Letters to a Princess Read online

  I threw my arms around Zoë and we both started jigging up and down with excitement. I beamed at her.

  ‘Brilliant Zoë! Just brilliant!’

  ‘I promised Miss P we’d do the lead article, and some others if she wants them, for the next edition of Underground to make up for our last assignment. Zoë screwed up her mouth in that prissy Miss P way, “See if you can redeem yourselves, you and Diana Moore, for your final mark”.’

  ‘Good one, Zoë! It’s a dream come true,’ I said to her.

  ‘But wait, there’s more!’ Zoë promised with high drama in her voice.

  ‘Do tell,’ I said as we linked arms and walked through the school gates to the bus stop.

  ‘Well, after we’ve seen the official stuff, we can go to Bar Coluzzi and chill there for the rest of the afternoon.’

  Zoë reckons Bar Coluzzi is a celebrity hang-out and that you never know if actors like Mel Gibson or Judy Davis might stop by. I like it there anyway, I can sip an espresso for an hour and just watch people go by. Darlinghurst has heaps of cafés. Tables and people spill across the footpaths. I love it most in spring—it looks so pretty when all the plane trees make the gritty streets seem like somewhere else. Europe, Babs reckons. She also said Kings Cross, which is just next door, used to be really elegant but now it’s sex city and full of druggies. She says I shouldn’t go there by myself at night. Babs is protective of me. Not that I’d want to go there anyway.

  That night, after considerable homework from all the inconsiderate teachers I had that day (you’d think they’d check with each other), I wanted to write to Princess Diana to tell her that Aronda and her mum and the wedding, not to mention Zoë’s new boyfriend Jason Chee, have all slipped off my radar as I think about seeing her tomorrow. But I lay on my bed dreaming instead. Wondering about what the Princess would be wearing; what she’d say; if she looked as much like a princess in the flesh as she does in all my pictures of her. If we could just get to see her in person—just get close enough to say a word or hear her say a word—it’d be a dream come true for me.

  It was getting late but I finally got up and sat at my desk.

  I opened The Diana Papers but didn’t write a word. I could take the first few letters with me and maybe try to give them to the Princess. Then again, I liked having the file of letters right by me, in my room. It was becoming a kind of diary of my life, I guess. ‘Not yet, Princess Diana,’ I thought as I put the file away, safe from Marcus’s prying eyes. There may be so much more to write later.

  In the meantime, I still had to deal with things like Graham nagging me at every damned meal. My appetite had become of increasing interest to him. It was all because of his frequent calls to and from Ingrid. She’s taken a very close interest in our ‘family’—an unhealthy interest I’d say. But who cared about the likes of Ingrid and Graham when a real-life princess was about to come into my life?

  8

  Zoë and I got into the Carven Memorial Building only minutes before the official party arrived. It was, of course, Zoë who had got us in. ‘Sydney Morning Herald Young Journalists of the Year,’ she announced to the security guards, flashing her ‘press pass’. ‘Special assignment for the official Sydney High Newsletter.’

  And just like that, they let us into the press enclosure, which is how we came to see her. And get close enough to speak to her!

  When I saw her coming through the double glass doors and caught the gleam of her blonde hair as she ducked her head in that shy way, I thought I’d faint.

  ‘It’s her! It’s really her!’ I grabbed Zoë’s arm.

  ‘Shut up and act cool,’ she whispered, taking out her notepad and pencil. ‘Princess Diana, radiant in a stunning blue suit, a fitted jacket and a gored skirt with delightful dark pigskin shoes …’ she said loudly, obviously for the benefit of the security guards, and bent her head as if to write. Meantime, I couldn’t take my eyes off the Princess. She smiled that oh-so-familiar smile, and the blue of her suit set off the blue of her eyes.

  I was certain she was looking our way. Then miracle! She actually stopped right in front of us and Zoë seized the opportunity.

  ‘Hi there, Princess Diana,’ Zoë called out cheekily, as if she did this every day, and stuck out her hand. Then another miracle! The Princess actually took Zoë’s hand, looked at her and then looked right at me. ‘Hello girls,’ she said to both of us and then passed on her way. I wanted to jump up and down as if we were at a rock concert and maybe scream out or faint or something. But I just pressed Zoë’s hand and babbled, ‘She’s stunning, stunning, stunning! And she spoke to us Zo. To us!’

