Jane Doe

Jane Doe [noun]: a woman who is a party to legal proceedings and whose true name is unknown or withheld.

He awoke from a dream where a forest of hands were reaching out the dirt and grabbing at his ankles. He was just about to be yanked down under the surface when his morning alarm rescued him from his terrible fate. Nowadays, Rob McAvennie always seemed to die in his nightmares. One night, he might be getting chased by a pack of hungry wolves and the next he was falling headfirst off a skyscraper. It was like running on an endless hamster wheel. He could never make sense of these visions, especially the lack of pertinence they had on his life. Either way, he was thankful to survive another night. 

     His hand was shaking as he pulled the thick bedcovers away. The daylight poured into his bedroom through a narrow gap in the curtains. He attempted to move from his pillow but the headache rang louder between his ears. He reached across to the bedside drawer and chewed down a paracetamol. The bitter taste reminded him of that bag of powdered motivation he had sniffed the night before.

As he searched the room for a glass of water, he noticed the strange outline under the covers beside him. He reached out his hand gently as though he would around a sleeping dog and peeled the bedsheets aside. A beautiful lady slept peacefully on the other side of the bed. Her delicate face was upturned to the revolving ceiling fan like she was posing for a portrait painting. She was completely naked, with her lacy underwear tangled on the floor. McAvennie guessed she was no older than twenty-four, the age where women leave behind their troubled girlhoods and bloom into the world. 

     The mysterious woman suddenly brushed a strand of hair from her face. McAvennie quickly turned over and braced himself for the shamefaced introductions between two naked strangers. He started prowling through the alphabet, hoping to remember her name. Abbie. Becky. Charlotte. Danielle. Ella. After several minutes of pretending to sleep, he rolled back to face the woman and found her undisturbed. The gloss of her nail polish winked in the daylight.

Eventually, vague details started to surface in his mind. He remembered them in a nightclub, hunched close together in a dirty bathroom stall, exchanging a coiled banknote to snort lines of coke. She innocently wiped the residue from under her nose and reapplied her lipstick in the mirror. Her long heels clapped against the sticky bathroom floor. He remembered those glossy red nails dancing over the buttons of his phone. 

     “There’s my number if you lose me,” she said, disappearing into the crowd of sweaty bodies on the dancefloor. 

     McAvennie again reached over to his bedside table and located his phone amidst the graveyard of broken martini glasses. He searched through his call log and found no evidence of her existence. Perhaps it was another episode of his bizarre dreams.

With the threat of puke rising from his stomach, he took a deep breath and settled against the wooden headboard. He studied the woman sleeping beside him; everything from her manicured nails to the small birthmark below her breast. Beyond the soft features of her face, McAvennie recognised a woman who had spent her entire life in the shadow of misogyny. She had grown into an environment of scary, hormonal men who licked their lips at the sight of her in a slim dress like she was nothing but a rotisserie chicken. They mistakenly thought that she was free for the taking like a complimentary buffet. The heaviness under her eyes spoke of the sleepless nights she had cried into her pillow about the chauvinistic pigs who had mistreated her. 

     Although they were yet to be formally introduced, McAvennie felt like he already knew this mysterious woman. He imagined that she grew up in a middle-class family and spent her lonely childhood under the thumb of her protective parents. As she reached her teenage years, she was growing tired of their constant supervision and began experimenting with all the luxuries she had been denied. She no longer dressed according to her father’s expectations and threw away her wardrobe of knitted sweaters for bright miniskirts and tight bodices. That was when she became familiar with the subtle gropes of predatory suitors. They lingered on creaky barstools, eyeing up her fishnet stockings with lustful fascination. He imagined the poor woman in a nightclub, surrounded by these men like vultures picking at the bones of a dead horse.

Against his better judgement, McAvennie walked across the room and found the woman’s handbag hooked over the bedpost. He carefully pulled out her leather purse and looked inside for anything to verify her identity. Despite the jingle of loose change, there was no bankcards in the tight compartments. He emptied the contents of her handbag onto the carpet and began searching through the items. Buried in amongst the essential cosmetics was a polaroid of a younger girl who might have been her twin sister but for the sleeve of geometric tattoos. 

     With no knowledge of the mysterious woman, he was beginning to question his own sanity. He paced the length of his bedroom, trying to piece together the events of the previous evening. He remembered brief snippets of naked strippers dancing under playful strobe lights and taking shelter from the rain in an old telephone box, but struggled to place them in chronological order. Every memory melted into one another until his life felt like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. He placed the items back in her handbag and slowly returned it to the bedpost. As he reached over, his foot caught on the strap of her stiletto heels and he crashed against the mattress. He winced at the squeaky bedsprings, hoping the woman would sleep through the commotion. Before he could let out a deep sigh of relief, the woman opened her eyes. He waited for the morning alarm to rescue him from his nightmare.