by Fen Wilde
Ravi would approach a lesson on the stock market in the same way. Learn the rules, play by them. At some point, he would carefully click the lid back onto his pen, and look at Natalie in a meaningful manner. He was an incredibly smart man. He would appreciate the complexities. But he would not appreciate his daughter taking such risks with her livelihood, day in, day out.
Risk and uncertainty were not part of Ravi and Upeksha’s way.
Risk could lead to standing out from the crowd.
Drawing attention to yourself.
Being different.
It could lead to surprises and uncertain outcomes.
Not that Ravi would say anything. He would look at Natalie meaningfully and expect her to step back into line.
To be sensible. To contribute. To be valuable.
To not risk things.
Natalie needs to find a good way to dissuade Ravi about the merits of the stock market without going through that exhausting process.
She supposes she could tell him that she no longer trades—but her current profession is hardly going to be an improvement, in his eyes.
Eventually, she settles on telling him that due to the uncertainty around the Trump presidency, she feels the stock market is too volatile at the moment. She’s gone back to law.
By the time she’s solved this problem, she slumps on the couch, defeated.
She doesn’t make an appointment to see her doctor.
2
The man watches the woman carefully.
He knows her name, her height, her eye colour.
He knows where she catches the bus into the city and where she frequently sees her clients.
He doesn’t know what she sounds like when she laughs, or what type of wine she likes, or what she plans to be when she quits escorting in a few years’ time.
He doesn’t know about the homework club she volunteers at once a week to support teenagers with their learning—on the surface, or with their sense of belonging—a deeper, and more important goal.
He does know what she’ll look like with his hands around her throat, though.
He’s seen how that looks several times before.
3
By the time Sunday lunch rolls around, Natalie still has not made an appointment to see her doctor.
She feels decidedly queasy as she drives the thirty minutes to her parent’s house in Linfield—the same house that she grew up in, that houses all her childhood memories. Occasionally, one jumps out at her, wraps her in its thick, tight, suffocating grasp—but mostly, she tries her damnedest to keep them in the past, where they belong.
Alex opens the door for her, his smile wide.
“Natty!” he cackles excitedly, reaching forward to hug her, his delight infectious. “I’ve missed you! I’ve missed you! What has kept you gone so long!” It isn’t a question, more a statement of his excitement that she’s here now. The conversation goes much the same way every second Sunday.
“Come,” he beckons her, already heading toward the stairs leading up from the foyer to the bedrooms.
A place, Natalie knows, where it’s harder to keep bad memories at bay.
“Let me say hi to Mum and Dad,” Natalie says gently, nodding at him encouragingly, but a dark cloud passes across his face.
“Now! Now! Now!” he repeats, jabbing his finger toward the top of the stairs, the volume increasing with each word and each jab. Natalie sighs, and acquiesces.
His bedroom looks much the same as when Natalie left home, though he’s two years older than her. Figurines of various superheroes are littered across the bed and floor. The bookshelves are lined with comic books and adventure stories. Terry Pratchett simpers from a poster above the bed.
Generally, Natalie’s parents don’t like her to go into Alex’s bedroom without one of them present, but she has never felt afraid of her brother. He seems as manipulable as a child.
“New—see?” he says, pointing at a figurine that Natalie doesn’t recognise. It stands about twenty centimetres high and has the bright, waxy look of something not yet well-handled, not worn down by hours of attention from small, grubby hands.
Except Alex’s hands are not small. At six feet, he towers over Natalie, the disparity between his body and his mind as painful to her now as it is every time.
“Lovely, Alex,” she tells him softly. “Tell me about him.”
Alex bounces on the balls of his feet happily, recounting something about Wolverine’s powers. Natalie nods encouragingly, keeping eye contact, wistfully grateful that she is able to provide this small slice of comfort in his day. His little sister—interested, warm, attentive.
He’s joyful about the smallest things.
Every time Natalie sees him, her heart breaks in two all over again.
Upeksha has made enough roast to feed twelve people.
The four of them sit around the formal dining table, Alex being reminded constantly to stay at the table until he has finished his meal and excused himself.
They make stilted small talk. As always, Natalie asks after Aunty She and Uncle Pu in Melbourne, her cousins dotted around Australia. Her mother gives tight-lipped replies.
Natalie keeps in touch with these extended family members herself, of course. She doesn’t know why she provokes her mother so. It’s almost like she’s trying to demonstrate family solidarity, draw her mother back to her heritage, her country of origin, despite knowing perfectly well that Upeksha wants nothing less. Her sister and her family epitomise all the things that Upeksha and Ravi disavowed when they fled to Australia; they celebrate their skin colour. They are at home in it. They visit Sri Lanka; cook curried mutton, pickle their own fruits, and make coconut relish.
The very opposite of assimilating.
