by S. A. McEwen
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.
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.