Chapter 13: Saturday 17 Dec 2022: Joe and Layna’s wedding

Aaliyah

She hadn’t slept. Not really.

She’d come home in a cab she couldn’t have paid for, with her dress pulled together where it didn’t want to stay together anymore, mascara streaked down her cheeks and Sienna’s face burned into the back of her eyes. Sienna. Of all the people in the world. Sienna had been there. Had seen her. Had seen her dancing, a vodka cruiser in her other hand and her hair sweat-stuck to her face. Had seen everyone looking at her. And worst of all, maybe she had seen Tyler’s hand inside her bra. Or maybe not, she hoped.

She’d snuck into the house without anyone seeing her in the dress they didn’t know about. She’d locked the bathroom door and washed her face and brushed her teeth twice and had a long shower and put on her pyjamas and got into bed. And then she’d lain there.

All night. Seeing Sienna’s face. Had Hamza been there? She wasn’t sure, couldn’t remember. It’d been Sienna, staring at her - she’d never seen past that.

By the time her mother knocked softly on her door at seven, she’d already cycled through every stage of grief about thirty times. Her mum had stuck her head in. “Get up, dear. Dad’s gone fishing. We’re going to have coffee with Sienna and her mother at eight, before they go to the wedding.”

“With Sienna’s mother?”

“Yes. Get dressed.”

Aaliyah had nodded. She hadn’t said anything else; she didn’t trust her voice. This was worse than any hangover. But if Sienna’s mother was there? Sienna wouldn’t say anything. Surely. They’d talk about the wedding. She gathered that Hamza was going to the wedding: incredible.

The cafe was on a side street in Mornington, the kind of place with mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu and big glass windows that someone had stuck a faded Covid distancing sticker on five years ago and never taken down. Sienna had picked it. Aaliyah hadn’t thought about it, but as soon as they walked in she understood: there was a back room, separated from the front by a glass door and a bookshelf, with one table and four chairs, and she could see Sienna’s security reading a paperback with one eye on everyone who came in and keeping them away.

Sienna was already seated, and so was a woman Aaliyah had only ever seen on magazine covers and TV shows, and could not stop staring at now.

Elise.

She had watched interviews with Elise. Elise had more presence than anyone else she’d ever seen. She had pinned pictures of Elise to her wall when she was thirteen, before she’d realised that the right picture to have on your wall was your mother and your sister, and had taken them down. She had memorised the way Elise tilted her chin in that Vogue cover from 2009. And here was Elise, in person, in jeans and a cream cashmere jumper and minimal makeup, looking at Aaliyah and her mother with the kind of warm, careful smile that Aaliyah recognised because she had spent the last sixty seconds working very hard on the same one herself.

“Yasmin,” Sienna said, and stood. “Aaliyah. Thank you for coming. Aaliyah, This is my mother, Elise.”

“Hello, Yasmin,” Elise said warmly, and they embraced. “Great to see you again.”

“You too!” Yasmin said. “Sienna, thanks again for yesterday, we had such a great time!”

Aaliyah looked at her mother, surprised. Yesterday? They what? She was about to say something about that when Yasmin continued, “Elise, this is my daughter, Aaliyah.” Aaliyah could hear her voice change, just hear the controlled steadiness of her voice, the voice she used when a parent at the school complained about the homework. Ouch.

“Aaliyah.” Elise turned the smile on her, and Aaliyah felt her face go hot. “I am very glad to meet you.”

“Hi,” Aaliyah said. Her voice came out small. “Um. I love your work.”

“Thank you, sweetheart. That’s very kind.”

They sat. Aaliyah sat opposite Sienna and didn’t look at her. The waitrress came over, and Sienna ordered for them without asking. “Four flat whites, two extra hot, no sugar, and four glasses of water, and a plate of those almond biscuits.”

The waitress went away. Nobody said anything.

Aaliyah looked at her napkin. She had it folded into a little fan. She didn’t remember doing that.

She had told herself, all morning, the same thing, over and over. She might not say anything. She might just be a friend now. She might just have a coffee with mum and pretend it didn’t happen and let me sort it out myself. She had clung to that hope all the way down in the car, and through the door, and into her seat. She might not say.

“So,” Sienna said. “Aaliyah. I think we should start with you telling your mum what I saw last night.”

Aaliyah felt the floor tilt.

