WE SAT ON MISKA’S apartment balcony eating baklava and admiring the tall shallots that had sprouted from the collection of pots by the railing. She pointed out the red and green chillies, cherry tomatoes and tiny fragrant strawberries with hairy seeds that she and her boyfriend had managed to nurture on their little balcony. It was impressive. Miska also pointed out my habit of not being open and honest with my feelings until it was almost too late. It was the day after the night at the warehouse, and my tear-streaked face had been embraced by my best friend, who knew me better than I knew myself. I confided all the truths I had hidden for the past few months and Miska listened and then gave me her own truth. She told me she had noticed that in both relationships, with Dom and with Ben, I had dissolved slightly into a different version of myself. She said I was ‘more placid’ and ‘wholesome’ with Ben, and sometimes ‘irritable’ and ‘mean-spirited’ during my time with Dom. Was I that much of a people pleaser that these men rubbed off on me? That I morphed out of my own shape to take on theirs? It was hard to hear. And, I feared, it was true.
I had been lonely in my relationship bubble, I realised now that I was back, feeling fulfilled with baklava and balcony vegetables and girly dinner dates. As I admired the colour of Miska’s glossy red chillies, I vowed to never again lose myself to anyone in such an all-consuming way.
From there, life began to fill out into a fun routine again. Work was busy as usual, but I had booked in some time off with friends, and I had moved into a new apartment with one of my best friends, Em. I shifted from an evening radio show to a morning one, and it surprised me how good that was for my overall health. Fewer late nights, healthier eating patterns, better sleep and ridiculous in-jokes as Em and I pranced around our kitchen each evening.
A few months after my balcony date with Miska, a basic white office envelope was sitting in my work pigeonhole. I reached in and grabbed it. My name and work address were written on the front. I recognised the handwriting immediately. The lettering was neat, but every so often a few rogue and deformed letters were pressed hard, almost through the paper. I carried it back to my desk.
I opened the envelope carefully, pulling out three A4 pages of blue-lined notepaper, the kind you vomited essays out onto during high school exams. Satisfyingly thin, almost weightless paper. All Nick’s letters started the same way.
Hello Beautiful Girl.
After asking me how I was going, he described in detail a dream he’d had about me. It was immersive and highly comedic. It wasn’t sexual. It was absurdism. Next came a couple of paragraphs of intense observations about my presenting style. I snorted at the bizarre details he fixated upon. Finally, he would reflect on how he was trying to become a better person and how grateful he was to have me in his life. All the letters ended the same way.
Much respect beautiful girl!!! Love, Nick.
His name was always underlined twice.
The letters were laced with such an entertaining and demented humour, and the content was so entirely ludicrous, that I couldn’t stop myself from reading them. Clearly, he was out of his fucking mind. I churned through this new letter with twisted amusement and the slightest pang of excited dread. I liked the soft crumply sound the thin paper made in my hands as I refolded it back into its envelope. It was a tangible novelty to receive a letter as opposed to a text on the textline from a stranger. But I knew from experience that the longer I held one of these letters in my hands, the more my inquisitiveness turned to uneasiness. I opened the top drawer of my desk and dropped the envelope onto an existing pile.
‘Nick’ had been sending letters to me via my work’s PO box every couple of months for around three years. They would sail past office reception and into my mostly unused work pigeonhole. Sometimes the receptionist would take the letter straight to my desk, where it would sit politely on my keyboard until I arrived. Each time I would read it covertly before promptly folding it back up and dropping it into my desk drawer. I never reread the letters, or mentioned them to my co-workers, but every time I reached into my drawer to grab a piece of chocolate or some goji berries, I’d see the pile of envelopes.
There were always a few people who would reach out on social media, through the on-air textline or, on occasion, through handwritten letters. I saw it as part of my job to handle encounters with these characters so long as they seemed like they weren’t going to cause me any real harm. Nick wasn’t waiting in the bushes by my apartment, he wasn’t stalking me at the airport … This guy was just a crazy, but harmless, pest.
