Before You Knew My Name (17)

I nod, and Mr Jackson—Jamie—rolls a tight smoke, then sits down beside me. The couch is draped with a white sheet. Our thighs touch and he doesn’t move away.

He holds out the joint and I take a deep drag, feeling a burn in my throat and nose. It’s better quality than I’m used to, and the second hit makes me cough until I’m doubled over.

‘God. You really are an amateur, Alice.’

Mr Jackson says this affectionately, laughs softly as he pats his hand against my back. With my head between my legs and his hand on my back, I’m afraid to sit up. The room is too small, it’s spinning around me, coming too close. It might be his fingers or the smoke, or what I’m doing here. With my art teacher, who used to look at me in class, and now he’s reaching around, sliding his hand over my belly, pushing me upright again.

‘Can I take this off.’

Maybe it’s a question. Some other day I’ll wonder if it wasn’t really a question at all. I’ll wonder if I could have said no to the weed, and those stained fingers pressed against my skin, pulling the straps of my singlet down. I’ll wonder why I didn’t try out that word, see where resistance would take me. But, for now, I simply close my eyes and nod. Missing the look on his face as he removes my singlet, and then my shorts. Unaware of the gleam when he reaches for a camera sat next to that stack of twenty-dollar bills and fixes the lens on my body.

Does it matter that I never actually said yes? I knew what was being asked of me. Life models wanted. $200 cash—Mr Jackson was clear enough about what he wanted. I don’t suppose I had any right to be surprised by the camera, or what it would lead to, eventually. It must have seemed, to him at least, like a natural progression.

He might even say I asked for it.



Back in Melbourne, Ruby is showing her sister the website of the long-stay studio apartment she has booked on the Upper West Side.

‘It’s small,’ she says, taking a sip of the wine Cassie has poured for her, ‘but it has everything I need.’ Next, they look at maps of the neighbourhood. ‘I’ll run here,’ Ruby says, tracing her finger around the blue of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park, ‘and maybe here’—her finger travels to the western border of the map, to a thick green line that snakes alongside the Hudson River. ‘Riverside Park. I read it’s less crowded there. More . . . local.’

‘Is it safe?’ Cassie asks, and Ruby rolls her eyes.

‘New York is one of the safest cities in the world these days.’

‘Yes, but you’re going there by yourself,’ Cassie says. ‘You have to be more careful when you’re travelling on your own.’

‘I’m always on my own,’ Ruby responds, and now it’s Cassie’s turn to roll her eyes.

‘Yes, well. We know why that is, don’t we! Here’s hoping you do more than run in New York then, little sis. Or’—Cassie tilts her wine glass at Ruby, narrows her eyes—‘here’s hoping you run for long enough that you finally get away from that man, and the hold he seems to have on you.’



I moved in. I supposed you could call it that. The way I just never went home that first afternoon. That first night. We didn’t do anything. Not really. And we still don’t. Although, it has been one week since he slid my singlet off. Since his fingers pressed against my skin as he rolled my shorts from my hips. He’d said ‘No underwear’ during our first phone call, when he told me what time to come over to his house. ‘And wear something soft. No lines, I don’t want lines, Alice.’ I had followed Mr Jackson’s instructions carefully, dressing as if it were ninety degrees outside instead of forty, shivering under my thick winter coat. There wasn’t much for him to peel away that very first afternoon, not much effort required to leave me completely exposed on his small, sheet-draped couch.

A week later, and my stomach still flips at the memory of it. Up until then, I had never been naked in front of a man. Never been looked at up close. Oh, I’d had sex before, if that’s what you can call it. Fumbling fingers, and thrusts under sheets at various parties, but nothing like this. I’d never been seen until that moment, with Mr Jackson sliding to the floor, looking up at me. The way he said ‘Like this’ as he reached up and spread my legs. On his knees, with those fingers running up the insides of my thighs, pushing them further apart.

‘I want to photograph you like this, Alice.’

The room tilted sideways. He used to watch me in class. I had that same stomach-pit feeling of sinking and floating, and I wanted him to keep touching me, wanted to cover myself, wanted to get up and run. I stayed perfectly still instead, pushed all the shaking deeper. This is what he had said was required of me, after all.

‘I will need you to stay perfectly still.’

I said, ‘Yes, of course. I have done this before.’

He now knows this to be untrue, although I haven’t yet told him my real age. It’s not a lie exactly to keep that from him, not like the lies I’ve told Gloria—when I went back to pick up some clothes, I told her I was going to the lake with Tammy—but more like an omission. Something better left out of the story because it doesn’t serve any purpose. It’s bad enough he knows I lied about my experience as a model, that he could see the way I flinched every time the camera clicked.