She made herself look up. Sienna’s face was kind. That was the worst part. Sienna wasn’t angry, wasn’t smug, wasn’t enjoying it. She was looking at Aaliyah the way Aaliyah’s mum looked at them when they’d made a mess: come on, love, we’re going to get through this, but we’re going to do it properly.

“I don’t...” Aaliyah said.

“Yeah, you do.”

“Sienna,” Yasmin said, low. “Please.”

“No, sorry, Yasmin. I’m sorry. I know this isn’t what you want. But she has to. She has to say it out loud, in front of all of us, because if she doesn’t, she’s just going to go home and tell herself that what happened last night isn’t really what happened, and we are going to be having this same conversation in six months when it’s worse, and that’s not right. Not good for your family, and not Larissa’s way. I’m sorry. Aaliyah?”

Aaliyah looked at her mother.

Yasmin’s face had not moved. But her hand on the table had gone white at the knuckles.

“What happened last night?” Yasmin said.

Aaliyah opened her mouth and closed it. The coffees came. The waitress set them down. The almond biscuits came on a small white plate. Aaliyah stared at the plate.

“Aaliyah,” her mother said again. “What did you do?”

“I went to a party,” Aaliyah said.

“Where?”

“Frankston. At Maddy’s friend’s friend’s house. I told you I was at Maddy’s. Where I left my phone.” It was still there.

“Yes, you did. And then?”

Aaliyah closed her eyes. Here it was, the end of the world.

“I drank some alcohol. More than some. I was, um. I was with a boy. I was dancing. And Sienna appeared.”

“Aaliyah.” Sienna’s voice was very gentle now. “What were you wearing?”

Aaliyah’s eyes filled. She tried very hard to stop it, and made it worse. A tear came down her cheek and then another and she pressed the napkin against her face and held it there.

“It’s alright, sweetheart,” Elise said. “Take your time.”

“I was wearing my underwear, and a sort of a, lace skirt,” Aaliyah said into the napkin. “I had a dress on when I went there. There was a game. With shots. And I lost. So. So I had to take it off.”

The silence in the room got bigger.

“And the boy?” Sienna prompted, with the same awful gentleness. “Where were his hands?”

Aaliyah didn’t answer. She put both hands over her face. Her shoulders shook.

“Aaliyah? You don’t want me to have to say.”

She tried, but she was going to be sick. She just couldn’t. The words, the sentence just wouldn’t form in her head.

She got up to run. Anywhere. She’d never go home. But all that security; she realised she would get nowhere, even if she got past Sienna. She was trapped here with them. Sienna had organised it that way.

Sienna sighed when she sat down. “She was holding the boy’s hand inside her bra,” Sienna said. “She had a vodka drink in her other hand and she was, I would estimate, one or two drinks past where she was going to be able to walk out on her own safely. There were maybe ten boys in the room and most of them were watching. I was told, after she ran out of the party, by a girl who was reasonably sober, that this is normal at parties Aaliyah goes to. Aaliyah dancing in sexy clothes while drunk. I am told she will dance with any one. She will let any one do that.”

Yasmin had put her hand over her mouth. She did not speak.

“Is that right, Aaliyah?” Sienna said.

Aaliyah nodded into her hands.

“Say it.”

“That’s right,” Aaliyah said. “His hand was ... there ... inside...”

She just couldn’t go on. Let alone admit that sometimes the bra came right off.

“How far have you gone with anyone?” Sienna asked her.

She wanted to die. She wanted the floor to open up. She wanted to be at home, in her bed, with her face in the pillow, even with Sienna’s face still on the back of her eyes — anywhere but here.

“Second base,” she whispered.

“Speak up, Aaliyah.”

“Second base.” She took her hands down from her face. She made herself look at her mother. Her mother’s eyes had gone very still and very bright. “I have only ever been to second base with anyone. I promise. I would let — I will let anyone get to second base. But I have never let anyone past second base. I swear to Allah, mum, I swear to Allah.”

She heard Elises’s small intake of breath, and saw, out of the corner of her eye, Elise’s mouth open, then close. Aaliyah didn’t understand, in that second, why. She’d understand later.

“Aaliyah,” Yasmin said, in Arabic. Her voice was very soft. “Aaliyah, do you understand what you have just told me?”

“Yes, mum.”

“In English, please. I want Sienna and Elise to hear this.”

“Yes,” Aaliyah said. “I understand what I said.”