A month later, I received another letter. A fresh twisted series of colourful sentences on the same blue-lined notepaper. I noticed Nick was more animated and incoherent than usual, and almost the entire letter was a mind-melting depiction of the friendship and romance between us. Still, I concluded that it was ultimately an innocuous pile of word junk, and as my plate was so loaded with extra work commitments, I simply slid it back into the envelope, into the drawer and out of my mind.
I had my method down to a fine art: I’d snatch the letter up, skim through it, and then plonk the newest slightly disturbing chapter onto the growing pile. Less than sixty seconds of my time.
I could have stopped looking at the letters altogether, but I didn’t. This is a test, I thought to myself. This is a test as to how to handle the real pressures of a public voice. It’s a privilege to have your job, and this is one of the things that comes with it. Deal with it. Laugh it off if you need to. Do your jaw and mindful exercises. No one likes a whinger. No crying and no complaints. You’re a consistent little shit and you know how to turn up. Good girl.
I could feel a little jaw ache coming on, so I locked myself in an empty, darkened studio to do the preventative jaw stretches Tad had taught me. I didn’t want to do it at my desk; I’d look like I was fucking gurning. This was me, taking care of business, handling what was thrown my way with pleasure.
A couple of weeks later, my stomach did a little queasy flip as I peered into my pigeonhole. Another white envelope. Still, I read through it, and kept it to myself. Nick’s tone had ramped up from comedic and delusional to aggravated. Why hadn’t I written back to him? Why hadn’t I acknowledged him? He wrote that he was a different person now, he had made real changes and he saw a real future for us.
Why haven’t you written back, Linda, my girl? Where are you? What did I do to deserve this from you?
His next letter arrived, like clockwork, a fortnight later. Alongside the frustration, his descriptive scenes had become less absurd theatre and more explicitly sexual. I was getting angry. I started to picture a man’s hairy white-knuckled hand gripping the pen tightly, pressing it into the paper hard as he scribbled out his perverted fantasies. I barely flinched when I noticed his delusional countdown to when he’d finally have me in his arms. I skim-read the rest of the letter, then felt pissed off for the rest of the day. What the fuck was I doing, wasting my time opening these sordid letters, and then carrying around that bitter taste in my mouth? How dare he ruin my day with a piece of paper, and how dare I let him? I defiantly closed my desk drawer and then locked myself away in a darkened studio to do my jaw exercises.
A week later I was catching up with my friend Sulinna at her brother’s place in Chinatown. She had been our band manager in London all those years ago—she still lived there but was in Sydney for a holiday. I sat cross-legged on the floor in her brother’s living room as she told stories from the past year and I listened, staring at her perfect black hair and fringe. How did she get it so glossy and shiny? She was a striking monochrome colour block of hair and porcelain skin. I asked Sulinna if her cat Mei Mei was still obsessed with trying to eat the Magnum ice creams out of her freezer.
‘Is that you?’ she asked instead of answering. ‘Is your phone vibrating?’
I looked down at my phone. Jared, my manager at work, was calling. I stood up and walked to the light-filled window that overlooked the dense streets below us.
‘Hey, mate,’ Jared said quickly. ‘Sorry to bother you but I needed to make you aware of something.’
‘Okay.’
‘So.’ He paused. ‘A thing arrived for you in the mail. It’s a pretty disgusting letter from a listener who’s, like, in love with you—’
‘Oh yeah, that’s Nick,’ I interrupted breezily. ‘He’s been sending those for years.’
‘Shit. Okay. Well, this one was stopped by office security before it got to you because it had something else inside it. We’ve had to file a police report, so there’s a detective here who would like to speak to you. Is that okay? I’m so sorry, Linda.’
‘Oh yeah, sure.’
I turned back to face Sulinna on the couch, and made a smiling ‘I’m sorry’ face at her. The detective took Jared’s phone and introduced himself. He explained that the weight and shape of something in the envelope had led the mail staff to check inside, and they had then handed it over to security, who had contacted the police.
