Chapter Forty
Duncan takes Christina’s hand as they slowly walk along the concourse from the Sydney Opera House toward Circular Quay. He’d invited her to join him for a baroque concert in the Concert Hall. Baroque music! Men have tried various things to impress her, but not baroque music until now.
‘So …’ he drawls. ‘Are you a convert?’
She laughs. ‘Are you?’
‘What makes you think I’m not an expert?’
She laughs again and turns to look at him. ‘The fact that your CD collection is almost entirely made up of Cold Chisel and INXS.’
He grins. ‘Admit it – you love it.’
That sounds almost like a dare, but she’s not sure if she’s willing to take it. And in the time it takes her to decide he leans in and kisses her.
A flash goes off and for a second – maybe two – Christina doesn’t think it’s aimed at her. Those two seconds are blissful. Time in which she’s simply herself and not public property.
It’s Duncan who pulls back and whips his head around, then Christina spots the photographer over by the railing.
‘Hey!’ Duncan yells, walking at speed toward the man, who grins at them then moves off quickly. ‘Hey!’
Duncan looks ready to take off after the photographer, but Christina grabs his arm. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she says.
Then she realises that she’s so used to her life not entirely belonging to her, she hasn’t considered that Duncan may not like being photographed with her.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m being self-centred. You can be worried about it if you want.’ Although she finds it curious that a photographer has turned up now. She’s been out of the spotlight for several months; the story is over.
Duncan turns to look at her. ‘I’m not worried about the idiot taking my photo. I’m worried because he took yours. He has no right.’
‘So … you don’t mind if a photo of us turns up in a magazine?’
‘Mind?’ Now he’s grinning again. ‘I’d bloody love it.’
He kisses her again, with more intent this time. Then he drives her back across the Bridge to Kirribilli and they park beneath the northern pylons, looking at the city and the Opera House they’ve just left.
They kiss some more, and she can’t remember anything in high school being like this. It was fumbling and awkward, like the boy himself and her too, but Duncan knows what he’s doing. So does she, probably – she’s had enough practice on actors.
He doesn’t pressure her to come home with him, and she likes not being rushed.
When she met Patrick, her most recent boyfriend, he’d kissed her the first night and stripped her naked the second.
She’d wanted it, or so she thought. Now, with Duncan taking it slowly, she wonders if she just believed she needed to rush into things in case the man lost interest.
Duncan has made it clear that he’s interested in her, which means she has time to get to know him. And she wants to. That’s what she’s thinking when she arrives home and climbs the stairs to her room.
There’s a newspaper on her bed. She sees the headline – HOLLYWOOD DIRECTOR IN NEW SCANDAL – and her first thought is that she now knows why that photographer was tracking her. Then she registers the words ‘new scandal’. New scandal? That implies an old scandal.
The article tells her what it was: he was arrested for raping a woman in college, then the charges were dropped.
Christina didn’t know this. People she’d spoken to before she signed on to the film told her he was an upstanding guy. Eccentric, maybe. Passionate, definitely. But not this. Not this. She falls to her knees in her bedroom and feels she might be sick all over the carpet.
The new scandal, as she finds when she reads on, is that he’s been arrested for assault on a young actress.
A nineteen-year-old. It just says assault but Christina knows what it would have been.
He has one mode around younger women. She has seen it.
Felt it. His hand over her mouth while the other was shoved inside her underpants.
Her face pushed against the wall so violently she thought her nose would break.
He’d used his arm to pin her in place, ripped her skirt down and used his knee to kick her legs apart, then forced himself inside her, all the while telling her that he knew she’d wanted this from the first time they met, that she just had that look of a woman who wants a man to take charge of her.
Because her mouth was pressed against the wall she couldn’t tell him to stop.
She tried to push back to get him off her, but he was so very strong, too strong.
And as her eyes spilled tears and she struggled to breathe, she had the clearest thought: that he had planned it like this.
Planned to make sure she couldn’t make a noise.
And that he’d probably done it before because it was planned so well.
Which made her feel worse. Made her feel like she was just one of many in a production line of horror.
Now here, in this newspaper, is the proof: she was.
She cries out; she can’t help it. She gasps and pounds the floor with her fists.
There’s a knock on her door.
‘Darling,’ her mother whispers as she enters the room, even though they are the only ones in the house.
‘Mama,’ Christina mouths, not sure if any sound comes out.
It doesn’t need to. Her mother joins her on the floor, wraps her arms around her, croons into her ear that she loves her, that she will always be here for her, that everything will be all right.
In this moment, with her mother’s voice in her ear so different to his, with her words of love pouring through Christina like a cascade, she believes that Joni has always known what happened to her in Los Angeles. She’s just given Christina the grace to manage it in her own way.
