Chapter Ten
‘Kevin, would you stop?’ Christina yanks on the lead as her mother’s beagle tries to run after a spaniel that walks past with its owner.
Kevin is the most sociable dog alive, she’s decided, because he wants to make friends with every dog and human who pass them, and if she’d known that about him she wouldn’t have offered to take him for a walk.
Well … she hadn’t offered so much as her mother had suggested it. Several times. ‘You need to get out,’ she said. ‘Leave the house. A young lass like you shouldn’t be inside all this time.’
Christina had laughed at her use of the word ‘lass’ – she didn’t hear it once in the United States – and that’s how she knew she was starting to feel better.
So she pretended to be doing her mother a favour by taking Kevin for one of the half-dozen walks he has each day.
Joni says he needs them. Christina thought she was exaggerating but now she can see how vigorously his tail is wagging, she believes her mother had a point.
The dog is happy. And if walks outside can make him happy, maybe they’ll have the same effect on her.
‘I’ll get the milk and the paper,’ she’d called to her mother as she left, not knowing then how much Kevin pulls on the lead and how she needs two hands to control him. She’s not going to have much luck carrying the milk and paper home.
When they reach Anderson Park at the bottom of the Kurraba Road hill, Christina lets him off the lead for a bit.
She’d decided to head down to the shops on the intersection rather than go up the hill to the little shop on Ben Boyd Road, thinking the climb up would be harder – except, of course, she’ll have to climb up to get home, and this time she’ll have groceries as well as an excitable beagle.
These are the sorts of quotidian issues she hasn’t needed to face in a while.
In Los Angeles, no one walks to do anything if they can avoid it.
Christina was told this before she moved there and she hadn’t believed it.
Growing up in Sydney, where everyone walks probably because there are just so many lovely places to walk and also because there’s no reason not to, then living in London, where people also walk, it hadn’t occurred to her that there might be a city so wedded to cars that people look at you strangely if you say you’re going for a stroll somewhere.
So she had adapted to the LA way and driven not very far for her milk and papers.
That was before she became mildly famous and started hiring people to run her life for her. It’s weird, having staff. Nice to not have to worry about shopping and cooking and cleaning. But weird. And even weirder now that she’s back in what some might call the real world.
Whistling to Kevin – named after Joni’s favourite uncle, long deceased – Christina clips his lead back on and heads for the mixed business that’s been there since she was a kid. Back then she’d buy lollies, which she’d make last all week.
The shop doesn’t look much different as she steps inside, and it still smells like eucalyptus oil, which is what the old owners – maybe still the current?
– cleaned it with. A little bell tinkles over the door too, just as it always did.
For a second – less – Christina feels like she’s twelve again, saving up her coins to buy the sweets.
Back when so little could mean so much. Maybe it still does.
Maybe that’s what she needs to remember if she’s to recover something from the wreckage of the life she thought she had.
She pulls a carton of milk from the fridge and picks up a copy of The Sun, then takes coins out of her purse and waits to be told how many are needed by the tall, sandy-haired man behind the counter who is grinning at her like he knows her.
Great. Clearly tucking her white-blonde hair into a baseball cap and not wearing make-up hasn’t helped her.
Nor have her rumpled white linen pants and un-ironed terracotta-coloured long-sleeved T-shirt paired with her oldest sandshoes – an ensemble designed to make her look like she doesn’t care about her appearance. Because she doesn’t.
Now she feels like she shouldn’t have left the house after all. Is he going to say something to her about the director? Is she going to have to leave the milk and paper behind? Is she –
‘Chrissie?’ He’s still smiling. And being quite familiar, calling her that. Which no one except her mother has called her since …
High school. She didn’t know that many boys back then, and none who would call her that now.
It’s not a name that’s in the papers. Nor is it a name her boyfriend, Patrick, has ever called her.
Not that he’s calling her anything at all these days – he hasn’t been in contact, even though she’s rung him and left messages.
She feels strangely numb about it, as if she doesn’t really care if she hears from him or not.
Which is an odd thing to feel about someone who has seen you naked more times than you can remember.
She peers at the cheery man behind the counter. There’s something about his eyes. They have crow’s-feet around them now, but the shape of them. The twinkle in them …
‘Duncan?’ She frowns and blinks. He’s the older brother of a classmate she never liked – or, rather, who did not like her – and his parents used to run this shop.
‘Yeah!’ He puts his hands on his hips and shakes his head. ‘I can’t believe you remembered!’