I took it all in with a disposition as light and bright as the sun beaming into the living room. A well-mannered, out-of-body experience. ‘Oh, there was something else in the envelope? Some sort of dried stuff? Maybe originally a liquid? Possibly his? Inside a snaplock plastic bag? Little flowers too? Oh, I see. Yes, it’s disturbing, isn’t it? You’ll run some DNA tests now? Sounds great. Thank you for letting me know and thank you for helping out. Okay, I’ll do that first thing tomorrow. Thanks again.’ I hung up the phone, walked back to the rug and sat down. I asked Sulinna to continue telling me how her cat Mei Mei was doing.
I went in extra early the next morning to stand in the quiet on my own. Most people hadn’t yet arrived at the office. I could stand in the studio, lights off, and do my jaw stretches. My jaw had been aching again, and I had been waking up tired.
Afterwards, I fished out the letters that I had been collecting in my drawer, picking them all up to take to security. Then I paused. For reasons I couldn’t completely understand, I took out two random letters from the pile and placed them back inside my drawer. Maybe because even though they were ugly things to me by now, I had once felt oddly sentimental towards them. I handed the rest to the head of security, who told me he would pass them on to the police. It would be someone else’s woeful job to comb through them. I was instructed to hand over any further letters directly to security.
I went on air as usual that day. Anytime I had an underlying rattle I could generally pause it when I was in the studio. With the panel of buttons laid out before me, and the microphones and the music, I had a safe little pod to step into. There was a large window that tore open almost an entire wall on my right. I could see the city skyline waking up. The sky slowly changed colour, buildings shadowed then brightened as the sun pulled past, a wall of apartment windows reflecting the blue back onto itself; there were portable washing lines visible on small balconies with distant undies drying.
I didn’t feel good that week. Am I in danger? I wondered. Surely not. I tried to convince myself that Nick was all talk, no bite. And yet I couldn’t be certain. It would take a ten-second internet search to find where this broadcasting building was in the city; it would take one afternoon of loitering to see me coming and going. My life wasn’t shrouded in mystery. I flicked those thoughts aside. That wasn’t going to happen. The police were looking for Nick, and I knew how to get on with things in the meantime.
Jared had asked if I had told my family about what was going on, or if I needed any extra support from him, as a friend. ‘Nah, I’m all good,’ I had replied, shaking my head and smiling back at him. I knew I was lying. But it felt like a good lie. The sort of lie that makes you stronger, and makes you proud of how you’re conducting yourself. I wasn’t going to worry my family or closest friends. It made me unreasonably happy to know I hadn’t taken any time off or had any allowances made for me. My reputation as a bright and consistent team player remained untarnished.
Almost a week went past before I heard from the detective. The DNA test was inconclusive. They had no real news. I asked if there was any other information within the letters. Nick sometimes rattled off an incoherent set of numbers—could that be part of an identification code or some sort of jumbled phone number? And what about the countdown he sometimes mentioned? The detective replied that they didn’t have anything solid to lead them to Nick just yet, but assured me they would keep looking.
A couple of days after that police follow-up, another letter arrived. The receptionist, unaware of the situation, had dropped it at my desk. I picked it up. Let’s see what you’ve got, you fucking prick. Even though I was meant to hand it directly to security, I flicked open the envelope, and immediately regretted my decision. The writing was messier than ever. Some phrases were written bigger, so intensely that they seemed to jump off the paper:
dragging you by your hair
going to find you soon
I didn’t read any more. I shoved the letter back into the envelope. I stormed past the kitchen, past the studios and down the hall to Jared’s office. When I got there, I stood at the door, fuming, holding the envelope in my hand.
‘I don’t wanna see these anymore!’
I threw the letter into the office—it spiralled through the air then landed on his desk, on top of his keyboard. I burst into tears, and Jared stood up and closed the door behind me. He offered me a box of tissues and apologised sincerely for what had been happening. He told me they’d intercept my mail so I wouldn’t have to see it at all. I apologised for being emotional, and explained that I’d been feeling heavier about it that day. We decided that I’d drive to work instead of taking the train and walking to and from the stations. I was embarrassed that I had become so upset at work, and I resolved to confide in my housemate, Em, to avoid any further unprofessional explosions.
