Bruno had come inside now and jumped onto the table (a bad habit) to sniff the money as it lay there in front of me, then he sat down and licked around his mouth, scraping the last traces of PussyChow onto his tongue. I sat and watched him, contemplating many things, such as:
Had Heather put the money there?
Was this a dream?
How could Joanna with your Stars have hit it so accurately?
Should I count it again?
Should I run naked down the road yelling "Eureka"?
Is there any more in the other mugs?
Was there a rational explanation for all this?
What was I supposed to do now?
Had Heather stolen it?
Had I stolen it?
Bruno was looking at me as if I was mad. He was probably right. He started to play with the money so I shooed him off the table. I picked up a couple of the notes and had a good look at them. Dame Nellie Melba looked back at me in that haughty way of hers and offered no explanations. The notes appeared genuine enough. I looked at the serial numbers and noticed they were consecutive. All the notes were crisp and new and smelled lovely.
I rushed to my bedroom and tossed things around until I found my reading glasses underneath my essay on Thackeray, still with 1,545 words (and three days) to go, then groped my way through the crinkling pages of the newspaper until I found where they had printed their phone number. I grabbed my mobile phone and dialled. There was the usual buzz-buzz, so I waited.
Buzz-buzz.
Buzz-buzz.
Buz-
"Good morning, The Trumpet," said a woman's voice. She sounded brunette, about twenty, white blouse and crumpled dark red skirt, too much make-up. "Can I help you?"
"Can I speak to Joanna please?"
"Who, sorry?"
"You know, Joanna." It occurred to me I was totally ignorant of her surname, mainly because she chose not to publish it. "The astrologer. Joanna with your Stars."
That sounded hopeful.
"Oh. Sorry, she doesn't work here."
That didn't sound hopeful at all.
"Well, how can I contact her?"
"I don't know."
"You don't have her number?"
"We don't give our contributors' numbers out, I'm sorry. Could somebody else help you?"
Probably not – how many astrologers did they have there? But I had to admit, I was not surprised about Joanna's anonymity. If I had made such predictions as she had that morning, I'd be keeping a low profile too. I decided on a different approach.
"What's your star sign?" I asked.
"What?"
"Your star sign. What is it?"
She seemed to think for a while. Difficult question, really.
"Taurus."
I glanced at the paper to see what Joanna had said about our bovine friends. "Have you had a visit from a Russian gymnast today?" I asked.
There was a longer pause. Perhaps I wasn't making myself entirely plain. I could hear her shift uneasily in her chair. No doubt she was wishing someone else was handling my enquiry.
Then, "No" came the tentative reply, as if from a great distance.
"Could you please open your purse?"
"I don't think so."
"Please? This is important." What was she afraid of? I was hardly in a position to steal anything. It was a perfectly ordinary request. If she had $4000.00 in it, the world would not make any more sense, but my insanity would at least feel less lonely.
"No."
The click sounded exactly like a telephone being hung up.
I was tempted for about three seconds to ring her boss and complain about the telephone manners of those persons in his employ, until I realised my call would have to go back through her first.
I grabbed the yellow pages and looked up Astrology/Clairvoyance. There were quite a few listings, to my surprise.
Joanna...Joanna...Joanna...I ran my finger down the column. Ah, Joanna. There she was. At least, there was an ad for: Joanna Clifford, Palmistry, Tarot Reading, Clairvoyance, Horoscopes and a phone number. I was dialling very fast, punching the numbers hard.
Buzz-buzz
"Hello?" A female, sounding a bit peeved.
"Hello," I replied with some trepidation. "Could I speak to Joanna Clifford please?"
"Wrong number, you dickhead."
And there was another unfriendly telephone click, louder this time, like force was being used.
Well, it happens to us all. I didn't even have a chance to ask her what star sign she was. Perhaps she was at that moment preoccupied with a sausage in the vanity basin. Or a Russian gymnast. Or was she a Virgo? If that was the case, I could understand her annoyance at being disturbed.
I dialled again, paying a little more attention to what I was doing.
Buzz-buzz
Buzz-buzz
It went on for some time. No answer.
I hung up. There was also an address in the phone book for Joanna Clifford, Palmistry, etc, so I looked vainly for a piece of paper to write it down on and, finding none, tore the page out of the book.
I went into the bathroom to wash my hands. I do my best thinking in the shower, but since I had just had one, this was the next best alternative. Somehow, my neurons perform better when surrounded by ceramic tiles, when I'm staring at a blank wall. I don't know why. Anyway, there I was, thinking hard, to no avail. No lights illuminated the dark, empty cavern of my skull.
I was slightly worried while doing this, in case another sausage appeared in the basin. It didn't. I went back to the kitchen.
There was a raw pork sausage on the table.
***
I stood outside Joanna Clifford's house, wiping bubble gum off the bottom of my shoe. The house was one of those renovated Queenslander jobs in Hamilton, which is a very posh suburb on the north side of the Brisbane River. In fact, Joanna's house actually had a view of the river, which is always desirable, if rather expensive. The house had wide verandas, the front garden planted with pink and white frangipani, and a driveway leading down one side. I quite liked the look of it.
