Star-Crossed

by Minnie Darke

  What was he doing? he asked himself, and was embarrassed to have to acknowledge that he was sitting in a lonely laundromat and composing a text, at midnight, to a girl who hadn’t asked for his phone number, and who most likely had a perfectly nice life without him in it. And so, to the soundtrack of the washing machine’s rhythmic swish, swish, swish, Nick put his phone back into his pocket.

  Aries

  MARCH 21–APRIL 19

  Late summer drifted into autumn. Things ended, and things began. But in the life of Justine Carmichael, things went on pretty much the same as before. In the mornings, she woke and went to work at the Star, and in the evenings, she came home and went to sleep. But no matter how often she looked at her phone and willed it to ring, Nick Jordan did not call.

  Home, for Justine, was an apartment on the twelfth and uppermost floor of Evelyn Towers, an Alexandria Park apartment block with classic, wedding-cake curves and mint green trimmings, original leadlight windows and a lobby with a parquetry floor. That Justine could afford to live in such a sought-after address was almost entirely thanks to her paternal grandmother. Fleur Carmichael, knowing that the family’s Eden Valley farm would pass to her eldest son, had endeavored to ensure that her two younger children would also inherit something of value after her death. In the case of Justine’s father, Drew, the something had been an elegant, city-edge investment property.

  Drew and Mandy let Justine have the apartment for little more than a peppercorn rent, although the downside to this arrangement came in the form of fairly frequent, and fairly frequently unannounced, visits from family members who were in the city for the theater, Aussie Rules football, the tennis, a decent restaurant or dentist. It was usually irritating to be suddenly infested with relatives, but on this particular Wednesday evening, Justine would actually have been quite grateful for some company.

  She tugged the curtains closed across a pair of French doors that opened out onto a semicircular balcony, and tried not to look at the view. Once, the windows and balconies on three sides of Evelyn Towers had overlooked the nearby park. But in the 1970s, a brown-brick apartment block had been inserted into the narrow space between Evelyn Towers and its neighboring twin. Justine’s view was therefore taken up by the ugly facade of the next-door block, and her balcony was only a few meters away from the rusted railing of her neighbor’s tiny porch. She had a clear view into the living room beyond that porch, and, more disturbingly, through the bathroom window as well. The current occupant of the flat was a middle-aged man with a massive AC/DC tattoo on one buttock, and no shower curtain.

  Justine dumped her bag on the kitchen counter and fished out her phone. There were no missed calls, nobody demanding her attention, and no messages that might have provided a distraction from the nothing that she really needed to do.

  It had been two months since best-pal Tara had traded in a city-based current affairs radio job to become the only full-time reporter at one of the ABC’s more distant rural outposts. In those months, Justine had begun to discover just how much of her social life was generated by the engine of Tara’s boundless, extrovert energy. Without Tara to turn up at the Star at the end of a working day and drag her off to the pub, or to arrive unannounced at Evelyn Towers on her way to a party that Justine simply had to come along to, Justine was prone to working longer hours and spending her downtime with the friends she found inside the covers of books and DVD box sets.

  Justine and Tara had been friends since their first year at university. That they were both journalism majors was one of the very few things they had in common. While Justine actually liked to study, Tara put the majority of her energy into volunteering for the campus radio station and making sure she never missed an event that involved free beer. This didn’t prevent her, however, from acing every subject.

  In those university years, Tara—raised in the inner suburbs—had been Justine’s guide to the big city, while Justine had been Tara’s ticket to experiencing the kind of country life that had featured in her childhood fantasies. Some weekends they stayed in town and on others they drove out to Edenvale, where Tara spent as much time as she could on Justine’s uncle’s farm, learning to drive all the machinery and trying to get her Blundstone boots authentically trashed.