Em and I were the sort of friends who did wees with the door open, sharing every insecurity, every sex detail, every stress and success we were going through. But I’d kept the story of the letters to myself. It was too absurd, too dark. Perhaps by keeping it a secret I thought I could stop it from becoming real. But I couldn’t compartmentalise it any longer.
When Em arrived home that night, singing loudly, I was sitting on the floor in our living room eating carrots and hummus. Em had already eaten dinner but we cut ourselves two big hunks of the olive oil chocolate cake that she’d made over the weekend. I stretched my legs out on the mushroom-coloured carpet and told Em what had been happening.
‘Oh no, Lindy,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Gross. The police don’t know where he is. It feels like it’s escalating. And I’m turning up to work, just holding it all in.’
Em set her fork down neatly on her plate. She leaned forward and hugged me, hard.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said tenderly, her arms around me still. ‘Is there something we can do to make you feel better in the meantime?’
I shook my head and laughed, out of frustration, out of exhaustion. Because it was easier to laugh. I told her I didn’t want to pull out of any of my extra work commitments, even though I was feeling increasingly anxious. She comforted me with another hug and a second sliver of cake, and advised me to say no to some things. She offered to make me a smoothie to take to work the next day, and I accepted. Her thick, green smoothies tasted like a million bucks.
Was I reaching my limit? I didn’t know because I hadn’t ever figured out where my limit was. Everybody had stressful weeks at work. There were deadlines upon deadlines, and I couldn’t simply pull out of my other commitments. Deep down there was a concrete certainty in me, a belief that I could push through and get everything done. So long as I was eating, and now smoothie-ing, and doing my jaw exercises, I could get through.
I had another restless sleep that night, waking up between dreams of dread and tossing, tossing, tossing until it was time to get up for work. I dreamed that I was lying in bed, watching as my bedroom door slowly crept open. A man’s dark figure stepped inside and approached my bed. I tried to scream but instead lay paralysed with fear, watching as his body leaned towards mine, his face sinister and ecstatic.
The dread was like a jacket that I wore every day. I felt myself clenching my jaw while sitting at my desk, so I would escape to a studio multiple times a day to stretch it. But I was finding it almost impossible to find the calm in the cocoon now. Something had shifted. I turned the mic on, but I couldn’t find my groove.
Doing the show was usually like riding a wave. You caught the flow of it and you could weave in and out of the songs. It was the most fun when the music was loud, when you were enjoying the records, connecting with the guests you were interviewing, and with the audience. Everything had an energy that you could feed off. It was always about being present. When I was good, I could tell. And when I faked it, I could really tell. I hated the insincerity.
I started stuffing up. Fumbling over my words. Faking the otherwise easy smile in my voice. Getting details wrong as my mind drifted midway through a sentence. Tiny things that added up.
Get your shit together, Linda. Get your head in the zone.
But nothing soothed me. I closed the textline screen because I didn’t want to process any more digital noise, good or bad. Instead, I opened YouTube and searched for ‘Top Ten Most Romantic Anime Scenes’, then ‘Soul Train Dancing Best Of’, then ‘Arthur Cartoon Full Episodes’. I thought the visuals would spring me back into a creative, energetic and safe headspace. It was a trick I’d often pulled if I was feeling uninspired or tired, but nothing worked. I kept making mistakes, and I kept getting angry at myself for it.
Sam told me I was acting strange and I finally admitted what was going on. I couldn’t keep it from my big brother; he knew me too well.
‘Sounds like you’re not taking this seriously enough,’ he said. ‘You’re still going to work every day, right? And they still don’t know where this creep is? He’s probably not going to do anything. But you can’t be a stupid prawn head and stick your head in the sand.’
