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Rattle of spoons on saucers. Coffee and cake they’d both ignore arrived. Georgia’s thank you to Angus sounded routine, as if she wasn’t in the middle of explaining how her life got taken apart, how guilt created her future.
“I could talk Jeffrey down. When he got angry, when he wanted to lash out, I could calm him. He would tell me how sorry he was, how burned up with remorse. I stopped him hitting another student in the lunch queue. There were dozens of people around—but I was the one who reached him.
“Hamish told me he was bad news. He wanted me to stay away from Jeffrey. We used to argue about him, about how Jeffrey was unstable, but he was always sweet with me. I thought he needed someone to talk to and I wasn’t going to abandon him.
“Then one day Jeffrey overheard Hamish and I arguing about him. He came to me and asked if I wanted him to do something to get rid of Hamish. I was horrified. I told him I loved Hamish and that if Jeffrey was going to be like that we couldn’t be friends anymore. He backed off. I thought he understood.
“The night of the attack it was coming on dark, it was drizzling. Hamish and I been at the library. We were supposed to be researching a joint paper, but we were fooling around, snogging in the biology stack. We were walking home to his place and came across a fight. Jeffrey was hitting a student in Hamish’s stats class, Thomas Tines. Thomas was so covered in blood he was barely recognisable.”
Damon gripped the bottom edge of the banquette seat, upholstery tacks and staples biting into his fingertips.
“I was different then to how I am now. I was confident. I thought I was invincible. I was in London on an exchange program, a scholarship. I was the girl who organised things, who fixed things for people who couldn’t fix things for themselves. I was into everything that wasn’t nailed down or illegal. My dad was a drunk and I managed him. It never occurred to me that Jeffrey would hurt me.”
“Oh fuck.” He didn’t want to hear anymore. Didn’t want to know this was Georgia’s reality: the colour of blood and mind-altering fear, the shape of anarchy and the solidity of confusion. But this is what she was made up of, not brown curls and pale skin, but mistakes of judgement and best intentions and inexplicable terror.
“Please, I need to hold your hand.”
14: Lost and Found
“I need you to let me finish.”
If Damon touched her, she would disintegrate. Sense and reason would stream out of her and diffuse in the atmosphere. The anxiety in his voice was enough to make her want to stop. If he took her hand, wrapped her safe in his lean strength and forgiveness she wouldn’t be able to do this, and he had to hear it all to understand that of the two of them, she was the one who stumbled around blind and needed help navigating the world.
“I called out to Jeffrey. Hamish tried to stop me but I shook him off. I got in Jeffrey’s face and he let Thomas go. Dropped him like he was a bag of groceries. It was only then I saw he had a knife. Another man, a pedestrian, tried to take it from him and Jeffery stabbed him. Hamish tried to pull me away.”
She risked a glance at Damon. His eyes were closed. His face contorted. He was there with her in the rain and the fading light. If she touched him, he’d surround her with sympathy when what she needed was something more pragmatic, more like recovery than remembrance.
“I could see Jeffrey was out of his head; his eyes,” she took a fortifying sigh. “He told me all the people who’d laughed at him needed to die. The police said he had a cocktail of drugs in his system.”
She couldn’t look at Damon’s face. She’d told this story before. Not often after the investigation, after the trauma therapists had declared her well, but often enough for the words to be there without having to fret them, often enough not to lose her place or to break down. She could do this calmly and knew that made it easier for others to deal with. But as much as she knew this needed saying, she didn’t want to see the horror of it play across his features.
“I asked Jeffrey to put the knife down. I told him everything would be fine if he put the knife down.”
Damon’s hand was on the seat, fisted into the red vinyl, depressing the padding. The muscle in his thigh was bunched. “You were insanely brave.”
There was no way to prepare him for what was coming.
“Jeffrey put the knife down. He rushed at Hamish, punched him, pushed him until his back was against a traffic barrier. I was screaming at him to stop. He picked Hamish up and tipped him over the barricade. Hamish hit the road headfirst. He was almost crushed by a car.”
Damon moved, slid sideways towards her, but she stopped him. “Don’t.” She shifted to put distance between them again. “Please don’t touch me. I need to tell you the rest. If you touch me I won’t be able to say another word.”
His elbows came up on the table. He put his head in his hands. “You don’t need to relive this on my account.”
Her, “I need you to know it,” made the tendons in his neck flare.
“Jeffrey was calm then. He said, ‘I did that for you. I did that for you, Georgie girl.’ Hamish spent six months in hospital. He ha
d to relearn how to do basic things again. Thomas had broken ribs, a punctured lung, a broken nose, eye socket, two blown eardrums, multiple stab wounds. He never got his hearing back. Jeffrey didn’t even know who he was. Jeffrey was charged with assault but he got off. He had a cousin who was a Queen’s Counsel. I should’ve known to stay away from him. I should’ve known I had no business trying to reason with a madman. A drunk is one thing but…I was so sure of myself. So arrogant. If I’d listened to Hamish he wouldn’t have been hurt.”
“That wasn’t your fault. That bastard could’ve killed you both.”
That’s what everyone said. It didn’t help.
“The band broke up. Hamish couldn’t stay awake, forgot words, couldn’t read, or write at first. He got savage headaches. We were going to travel, see the world, get married, have one boy and one girl, didn’t matter which came first. We were going to be together forever.” She took a breath and it caught in the back of her throat, tasted like old books and blood. “I put Hamish in Jeffery’s sight.”
Damon rubbed his forehead as though he was trying to hold the events and his emotions in order. She knew that wasn’t possible. It was too big, too random, too dreadful to make sense of. “You probably saved Thomas’ life.”
“I couldn’t save Hamish’s. He almost died. Most days he wished he had. His injury was severe, but he was young and fit. We didn’t know how long it might take him to recover. We married when he was still in hospital. And for a while, we were happy enough. His condition improved, but he couldn’t read music anymore or play, he couldn’t work at first. I graduated and got whatever steady work I could. We needed my salary.
