Before You Knew My Name (24)

He is pacing the room now, shouting.

‘No, Jamie. Don’t be silly. It’s just one more day and we’ll be fine. Just one more day and—’

‘Shut up, just shut the fuck up. Get away from me, you stupid little cunt!’

These are the ugliest words he has ever said to me, worse than anything I could have imagined, and when he does not come to comfort me, I know that he means them. I say Sorry! over and over, but he has already left the room, I can hear him fumbling for his car keys in the hall.

‘You need to be gone by the time I get back, Alice.’

Mr Jackson says this from the front door, and then I hear it open and slam shut behind him. His car revs, skids from the driveway. And I am, once again, on my own.



My chest is caving in.

He knows I have nowhere to go. He invited me in, with no real intention of letting me stay. Anger rises up in my throat each time I think of what he offered me, what he held back. This righteousness is a brief respite, before I throw up my sadness all over again.

I can’t go back to Gloria’s. She texted the other day to say she was out of town for the week. When I get home, we’ll need to talk about your plans, she ended the message, and I knew what that meant: she was expecting me to leave after my birthday. I’m going to stay up here with Tammy through the spring, I had texted back, thinking I was creating space for Mr Jackson and me. I’ll let you know when I’m back in town. Her Cool in response was enough for me to know that she wouldn’t bother checking up on me. As for Tammy, we haven’t spoken since she called me jailbait, outside of a few text messages we each take a little too long to respond to. I’ve been preoccupied with Mr Jackson, and she will no doubt have been busy monitoring her father’s sobriety, and keeping her boyfriend Rye on the straight and narrow; I can see her drinking vodka from a can and rolling her messy smokes, as they huddle together by the water, inhaling harder stuff than whatever she could get hold of back home. I know she is as happy as she expects to be, which makes me happy for her.

I want more.

What I need then, if I want to get out of this town once and for all, is money. I can’t believe I let Mr Jackson distract me from the only thing I knew for sure.

I make a decision that will change my life. Quickly, and with the clarity necessity brings. Going to where Mr Jackson hides the cash he makes from selling his art, I grab every last bill stuffed in that old film canister. Next, I throw my clothes into the duffel bags I brought over from Gloria’s house, just the clean stuff. I know I have left underwear and T-shirts in the bathroom, and I am glad. I want there to be evidence I was here. He will have to consciously discard this proof of me. He’ll have to know what he’s doing as he scoops up my belongings, throws them in the trash. To consider his discomfort at this task is a small satisfaction, like an ice cube on a sting.

I have almost shut the door to his house behind me, locked myself out, when I turn back. There is something I want to take with me. A gap I want to create in his world. When I lift it from the box, the Leica is lighter than I expected it to be. Having never held it before, it feels even more precious in my hands.

It was his mother’s camera. I know what this loss will mean to Mr Jackson, and my small satisfaction expands and bursts in my chest. There should be consequences when you hurt someone. I want him to know that I do not care for him, for his art, anymore. He has shown me who he is, and now I will show him the real me, too.

I close my fist around the money. Press the Leica against my chest. A slut. A thief. A liar. Mr Jackson can cast me any way he likes from here. Because I know what I am. I am a survivor. I will turn eighteen years old tomorrow, and I am leaving on my own terms. Nothing—no one—can hold me back now.

Ruby Jones is telling herself this very thing as she weighs her suitcases at the airline counter in Melbourne, scans her passport, prepares to board her flight to New York City.

I’m ready, she thinks, for whatever comes next.

This optimism, despite everything that came before, is how I know she understands. That if you tell yourself a lie enough times over, you eventually come to believe it.





EIGHT

AFTER THAT NIGHT WITH THE BOY ON THE GROUND, THINGS feel different.

It isn’t that I think the sky will fall. Or that I wouldn’t know what to do if it did. You should understand that I’m still sure of myself at this point. But I was just starting to feel safe, starting to forget. Which is all that safety is, right? A forgetting of what you know. A refusal to remember bad things are only ever just around the corner.

Your days are numbered. Blood-red, leaking down tunnel walls. It felt like a warning, that subway graffiti. A reminder. Before New York, before Noah, I never truly believed I’d be safe.

Do you know how aware we have to be? Girls like me. The man ahead who slows down, who disappears into doorways. The man close behind who walks too fast, his encroachment felt on your skin, creeping. Vans with dark windows and streets with alley ways. A park at dusk, or empty lots, eerie, any old time of the day. The friend’s father whose hand lingers, or the group of boys with beer on their breath. The door closing and the room spinning.

Do you know how aware we have to be?

Did that kid on the ground ever feel safe? Did he have a small life before something turned, twisted, and he became the kind of person others would step around? Did anyone hug him, love him, miss him when he was gone? There is darkness over my days now, a kind of cloud, and it isn’t just the rain, or the fact that Mr Jackson has never tried to call me, or that no one at all seems to care that I’m gone. It’s the record scratch of my new life. Baby Joan skips across flooded streets, takes photos of crowned buildings, collects facts about sirens and churches and stars. She walks other people’s dogs and two days ago, when one of the dogs stopped to pee, she found herself out front of a photography school. Three blocks from Noah’s apartment, with a sign on the door saying late spring classes were starting soon. She has flyers for the school on her bedside table, and she has Noah. And there, the scratch, the glitch. Once again, just like my mother, my life has grown up around a person, one person, who could get tired of me anytime, could ask me to leave. And then I would be alone again. Homeless, penny-and-parentless, destined for street corners and coins thrown into coffee cups, and signs asking strangers for food. Can I—would I—survive another loss so soon?