Chapter Twenty-Two
Standing by the counter at the frock shop, Christina blows air up to her new fringe and tugs her T-shirt away from her sides.
The start of summer probably wasn’t the best time to have a fringe cut, but it seemed to go along with changing her hair colour from its usual blonde to a softer light brown.
Why have one change when you can have two?
She had gone to the hairdresser at Cremorne Plaza whom her mother had been visiting for years.
‘Tell Julie you want a change and ask her what she thinks you should do,’ Joni had said.
As Christina is used to other people making decisions about her hair – directors, producers, hair and make-up people on set – she’d thought she might want to take charge this time, but as soon as Julie started running her fingers through her hair, she remembered that it can be a relief to have someone else take charge.
It was Julie who suggested the fringe, and the look she gave Christina suggested she thought Christina might want to hide for a while.
‘Do you need to keep things the way they are for work?’ was the only thing she said that even hinted at Christina’s former life.
‘What work?’ Christina said, smiling ruefully.
Julie patted her shoulders. ‘It’ll come good,’ she said, before setting about making changes that Christina had never envisaged and now enjoyed.
She looks like someone who looks like Christina Clarke – someone who might be approached on the street and asked if she is Christina Clarke, and she can say no and have the inquisitor believe her.
So, still herself but not enough of herself that she can’t hide.
Which suits her at this point in her life.
When she arrived home from the salon, Joni had told her that Duncan had called, and Christina had to think who that was.
‘Duncan from the shop?’ Joni had prompted.
‘Oh. What did he want?’
Joni had given her a smug look. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, waving a piece of paper. ‘Here’s his number. You could call him and find out.’
Christina will do no such thing, she thinks, as she leans on the counter in the frock shop.
Just because she knew Duncan in her teens doesn’t mean he’s trustworthy now, even if he did help her that day in the shop.
For all she knows he has a friend who works for a newspaper and wants some kind of scoop.
‘Now,’ Daphne says, fossicking under the counter, looking for who-knows-what.
Since Christina started volunteering at the shop she’s learnt that Daphne has pockets of treasures hidden all over this place, and in quiet times she’ll go through them to find something to jazz up a display, or some piece of jewellery that’s worth more than she thought when it came in.
The other day she found a ring that looked like it may have real gemstones in it, and had marked up the price accordingly.
The next time Christina was in the shop Daphne told her that the ring had sold to a young man who couldn’t afford a flashy new piece for his girlfriend but wanted to give her something special.
‘Would you like to go through these?’ Daphne says now, as she puts a box on the counter.
‘I don’t think I’ll know what’s good and what isn’t,’ Christina says.
Daphne gives her a funny look. ‘All those premieres and whatnot and you don’t know the difference between real jewellery and fake?’
Christina laughs. Part of what she appreciates about Daphne is her matter-of-factness about the life Christina used to live.
She doesn’t ask breathless questions about movie stars she’s met, or what it’s like going to the Academy Awards – which Christina did, three years ago, as the companion of an actor who is moderately well known and hoping to be better known, and thus trying to hide the fact that he’s gay so it doesn’t, in his agent’s words, ruin his career.
His agent was also her agent, which is how Christina found herself at the Shrine Auditorium, ingenue enough to enjoy the spectacle and Australian enough to take it all with a grain of salt.
It’s only now that she realises how odd it was that she didn’t think twice about being someone’s fake girlfriend for a night.
She play-acted for a living, and that was just another role.
At a certain point she had to presume that everyone she met in Los Angeles – agents, busboys, drivers, nannies – was play-acting.
They all wanted to act themselves into a version of their lives that was more vibrant, more fulfilling, more noticed than the one they were leading.
Christina had never thought of herself as an attention-seeker but why else was she doing that job?
Of course she wanted people to notice her.
To fill some kind of hole she didn’t even know she had.
The psychiatrist she was seeing – because everyone in LA had one – told her she had a ‘father wound’ that she was trying to heal. Christina retorted that she’d healed it by never talking to her father again.
‘And that,’ said the psychiatrist, nodding gravely, ‘is the wound.’
