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 takingmyphoto. 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 herfirst thought is that she now knows why that photographer was tracking her. Then she registers the words ‘new scandal’.Newscandal? 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 saysassaultbut 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 tohis, 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.