by Minnie Darke
Brain: Go on…
Justine: No. I’m closing the page now.
Brain: But tomorrow the files will be gone and it will be too late. If you’re going to do it, you’re going to have to do it now.
Without yet having any definite intent—and without having committed to any course of action—Justine selected the copy for Aquarius. 389 characters. Provided her changes didn’t make the entry fall much short of that number, or greatly exceed it, there would be no impact on the page setting.
She could write, Aquarius—Something or someone from the past will be important in your life this month…
No, too obvious. Justine had seen for herself the way Nick read his horoscope: looking between the lines, searching for hidden messages. She needed to remind him of herself, but not too directly. She could mention a spelling competition? No, too specific. And anyway, how would you work something like that into a horoscope?
Then an idea popped into Justine’s head.
Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” she thought, remembering her Little Mermaid karaoke machine. Nick would remember their famous living-room rock concert, surely.
Her fingers flew over the keys. Were we not beseeched by songbird Joni Mitchell, at the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, to leave our apples spotted and our Paradise unpaved? This month, you experience a powerful surge of nostalgia for what once was, which also doubles as an intuition of what yet might be.
Justine smiled. Writing hog-shit was surprisingly good fun. But at 276 characters, the entry was too short. She thought back over Leo’s copy. It was probably wise to include at least something from the original. So she added, In further news, a change of abode may be on the cards, or at the very least a modest makeover chez water bearer.
That bulked it out to 390 characters. Perfect. Justine read over the copy one more time, jiggled the computer mouse and clicked…Save.
“Darl,” came a sudden voice at the door, and Justine jumped slightly.
It was Jeremy, still rather rosy from their lunchtime excesses. Hoping that she did not look like a child caught with her hand deep in the biscuit tin, Justine smiled widely, and closed the page on her computer screen.
“Everything all right?” Jeremy asked. “Anything I can do? Hm?”
“Ah, no. Everything’s fine. I just want my first edition to be, well, perfect,” Justine said.
“Very good, very good to be careful,” Jeremy said, putting on his jacket and fishing out his shirt collar. “But I would caution against perfection as a goal. As the Italians say—he that will have a perfect brother must resign himself to remain brotherless. And, I would quite like, if you are amenable to the idea, to, ah, send the files off now?”
“Oh, Jeremy, I’m so sorry. I was just going over Doc’s crossword one last time.”
“Yes, indeed. Very wise, very wise indeed,” Jeremy said, nodding. “But you’re done?”
“Oh, yes. Absolutely. Completely finished. Good timing, actually.”
“Excellent,” said Jeremy, taking a step backward into the corridor. “Then I shall send our new edition away into the ether. Next to be seen in glorious Technicolor, between covers.”
Had she really just done what she thought she’d just done?
She had.
As Jeremy walked away down the hall, Justine heard him call out, in a rich, singsong voice, “For such is the magic of publishing!”
Cusp
It was over onions, of all things. How to dice bloody onions.
Gary’s way of doing it was to cut each onion lengthways, then put the halves on a board, flat side down, slice each half vertically, then laterally, and…voila!…onion pieces of a fairly uniform size. Although this was obviously, objectively, the best way to dice onions, Nola insisted on chopping onions into fat, uneven rings, piling the rings up and hacking at them randomly. Which resulted, of course, in random-sized pieces.
“Just admit it,” he’d said, in the kitchen, five weeks ago. “My way’s better.”
“There’s nothing wrong with this way,” she’d said, each chop of her knife causing a little tremor in the loose underskin of her upper arm.
“Except that it’s not the best way.”
“They’re only onions,” she’d said.
“Yeah, but the way you do it, it’s so, so…Rokeville,” he’d said.
He’d only been joking, but she stopped chopping. “What did you say?”
“I said, it’s so Rokeville.”
They were both from Rokeville, originally.
The knife was still in her hand, little triangles of onion clinging to its blade.
“Are you saying that I cut onions like a bogan?”
“Hey…”
“You fucking snob,” she’d said, and the blade’s point had entered the timber of the kitchen counter, a millimeter from his index finger.
“Jesus! You could have had my bloody finger off!”
“Get fucked,” she’d said.
Then the fight was on in earnest. Now Gary Direen—Aquarius, public service middle manager and round one MasterChef reject, a fifty-two-year-old man who was not afraid to wear salmon pink shirts but who had long regretted the youthful decision to have a large photorealist image of AC/DC (circa January 1980) tattooed on his left bum cheek—was living alone, with next to no furniture, in a one-bedroom kennel on the twelfth floor of the ugliest apartment block in Alexandria Park. While Nola, his partner of four years, was living further out of the city, in the tidy little duplex they’d bought, together, off the plan.
Like most relationships, Gary and Nola’s had its own Pandora’s box of unspoken gripes and politely suppressed truths. The onion fight blew the lid clean off it. Nola told Gary that half of Australia had nearly puked watching him do his weepy MasterChef backstory segment about growing up with a single mother who didn’t know there was a culinary world beyond fish fingers. It was hardly the stuff of tragedy, she’d said. He’d come off like a whiny little brat. So Gary told Nola that he’d snipped the size tags off the lingerie he’d bought her for Valentine’s Day to save her facing the reality that she was an eighteen in the arse. Which provoked Nola to tell Gary that the only way for her to orgasm during sex with him was by thinking about Liam Hemsworth.
