Chapter Two
‘It’s a little too loose, doll – round here.’ Candy the wardrobe mistress pinches at Christina’s waist and Christina barely feels it. She’s so used to being pulled at, prodded and poked. That’s what happens when you’ve been an actress for most of your adult life.
At thirty-two, she’s had over a decade of being a clothes horse, a vessel, a symbol.
She has embodied and represented other people’s stories and the way they want to tell them.
Wearing a dress to an awards show is no different.
She has to present as something her agent, her public, prospective producers and directors want to see.
And she’s not going to complain about it because she chose it.
As soon as Christina left school she left Australia, treading the well-worn path to London.
Her mother’s brother lived there and took her in for a while.
She worked as a secretary – not very successfully – before finding work as a stagehand.
She’d always liked drama at school, and her father used to take her to see plays and musicals at the Theatre Royal in Sydney.
The theatre is tied in with happy memories for her, although she never imagined acting until one day the director of a play at the theatre where she worked asked if she’d consider auditioning.
She was so beautiful, he said, that she shouldn’t be backstage.
Christina didn’t know she was beautiful.
At the girls school she attended in North Sydney no one said anything; certainly her mother and sisters didn’t.
And she was mostly kept well away from boys, apart from the brothers of her classmates and she was too shy to talk to any of them.
After she arrived in London she thought Englishmen were just friendlier since they all seemed to want to chat to her.
That first play led to more, and more. After a year she had an agent, then she had a career.
Then she moved to Los Angeles as her agent said her face was wasted on the stage and belonged in the world.
On the big screen. So she became a movie star: Christina Clarke.
A fake last name and one that sounded better, the agent said, than her real one, Christina O’Flynn.
Therefore she chose to become Christina Clarke.
Chose to lie about her age so that the press, the fans, the industry think she’s twenty-eight, not thirty-two, and even then people say she looks young for her age.
One reviewer called her an ingenue, which, when she read it, made her snort out her black, unsugared coffee.
It is being Christina Clarke that has brought her to this fitting today.
And this pink, one-shouldered, toga-inspired dress that is supposed to be cinched at the waist to show off the figure she half-starves herself to maintain is meant to present her as a modern Grecian goddess, because the film she has just wrapped – the one that everyone is buzzing about, and saying will make her a proper movie star – is a retelling of a Greek myth, set in modern-day Texas. Orpheus and Eurydice in Stetsons.
A stretch, perhaps, but Christina loved the script from the first page. She wanted the role. She wrote a letter to the director telling him how much she connected with the story. It was true, but the fact that the director was one of the most in demand in Hollywood didn’t hurt.
‘Doll, let’s get the needle and thread,’ Candy rasps, patting the side of Christina’s waist, making her flinch then shudder.
‘Cold, doll?’
Christina shakes her head. It’s the touch on her waist – that’s what she reacted to. It’s a spot where …
She stops herself. No. That memory is not going to intrude. She’s worked too hard to let it do that.
Practising what she knows best – the art of pretending – she stands immobile as Candy pins the dress. Then they’re done and Christina is back in her street clothes.
‘May I use your phone to check my messages?’ she asks.
‘So polite!’ Candy laughs. ‘Of course, doll, it’s in the office.’
Christina’s politeness has been remarked upon by crews on sets, by PR people, by waitresses. She used to think it was normal but after five years in LA she knows it’s not.
When she dials her number to reach her answering machine, the first message is from Lindsay, her agent.
‘Call me as soon as you get this. Mischa will put you through.’
His tone is hard to read. But Mischa is his assistant and normally Christina has to spend at least ten minutes on hold waiting for Mischa to decide to put her through.
So whatever the reason is for Lindsay’s call, it must be important.
She went for an audition last week, for a big new movie.
Could they have made the decision already?
‘Hi, Mischa, it’s –’
‘Putting you through.’
Christina frowns. Mischa also usually pretends she doesn’t know who Christina is, but clearly she recognises her voice. Maybe she’s the only Australian who calls.
‘I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt,’ Lindsay says as soon as he’s on the line.
‘Okay.’ Christina draws the word out, confused.
‘Tell me you didn’t.’
‘Didn’t what?’ This feels like some kind of joke but she’s not in on it.
‘You slept with him.’
She blinks, trying to process the information. Lindsay knows she has a boyfriend, but what she and Patrick do together is none of his business.
‘What?’ Now she’s convinced this is a joke.
‘It’s about to be all over the news, Christina. You should have told me.’
‘I really –’
‘Your director? Seriously? When did it start? Do you know how hard I had to …’
She stops hearing him. She stops hearing him because she is suddenly very cold and sick and afraid.
This story, whatever it is – she can’t begin to imagine what the director has told people.
The same director she wrote the letter to.
The one who said he loved how much she understood the part.
How he’d gone into battle with the producers to have her.
How the writer had wanted someone else – someone less blonde, he told her – but he fought for her.
The same director who put his hand on her waist the night after filming wrapped and she thought it was playful but then it wasn’t, and he didn’t care that she had a boyfriend or that he had a wife.
The same one who now, she realises with the dread that comes from wanting something a great, great deal then watching it teeter on the precipice of falling away from you forever, has probably set out to ruin her just because he can.
As she has seen other men do in this town to actresses who are too blonde or too shy or too curvy or too abrupt or just too much alive for them.
Too much not under their thumb, so they make them that way.
‘I need a line on this, Christina,’ Lindsay is saying as her brain rejoins the phone call.
‘I …’ She can’t think of anything to tell him that won’t require her telling a story she is not ready to tell.
‘I didn’t do it,’ is what she says, because it’s the truth. She didn’t do anything.
‘Right. Sure.’ Lindsay snorts. ‘Whatever, I don’t care. But it’s gonna be in the news tomorrow and I can’t come back with “she didn’t do it”. So gimme something. Do you love him? That’d be good. Ill-fated lovers. That’s a story people like.’
The coldness in her body has condensed into a stone in the pit of her stomach. Telling her it’s over. This life she’s made here. This career she has hewn out of the stern rock of indifference and improbability. The premiere she was going to. The dress she has been fitted for.
She knows it’s over because she’s seen it be over for others in this town. Seen how one story can both undo a woman and make a man. It’s just that now the story is about her.
She hangs up the phone, picks up her handbag and somehow makes it to her car.
Lindsay will probably be relieved that she hung up. He’ll have a story to tell people about how she’s a mad witch or something. He likes that phrase.
The golden LA light surrounds her as she drives down congested roads lined by palm trees, trying not to think about how she probably won’t ever see them again.
Once she makes it home, she starts to pack. There’s only one place she can bear now. She’s going there.