Before You Knew My Name (3)

Later, when we get to that next part, it won’t take long for a man with fingers at my neck to prove me wrong. He will mock my sincerity, laugh at the idea of a girl like me making her own world. He will be so sure of his own right to my body, he will leave nothing but the memory of that girl behind.

We will keep coming back to this part. No matter how hard I try, the streets and sounds of Manhattan will fade, the men with their fruits and their flowers will disappear, and we will end up down there on the rocks. It’s inevitable, no matter how much I try to distract you. Because this hopeful, heaving night is just one part of my story. The other story is this: there is the body of a dead girl waiting, down on the banks of the Hudson River.

The man who did this has left her there, gone home. And soon there will be a lonely woman who looks down, across, at the dead girl. I can see this lonely woman coming, or see her already there, and she’s sadder than I have ever been, because her sorrow is still simmering. It hasn’t boiled over and scalded her life, which makes her feel that nothing important, nothing meaningful, has ever happened to her.

I am about to happen to her.





TWO

RUBY JONES HAS NO IDEA HOW OLD SHE IS. OR RATHER, SHE knows her age solely in relation to calendars and dates. The number itself remains foreign, this tally of her years on the page, as if the age she has landed at is an irrefutable place, a landmark plotted on a map. In other words, Ruby Jones does not feel thirty-six years old. This age she notes down on forms, the number of candles on her cake, consistently confuses her. So much so, she has been known to experience a jolt of surprise upon discovering this famous woman or that, someone whose life she has observed from afar, is in fact much younger than she is. She could swear these women, with their multiple careers, with their multiple marriages and multiple babies, are her contemporaries. Maybe even older, with all that life crammed in.

The truth of it is this: Ruby is approximately three years past pretty. Though camera filters are designed to hide the facts of the matter these days, it is a reality she sees in the mirror every morning: the slackening jaw, the fold-down corners of her mouth, the stomach rounded and hips fleshed. She has not had the opportunity to age with someone, has only herself to wake up to each morning, and this is what she sees. A woman well past pretty, still sexy, maybe even beautiful at times, but there is little youth to be found in her features now. She can no longer look young without artifice, and this she cannot deny.

How to be thirty-six, then? How to understand in her bones what this means, when it is nothing like they told her it would be. They. Her mother. Women’s magazines. The authors who wrote her favourite books growing up. People who should have known better. All Ruby knows for sure is that she is suddenly older than she understands herself to be. Which is how it comes to pass that, in the middle of a makeshift dance floor in Apollo Bay, three hours’ drive from Melbourne (and half a world away from where she wants to be), eighties songs shrieking from cheap speakers in the corner, Ruby Jones makes the decision to throw those thirty-six years she has accumulated up in the air. To close her eyes and see where they scatter.

She won’t fully understand the gesture as it happens, misremembered lyrics bellowed in her ear, friends stumbling into each other, pulling her into their circle. She is drunk, they are drunk. Sally, the bride, will end up throwing up on the beach as midnight approaches, and Ruby will hold back her hair, soothe her, and tell her what a magical day it was.

‘I wish you had someone who loves you, too,’ Sally will mumble when she’s done, mascara tracking down her face. ‘You’re such a great girl. Our precious Ruby.’

This sentence. This wedding. This late-summer night of clinking glasses and shoeless dancing and misty rain. It has all become too much for ‘precious’ Ruby (or too little, she will decide, when she is thinking more clearly). Her friends in their expensive outfits, drinking their fancy wine, pills popped surreptitiously between the speeches and the band. Sally, drunk-crying, wearing a dress she dieted herself into all summer, marrying the great guy she met on Tinder barely a year ago. The ‘right swipe’, they called it in in their vows, and for the life of her, Ruby couldn’t remember if left or right was the way to say yes.

Later, at the beach house she and her friends have rented for the weekend, Ruby takes a pillow and blanket and quietly pads out to the downstairs balcony. It is 3 a.m. and everyone else has passed out in their shared beds, couples curled into each other or snoring obliviously against each other’s backs. Ruby is, as usual, the only single person in the group. Though she doesn’t exactly consider herself single, not privately at least. There should be a better word to describe the state she has found herself in.

Alone.

That would do it, she thinks, folding herself down onto a damp, wicker sofa. Someone has removed the spongy seat cushions, Ruby can see them stacked under the lip of the second-floor balcony above her, but she does not have the energy to drag the cushions over. It has started to rain in earnest now, and she is glad for the discomfort, for the wet on her face and the unyielding sofa base, pressing into her hip. Back in her room, the world had started to spin. Now, she can see the black of the ocean, hear the inky water of the bay slapping against the sand. The sound seems as if it is coming from inside her, it’s as if she is the one cresting and falling, and it takes a moment for Ruby to realise she is crying, out here on this balcony, alone with the rain and the waves and the starless sky. Soon she is crying as hard as the weather, the accumulations of the past few years rising up out of her. This is not where she intended to be.