  ‘She took my hand. Oh my God Di-Di, a real princess took my hand.’ Zoë held her right hand limply, gazing at it as though it were a national treasure.

  We listened to the short formalities in a kind of stupor of delight with Zoë squeezing my arm so hard I knew I’d bruise. When the Princess left the stage they’d set up for her and disappeared into the depths of the building for the reception to which we were not invited, we just stood and stared at the empty space where she’d been. Even Zoë was unusually silent. Now I knew what it was to walk on air because that’s how I felt when the crowd finally dispersed and we made our way up the street to Bar Coluzzi.

  I just kept chattering about Princess Diana and how everyone at school would be amazed that she’d actually spoken to us. I would have kept on all afternoon but Zoë finally cut me off.

  ‘It’s a damn shame we have these bloody old brown uniforms on,’ she complained. ‘There’s a hot guy over there looking our way …’

  ‘But you’re not looking at hot guys these days. Didn’t you say you and Jason were …?’

  ‘You can still look, Diana. I’ll never stop looking. Even when I’m married. That is, if I ever marry!’ And she tossed her head. ‘Come to think of it, I won’t! If marriage didn’t do too much for a princess … but let’s not go there just now. I have a better suggestion.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Let’s start writing up our article for our assignment and …’ she stopped, smiled, and grabbed my hand in a way that showed me she was up to something.

  ‘What are you up to, Zoë? I blurted out.

  ‘Let’s say Princess Diana granted us a special interview. Short and sweet but ours. I mean she did speak to us so it’s only a bit of a stretch. It’d make the article far more interesting. And God knows you know everything she thinks and does and eats!

  ‘It’ll be fun. You be her, Di-Di, and I’ll interview you. Then we’ll have a scoop! You do the writing, though, you’re better at it.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about this Zoë, really, it mightn’t be such a …’ I mumbled.

  ‘Oh, come on, Di. Think about that smug Selma Fitzsimmon and her journo dad. She’ll be green! Plus it’ll impress Miss P no end, the old hag. We’ll call it The Princess and the Schoolgirls or Hot Aussie Royal Gossip, something catchy like that! Top marks guaranteed!’

  ‘Oh Zoë! We shouldn’t!’ I was already laughing and I knew that we’d sit for another hour in the café. And I knew there’d be a credible interview outlined by the time we left. Written all by myself!

  9

  The fake interview was a crazy thing to do. And I knew right from the beginning it could lead to trouble with a capital T. I’d been in enough shit with the Aronda wedding affair to last, well, for quite some time. But I went right along with the interview anyway. I was on such a high that day from actually seeing Princess Diana in the flesh. I’d stood for a whole long moment in the warm glow of her very real gaze; I’d heard words from her mouth directed at me, okay, at us. ‘Hello girls!’ Now anything seemed possible. And Zoë was so persuasive. But I can’t blame Zoë altogether for what happened because, as Babs said, ‘You have free will, you needn’t have listened!’ sounding just a bit like Martin who could be so self-righteous sometimes. But I knew she was right.

  ‘We’ll get top marks for Journalism with this,’ Zoe had said. ‘Maybe even the Year Pr
ize. Now let’s ask her something really personal and invent a Diana-type answer.’

  I could already see myself reaching out for the prize cup with Babs in the audience clapping madly and maybe even loser Graham. The idea gave me a warm glow and I lent my full imagination to the ‘interview’.

  We ‘asked’ the usual questions about her kids, her interests, about living in England, about living in a palace and life after divorce. Just as Zoë predicted, I knew all the answers because I’d read every article on Princess Di that I could get my hands on.

  ‘We need to end with a clincher,’ Zoë screwed up her eyes thoughtfully.

  How about, “We don’t mean to be too personal, Princess Diana, but is there a love interest in your life right now?” Then we can ‘choose’ a really lovely man for her—someone who’d be good for her instead of those no-hopers who leave her in the lurch. We’ll make him a nice guy.’