But Natalie can’t let it go. She couldn’t let it go twenty years ago, and she can’t let it go now.
“I went to the gallery to see the Archibald exhibition a few weeks ago,” she tells her family. Jack Charles is still haunting her. The portrait of the Aboriginal actor and elder by Anh Do went on to win the People’s Choice Award, and Natalie can’t reconcile that with the people that she experiences in her life. That they would vote for a portrait of an Aboriginal man. A stolen man. An addict. Which people voted for his portrait? she wonders. Submitted by a Vietnamese-born artist, no less. A refugee, surviving five days in a leaky fishing boat, attacked by two different bands of pirates on his way here.
He’d be left to rot on Manus Island if he tried to come now, Natalie thinks to herself. The thought is unbelievable, unbearable. All the things Do has contributed. What things might those languishing on Manus Island have contributed, if they’d been given a chance?
Perhaps the artistic community are different, though, Natalie thinks. Perhaps people who care about art are slightly more evolved, more refined, carry a softness or a sensitivity that is missing on the streets. A whole other world to the people that Natalie encounters every day. The ones who slow their cars to shout obscenities to her out the window. The ones who watch her extra carefully in David Jones.
“I liked the portrait of Jack Charles. Did you see it won the People’s Choice Award?”
Natalie knows that her parents would know this. Part of being white is keeping up with the culture. Art. Literature. They would have seen Jack’s face. They would have passed over it hurriedly. Moved on to more European-inspired images. Traditional.
White.
“We preferred the one of Eileene Kramer,” Upeksha says, without missing a beat. “So much beauty. So much stillness. And my, what an accomplished woman at one hundred and one! Imagine that. Still working. Still travelling. Still following her passions. Can you imagine being so immersed in something that you love, that you just never retire? I guess it’s like football stars. They go on to coach, to be involved in the club in other ways…”
Natalie lets the words drift over her. She knows this dance well enough by now. Her mother beats back Natalie’s mutiny by sheer volume of words. She drowns Natal
ie in them, suffocates her subtle rebellion in a tedious snowball of white words. The football, the cricket, the current issues of being Australian. After all these years, Natalie still feels a pang of heartache at the zeal with which her mother took on anything that she considered a commitment to their new life in Australia.
Usually, it was concurrently a nail in the coffin of anything to do with Sri Lanka.
It’s always this way with her family.
A constant push-pull of longing for connection to her heritage—and her parents—and finding none. Natalie longs to hear stories of where they came from, even now. Even after thirty-odd years of being deflected or outright ignored. She wants to hear the good ones and the happy ones and even the hard ones. Especially the hard ones, perhaps. The ones that will make her weep, and despair, and fold into herself.
Her longing to know every little piece of who her parents were and what Sri Lanka was like for them is like an obsession.
To her parents, it is inconvenient at best and blasphemous at worst.
“It’s not relevant,” they say. “It’s not important. Let’s be grateful for what we have here,” they tell her.
Deflect, deflect, ignore.
By the time they’ve had a cup of tea, Natalie is exhausted.
Alex is long gone, and she can hear him banging and shouting upstairs, his figurines fighting over imagined injustices, saving the day.
Where were they for you? Natalie thinks to herself. Where were your heroes that day?
She knows the answer though. They were busy pretending none of it was happening.
They were busy pretending to be white.
It’s after 11 p.m. when she gets home.
She’s already discarded her wig, her scalp warm and itchy from the extra layer and the weight of the thing. But her short, aggressive style didn’t only horrify her mother.
To be fair, Upeksha had done everything she could to raise Natalie in a way to facilitate her fitting in. To help her to be invisible, or at least, only visible in the right ways.
Feminine ways.
Soft ways.
Ways that didn’t make any trouble.
She thought that she was doing the right thing by Natalie.
But Natalie was none of those things. She was opinionated. With rough edges and strong features. She did not fade into the background. She wore her brownness like a talisman, as though in it she might belong, though the true meaning of the word was stifled underneath the way her parents attempted that very thing. Because fitting in for them meant safety and acceptance—life, even.
Natalie understood that. But she wished more than anything she could understand it in her bones. Know her parents’ stories, feel them in her skin, have them as protection, as armour. Stories of survival, or heartbreak, or terror, or tragedy. Something she could belong to, whatever it was.
Because what her mother failed to understand was that being brown did make her different. Not to everyone. But to the kids at school who turned their noses up at her; to the parents who pulled their children away from her on the bus; to the grown men who shouted insults from their cars—Natalie was brown. And they rejected her.
So growing up, Natalie had found she did not belong anywhere. To her parents, the only acceptable daughter—the only loveable daughter—was one who was following their lead and living white. And to the white people she encountered in the schoolyard, on the bus—it didn’t matter how hard she tried. She would never be white.
She was brown, and they made sure she didn’t forget it.