I looked down, nodding my head at the tiled floor of the cafe, big teardrops welling up in my eyes. ‘Prawn head’ was an insult that my mother reserved for me whenever I did something that was considered not just wrong, but thoughtless or disorderly. When I was a kid, if I left something at school she would look through my backpack and shriek, ‘You big stupid prawn head, you left your drink bottle behind again!’ The next day I would get to school early and look around the playground until I found my lonely water bottle discarded on a bench. I’d feel guilty and stupid; I really was a prawn head.
‘And you shouldn’t be taking chances,’ Sam continued, ‘because you’re not coping in the meantime anyway. Why aren’t you asking to have a day off? How’s your jaw?’
I sighed. ‘Jaw’s not great. And I told work I’m fine and don’t need time off. I’m afraid to say no to extra work stuff, so I’m just a bit stressed.’
My brother shook his head disapprovingly. He stirred the drink in his hand with a long metal teaspoon. We were sitting inside the tiny Vietnamese coffee shop around the corner from his house. He’d ordered two identical ice coffees for us: extra strong, with less condensed milk. They’d arrived in highball glasses, the dark brown coffee oozing down around the ice. It tasted delicious. Strong but sweet, like my brother’s temperament.
‘Do you feel safe in your apartment? You don’t look like you’re sleeping very much.’
‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘But I’m sure it’s fine. I’m keeping my wits about me.’
‘It probably is fine, but you don’t know who this guy is. Have you thought about getting security for your apartment? Just at night-time so you can sleep and not worry about him fucking following you home one day?’
‘What, like a camera?’
‘No, like a person. I know guys who would do it. They’ll turn up, they won’t bother you, but they’ll keep guard at your place each night until the police find this Nick guy.’
‘You mean hire a personal bodyguard?’ I scoffed.
‘You can’t just keep laughing it off and then crying about it, Linda. The best-case scenario here is that nothing happens, but you can sleep safely through the night. The worst-case scenario is that on the one per cent chance that this crazy guy does turn up, there’s a proper security dude at your door.’
‘But I could spritz him with my rosewater face spray, it’s the ultimate calming force.’
I was joking, but I didn’t want to argue with my brother. As hysterical as the security idea sounded in theory, the consequences were too high if the situation with Nick turned nasty. Sam was stubborn, and he would be relentless if I didn’t give in. I remembered how protective he’d been of me when I first started going out to gigs and nightclubs. And I admitted to myself that he was probably right. At the very least, I would sleep better at night knowing I didn’t need to worry about someone approaching my door. I agreed to let him hire someone.
The walkie-talkie sat beside my bed. Fire engine red and childlike.
A voice crackled on the other end. ‘Hello, ma’am?’
I pressed the button for my microphone. ‘Yes, hello?’
‘Hello, miss. This is a welfare check. Are you okay?’
‘Ah, yes. I’m in bed. Thank you, Moses.’
‘Your safety is my priority, miss. Enjoy your beauty sleep.’
For the last week, Moses and another security guy had taken turns guarding the front gate to our apartment block. They would arrive in the early afternoon and wait for me to drive home from work, then stay there overnight until I got in my car the next morning. Our brick apartment block was on a tiny one-way street, with overhanging leafy trees and roots that erupted out of the cracked narrow footpath. The macho figures of the appointed guards, taking up almost the entire footpath in their all-black outfits, was an odd sight. The block housed only about ten apartments, mostly little duos of girlfriends like Em and me. We usually only crossed paths with the others in the communal garden out the back when we hauled our washing to the clothesline. If I happened to see one of the other tenants as we were coming or going, I would say breezily, ‘Oh we’ve just got a guy helping us out for a week, he won’t bother you, sorry.’ Em reckoned that they all would assume one of us had a crazy ex-boyfriend in town. Either way, no one questioned it.
I was instructed to stay at home each night after work, and on weekends. I called Nonna and apologised for not being able to visit her. Her sad voice replied that it was all right and that she knew I was a busy girl. She asked when I would have time to take her down the road to go shopping at her favourite fruit market. Her disappointed tone made me feel horrible. I couldn’t explain the truth, and so I ended up sounding like a vague, shitty granddaughter who wouldn’t make time for her nonna. After I hung up, the guilt turned to anger. I couldn’t even let myself be distracted for an afternoon at Nonna’s cooking eggplant for lunch. My whole life was being swallowed into the vortex of Nick’s letters.
