by Fen Wilde
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.
In the shower, he leans into the heat and lets it pummel his face, run over his body. He keeps his eyes closed, memories like tiny chips of glass under his skin, scratching and pricking at him.
He remembers crying, and screaming, and collapsing.
He remembers life being altered forever in that instant.
He feels the pain like it is yesterday.
A thousand tiny needles stuck inside him, scratching him from the inside out, forever.
Subdued sometimes, but never, ever, ever destined to go away.
20
As she had suspected he would, the detective closed his notebook with an air of finality when Natalie told him how she and Evelyn really met.
“You don’t understand,” she had insisted, her voice getting louder, it clear the detective was just humouring her. “She charges six-hundred dollars an hour. This isn’t lowlife scum picking up a powerless woman off the streets and killing her for pleasure. She has good clients. She’s fastidious about screening. She was just visiting my parents for lunch, for God’s sake.”
But he didn’t seem interested in differentiating between the different types of sex work and the associated risks.
And Natalie was pretty sure he wasn’t very interested in Grant Boyd.
This is where sex work stinks, Natalie thinks to herself. No matter how much she charges her clients, the general population curl their lips in distaste. There’s no understanding, no belief that she and Letitia are just as nuanced a person as anyone else. Unless someone personally knows a sex worker and has their perceptions challenged, they assume all sex workers are less than human: drug-addled, desperate women who can’t hold down any other work. Nymphomaniacs who could never keep a partner.
It was almost as though they thought that by choosing this profession, Evelyn was asking to die.
Natalie stays in her car, half defeated, half burning with white-hot, brewing rage.
21
The man hires a car at Melbourne Airport—a v8 ute, which suits his mood—and drives out to his family’s old farm.
His latest conquest has left him feeling unsettled.
Everything had gone to plan, of course. It always did.
But he feels uneasy nevertheless.
He doesn’t know why he’s taking this drive. If he tells himself anything, it relates to the solitude, the space to think amongst open fields. Driving has always soothed him.
He pulls up outside the farm two hours later.
The old gate at the start of the long drive has been replaced with stone walls with lions atop, and electric gates with sharp-looking tips on each black metal rail. The man supposes they are meant to look impressive, but they make him feel strangely wistful. He can’t imagine why—his memories of living on the farm are hardly heartwarming.
Still.
He remembers racing to the bus stop on his bike, skidding to a stop at the gate, and hurling himself over it, his bike discarded where he stopped, despite the endless reprimands from his parents to put it out of sight and not block the drive.
He thinks he did that for a whole month before his father made sure that he never, ever did it again.
He sits at the gates, the engine idling. The plain trees lining the driveway are twice the size they were when he left. The house is blocked by high, neat hedges—another new addition from the new owners. His father moved into town several years ago.
The man has not visited his father in his new home.
If you asked him, he wouldn’t have been able to explain why. He and his father were thick as thieves, he supposed you could say, after his mother left.
He stares at the gates, in his mind seeing her running through the orchard, laughing, the sunlight in her hair.
Her soft voice calling him over for freshly baked cupcakes.
The warmth of her smile, when his father
wasn’t around.
The man starts, a fleeting feeling confusing him, stabbing at him.
It’s all okay, he tells himself, shaking his head as though to shake the discomfort away. The dead prostitute. It all went to plan. There’s nothing to worry about.
It would not have occurred to him that that feeling might be what regret, or grief, or pain might feel like.
Regret and grief and pain were not part of his vocabulary.
He’s tempted to go in, chat to the new owners, take a walk down the familiar dirt tracks. But he pushes that urge away too.
Nostalgia is also unfamiliar to him.
Instead, he turns the car around and heads back the way he came.
22
Her apartment is empty when Natalie returns home, and she’s grateful for the solitude. She heads straight to her bedroom and sinks into her soft bed, pulling the second pillow in to her stomach to curl around.
The detective has promised to stay in touch, but she doesn’t have high hopes for his investigation. He did, however—with the one flash of empathy he had shown the entire conversation—gently explain that Letitia’s profession would probably be in the media soon enough. They wouldn’t release the information at this stage, but at some point it might help them to have that angle when requesting information from the public.
“You might want to think about what you want to say to your parents about that,” he’d said, and he had actually managed to look concerned.
Because, obviously, being a successful, self-employed sex worker was something to be ashamed of and to be kept hidden from one’s loved ones at all costs, Natalie thinks bitterly to herself.
At the moment, though, that eventuality seems like the least painful thing to be pressing down on Natalie.
Her grief is quiet, and heavy, and colossal, and complex. It’s not just that she loved Letitia. It was also that Letitia was a kind of home. She understood, experientially, how Natalie experienced the world. She understood her as an escort. She was one of only a handful of people in the world that Natalie felt effortlessly connected to. Who she could laugh about her parents with, and feel understood by. Her fierce protectiveness of them, alongside her abject despair at who they were and how they got there. The ways their experiences pressed into her, and changed her. Her resentment toward them and her connection to them, however dysfunctional. However damaged.
It’s intermingled with a kind of hopelessness, because do black lives matter? Natalie feels this, rather than considers the question. She doesn’t formulate sentences about it, but she feels it in every cell in her body. Can a black woman just be plucked off the street with barely a ripple? Because already, Natalie knows that there won’t be marches thirty-thousand strong down Sydney’s main streets. There won’t be vigils attended by politicians and academics. There won’t be cries of “things must change” echoing around the nation. Even before her work as an escort comes out, Natalie knows in her bones that for Letitia, this is true.