I scraped the green, sickly gob of bubble gum away with a stick. A boy raced past on a skateboard and laughed. I told him to fuck off, which he did, jumping up and spinning around and landing back down without breaking his neck. Show off. It was probably his bubble gum.
I walked through the wrought-iron gate of the house and up the pathway. My shoe stuck to the path with each step and came away with a jerk, which was exactly how I felt.
There were six steps up to the veranda. I paused at the top and looked for a moment over the well-kept garden. The lawn was closely mown and all the edges trimmed, but the garden still had a natural look about it. I wondered vaguely what star-sign Joanna was. My interest in astrology had grown somewhat that morning.
I pressed the bell beside the door.
There was no ring. Either it was one of those bells that are designed to infuriate callers because they are inaudible from outside, or else it didn't work. As I had no idea which was the case here, I pressed the bell again and held it down. After about ten seconds I lifted my finger. Waiting...
I was buggered if I was going to knock.
While I waited, I tried to gather what other information I could about Joanna from the appearance of the house, like I had with the garden. I play this game with myself all the time: imagine what a person or place is going to be like, then compare it with reality. I invariably find I was totally wrong in every way. It's good for deflating the ego.
A mobile of the planets hung from the veranda roof, which was dusty and needed repainting. Around me, a few potted plants; no flowers; a banana lounger next to a low plastic table; a blue ceramic bowl in the middle. Nothing out of the ordinary at all except for the mobile, but given Joanna's astrological interests, it too was hardly out of the ordinary.
Still nothing on the door-opening front. Perhaps she was out after all, which would go a long way towards explaining why she hadn't answered t
he telephone. See, not just a pretty face. I debated whether or not to try the doorbell again, but elected this time to knock. The screen door was locked and, as the edge of the front door was hardwood and likely to bruise my knuckles, I had no choice but to knock on metal and listen dispiritedly to the pathetic rattle of aluminium.
Surprisingly, this had results. Almost instantly I heard a voice within say "Just a minute", and footsteps.
Encouraging.
So I waited again. I amused myself this time by blowing at the mobile so that the planets jiggled and spun. Then the door opened just as I was giving a really good blow and Joanna Clifford saw me with lips pursed and making a complete fool of myself.
"Yes?" she said.
Joanna Clifford was a hippie chick, like something off the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's album. She'd not only gone to San Francisco with some flowers in her hair, she was posting the photos on Facebook. That said, I had to admit her picture in the paper did her no justice at all. She was actually forty-three years old, I was later to learn, but looked about thirty; tall and slim, with a peaches-and-cream complexion. She wore a blue and purple blouse and a blue skirt that reached to her ankles and looked just exactly right for her, plus the obligatory beads around her neck and sandals on her feet. There were rings on five fingers and a couple on her toes.
I stood there for a moment under the mobile, wondering what the hell I was going to say. Jupiter swung around and hit me on the forehead.
"Can I help you?" asked Joanna.
"My name is Emily Branwell," I said. "I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute."
"I'm a bit busy. What's it about?"
Now what was I supposed to say? Sausages? Large sums of money? "Can I come in?" I asked. "It's about your horoscope in the paper."
"Oh. Fine."
She opened the screen door and stepped back. "Come in," she said. "Mind the rug."
The Rug was a Turkish affair on the hall floor. It was the usual multi-coloured, fifty-million-stitches-to-the-square-inch affair. I wondered what I had to do to mind it. I could not help walking on it. I stepped in Joanna's footsteps as we went along the short hall, walking on my toes to keep the remains of the gum off it.
The Rug ended and polished hardwood boards took over. I liked the house, which was not hippie at all: no burning incense, no posters of Joni Mitchell or Donovan. Joanna directed me to the living room: tongue-in-groove walls, with a scattering of black leather furniture, a big African mask above one chair, and a sound system with an iPod dock. It gave itself away with some soft classical music. There was a television in another corner.
I sat where Joanna invited me to, at one end of the leather sofa. She sat in a leather recliner chair, her hands over the arms, her long, sunlight-coloured hair draped over her shoulders, perfectly straight, framing her thin face, which held a pair of intelligent brown eyes. By comparison, I felt plain and awkward, with my scrappy brown hair, slightly pointy chin and my hands clasped between my knees.
"Right," she said, smiling. "What can I do for you?"
"I read your horoscope column this morning," I began, feeling as confident as Julius Caesar had when he stood in the Capitol and noticed everyone kept one hand under their togas. "It was...remarkably accurate."
"Thank you," she said. "You're a Leo, aren't you?"
Oh, she was good. Or lucky – a one in twelve chance. She probably expected me to ask how she knew, so I refrained from doing so. I remembered I wanted to know what star sign she was, so I asked, before I realised it made me appear even more pig ignorant than I usually am, which is saying something. But I was desperate to put off mentioning the real reason I had come for as long as possible.
"Sagittarius," she said.
I pulled out the horoscope column I had torn from the paper and glanced at it, holding it slightly away because I had forgotten my glasses again.
SAGITTARIUS Beware of a mysterious stranger. Money matters could be rather better than they have been for a while. You will look for Macquarie Island in the atlas.