Kevin starts whining and pulling on his lead. He’s probably not even meant to be in here. Are there rules about these things in Australia?
‘G’day, Kevin,’ Duncan says, stepping out from behind the counter and bending down to scratch the beagle behind his ears. Then he straightens. ‘Can’t stand still for a minute, can he?’
‘You … know him?’ It’s a redundant question but she’s taken aback.
‘Sure! Your mum’s in here a fair bit.’ He smiles kindly. ‘So you’re home.’
‘Not permanently,’ she says quickly, although she has no idea if that’s true or not.
‘Right.’ He steps back behind the counter. ‘Returning to LA, then?’
She stares at him. Is he trying to get her to say something about the story? The scandal as the papers in the US called it?
‘Maybe,’ she murmurs, then gestures to the two items. ‘How much?’
Before Duncan can reply there’s a yelp from Kevin as a man coming into the shop treads on his paw. Christina looks up in time to see a huge camera; she hears the whirr of its shutters and the man says her name over and over, almost like an incantation.
So they’ve found her. The vultures, the press, the paparazzi have found her, despite her hair being in its baseball cap and her face looking decidedly un-Hollywood.
She thinks about how she’ll look so bad in the photos with her un-ironed clothes, then feels furious that this is what she’s caring about even though she’s been trained – has trained herself – to care about her image first. It’s her image that got her into this position, where a director with too much power and not enough conscience can punish her for not giving him what he wanted to take from her, for guarding herself against his invasion until he overpowered her.
And now she’s being invaded again by a man wielding what she can only think of as one of the worst weapons of the modern age.
She feels sick and panicky and her vision starts to go blurry, and when she tries to pull Kevin closer to her the man is in the way.
Before she has time to do anything more Duncan is yelling and his hands are on the man’s shoulders, then the man is on his side on the footpath, yelling back at Duncan, who picks up Kevin and tells the man to get lost or he’ll call the cops.
It probably takes a minute, all of this. One minute for her to go from feeling like she might be safe here to feeling nothing of the sort. She can hear her own breathing and it’s rapid and ragged, and she has the odd sense of observing herself in her own body.
A hand on her shoulder makes her jump, mainly because it tugs her back into herself.
‘Sorry,’ Duncan says.
‘For what?’ she says softly.
‘Scaring you.’
She blinks again. ‘You weren’t the one who scared me,’ she almost whispers.
He puts Kevin down, then wraps his arms around her as she starts to shake.
‘There it is,’ he says quietly.
‘What?’ Now there are tears.
‘The shock.’
She doesn’t hug him back, if what he’s doing is even hugging her. It’s more like he’s stopping her from collapsing.
Another minute passes. Maybe more. He lets her go.
They stare at each other and oddly he doesn’t seem any more familiar than he did before it happened.
‘You all right?’ he asks.
She shrugs. ‘I have no way of knowing.’
He doesn’t ask her why it happened, so clearly he is aware of the story. It was foolish of her to presume otherwise.
Kevin whines at her feet.
She points to the goods on the counter. ‘How much?’ she says again.
Duncan’s brow furrows, then he gives her a figure, she pays, and he puts the milk and paper in a bag before handing them over.
‘I should walk you home,’ he says. ‘To make sure you’re in one piece.’
‘I’ll be fine – I think you scared him away.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
He is looking at her with such care. Why? They barely knew each other in their teenage years.
‘Thanks but, um … I’ll be fine. I’m …’ She was going to say ‘used to it’ but she’s not really used to the way the photographers are now. Once upon a time they wanted nice pictures. Now they want her at her worst.
Another customer enters the shop. A teenage boy with a schoolbag, not a camera.
‘Thanks,’ she says, hurriedly picking up her groceries and pulling Kevin out of the shop.
Halfway back up the hill to home, the adrenaline that she must have produced during those brief, wretched seconds continues to work itself out of her system, this time knocking her sideways so that she has to put one hand on a fence to steady herself.
She’s almost glad for Kevin’s eagerness to move on. He’s keeping her here, in the present, making her focus. She lets him yank her home, then avoids speaking to her mother for an hour or so, knowing Joni will see straightaway that something happened.
Something that can’t happen again because Christina doesn’t want to live like this. She needs to find out when things will settle down. When the story will fade.
She can’t ask Patrick, obviously, and her agent Lindsay doesn’t seem to want anything to do with her. Maybe she’ll write him a letter if he won’t take her calls. He may not answer it, but she’ll feel like she’s doing something proactive and that will be a start.