  Right then it seemed not only a good thing to do, but a kind thing. I could hardly say no to inventing a nice guy for my heroine.

  We created an American millionaire publisher for her. The publisher bit sounded stable, if a bit boring, and the millionaire added an edge. Zoë came up with the name Zeigler. ‘There’s a student actor called Paul Zeigler who is hot! They say he’s the next Mel Gibson. Just graduated from NIDA. We’ll use his name for good luck. Now we need a unique first name to go with it.’

  I pointed at an ad for Hammond Organs and Pianos in the scruffy newspaper on our coffee table.

  ‘How about Hammond Zeigler? It sort of hums,’ I said. ‘Hammond Z who would dote on Princess Diana so she’d just be purring like a kitten around him. He’d love her kids too. Hammond and Diana. Di and Ham.’ I could see them already.

  ‘Don’t “ham” it up too much!’ Zoë joked. But we did!

  ‘What does he look like?’ Zoë asked after she’d ordered another latte for herself and another espresso for me. We scribbled out a description of a perfect male specimen with a fantastic personality and a kind, kind heart. I’d never seen Zoë concentrate for so long or so hard. We finished the whole thing in under an hour even though we wasted a lot of time giggling.

  We should have left it at that. But not Zoë. She asked me to ‘tidy up’ the interview for the next day. It was a lot of work and I stayed up really late. There was no time at all for my precious Diana Papers.

  It was a good piece and would get us high marks, I was sure. And we still had three days to revise it and hand it in. I’d make sure it was perfect. We’d acknowledge that it was an imaginary interview, of course. Well, that’s what I thought anyway. But Zoë had other ideas.

  ‘Let’s give that old goat Miss P a thrill and say, just for today, that it’s true. I want to see the look on her face. It’s only a teensy white lie. We’ll confess later and say we were on a high. C’mon Di, for the hell of it,’ Zoë said the next day as we approached the English staffroom. We had to report to Miss P to give an account of yesterday’s excursion.

  ‘Let’s make it more exciting. God knows we’ve had to listen to shitloads of crap from her!’

  ‘Okay,’ I agreed reluctantly. ‘But I don’t think she’ll fall for it. Not coming from us.’

  But she did.

  Zoë told Miss P we’d lucked out and actually had a brief interview with the Princess. I stood dumbly by, nodding every now and then—a real mistake. Then Zoë answered Miss P’s searching questions without flinching. What was Zoë thinking? I fidgeted, getting more and more nervous. I cleared my throat. I could see that the more details Zoë gave, the harder it was going to be to come clean later.

  ‘You have all the notes of this, this “interview”, then, Diana?’

  I nodded, ‘Yes Miss Pate.’ At least that bit was true. I did have a sheaf of handwritten notes.

  ‘You’d better get together then and refine your article,’ Miss P said in her cold way, but I could hear the tinge of admiration in her voice. My heart was thumping. Pushy as anything, Zoë asked if we could use the computer room that afternoon to work on the assignment.

  It was hard not to giggle like hell as we walked down the corridor, studded with awards and honour boards of girls long gone but obviously still revered, on our way to the computer lab.

  ‘We’ll be up there soon,’ Zoë said, cheekily pointing to a half-empty honour board.

  That was when an uneasy feeling rose up in me. I hated Miss P but I hated lying to her too. I knew that things had already gone too far, and I said so. ‘This little white lie is growing into a big black one Zo.’ But Zoë opened the door to the computer lab and bowed low. ‘I have a master plan. Stop stressing and just chill out would you!’ she said. ‘Being here beats the hell out of listening to Miss P, doesn’t it?’ With that she sank into a chair and began to file her nails. Obviously it was going to be my job to type it all into the computer.

  ‘Maybe we can keep this up until the assignment’s due and miss every English class!’

  ‘But we’re telling her this afternoon, aren’t we?’

  ‘We’ll come clean after we write it up and maybe add, You wish: A Conversation with a Princess, or something, to the title—I mean, headline.’

  ‘An Imaginary Conversation with a Princess would be better.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Zoë said tipping back her chair with her typical air of confidence.

  ‘Miss P will be furious if we leave it till tomorrow to tell her the truth.’