If I needed to host something after work, Moses would accompany me and stand to the side of the stage before taking me straight home. I didn’t go out socially and I didn’t stroll the streets or dawdle home from work getting a bubble tea. I knew the security presence was intended to make me feel safer, but, surprisingly, it had the opposite effect. Greeting the guard as I arrived home each afternoon and checking in with them each bedtime and morning served as an isolating and absurd reminder of my circumstances.
Every day I watched my phone, waiting to hear from the police that Nick had been found. The waiting was agonising.
In the studio, I put a muted episode of Arthur on YouTube, and turned the music I was playing up loud. Get in the zone, Linda.
Fuck. I’d played the songs in the wrong order. I’d already stuffed up one of my intros. I couldn’t help it, my mind kept wandering. I still hadn’t been sleeping through the night, picturing gruesome things and waking up with an aching jaw.
After stumbling through my final mic break, I hurried back to my desk. There were multiple radios playing our station loudly across the office. One in the kitchen, one in the common areas, one by people’s desks. I hoped none of my colleagues had been paying enough attention to notice how off my game I’d been. No one batted an eyelid as I rushed past. As I approached my desk my phone vibrated; the detective was calling me. Finally! I stepped into an empty recording booth to speak to them.
The detective informed me that they had received some more letters and they wanted to let me know that they were still working on it, but that they hadn’t found Nick yet. I asked if they’d looked into the random series of numbers on the envelopes more closely. The detective said they hadn’t, but that the most recent letters were the most explicit and aggressive he had seen so far, so could I please be careful coming to work and going home. I told them my brother had hired security at my apartment, and that I was driving to work now, so I was doing ‘just fine, thank you’, ‘just fine’ being code for ‘My jaw is killing me, I am not sleeping, I feel very alone and I am doing some spectacular nervous poos on account of my anxious gut, thank you.’
After the call, I sat down at my desk, racking my brain. I stared at the locked blue screen on my computer, trying to contain my mounting aggravation. I was bitterly disappointed at the lack of progress. How much longer was this going to go on? I didn’t want to go from work to home in a fearful little loop any longer. I didn’t want sweet Moses checking in on me each night. I wanted to yell or cry or walk down the street with headphones on and not worry about anything except what I was going to eat for dinner that night.
Why haven’t they found him?
What did the countdown mean?
What did the series of numbers mean?
WHO IS HE?
Then I remembered.
I had two letters that I hadn’t given to the police still sitting in my desk drawer. I pulled them out. They were both fairly recent ones, from around the time Nick had started getting more intense. I’d skim-read them and shoved them out of sight. Now I was sure that there had to be something in one of them. A clue. A reference to something. Anything. I opened the first one.
His writing was hideous. No wonder I hadn’t read it through properly—it was hard to make out some of the last sentences. I squinted at the end. I could just make it out.
Fuck. My heart dropped.
Keep in mind girl that this sentence doesn’t finish for another two years but I can get parole to be with you from the sixteenth of may.
A prison sentence?! So Nick was in jail. In an institution, far away from me. But not for long—he was eligible to get out in less than two months!
I scanned the rest of the letter for clues. Nothing besides scum fantasies. I flipped the envelope over. The numbers were there. Six of them. I googled them and found nothing. I grabbed the second letter from my drawer and read through it, but I couldn’t find another clue within it. The envelope had the same sequence of numbers on the back of it. And something else. Three letters, written randomly, on another part of the envelope: CRN.
I frantically typed the letters into the search bar of my computer. A Customer Reference Number? That seemed like a lead, but it wasn’t quite right. I searched again, this time typing in ‘CRN jail’. Bingo, fuckwit! It could potentially stand for a Corrections Reference Number for Victorian prisons. Maybe these letters and numbers weren’t related, but it was a pretty striking coincidence. This, and the line about his sentence? I thought I had cracked the code. No wonder he had been so angry with me for not replying—he was giving me his sender’s address on the back of the envelopes! It was right there the whole time. I sat back in my chair, feeling relief rush through me. It was all starting to make sense. But with these potential answers came a new kind of tension. If Nick was actually in jail, if he really was dangerous, then we needed to find him before he got out.