Maybe. Is that wound the reason Christina walked into the director’s trap? Because she wanted his attention?
She will never know and it’s too late to change it. But if it is, that wound has led her indirectly to be here with Daphne and her box of random jewellery.
Christina starts to pick through it. ‘There are a few single earrings here,’ she says.
‘Fashion statement!’ Daphne says.
‘What?’
‘Doesn’t that Madonna wear just one earring in a pair?’
‘A few years ago, yes. She’s moved on now. She’s wearing diamonds in both ears.’
‘Have you met her?’ Daphne says it the way she’d ask if Christina has met the new postman.
‘Briefly. The way everyone meets everyone in LA.’
Daphne nods and glances around the shop. ‘Needs a bit of a tidy.’
‘Really?’ Christina laughs. The place is always neat.
‘Mm.’ Daphne frowns and nods. ‘I think so. I’ve been on my own a few days. Fallen behind.’
‘The other volunteers didn’t turn up?’
‘My friend Adelaide has been unwell.’
There’s a quaver in Daphne’s voice that makes Christina think something bad has happened.
‘Will she be okay?’ she asks.
‘Oh. Yes, I don’t think it’s anything serious.’ Daphne waves a hand. ‘Although she’s cancelled a couple of times on me now. Maybe she just needs a break from me.’
‘I don’t think that would be the case.’
Daphne turns to look at her, surprised. ‘Oh?’
‘You’re hardly bad company.’ Christina almost blushes, because it feels audacious to say this, as though she’s asking Daphne to be her friend.
Which, perhaps, she is. It’s not as if she has a tonne of friends in Sydney, and even though they’ve barely spent any time together Daphne makes her laugh and also makes her think.
Plus she probably has a raft of great stories she could tell, from working in this shop alone.
‘You’re not too bad either.’ Daphne gives her a nudge. ‘For a movie star.’
Christina laughs, and for some reason it builds and she throws her head back, feeling the laugh emanating from her belly.
‘I’m not that funny,’ Daphne says, which only gives Christina momentum.
Soon they’re both laughing, the single earrings on the counter in front of them. It’s the most normal Christina has felt in months and she doesn’t want it to end.
Then the door opens to admit a customer.
‘Yours,’ Daphne whispers.
The customer’s eyes widen as Christina approaches, then the curiosity fades.
The hair change is working, she thinks, and that makes her feel normal too.
Normal the way she felt years ago, before she set in motion the events that took her over oceans and across continents, onto stages and sets and red carpets.
Normal the way she thought she wouldn’t want to feel again, because that was for the life she’d left behind, not the dream she was pursuing.
If this is normal, though – to spend some of her time with a new friend and old earrings, as she tries to work out what to do with herself next – it’s a good state to be in.
When Christina returns home from her shift, she puts on a pale yellow smock dress she bought at a boutique near the frock shop for what promises to be her first actual social activity since she returned to Sydney.
She had a friend at school, Belinda, who shared her interest in French and history, so they sat next to each other in those classes.
Actually, they probably weren’t friends so much as colleagues, if you can call other students that – the proof being that they didn’t stay in touch once school was over.
So Christina should probably have been surprised when Belinda rang to say she’d heard Christina was back and asked if she’d like to meet for a drink.
Except when you have even a little bit of fame, people come out of the woodwork, which makes her suspicious of Belinda’s motives in meeting up.
It was hard to come up with a reason why she couldn’t meet her for a drink, though, given that all Christina’s doing with her time is occasionally volunteering at the frock shop.
‘It’ll be good for you,’ her mother said when she told her about the plan to meet Belinda at The Oaks Hotel at the top of the hill in Neutral Bay. ‘See someone your own age. Who knows? You might become friends again!’
It’s a nice idea but an unlikely one, because the life Christina’s been living these past few years is probably as different from Belinda’s as a Martian’s would be from an Earth-dweller’s.
They have nothing in common any more, of that Christina is sure, and a smattering of French vocabulary and working knowledge of the causes of World War I won’t bridge the divide.
Obviously that didn’t stop her saying yes, though, because now she’s sitting here at The Oaks, trying to be inconspicuous and still noticing glances coming her way.