  Unlike Justine, who’d steadfastly held on to an increasingly old-fashioned desire to work in print, Tara had been keen on digital media from the start. In recent years, she’d been offered plum television current affairs jobs in several of the nation’s capital cities, and also in an impressive range of overseas bureaus, but she’d turned them all down in favor of this multiplatform reporting position in the country. Now, every time Justine heard her friend on the television or radio, she was talking about fracking or live cattle exports, regional internet speeds or the never-ending drought.

  Justine dialed Tara’s number, and the phone rang, and rang. Probably, thought Justine, it had been abandoned on the dusty seat of a ute while Tara was interviewing a farmer. Or it might have been left lying on the bar at the local pub while she took her shot at pool.

  If you really can’t text, said Tara’s recorded voice at last, leave a message.

  The tone wasn’t exasperated, just blunt. And that was Tara all over. In all the years she and Justine had known each other, Justine had never had to wonder for a minute what Tara was really thinking.

  Resigning herself to an evening of solitude, Justine did the breakfast dishes, hung out a load of washing and scraped the bottom of the Vegemite jar in order to make dinner. Then she took a bath and went to bed early with the handsome Arden edition of Romeo and Juliet, which had in recent days taken up residence on her bedside table. She flicked the book open to the marked page and began to read.

  Juliet was whining.

  The clock struck nine when I did send the nurse, Justine read. In half an hour, she promised to return. Perchance she cannot meet him. That’s not so. Oh, she is lame! Love’s heralds should be thoughts, which ten times faster glide than the sun’s beams.

  It must indeed have sucked, Justine thought, having to rely on a servant to come back with a message from your beloved. What Juliet would have given for a smartphone!

  Justine glanced at her phone, propped against the stack of books on the bedside table. For all the good it did. What was the use of owning a device that could herald love faster than a sunbeam if nobody bothered to avail themselves of the technology?

  Brain: It’s been ten days.

  As if she didn’t already know.

  Justine tried to refocus on the words on the page in front of her, Shakespeare’s words. Is thy news good, or bad? Answer to that; Say either, and I’ll stay the circumstance: Let me be satisfied, is’t good or bad?

  Brain: Remind me again why we came home without his phone number?

  Justine: Because, as you well know, I’m impulsive. By now, I definitely would have called him.

  Brain: And?

  Justine: Then I would never have known what I know now. That he had no intention of calling me.

  * * *

  “Darl,” said Jeremy Byrne, the following morning.

  It was very early and Justine was dressed for speed in three-quarter black pants and a shirt printed with leaping hares. She had barely set foot in the hallway of the Star offices, when the editor’s sudden materialization at his office doorway startled her—as did the tenor of his voice, which was unusually low and somewhat conspiratorial.

  “Got a mo?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said, and as she followed Jeremy into his den of papery clutter, she did a quick poke around in her conscience to see if there was anything troubling her there. Oversights? Conflicts? Misdemeanors? Nope. Nothing. So, what did he want to discuss with her?

  “Darl,” Jeremy said, sitting heavily in his chair on the far side of his desk, then leaning forward to rest his chin on steepled fingers. “It has been a joy and a privilege having you
as our copy-girl. And although I had hoped to have better news for you today, it seems…”

  Justine’s heart was hit by a bolt of adrenaline. What? Was this bad news? She started to speak, but Jeremy sailed blithely onward.

  “…that the changes I have in mind are not entirely, shall we say, perfect? Should you be amenable to the idea, we could—as I say, if you were amenable to the idea—call you our contributions manager, which of course is not quite the position that we have in mind for you. Eventually. In the long run. But still, let us consider this another step closer, and in fact, let us hope that in the fullness of time, in due course, an opening will become…”

  Jeremy’s delivery was speeding up and down, so that some words, like “contributions manager,” were lost on Justine’s ears, while others, like “in the fullness of time,” came out so slowly that they seemed unduly important.

  “I’m sorry,” Justine interrupted. “I’m not following.”

