. “And the legs.” Then she starts to frown, stops talking to Natalie. For a minute or two she frowns and pushes, mo
ving the wand this way and that. Natalie can’t make out much of anything.
The ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom fills the room.
The doctor turns some more knobs and the sound disappears. She turns the monitor back toward her, so only she can see it.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs eventually, concern clouding her eyes as she looks over at Natalie. “There seem to be some abnormalities.”
Natalie struggles to sit up, and the doctor places a gentle hand on her thigh, the gesture indicating she should lie back. “Let’s make you comfortable, then we can talk.”
“No!” Natalie responds sharply, thinking, how on earth was one supposed to get comfortable after being delivered the news that your baby was abnormal? Even if you were minutes away from terminating it. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I’m not sure exactly,” the doctor responds, looking at Natalie carefully. “Some of the organs appear to have formed on the outside of the body. The heart is strong, but it is not a viable foetus. It won’t survive. I’m so sorry.”
Natalie nods dumbly.
It has taken the question out of her hands, the need to make the right decision. The “last chance” nature of it. The questioning.
But now she feels empty. Distressed.
Alone.
“Can I proceed with the termination, then?” she says softly to the doctor, who gently starts to talk to her about her options. If she wants to find out more about what has gone wrong.
When she gets to the part about waiting until she miscarries, in order to run tests on the tissue, Natalie holds a hand up to silence her.
The doctor nods silently and leaves the room.
Shortly, two nurses come to take her to theatre.
The anaesthetist walks by her head, talking her through what happens next, but his words are a meaningless hum in her ears.
Natalie stares at the ceiling and watches the fluorescent lights flash by.