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.
CHAPTER THREE
Home for Lucy is on Raglan Street, which is pretty much the longest street in Mosman apart from Military Road, the main artery. It stretches from the city side of the harbour to Balmoral Beach, transecting the suburb. The beach side winds downhill; the city side is the high side, which is where Lucy’s family’s house is. Her parents’ shop is on Avenue Road, about fifteen minutes’ walk away but mere steps from Lucy’s high school. Less than a minute of commuting, on foot.
Each weekday Lucy’s routine is the same, with slight variations: she finishes school, she goes to the shop – it’s a dry-cleaning business, but calling it ‘the dry cleaners’ makes it sound like it belongs to someone else – she works for a couple of hours, then she walks home while one or both of her parents closes up for the day.
Home is rundown because her parents spend all their time and money on the business, even though her mother would love to do some renovations on the house. Her father has ‘been through it all before’, though, and says that renovations are a waste of time.
He’s been through it all before because he’s been married before. Lucy’s mother was nineteen when she gave birth to Lucy, but her father is twenty years older and already had another family.A wife, a son, Russell, who is ten years older than Lucy, and a daughter, Gail, who died at ten. It was losing Gail, her father has said, that ended the marriage. Although Lucy tends to think – because of what her mother has told her – that it was him meeting her mother and having an affair.
Lucy is the result of the affair. She’s the reason her father left his first wife, even though he’s never married her mother.
‘Lucy!’
She turns to see her friend Angelica running up, struggling to keep her backpack on both shoulders.
‘God, I’msounfit.’ Angelica rolls her eyes. ‘Are you leaving already?’
‘Yeah.’ Lucy shrugs and smiles like she doesn’t mind the fact that she doesn’t get to hang out with her friends instead of going to work at her parents’ business. Like every teenage girl would rather be dry-cleaning than doing anything else.
Angelica screws up her face. ‘What about our English project?’
‘Hey! Hi!’ Their friend Poppy appears, her own backpack hanging off one shoulder. Poppy’s too cool to wear it on both shoulders. Not that she’s said that. Poppy’s coolness is just a fact that Lucy and Angelica have to live with.