Nothing much to go on there. Trust her to give her own sign something innocuous, if rather baffling.
I decided to go for broke. If this was all a funny ha-ha hoax on her part, now was not the time to hold back.
"I found a sausage in my vanity basin this morning," I said.
Ever had that feeling halfway through saying something that you should never have opened your mouth in the first place? Like, the person you're speaking to suddenly retreats a million miles away and you're left with your mouth flapping and these idiotic words spewing forth and you feel completely alone and ridiculous, but you can't stop yourself? Yeah? So did I, just then. I wanted to shut up after about sausage but my brain was having trouble getting the message to my mouth. At the end of the sentence I watched Joanna from the wrong end of a telescope, all small and yet perfectly clear, sitting there staring back at me, or rather at a point in the air between us. Electrical impulses shot from my brain down to my legs saying Get me up and out of here, you stupid bastards. But nothing happened.
Joanna looked like her own brain was doing something similar, but of course this was her house, and it would be silly if she ran out of her own door, so she just sat there. Ten thousand years later she said:
"I see. And...?"
It was really clever the way she worked those dots in before the question mark. No kidding, they were there. I could hear them.
"And," I said, "I was wondering how you knew."
This just seemed to make things worse. The first signs of complete stupefaction appeared on Joanna's face: a tiny crinkling of the brow and a drawing together of the extremities of the mouth. Irrelevantly, I felt a burning desire for a cup of coffee and a chocolate biscuit.
"Knew what?" she asked eventually.
"That I was going to find..."
I trailed off. This was pointless. Everything I said sounded totally stupid. I knew that this was normal for a lot of people, but I hardly counted myself among them. Nevertheless, I tried again.
"Your horoscope said Leos would find sausages."
I held the newspaper clipping out to her. My hand trembled slightly. She took the clipping, cast her eyes down it. She smiled. It started out as sort of lopsided grin and grew from there. I felt suddenly better. She finished reading it and looked at me.
"Where did you get this?" she asked.
"This morning's paper," I said. "Your column."
"I didn't write this."
The African mask on the wall suddenly took my attention. He was a big, ugly dude with bones and feathers coming out of his nose and ears. Nasty if you had a cold. I felt a sudden affinity with him: we were both out of place and ridiculous. I glanced back at Joanna. She was sitting there, one hand holding the clipping, her head to one side, a puzzled-to-say-the-least expression on her face. She thought this was a joke. But that's exactly what I thought too, so we were both getting nowhere.
I broke the silence at last with: "You didn't write that?"
"No," she said. "I mean, it looks like my column, but that isn't what I wrote. Where did you get this?"
"Out of the paper this morning."
I wanted to grab the clipping back, but she was still reading it.
"It's certainly...very...interesting."
Those dots again. Her voice, I concluded, was most expressive. The word nuance came to my mind in a single leap of blinding articulation.
The next sentence that came to mind was, of course, If you didn't write this, who did? but I hesitated to say it. If she had known, she would have said so, I suppose.
"I wouldn't write crap like this," she continued. "Give me a minute."
She stood up and left the room. The mask and I stared at each other for a minute. He said nothing. Neither did I. Joanna returned with a newspaper before the silence grew awkward. It was open at her column. She handed it to me. I cursed again that I had forgotten my glasses and read the blur for Leo that she graciously indicated with one immaculately ma
nicured fingernail.
LEO Business affairs are likely to occupy your time this week, but make sure you don't let greed dictate your actions. Be careful with money and you should have few problems. The colours red and purple are lucky.
Of all the non-verbal expressions that people find so useful in everyday communications, the one I uttered after reading this was the ever-popular Hmm. I read Sagittarius, Joanna's sign.
SAGITTARIUS Romance is indicated with Venus in your sign this month. Be careful, though, that you don't rush into anything. Consider carefully what others tell you. Yellow and red are lucky.
"I think," said Joanna graciously, "that someone is playing a joke on you."
I had to admit, it seemed that way. "But how?" I asked. "I mean, who?"
I immediately thought of one person who might do such a thing: Jack. But there had been no time. He had only broken up with me last night. Besides, I was the wounded party, not him. I was the one who should be exacting revenge. I did the only thing possible in the circumstances.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I must have made a mistake."
I started to leave. That is, I had unbent my legs to a 45o angle with my head thrust forward and on its way up, when Joanna spoke again, stopping me.
"Wait on, it's not that simple."
I fell back onto the sofa. It made a soft plplplplpl noise. I hoped this was usual, and not just me. Joanna went on.
"I don't appreciate people making fun of what I do," she said. Her puzzled expression had matured into a frown.
"I'm not making fun of you," I said defensively. "Someone's making fun of me."
"Lots of people believe in astrology, you know."
"I know. I mean, I don't, but obviously some people aren't as…that is, they don't have..."
Joanna's frown deepened. My internal censor shoved a note into my mental suggestion box.
Shut up now, it said.
But I was never one for taking my own advice. "Perhaps if I started at the beginning," I suggested. "Give me ten minutes, then throw me out if you like."
Plato's Cave Page 2
