Before You Knew My Name (23)

My mother, I think, might have warned me about him. Might have told me how all those terrible men said she was beautiful, too. Or perhaps she would have pushed me right into my teacher’s arms, considered this her validation. I am beautiful, just like her. And just like her, I have something this man wants to capture, possess.

It occurs to me, briefly, as Mr Jackson places his hands on my tear-stained face, presses down, that he finds my total reliance on him the most beautiful thing of all.

Later, he shows me photographs of his own mother. Before she got sick. He looks like her, in the way that I look like my mother. A shadow version of the real thing, not quite as lovely. He tells me she was an artist, too, and then he carefully takes something from a shoebox in his closet, wrapped in a red silk scarf and no larger than a brick. It is a Leica camera from the 1930s, beautifully preserved. His mother bought it from a second-hand store when she was a teenager, and when she got sick, she gave it to her son and asked him to take care of it.

‘It’s not worth a whole lot,’ he explains. ‘Maybe a thousand dollars. But I’ve moved around so much, too, it’s the only thing of hers I have left. Takes great photos, still. Back then, they built things to last.’

I ask him to show me how the camera works, confused by the unfamiliar dials and levers and discs. He loads a fresh roll of black and white film and gives me a brief lesson. Never letting me touch the Leica itself, as he turns the camera this way and that. We are sitting side by side on the bed when he looks at me through the viewfinder, explains this camera model was one of the first to include a built-in rangefinder. How this feature changes the way you view objects through the glass.

‘You start with two images, and this focusing lever helps you bring them closer together … see?’

He is holding the camera too close to my face, and I duck my head away from him, laughing as I hear the snap of the shutter.

‘Silly girl,’ he says, putting his mother’s camera down and pulling me into his arms. ‘You always were impossible to teach.’



Did I think we could just stay like this?

Did I think there was a place you could land, and everything else around you would fall away? That nothing and no one else would matter, because you were exactly where you wanted to be?

Did I think there was such a place, and such a time, and it would all stand still for me, because I was secure in that place, that time?

How else to explain my surprise when it all came to an end? How else to make sense of my utter confusion to find the earth shifting beneath me once again, spinning me away just as I began to get my balance. When this shift was what I had been taught to expect, my whole life before him.

He kicks me out on a Sunday morning, one month after he invited me in. It is the day before my eighteenth birthday, and the day my lie about my age catches up with me, surprising us both.

‘It’s my birthday tomorrow,’ I tell Mr Jackson, into that place under his arm I fit so perfectly. I lick at the downy hairs of his pit. ‘I just remembered.’

We’ve been living outside of time. I’ve stopped tracking days. A birthday feels odd to consider, evidence of life going on, when we have retreated so far from the everydayness of it.

‘We’ll do something special,’ he says. ‘Oh, to be nineteen again.’

‘Mmmm.’ I am drowsy, careless. Forgetting my first lie. ‘I’m turning eighteen, silly. Don’t add another year just yet.’

I don’t register at first. The way his body tenses, the way he pulls away from me, his body beginning its retreat.

‘Alice.’

‘Mmmmmm?’

‘Alice!’

He is gripping my shoulders now, his knuckles turning red. Something is charging under his skin.

‘What? Ouch. That hurts, Mr—Jamie! Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Alice,’ he says my name slowly. ‘Alice, how old are you?’

‘Huh?’

‘How old are you!’

It is no longer a question, but a command. How could I have thought I had any power over this man.

‘I … I’ll be eighteen. Tomorrow.’

He looks at me for a second, and then he is up out of bed and across the room before I understand what is happening.

‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuuuuuck. Jesus Christ, Alice. You’re fucking seventeen?’

‘Yes? Why—’

‘I took pictures of you! I filmed you!’

He hurls these words across the room at me, looking like he’s going to be sick, and I still don’t fully comprehend what is going on, why my birthday has caused such a panicked reaction. Then slowly, up through the fog of my brain, I hear Tammy’s voice the last time we spoke, the way she called me jailbait, and I cannot believe I never considered this. The girl so obsessed with the freedom that comes from turning eighteen should never have missed what she was not considered free of, all the days before.

‘Jamie, I’m sorry. I thought you knew. And it doesn’t matter. I mean, I said yes. It was my choice. It wasn’t … you didn’t …’

That strange, unrecognisable look has solidified, he is now staring at me as if he has never seen me before.

‘Jesus Christ! I could go to jail for this!’

‘No! I would never. It would never—’

‘You have to go!’