Chapter One

 November 2002

It's a warm summer night. Above the white sails of the opera house the full moon is circled by a bright halo. Its reflection is hazy in the dark sea.

We are here for my flatmate, James's Birthday. A group of backpackers in our best clothes, more suited to seedy nightclubs than an evening watching a classical orchestra. Inside we are uncertain how to act. James closes his eyes to appreciate the music. Henry falls asleep. I stare hard at the musicians, watching their individual movements come together to create this huge swell of music.

I've been in Sydney for two months and it feels like home. I love the Botanic Gardens that curve around the bay and the trees hanging with sleeping bats. I love the way I can never find Darling Harbour when I'm looking for it but sometimes I'll turn a corner and there it is.

I'm on my second job since I've arrived. After a month in a call centre I now work for a mail order company assembling cheap toys in a factory. I'm living in a two bedroom flat with six other people. I would have hated this at home but here everything is coated in a bright glossy sheen.

On days off we go on trips to museums, to art exhibitions, to the beaches where we swim in the ocean and I feel its vastness pressing into me. We go on a wine tasting tour in the Hunter Valley.

'That one's going to be wasted by the end of the day,' a woman at the first place we visit says as I sip wine. 'It's always the quiet ones you've got to watch out for.'

James laughs. 'You don't know how true that is.'

We stay out late at night drinking and dancing and playing pool.

One night a man approaches me in a nightclub. He tells me his name, Chris, and kisses me like he's kissing a brick wall. He takes me round the club introducing me to people he knows. We all smile politely. He tells me I'm going home with him.

'I need to tell my flatmates I'm going,' I say.

'Yeah, you go and say goodbye to your friends.' He smiles, looking down at me.

I see Henry and Toby chatting at the side of the room. I go up to them and talk. The three of us look at Chris. He is frowning back at us. I go back to him.

'Wait there,' he says.

He goes to Henry and Toby. I watch them talk and nod. 

He comes back to me. 'I thought your flatmates would be girls.'

I shrug. 'Two of them are.'

Outside I tell him he shouldn't be going home with strangers. 'How do you know I'm not going to brutally murder you?' I say.

He sneers at my narrow body, my twig-like limbs. 'I don't think I've got anything to worry about.'

   He kisses me. 'All this is is I want sex and you want sex,' he says.

    I realise I don't want sex. I've just been going along with him because... because... I don't know why. Because from the moment he approached me we seemed to be heading there with a grim inevitability.

He is staying in a hostel, the only person in a small dorm. We argue about whether to keep the lights on.

'I want to see you,' he says.

I don't want him to see me, to see the scars still faintly spelling out words on my stomach. 'DEAD', 'HELL', 'BITCH'.

He wins the argument. He doesn't seem to notice the scars.

The next morning I say goodbye awkwardly.

He tells me that one day I'll find someone who really likes me.

Back at the flat they ask me questions.

'Is he good looking?' says Shelley.

I wrinkle my nose. 'No.'

They laugh.

In the afternoon I go to the botanic gardens and watch the bats sleeping, their upside down bodies wrapped up in their wings. 

I wish I had wings.

NHS self-harm support

Chapter Two