Page 34 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
‘No, thanks.’
‘Vera made them. You know, from The Billy Button Café. She’s engaged to my brother so we get treats dropped off on a regular basis.’
‘In that case, yes, and don’t be stingy.’
Hannah pulled a tin from the pantry and plonked it on the table. She lifted the lid to reveal a cluster of golden biscuits with chocolate and rum-soaked raisins dotted generously throughout.
Sergeant King’s eyes bulged when she offered her the tin—rather like, now Hannah thought about it, Flower the pug’s eyes had when Hannah shoved her blunt-nosed forceps down his throat—before snapping back into police mode.
‘I’ll have one in a minute,’ she said. ‘After we talk about the assault charge Donny Hay is hounding me to make.’
For a second Hannah wished Josh was here, so he could answer these questions for her. Cowardly, yes. Safe, also yes.
‘I hit his camera, not him. My defence is that I thought he was going to take my photo.’
‘Hewasgoing to take your photo.’
‘Exactly. And I hadn’t agreed to that.’
‘Why didn’t you just tell him that?’
‘I was … well, the truth is, I kind of panicked.’
‘You want to tell me why?’
‘Um,’ she said, hating the tremor that made it sound like she had a plastic pirate hat problem of her own.
The sergeant leant forward. ‘Hannah, I’m not an idiot; I can tell when there’s something else going on.’
Hannah looked at the policewoman’s face and saw nothing but calm composure. God, how she envied that. She took a breath and launched into it. Like ripping a sticky bandage off a hairy paw, do it quick and all in the one go.
‘I have a fear of having my photo taken because of something that happened to me. Years ago. I’m okay about it now, mostly, but only because I avoid going to places I’m not used to—you know, situations where someone might catch me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting that bloke to rope me into the photo, but everyone was talking, and Bruno’s, you know, not well, and anyway, I didn’t speak up, and then your Cooma bloke lifted his camera and told me to smile, and … I reacted. Badly.’
The sergeant frowned. ‘Tell me about this “something that happened”.’
God, this was difficult. She took a swig from her coffee cup, and the heat of it was a comfort. ‘Okay. Here’s the short version. When I first went away to uni I stayed at a residential college, where some girls photoshopped my face onto a picture. A rude picture. Porn, I guess you’d say. And it went viral all over college and the fallout, for me, was huge.’
‘Wow. What bitches. Were they charged? What happened to them?’
Hannah frowned. ‘To them? Nothing. They were the cool girls. They’re probably running the Sydney financial district by now.’
‘And what happened to you?’ The woman’s voice was becoming a little too kind. Any kinder and Hannah was going to lose it.
‘The picture went up on noticeboards. People used it as a lock screen on their phones. I couldn’t go to the dining room without being looked at, laughed at. There was this dumb awards night run by the college committee and I won a stupid prize. Guys would bark when I walked past.’
‘Arseholes.’
‘Yep. I was enrolled in medicine at the time—a course I’d busted eight guts to get into when I was at school—and I dropped out.’
‘That’s rough.’
‘Yep. I came home and lay in the foetal position in my bedroom for weeks. I kept in touch, for a while, with a few people I’d known in Sydney. I had a boyfriend at the time, for instance, but it turned out he and everyone else wanted to keep in touch online, tagging each other in photos. Every time my name came up, so would that effing picture. That’s when I …’
‘You what?’
No. She wasn’t telling some stranger about that, no matter how well she could deliver the word ‘arseholes’. ‘I went into a dark place. For a while there, I wasn’t sure I’d ever come out of it, but I … healed. Well, that’s not totally true.’
‘The scar healed over on the surface, perhaps,’ said Sergeant King.
