Ruined (Family Untied Book 1)

by S. A. McEwen

  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 believe.

  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 their 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.

  She hears her mother suck in her breath sharply.

  “That information hasn’t been released yet,” the detective says, looking at his notebook, glancing at his colleague.

  “May I have a word?” Natalie asks, indicating the front door slightly.

  She doesn’t even know what she wants to say. But whatever it is, it’s best said away from her parents.

  One detective stays with her parents, the other walks into the front yard with her. Neighbours on both sides are watering their garden beds, as close as they can get to her parents’ front door, curious about the well-dressed visitors. Natalie frowns at them, then indicates her car. The detective squeezes into the passenger seat, his long legs awkward in the small space.

  She starts with Grant.

  “Look, you probably know this. But a violent man has recently been released into number seven there.” Natalie gestures to the house over the road. “He’s been in and out of jail his whole life. And he violently assaulted my brother when he was sixteen, leaving him with a major brain injury. Alex still lives with my parents. He needs a lot of support.”

  The detective is not writing anything down.

  “It was a racially motivated attack. He hated people of colour living on his street. He taunted us for months before attacking my brother when he was by himself. It was very opportunistic.”

  Still the detective does not write anything down.

  “I think you should look in to him first. He has the history. He has the motive.”

  “Miss Weber was sexually assaulted,” he says, and Natalie jerks over the steering wheel, the pain hitting her in the stomach like the worst of her termination cramps. She expected this, but the confirmation of it is breathtaking. “I didn’t want to distress your parents. And please keep that confidential at this stage. But it seems unlikely that a
man who dislikes people of colour would rape them, don’t you think?”

  Despite her anguish, Natalie feels a flash of rage again. The most basic education on the topic would teach an interested person that rape is about power, not desire. Surely a detective should know that?

  “On the contrary,” she says, her voice tight, thinking of the man who refused to pay, “rape is an excellent way to exert power over someone you despise. Just look at any war.” She wants to add that perhaps the case should be given to someone with expertise in sexual assault as well as homicide; she can’t believe someone so ignorant could be in charge here. But at the same time, she doesn’t trust the police. She knows all too well the ways they entrap sex workers in South Australia, directing resources into sting operations against workers instead of targeting the dangerous clients who assault them. As if sex work is ever going to go away. And while she enjoys the luxury of decriminalisation in Sydney, she doesn’t want to exacerbate anything. She doesn’t want this detective to feel he needs to assert his power about this case over her.

  She stays silent and concentrates on breathing.

  In, out. In, out.

  “Evelyn was an engineering student,” he continues, as though not hearing her. “She had just deferred her final year. Yet you said that you met her through the law newspaper. That she was interviewing you.”

  He lets the statement hang there. Natalie guesses that he knows that Letitia didn’t transfer from law.

  She weighs her options.

  And dies a little inside.

  19

  Alone in Ivy’s apartment, Griffin takes a slow shower and wonders what to do next.

  He had been planning on asking her about the different name on her mail this morning. But the turn of events had meant that question was left unanswered, still. And Ivy had shut down with walls so obvious and powerful she might as well have been thrown in a cell.

  Of course, the violent death of a friend was awful. Horrifying. Vomit-inducing. But Ivy didn’t express even a fraction of anything. She went very stiff, and very still, but she didn’t cry. She didn’t scream, she didn’t collapse. She didn’t want him to comfort her. She didn’t do anything people usually do when confronted with something so hideously awful that life as you know it is forever altered in that instant.