“But you do not understand,” Yasmin said, in English now, and her voice was still soft but Aaliyah could hear the thing in it that she had heard once before, when her mother had stood in their kitchen and told a man on the phone that no, she was not going to be told what to do, that this was Australia and her daughters would be educated. “You do not understand. You are sixteen years old. You are a child. You are my child. And you have told me that you go to parties where you drink so much you cannot walk and you take off your clothes for boys and you let boys put their hands —” she stopped. She took a breath. “Boys you do not know. Boys whose names you do not know. Boys whose mothers’ names you do not know.”

“I know their names,” Aaliyah said, weakly, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

“That is not the point I am making, Aaliyah.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You are not sorry,” Yasmin said. “You are sorry that you were caught. There is a difference.”

Aaliyah closed her eyes again.

“Aaliyah.” Her mother’s voice was shaking now, just a little. “Do you know what people do to a girl who has been drinking in her underwear at a party? Do you know what they will think they are entitled to do? Do you know how easy it would have been, last night, for what happened to you to be — much, much, much worse?”

“Mum —”

“Do you know how many girls in this country, every weekend, have something terrible happen to them because they were a little drunker than they meant to be? Because they trusted a boy a little more than they should have? Aaliyah, you are Muslim. You are an Australian Muslim. You think the world is kind. The world is not kind. The world will punish you for being a girl, and it will punish you double for being our girl, and —”

“Mum, please —”

“And you —” Yasmin had to stop. She put her napkin to her mouth. “And you are doing this to yourself. And you will be sorry. But nothing will change.”

Aaliyah felt something hot rising in her chest.

She had heard the speech before. Not this exact version. But the structure of it — the litany of the dangers, the rule of the hijab, the warning about being a Muslim girl in a non-Muslim country, the reminder of who she was, the implicit weight of what people will say. She had heard that speech for as long as she could remember. From her mum, from her mum’s friends, from her father, from Noor when Noor had been at the age where Noor had decided she was responsible for Aaliyah. It was a familiar speech and Aaliyah had a familiar, automatic response to it that started in the bottom of her belly and rose up through her like steam, and she could feel it rising now even with everything that had happened, even with Sienna sitting two feet away and Elise watching her face, and she was so tired and so ashamed and so frightened, but the steam was rising anyway, because it always did when her mother started this speech, and what she was about to do, she knew, was nod and look at her hands and say yes mum, I’m sorry mum, and walk out of this cafe, and it was, none of it, going to make any difference at all. They all already knew that.

She sat there with her mouth half open and the steam rising in her chest, and she hated herself.

“Yasmin,” Elise said.

Yasmin looked up.

“May I?”

Yasmin held out her hand, palm up, towards her daughter, in a gesture that said please, be my guest, I have nothing left. The hand was trembling. Aaliyah saw that.

Elise turned to Aaliyah.

“Aaliyah, sweetheart. Look at me.”

Aaliyah looked at her.

“I am going to tell you something. I am going to tell you something that I have told only four people in my life. My husband knows. My daughter knows a bit. A friend of mine called, well, Larissa, she knows. My agent at the time knew, and I think did absolutely nothing about it, which is why she is no longer my agent. And now you are going to know. Is that alright?”

Aaliyah nodded.

“Yasmin? Is it alright?”

“Yes,” Yasmin said resignedly.

Elise sat back. She picked up her coffee, and looked at it, and put it down again without drinking.

“I started modelling when I was fourteen,” she said. “Very young. Younger than you. The first time it happened to me, I was sixteen. The same age as you. It was a photographer who’d worked with me three or four times. He was older. He was married. He had a daughter who was a year older than I was. I had been at his house for family dinner. His wife had cooked. He drove me home and on the way he stopped the car.”

Aaliyah swallowed.

“That was the first time. My first time altogether. The second time I was seventeen. It was a man who was on the board of the magazine I was about to be on the cover of. We were at a launch, I’d had a few. He was, I would have said at the time, the safest, most boring, kindest man in the room. He had grandchildren. He took me upstairs to show me, he said, where the coats were.”

“Elise —” Yasmin said.

“It’s alright, Yasmin. The third time was a few weeks later. He was the assistant of a designer I was working with. He was twenty-three. I had known him for two years. He was gay. He said. And I thought he was. I had told my friends he was gay, we laughed about how gay. I had spent more time alone with him than with any man in my life up to that point, including my own father. Often in my underwear. We were doing a shoot in Greece and we got back to the hotel and I felt not right and I asked him to walk me up to my room and he did and I let him in because I trusted him, and I had been drinking — not very much, but enough.”