Still, she thinks to herself now, perhaps she would grow her hair again. Though she loves it short—she feels more herself than she ever has—she hates the wig. And her bookings—and thus her income—dropped dramatically along with her long locks.
Yes, she thinks to herself. She’ll grow it again, just while she’s escorting. When she quits, she can always cut it off again.
She’s just flicking through Netflix for something trashy and light to entertain her for half an hour when her phone pings.
Unknown: Ivy. I need to see you. Be ready tomorrow at 11. I’ll pick you up. What’s your address?
Natalie stares at the message, bewildered for a moment. Her work name on her private number. It makes no sense.
Then she remembers giving Griffin her number as he left. She didn’t actually expect him to call, and rattled it off without much thought.
She gazes at her phone vacantly for a while.
As it happens, she has a booking tomorrow at 11 a.m. That aside, she doesn’t like being told what to do.
And besides which—her line of work doesn’t really lend itself to satisfying relationships. At least, that’s what she tells herself as she deletes Griffin’s message.
Then she books an appointment with her GP online.
4
James: Will you have your period? I’d really like you to sit on my stomach while you’re bleeding.
Natalie rolls her eyes.
She likes her job—she really does. But men are so peculiar.
She’s been emailing James for a few days, planning their date. He’s been polite and respectful—anything less and she terminates the contact. At eight-hundred dollars an hour, she can afford to pick and choose her clientele.
And now, just before their meeting, this text.
What does he think, it’s like a stream on command? Natalie thinks to herself. And surely it’s a little late in the planning to mention he wants something that only occurs for four days a bloody month.
The corners of her mouth twitch at the unintended pun.
Natalie: No, darling, not this time. Maybe we can plan for that next time? x
James: I’m only in Sydney for four days. Maybe I can fly you to Brisbane at the right time?
Actually, Natalie is thinking to herself that any time at the moment would probably be suitable.
She’s been bleeding intermittently. She feels vaguely unwell. And for the first time in years, she is constantly thinking that there’s nothing she’d like to do less than have sex.
Much to her surprise, she couldn’t walk into her GP, request a termination, and have it over and done with the same day. She was utterly baffled to find out that abortion is a crime for women and doctors in New South Wales.
“But…it’s 2017,” was all she could think of to say, staring at the doctor in disbelief.
The doctor had shrugged, surprised that Natalie was unaware of this. “I need to ascertain that a termination is necessary to protect your mental or physical health. It’s relatively easy to show. But you’ll need to expand on your reasoning a little for me.”
It seemed completely ludicrous that she could not just state “I don’t want children” and proceed accordingly. It was her body, after all. Natalie had never thought much about women’s rights or feminism, because she felt like she was afforded far more freedom and respect as a woman than she was as a coloured person, and her ponderings on privilege were always focused on race. But at this point in her life—pregnant, nauseous, and slightly shocked to find herself in this predicament—Natalie felt the stirrings of rage.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t felt rage before. But this felt like a different kind of rage. A less quiet rage, that she could take home and rationalise away, talk herself down into a space where she could go back into the world without it.
This felt like a more violent kind of rage.
Because what could she tell the doctor that would convey the terror and pain and panic that swirled around in her at the thought of having children? How could she explain Ravi and Upeksha and Alex in a way that any upper-middle-class white doctor would understand? The disconnect she felt from them, from herself, from everyone? God, she was barely able to nurture herself. A child was out of the question.
This ends here, was what she would have said, if only she could adequately convey the past thirty-eight years to her doctor in that phrase, in her six-minute appointment.
But it was hard to pin down, le
t alone convey. How do you communicate the scope of how petrified Natalie was of parenting? The sheer enormity of it. Of passing it on. This inability to feel things. To connect with other people on a deeper level. Her parents had, after all, only tried to make her and Alex feel safe. How they had succeeded only in making the world seem terrifying was unclear to Natalie. All she knew, deep in her bones, was that she did not feel whole enough herself to do any better. Both she and these unborn, imagined children would be far, far better off if they never actually met.
But family and children were the point, to most people that Natalie knew. They were joy and connection and love and life.
So Natalie just muttered that she was not with the father, and was not in an emotional position to raise a child on her own.
She had taken the pamphlets and phone numbers provided and walked home in an enraged, confused daze.
Now, two weeks after that appointment, Natalie puts her phone and James’s bizarre requests away, and turns back to Eloise.
“I can’t bloody work for two weeks afterwards. I had to wait until there were some bookings I could shift,” she says, referring to the termination she has delayed until the following day.
Eloise is not impressed.
“Surely this takes priority over men’s libidos? Christ, Nat, especially if you were feeling sick. How did you work through that?”
Natalie shrugs.
“Sex work is all about putting on a show of sorts, no matter what you feel like. It really wasn’t that hard.”