‘She’s not moving. She’s not responding. She’s not turning over. Please! I’m not close enough to see if she’s breathing. Tell me what I need to do.’
Please.
She’s not close enough. To see that I’m not breathing.
Standing across from my body. All that murky water in my mouth, in my lungs. Stripped below the waist, blood matting my hair. Left on the rocks to flail like a fish, until I stopped moving, eventually. Pulled away, mercifully, as he plunged in. And now a stranger is looking at my dead body. Now we’re both scrambling to understand what it is we’re seeing. What it is that’s been done to me.
I now know that you can cry, scream, howl like the wounded animal you are. And they do not stop. It does not move them. They keep going until there is nothing left, until you are broken apart, obliterated.
Almost like you were never really there at all.
Ruby Jones is my only witness. I understand this suddenly, explicitly, and I grasp at this singular certainty, feel my way along it, until I find myself standing next to her, there on the waterfront path. She couldn’t get to me, but somehow, some way, I make my way to her. I am in awe as I reach out to Ruby, but my fingertips turn to rain, drip down her cheek, and a second truth claps itself out above us:
She can only see the husk of me, left down on the rocks.
Turns out you have to learn how to see a dead girl. To recognise her. For now, I can do nothing but wait, terrified, beside this shivering stranger. Knowing she won’t be able to feel my presence, find me for a second time, until she is ready to see what everyone else has missed.
Ruby is wrapped in something silver. Two kindly police officers keep calling her Ma’am as they take turns with their questions, pressing gently against her confusion. She is trying to cooperate, trying to swim up through her cold, saturated brain, but her eyes keep going to their belts, to the thick, black weapons heavy like rocks. Thinking how easy it might be for someone to reach over and pull one free, grasp a gun or baton and—
She closes her eyes and metal comes down against her skull, smashes through skin and bone, breaks her into a thousand little pieces. She sees blood. Exploding. But it’s just the sirens flashing, and the yellow of a girl’s hair, and the slow, steady stream of uniforms making their way down to the river. She was moved away from the water once the forensics team arrived, but Ruby can still see the rush of activity down there. All the ways they make a crime scene of the body.
She feels like she’s going to be sick.
The officers are staring at her; Ruby’s hand has gone to her mouth. There is metal on her tongue, and it tastes like a gun, the cool, hard sensation of a barrel pushed against her face. Like a fist.
She doubles over and throws up on the gravel.
‘Ma’am. Are you okay, ma’am? Can we get you some water, ma’am?’
And the questions stop as someone pats Ruby’s shoulder, the female police officer perhaps, though Ruby cannot be sure, because rain and tears have blurred everything now.
‘Did you notice anything just before you saw her? Did you see anyone strange in the area? Did anything seem out of place?’
That’s what they kept asking her when they first came down to the river. And she’s said no, yes, um to all variations of these questions, leaving a useless trail of words between her and these people trying to help, because she saw nothing. There was nothing. There was just the rain closing in, and the river churning, and the place she stopped to breathe, before turning for home.
‘What’s going to happen to her?’
Her one question for them. Left unanswered as she shivers in her silver wrap and another siren keens its way toward the river.
Later, Ruby sits on the tiled floor of her shower, water hitting her shoulders, spraying over her skin. She watches as this water pools at her knees. Tries to think of anything but this morning. If she closes her eyes, she’s immediately back there, and the water trickling over her body turns red, covers her in thick, congealed blood. They think she didn’t see; they think she had been moved far enough away from the water, but when my body was turned over, there was bright red at my right temple, or where my temple should have been. Ruby wasn’t supposed to see my face, but those nice police officers were still asking her questions as the others got to work, the ones who lifted the caution tape with their gloved hands, darting under and around it, as if they did this all the time.
She knows she wasn’t supposed to see that my face had been smashed in.
（What she doesn’t know. In that moment, I looked just like my mother. That pretty, destroyed face of hers when I found her on the kitchen floor. I’m sorry, I want to say, the first of many times, for all the things Ruby will have to deal with now. I know what it’s like for the horror to follow you home.）