Curled up on her bed, her eyes dry, Natalie finds it almost humorous that she went to Aunty She about her parents. Like knowing about them would help her belong.
In Australia, suddenly and breathtakingly, she knows that no amount of closeness with her mother will help her to feel like she belongs.
23
When the man returns to Sydney, his sense of unease hasn’t lifted.
He scans the news online, again, hoping to find something to settle him.
Following the story has never really appealed to him. He’d read things for a day or two, maybe a week at the most. But what happened, how people reacted, what the police thought—usually that stuff felt irrelevant to him. He felt invincible, untouchable. His plan was flawless, as far as he could tell. And he was still a free man, so it seemed that his assessment was spot on.
The police always looked for the disgruntled client. A job gone wrong. That was the beauty of his work. While they were looking at the movements of recent clients, the client they were on their way to and from, or looking for men who’d been sighted in the vicinity—the opportunistic stranger—he was long gone.
But he’d made a mistake this time.
Evelyn.
He didn’t know Letitia’s real name when he chose her. He always took care to meet his targets when they were working. It was easy enough to arrange. Book an appointment, with an old phone that didn’t have his name attached to it. Be a model client. Nothing memorable. Polite, vanilla, respectful.
Wait a few weeks.
Wait, and watch.
It had worked every single time.
They didn’t usually remember him, when he first approached them the second time.
He’d remind them—the day, the hotel, something they’d said. Something unique and well-planned, because he needed them to remember.
He needed them to feel safe.
So they’d remember. At least pretend to be happy to see him. Give him a friendly kiss on the cheek.
It didn’t matter. He didn’t need them to be genuinely happy. He didn’t see them that first time to create a lasting impression.
That was what the second meeting was for.
But Letitia hadn’t been going to see a client. She’d been going to visit friends. And even though there was still the “stranger danger” narrative to fall back on, it was much less robust than the whole prostitute-with-a-client-gone-bad narrative.
The police would be starting with strangers sighted in the area. Cars noticed. Usually, his method results in them being tied up with the “bad client” red herring for the first few days. They fail to focus on asking everyone to remember every car they’d seen in the vicinity.
And by the time they’d cleared the clients his victim was leaving or en route to…well. People’s memories were pretty iffy two, three, four days later. Whatever people wanted to think about their own memory, the way they saw things was overlaid with all sorts of stuff. What they thought they saw becomes confused when faced with law enforcement, who really, really want them to remember.
His mind drifts back to the farm.
In a rare moment of clarity, he wishes his memory was so fickle.
His mum. His dad.
He wishes he didn’t remember everything.
Some things are better to forget.
24
Griffin sits on the plane, staring blankly ahead while his fellow passengers disembark.
“Sir?” the hostess asks him, when those passengers have all long gone, and still he stares.
“Right. Yes,” he answers, smiling wanly at her, rising from his seat.
He hasn’t been able to reach Ivy since that day in her apartment, when the news of her friend’s death catapulted her out the door.
It seems to have catapulted her right out of his life.
Phone calls and text messages have gone unanswered for nearly two weeks. He’s thought about dropping in, but he guesses that she is grieving in her own way, and might not appreciate him impinging on her space. He sent flowers instead, just reiterating how sorry he was and that he was thinking of her.
To be honest, he doesn’t know how he can be close to her in that space, post-death. He feels angry and confused himself. It feels too close to him, raises too many painful issues that he felt were long behind him, but are now sizzling and sparking too close to the surface.
Perhaps pain never really goes away, he thinks to himself, as he walks to a waiting taxi.
He thinks back to his conversation with Natalie, or Ivy, or whoever the hell she is, the night before the death. Maybe she’s just collecting Natalie’s mail, he thinks to himself. Or maybe she’s lying about something.
He knows that’s a possibility. Because God knows, he lied enough that night.
He’s lied enough his whole life.
Not completely. Not entirely.
Not about everything.
He’s found fiction works best when you thread a little truth through it.
25
One Month Earlier
– March 6, 2018
“I don’t have money for you.”
Natalie stops her advance into the apartment abruptly.
She just barely stops herself from shaking her head in disbelief.
Her first client back at work, and it’s a Time Waster.
She had thought he looked a bit too young and broke for this as he opened the door, despite the fancy apartment.
Strangely, she doesn’t feel too annoyed, or like he might be dangerous, a thought that plays on her mind a lot these days.
In the last couple of weeks, she has reached out to the sex-work community in a way that she never has before. Starting out, she had taught herself what worked and what didn’t in this job. What she needed to do. How to stay safe. How to recognise STI’s and dodgy clients. She barely spoke to any other escorts at all.
But after Letitia’s death, she felt so alone and so lost and so angry, and had so few people to talk to, that she couldn’t really think of anywhere else to turn. Eloise tried to help as best she could, of course. But for the first time, Natalie longed to connect with more people like her. Who understood what it felt like to not be taken seriously. Who understood being reviled and rejected for the work they did. Who lived it, just like her.
The community was open and welcoming, with various online groups, helpful advice, and all sorts of interesting commentary. Natalie suddenly wished she hadn’t been so solitary when she started—a community like this could have saved her so much time and heartache.
Plus, she liked these people. They were smart and funny and strong. The more she chatted, the more she read, the more stories she heard, the more proud she felt to be counted among their numbers.