The police also had envelopes with the number plus the letters CRN, but they hadn’t put the two together. But now, with that plus the parole date, it didn’t take them long to find Nick. He was in jail, in Victoria, and they made certain that his request for parole was denied. Once it was confirmed that he was still in prison, I cancelled the security guard at the apartment and walked to and from work with a little more ease as each day passed. Moses forgot to ask for the walkie-talkie back, so it sat silently on the floor next to my bed. I didn’t feel like touching it, even though I had to avoid stepping on it in the mornings when I got up to pee.
I sat down with the police and filed a lengthy statement going through everything I could remember from Nick’s letters over the years. When they began, how frequently they had been sent, how unsafe they made me feel. That statement would be used in court to charge Nick and keep him behind bars. The detective asked why I hadn’t come forward earlier, and I told them that I thought it was best to carry on, that he wasn’t a real threat. The detective replied that that could have been the case, but that I needed to be safe rather than sorry.
‘You don’t want to give people like this the benefit of the doubt, Carmelinda, because you never know how serious something might become.’
I nodded. The detective didn’t tell me why Nick was in prison in the first place, or how old he was, or if he had a permanent snarl on his face or the claw-like hands with big knuckles that I had dreamed about so many times. Giving the statement was like an offbeat therapy session that offered no insight or psychological soothing besides the officer assuring me that Nick would remain in prison. Which was an ideal outcome, I supposed.
Afterwards, I walked out of the police station and made my way up the steep street towards the city. It was a windy grey afternoon; autumn leaves were being swept along the sidewalk, picking up an empty chip packet and some other shit along the way. It was horrible and gusty in between the buildings, none of the afternoon sunlight could penetrate them and my hair was whipping across my face. It was unpleasant, but I wanted to walk home. It had been a long time since I’d been able to walk the streets freely, and linger along the way.
The conversation with the police detective echoed in my mind, especially the question about why I hadn’t come forward earlier, when Nick had started to become more aggressive and threatening. I had been strangely proud of being able to keep the letters a secret for so long. It had helped to think of it like a movie I was watching, rather than something I was living. I figured if I kept acting entertained, then I wouldn’t be scared. And that way, I could keep doing my job. I had thought of my brain as a bright wall that this dark thing wouldn’t penetrate. But it had. My on-air mistakes proved that.
The two letters I had kept were still sitting in my desk drawer at work and a few days later I pulled them out. I had finally had a decent night’s sleep, and my jaw was gradually improving. I couldn’t bring myself to throw the letters in the tall yellow recycling bin in the office kitchen. After what my measly brain had been through, I needed these physical reminders as proof of the lesson I was slowly learning. My jaw had been in agony again, I hadn’t been sleeping, I couldn’t do my job properly and I had kept it all largely hidden from my closest friends and family.
I could hear the microwave whirring in the office kitchen as it blasted someone’s leftovers for lunch, no doubt caking pasta sauce into the side of someone’s plastic container. I kept staring at the envelopes, and then I turned to the tote bag hanging on the back of my chair and placed the letters carefully inside.
I had a feeling that I couldn’t just do another rogue yin yoga class or book a one-off date with the psychologist Kevin. No amount of jaw exercises could heal the ache within me. My whole ‘fake it ’til you make it’ approach was not the healthiest way forward for me, and I could no longer trick myself into believing things were okay when they weren’t. I needed to break the cycle.
When I arrived home that afternoon I put the letters with the other items in my underwear drawer: the collection of greeting cards, Ben’s mum’s letter and now Nick’s letters. Things that I couldn’t part with, things that meant something to me, things that had penetrated my prawn head heart. I wanted to keep them. Not because I was happy with what had happened in each circumstance, but because I was determined not to forget the way I had crossed a line within myself.