Free Letters to a Princess by Libby Hathorn Page A

with your high and mighty airs, Princess Poo, but you never will. Not in my house! So handle that, Ugly!’and he laughed as he stomped on the door and kicked the handle.
    Ugly! Like he can talk, he’s the ugliest person on earth when he speaks like that, with his piggy little eyes narrowed. I was so angry I wasn’t even frightened. I just shoved him out of the way and braced myself for a retaliatory whack on my back, but it didn’t come. He was too shocked, I guess. I walked right out of the house. His house, yeah right! At least the park at the end of the road was private. I stayed there for hours thinking about lots of things—the door, the Diana interview fiasco, Mum and, most of all, my future. It didn’t look all that bright. Not a glimmer of hope. Usually I’d try to jog it all off, forcing my legs when my muscles screamed for mercy, faster and faster down street after street, until I exhausted myself and my feelings. But tonight I was even too dispirited to exercise. I felt so low I just sat there in the park like a blob.
    Graham came looking for me eventually. ‘You’d better come home, kid,’ he said in a sympathetic voice. ‘I’ve seen what Marcus has done and it’s not on. I’ll fix the door on the weekend, but the lock can’t go back on. The only doors we lock in our house are the exterior ones.’ I knew Graham hated screwdrivers and hammers and that the door would never be put on unless Martin did it. I felt utterly hopeless.
    As we walked up the road together he surprised me by saying, ‘And what’s this about an interview I heard you and Zoë did? That’s a hell of a scoop if it’s true. Is it Diana?’
    I didn’t answer him.

11
    Dear Princess Diana,
    This is to offer sincere, heartfelt and BIG TIME apologies for what happened. I’ve wanted to write to you for weeks but I’ve been feeling sick about the whole thing and so, so guilty. To tell you the truth, we’ve been in heaps of trouble, Zoë and I, ever since the Hammond Zeigler TV affair, that I haven’t had the heart to do much at all. For weeks I haven’t even wanted to show my face to the outside world.
    I’ve even stopped collecting pictures of you, I’m feeling so bad. I’ve apologised to every picture of you on my walls—all 217 of them—quite a few times. I’ve cried and I’ve even laughed, somewhat hysterically, I have to admit. But laugh or cry, talk or shut up, I feel bad, bad, bad!
    And to top it all off, Babs is trying to get me to go tohospital for a while because I’ve lost so much weight. I’m not eating much and I’m feeling low in every way but I’m certainly not a nutcase.
    Of course I don’t want to go to this miraculous treatment facility Babs is raving on about. Although sometimes I think anywhere would be better than here with Marcus. He’s having a field day over this Hammond Zeigler thing. He keeps calling me ‘ham-fisted and ham-faced and ham in the sandwich’, among less polite things I won’t bore you with.
    As for Martin, well, he left a bible on my desk and said we could talk any time about truth and lies, love and Jesus. I don’t want to talk to anyone, not even to Babs.
    I don’t want you to feel responsible in any way—heaven knows you have your own problems—but it was after the visit to the Carven building that you opened here in Sydney that things took a downward turn for me. Big time!
    No doubt you’ve heard something of the Hammond Zeigler saga since it was on international television! The whole world knows about the ‘schoolgirl prank’ pulled by ‘two psychologically disturbed Sydney students’. It’s so unfair. It was just an ill-timed series of disastrous events.
    I’d like to explain a few things to you from my sideabout how Hammond Zeigler’s name came to be linked with yours. I mean, it was my fault—our fault—but then again, it wasn’t.
    Basically, Zoë and I are in trouble at school because we pretended to have interviewed you when we saw you at the Carven