  “Oh,” Jeremy said, and paused for a moment to find a different angle. “Ah, well. Natsue is leaving us. Going to Europe to live with her, ah, family. And I am wondering if perhaps you would wish to replace her in the role of contributions manager. Of course, it’s not quite the usual route to a reporter’s job, and you could, if you wished, forgo this step and continue to wait for a genuine opening in the newsroom. Believe me, nothing would bring me greater happiness than to be offering you a cub reporter position today. Our goal after all is to have you writing for the Star, but the role of contributions manager would offer certain opportunities to make your mark on the publication. Selecting the Letters to the Editor. Proofreading my editorial, hey? Chopping Dermot’s column to size. And speaking to our rather rambunctious gourmand on the phone afterward. Hm. Well. You can learn from Natsue, there. The, um, best way to proceed.”

  Justine tried to keep herself steady as two distinctly different feelings began to unfurl in her chest.

  “Natsue’s leaving?” she said, with a sad frown.

  He’s offering me a chance to step up, she thought, with an internal squeal of joy.

  “Indeed, indeed. Natsue has been our oasis of calm, and we will miss her very much. And she will leave us very soon. Friday next, in fact. She was willing to stay on longer, but I suggested to her that if her heart is in fact in Sweden, then so too must she be. So, what do you think, hm?”

  “I’m ready…very ready…for a new challenge,” Justine said.

  “Excellent, excellent. Thought as much,” Jeremy said, beaming.

  “I’d still be next in line for reporter?”

  “Indubitably,” Jeremy said.

  “Then, yes!” Justine said. “Yes, please!”

  “Good, good, very good,” said Jeremy, sinking back into his chair, and Justine tried—not entirely successfully—to keep her celebratory dance moves on the inside.

  Jeremy continued, “Well then, it seems I will spend the rest of my day in search of your replacement. And let us hope that I am able to locate someone almost as marvelous as you have been. It can be a trial, I know, all the fetching and carrying. Did I ever tell you about the time when I was a copy-boy at the New York Times and…”

  But Justine could not even have claimed to have been half listening. She was one-eighth listening, at best. What was it that Nick had read to her from Leo’s column? Late March is auspicious for career advancement. Justine remembered that Leo had also written, workplace change will continue to be a theme throughout the coming months. Perhaps her long-awaited reporter’s job wasn’t so very far away after all. Perhaps she would soon be writing for the Star. She imagined her first byline, her first cover story, her first Walkley Award–winning…whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute, she counseled herself. She had just been promoted to contributions manager of the Alexandria Park Star. In her new role, she would be professional, capable and logical. It wasn’t as if, for heaven’s sake, she was about to start believing in the stars.

  * * *

  By Friday afternoon of the following week, Justine had three-quarters-filled a notebook with facts about her new job. Even so, Natsue was still meting out small but important details.

  “Don’t forget Dermot expects to receive five copies of each new edition,” Natsue said. “This is because he likes to have his column on display in all of his venues: at Cornucopia, at the cafe at the cheese factory and at the demonstration kitchen.”

  The whole time she spoke, her hands were moving efficiently over a keyboard as she transcribed a hard-copy letter that was pegged to a document holder beside her screen.

  “That doesn’t add up,” Justine said, with a frown.

  “The fourth copy,” said Natsue, without ceasing the allegro music of her typing, “is for Dermot’s own private records, and the fifth must go—this is important, Justine, unless you wish to receive several anxious phone calls—to Dermot’s mother in the Holy Rosary nursing home in Leederwood.”

  Justine could hardly believe that this skylit cube of an office was to be hers. On Monday. She loved its compact tidiness, and the way Natsue had arranged the objects on the desk. They were quite usual things—just a computer, in-box, document holder, document spike, a slimline fax machine, a jar of sharpened pencils, a potted fern—but Natsue had created a composition that was somehow pleasing and relaxing.

  “Do you know what caused the greatest number of complaints ever in the history of the Star?” Natsue asked.

  Justine did not.

  “It was a problem with the cryptic crossword puzzle. The clues were inadvertently matched to the wrong grid,” Natsue said. “Chaos!”