  ‘Who cares? She’ll be furious today too, so what’s the diff?’

  I admired Zoë’s courage. I took out my notes. I’d already made the interview a bit more fantastical and now we couldn’t help embellishing Hammond Zeigler even more. We worked really well together and it sure did beat the hell out of listening to Miss P.

  ‘I think I’m in love with him,’ I told Zoë as I reread Hammond Zeigler’s description. ‘We’ll have to edit this but the sound of him right now … Tall, dark, handsome, smooth as, rich as, gentle as, but with the right amount of get-up-and-go to seek adventure all around the world. How glamorous!’

  ‘Me too—but he’d have to shed about twenty years for me!’ Zoë joked.

  ‘That’d be shedding $20 mill too!’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you remember? Hammond is a billionaire!’ she countered. ‘Ham and I—sounds like the name of a book,’ she said dreamily.

  ‘A movie!’ I was getting enthusiastic myself.

  We started fantasising about the movie and getting a bit intimate about Ham and the Princess’s bedroom antics, and more than a bit noisy. Zoë doesn’t exactly hold back with her laughter. We were both in stitches, when suddenly Zoë went quiet. I looked over my shoulder and couldn’t believe who was standing there in the doorway, possibly listening to our indecent conversation.

  It was the principal, Ms Morrison. She didn’t come in, just stood at the door, an oddly bright smile on her face. ‘I’m glad you two are enjoying yourselves,’ she said, and it didn’t even sound sarcastic. ‘I’m sure you’re doing terrific work on this piece.’ We couldn’t speak but we could see she was still smiling at us. Smiling.

  ‘I’ve just heard you girls actually interviewed her! The Princess! I’m so proud of you both!’ She was still smiling as she retreated, ‘I’m looking forward to the article. All of us are. So do get on with it girls.’ And she was gone.

  I looked at Zoë, Zoë looked at me, we both frowned.

  ‘Oh God no! Miss P is such a gossip, such a bloody gossip.’

  ‘Couldn’t wait to spread it around, the bitch!’ Zoë agreed.

  ‘But we did tell her Zoë, and she believed us. We both know that. So now what?’

  ‘Mmm,’ Zoë sounded worried herself.

  ‘It has to stop right now,’ I told Zoë. She’d gone a little pale and she nodded in agreement for once, but she took the disc from my grasp. She tapped it thoughtfully on the desk.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. Let’s go confess and get it over with.’ But just then the bell rang and we made our way out into the corridor,
where we were just about run down.

  ‘Hey, you two!’ It was Selma and she was beaming at us. ‘We just heard. You can give me a copy of the interview when you’ve finished it and I’ll get my dad to go over it for you. Give it the really professional touch. I’ve already phoned him.’

  ‘We’d have to talk to Miss Pate about that,’ I said nervously.

  Girls were clustered around us and with sinking hearts, or at least with one sinking heart—mine—we made our way through the admiring crowd. The funny thing was, Zoë seemed to really enjoy it.

  ‘What now, genius?’ I hissed at her.

  ‘Just play along, I’ll think of something!’ she hissed back.

  ‘We’re going to the principal’s office right now,’ I insisted.

  ‘Okay, okay. Little Miss Perfect. We could bask in the glory for just a little longer, you know.’

  In the end it didn’t matter. When we got to the office Ms Morrison was nowhere to be found and her secretary was clearly excited.

  ‘Imagine two Sydney High students getting to interview the English Princess. Well done, girls!’ she said. ‘Now, how can I help you?’

  ‘Actually, there’s been a bit of a mistake and we want to …’ I began, but Zoë grabbed my arm. ‘We’ll come back later,’ she said.

  We tried to slink off to a quiet corner but there was no hiding. The grounds were alive with the news. We had suddenly attained celebrity status and there was nothing we could do about it. We didn’t even have five minutes alone to come up with a decent strategy for putting an end to the whole thing. And Zoë simply smiled and nodded and talked, while I was entering full panic mode.

  Oh Zoë, Zoë! I kept thinking, We’re getting in deeper and deeper. Speak up, you coward! But I couldn’t speak. And Zoë couldn’t stop speaking. The worst thing was that people kept asking us to tell our story all over again.