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? Thescandalas 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, thepaparazzihave 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 aman 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.