So Christina lets herself sob, lets Joni hold her and support her.
Eventually her mother puts her to bed like the child she used to be. Takes off her shoes first, helps her into a nightgown, kisses her forehead, turns out the light.
Christina lies there for a minute or two, convinced she will toss and turn all night, but instead she falls asleep straightaway.
When she wakes, the sunshine is bright. She rises slowly, has a shower, makes her way to the kitchen just as the phone is ringing.
She hears her mother answer, then silence until Joni calls softly, ‘Darling, it’s Lindsay.’
Tell him I’m out is the first thing that pops into her head. That rat has dropped her, but now that the director’s been arrested he wants to talk? Probably to come up with some excuse as to why he didn’t tell her about the director’s past.
Except she knows she’ll have to deal with Lindsay eventually. Maybe it’s for the best that it’s now. Get it over with.
Christina makes a face and goes to the phone. ‘Yep,’ she says into the receiver.
‘Chris-tina! Hi!’
He’s so sickly sweet that she wants to throw the phone at the wall. Maybe he’s worried she’ll sue for … what? Negligence? Maybe she should.
‘Hello, Lindsay.’ She keeps her voice neutral, like he’s the most boring person she could imagine speaking to.
‘Honey, how are you?’
Now her patience runs out. ‘What do you want, Lindsay?’
‘Honey, look –’
‘I saw the news.’
Silence for a beat or two. ‘Right. Right. Of course. Look, here’s the thing – there’s a role.’
She can’t believe what she’s hearing. After he told her she’d never work again, miraculously work has appeared?
‘Where?’ she says, the neutrality falling away. ‘The Paramount commissary?’
Lindsay titters and once more she feels that urge to throw the phone. ‘You’re so funny. No, honey, an acting role.’
She sighs. It would be entertaining to leave him dangling. To not speak for a minute or two, let him wonder if the call’s cut out. But she still wants to get this over with.
‘Suddenly you have a role for me?’
‘Uh-huh. A lead.’
‘A lead role? Just sitting there, ready to go? For me?’
He has to be joking. Or else he’s shunted one of his other clients in order to get this for her – which is entirely possible. She thinks she was once shunted for an actress he’d just signed at the time.
‘Well, I pulled a few strings,’ he says.
‘When?’
‘Look, honey –’
‘When?’
Silence-two-three-four …
‘Last week.’
So that means he knew the story was coming out. Knew a week ago, if not longer, that she was telling the truth about the director. But he didn’t tell her what was coming. He waited until she found out along with everyone else, all the way down here in Australia.
‘I’ve heard enough,’ she says.
‘Don’t you want to hear about the role?’
‘Fax me the details,’ she says and hangs up, knowing full well there’s no fax machine in this house.
She leans back against the wall, her breath coming in short gasps as she tries to make sense of what has happened to her. To the other women harmed by this man. She thinks of the lies the industry must have told to protect the director. How it betrayed her. Betrayed the others.
She thinks of Daphne’s story about Adelaide, the lies and betrayal.
She’d asked Daphne if she could forgive Adelaide. How could she have thought that was possible?
She won’t forgive. She won’t forget.
‘Darling?’ her mother enquires gently as she re-enters the room.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ Christina says and she heads into the adjacent laundry to grab her running shoes.
She’s not dressed for a run but she doesn’t care.
She has to get out. Go down to the park.
To the water. She needs to touch trees and breathe in salt air and see birds and remind herself that she is here, not there; that nothing can touch her here, in her home, in her city.
The lies and betrayal belong over there.
They won’t reach her again. She won’t let them.
‘I love you,’ she says to Joni, kissing her on the cheek as she opens the back door. ‘I won’t be too long.’
As she sets off down the hill, she thinks about how the phone call from Lindsay might have seemed like a vindication to someone else, but Christina knows he probably never cared in the first place whether she had or hadn’t been involved with the director; he only cared about whether his ability to earn commission was affected.
That’s why he called her now: suddenly she’s commissionable again.
And the speed at which he called after the news about the director came out suggests he sees her as a valuable commodity.
If Christina were more ambitious, she wouldn’t care. She’d leap at the chance for a lead role, no matter how she came by it. She would think That’s showbiz! and get on the first plane to Los Angeles.
Maybe she used to be like that. She must have been, to have gone as far as she did.
A little dash of both ruthlessness and single-mindedness is a necessity for anyone who wants to claim a sliver of spotlight.
You have to be willing to decide that you are by far the best person for any given role and pursue it accordingly.
Something has happened to Christina since then – and not only the attack by the director. That was the catalyst, but not the cause of her resistance to furthering her career now that there’s no impediment.
Nearing the harbour, she feels bright sunlight on her cheeks and the breeze in her hair.
I am free, she thinks. I am free, I am free, I am free.