‘Or deaths,’ I said. I sounded hardened, even to my own ears.
‘What about this one?’ she traced the line of a symbol with her fingernail, and I felt trapped and exposed. I wanted to retreat. I wanted to gently extricate myself from her embrace and her bed and go back to my apartment to sleep by myself. But Molly waited, and there was a gradual unfurling within my gut. I stopped wanting to leave, but I still didn’t want to talk to her about this. Then I stopped wanting to avoid the discussion altogether, and I started wanting to talk to her just a little – just enough to sate her curiosity, which was, I told myself, natural after all. But then I started talking, and the gentle flow of words became a torrent.
‘I was in Darfur in 2005. I wasn’t meant to take the assignment – I had been working in Iraq for months and I was due for a break, but Brad had been shooting there and he called me and asked me to come over. He said it was bad and that it needed more media attention, and that we should do a series together. We saw a lot of bad shit that trip – a lot of really, really bad shit.’
My memory bank was full of images that I wished I could erase and those from that particular trip began to stream through my mind. Brad and I had quite deliberately exposed the worst human rights abuses we could find in that crisis, in as much detail as we could – cataloguing the horror, trying to ensure that ignorance would not be an excuse for the world’s failure to act.
But I did not want to tell Molly about those things – about the mass graves and the sickening stories of abuse and the immensity of the refugee camps – the sheer scale of it bewildering and overwhelming; it was if I was living a horrifying dystopian novel. She was confident and intelligent and – I’d quickly learned – bold, but she was also optimistic and quite sheltered. I felt that to expose her to the detail of those moments would be to sully her somehow. So I summarised, and I sanitised – techniques my editor forced me to use when I had written a piece and the content was just too brutal for my audience.
‘That tattoo represents a refugee camp I visited.’
‘What about that long one across your shoulders? Is it a snake?’
‘Ah, that one is particularly special,’ I admitted. Her fringe had fallen over her eye and I brushed it back gently. ‘That’s the only other tattoo I have that isn’t about a piece I’ve written. It’s about the loss of my culture.’
‘As in…’ she hesitated a little, then asked carefully, ‘Aboriginal culture?’
‘Yeah. Forty thousand years of culture passed down in oral stories and songs and rituals and paintings – and within two hundred years almost all of it was lost. I wish I could understand how I miss that knowledge. It should have been my birthright. My mum’s family is so disconnected from our cultural heritage, so that means I have always been too, and it’s so easy to feel like I should have had a grounding and a framework to understand the world and I just never got that. I had to build my own.’
It was too much – I’d said too much. Molly was still looking at me, doe-eyed and engaged, but I felt raw and naked in a way that had nothing to do with the fact that I was naked. I cleared my throat. ‘So that’s the two things you know about me that no one else does.’
‘Thank you.’
‘What for?’
‘For showing me yourself.’
I paused. Now that I had finished forcing myself to be vulnerable, I was really glad I had. I liked how pleased she was that I’d made the effort to do so. I liked the way that her acceptance made me feel. I wanted more – not more sharing on my part, not yet. I wanted to know her at a deeper level too.
‘Now it’s your turn. You owe me two secrets.’
‘I don’t really have many secrets.’
‘Everyone has secrets.’ I paused, then asked her, ‘Do you do this often?’
‘This?’ she repeated, and she looked up at me. ‘You mean, bring men I barely know back to my apartment for several rounds of intense but thoroughly satisfying sex?’
‘Several rounds?’ I repeated, and she grinned at me.
‘Well, the night is young. Was that presumptuous of me?’
‘I wasn’t complaining,’ I assured her.
‘Did it bother you that I was forward?’ she asked and her eyes narrowed a little.
I laughed and shook my head. ‘Did it bother me that a beautiful, intelligent, amazing woman came at me as hard as I was planning to go after her? Let me think about that… No!’
‘When I know I want something, I don’t like to play games – I just like to go after it. I know that sounds spoilt, maybe it is. Maybe some people would think it’s unbecoming for a woman to say such a thing. You know – some people – like people from your generation.’ The lilt in her tone left no doubt that she was kidding, and so I made a joke about my age too.