  The second most grievous episode in the magazine’s history was when the “Down” and “Across” clues were accidentally transposed. And, Natsue said, although these events were now more than a decade in the past, for Doc Millar, the cryptic crossword setter, the pain was both fresh and enduring.

  “So, be sure to email the final layout of the crossword for Doc’s approval,” Natsue said. “And don’t be surprised if he drops in to the office to check the setting in person, just to be on the safe side. He takes his coffee strong and black, with three sugars.”

  Justine continued to make notes as Natsue talked her through the peccadillos of the Star’s finance writer and the paranoia of its agony aunt.

  “Only two contributors,” Natsue continued, “are yet to participate in the email revolution.”

  They were, she went on, Lesley-Ann Stone, the gardening writer, and Leo Thornbury, the astrologer. Lesley-Ann was an anti-fluoridation campaigner and breeder of vintage daffodils whose monthly contribution came thriftily composed in blunt pencil on the backs of used envelopes and the insides of torn-open seed packets, often with a free sprinkling of certified organic earth.

  “In the case of Lesley-Ann, and Leo, our task is essentially one of data entry,” Natsue told Justine. “Neither invites further correspondence, and each prefers not to accept contributor copies. Lesley-Ann because she thinks publishing is a waste of the earth’s resources, and Leo because he is not interested in earthly affairs. He owns no telephone, apparently. But he does, at least, have a fax machine.”

  From her in-box, Natsue plucked out a fax and handed it to Justine, who immediately saw that it was a neat and closely spaced page of text that appeared originally to have been typed on an old-fashioned typewriter.

  “This is how Leo’s stars come to us?” Justine asked, incredulous. “By fax?”

  Natsue nodded. “Usually overnight.”

  Justine handed back the fax and Natsue clipped it to her document holder. As she began to transcribe it at a fearsome speed, there came the sound of a champagne cork popping in the hallway, followed by some general shouts of delight. Jeremy came to Natsue’s doorway, unleashing a stream of bubbly into a glass.

  “Kobayashi-san,” he said, with a bow. “You are hereby summoned to the tearoom for libations. This instant!”
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  Natsue glanced up at her computer clock, which read 4:05 p.m.

  “But, Jeremy, the stars…” Natsue said. “Five minutes more, please.”

  “Absolutely not,” Jeremy said, holding out the champagne flute invitingly.

  “I’ll do the stars, Natsue,” Justine offered. “It’s no problem. You go.”

  Justine saw the tension in Natsue, pulled between demands.

  “Really, go on,” Justine urged. “It’ll be good for me, you know, to get the hang of it.”

  “If you’re absolutely sure?” Natsue said.

  “Quite sure.”

  With that, Natsue got up from her office chair for what would be the very last time. Justine waited a moment, then slid happily into her new place behind the desk.

  Aries, she read. According to Leo, Arians were going to be affected by Lilith in their relationship sector. Though, what the hell was Lilith? Apparently—thanks to Venus going direct on the fifteenth, whatever that meant—Taureans would experience a surge in romantic possibilities. Justine made a mental note to tell this to Tara, who was a proud Taurean. Although it was probably old news, since Tara seemed to live in a perpetual surge of romantic possibility.

  Geminis, said Leo, were breaking free of the influence of a series of troublesome eclipses, and experiencing a sense of fresh air and liberation. It was, Justine thought wryly, exactly the sort of one-size-fits-all nonsense that her mother, the Gemini, would get a shiver of pleasure from reading. Fresh air and liberation, Mandy Carmichael would read, before spending a day or two noticing how good—how free!—she felt when she breathed deeply.

  And here was the entry for Sagittarius: Beset by restless thoughts, Sagittarians may be feeling the urge for change, but with Venus in retrograde for most of the coming month, now is not a good time to make changes to your appearance. Delay until May any temptation to alter the color of your hair or overhaul your wardrobe. Intuitive archers may sense the impact of stellar activity now taking place in their twelfth house of secrets and desires.