So Gary, seething with righteous pissed-offedness, packed his bags and checked in to a motel. He maintained his rage for as long as it took to inspect a handful of uninspiring rentals, sign the lease on the least dodgy one, buy a cleanish single mattress from a charity shop, and borrow from his sister’s camping crate a plastic plate, bowl and cup, some bent cutlery and an aluminum saucepan.
But by the time the real estate agent gave Gary the keys to his moldy little dog box, his fury was just slightly off the boil. He woke up on his first morning at the apartment, uncomfortable on his second(or more)hand mattress, and cold under a cheap and gutless polyester comforter.
“Onions,” he muttered, shaking his head.
Five weeks later, on a chilly overcast April morning, Gary stood pouring milk over his cereal and thinking about Nola, who would about now be taking tea and toast in the climate-controlled ambience of the breakfast nook back home. She’d be all sleep-creased and warm, and wearing that white cotton robe of hers that she tied in a way that showed off the gentle heave of her magnificent breasts.
No, he told himself. He must not think comforting thoughts about Nola. He was angry, he reminded himself. And he had to remain angry. He had to stay angry until Nola called him and begged him to come home.
The bathroom of his apartment was, bizarrely, carpeted; it smelled of wet nylon and mildew. The shower gave out alternate spurts of scalding and freezing water. But Gary stepped in, grimly, and reminded himself he needed to get around to buying a shower curtain.
By remembering some old fights, Gary managed to keep himself modestly angry until lunchtime. Al
one in the tearoom with a cafeteria-grade curried egg sandwich, Gary checked the messages on his phone. Nothing. He checked his email. Nothing. But at least Nola hadn’t unfriended him on Facebook, or changed her relationship status. And she hadn’t, like many women in her situation would, started sharing inspirational quotes, or taking pictures of ice cream tubs next to DVD box sets of Gilmore Girls. But equally, she hadn’t posted anything that even hinted she was lonely or sad.
Gary took a bite of his sandwich and reached for a copy of the Alexandria Park Star, which somebody had left lying on the table. He glanced at the cover with its close-up of a young dark-skinned guy with a scary-looking scar across his forehead, and skimmed over a tut-tutting opinion piece about the arrogance of the Australian cricket team.
“At least they win,” Gary mumbled, to nobody.
Then, finding nothing else he especially wanted to read, he turned to the horoscopes. It wasn’t as if he was into horoscopes. But at least a horoscope was, in a way, personal. And what Gary Direen wanted and needed, on this day, was a message that felt like it was addressed at least partially to him.
Aquarius, he read. Were we not beseeched by songbird Joni Mitchell, at the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, to leave our apples spotted and our Paradise unpaved? This month, you experience a powerful surge of nostalgia for what once was…
If, inside Gary Direen, there was an hourglass that had been filled with anger, then this was the moment that the very last acid yellow grain of it ricocheted down through the bottleneck and landed on the “spent” pile. Now all he could feel was regret, embarrassment and an urgent desire to have everything back the way it was. Deep in the sound library of his memory, he could hear Joni Mitchell singing the chorus of “Big Yellow Taxi.” It did indeed seem that Gary Direen hadn’t known what he’d got, until he’d thrown it away.
Nola loved Joni Mitchell. Gary loved Nola. He really did. He loved her.
“What the hell have I done?” he whispered.
Two seconds later, the tearoom was empty of humanity, and half a curried egg sandwich lay abandoned on the table.
Margie McGee—Aquarius, writer of haiku, bird-watcher and wildlife warrior, regular blood donor (AB negative) and long-serving Greens political adviser—had over recent months been experiencing a curious phenomenon. It was as if the main content of her mind had shifted just a little way over to the right, and a new, narrow panel had sprung up down the left. There was nothing on this new panel but churning columns of numbers. There were projections, multiplications, calculations for compound interest, best- and worst-case scenarios, all of them depending on stock market movements, interest rates and the CPI. But try as she might, Margie could find no little cross to click in order to close the panel. There was no way, it seemed, to banish her preoccupation with these complex formulae for when she would be able to retire. In five years? Ten? Fifteen?
On a squally Friday morning in late April, Margie was driving Senator Dave Gregson—the sartorially notable champion of renewable energy—back to his city office after a press stunt about global warming. It had been Dave’s idea to hold the event at a wind farm in the outer, outer suburbs; he had wanted to stand before a backdrop of frantically spinning turbines and wind-whipped wattles. And this might have been a stroke of illustrative genius, with the visuals reinforcing his near-biblical warnings about the likelihood of future catastrophic weather events.
But in the end, there had been no visuals at all, because every single one of the television networks had stayed away, deciding that a predictable spiel by a minor party senator was hardly worth the drive out of town, and the sole journalist who had turned up—a girl from the local give-away paper—had come without a photographer.
Margie tapped the steering wheel with bitten-down fingernails. Dave, meanwhile, sat in the back, using a stack of unread estimates committee papers as a resting pad for a copy of the Alexandria Park Star.
In the rearview mirror, she could see that Dave had done his best to smooth down his wind-buffeted hair, and that he’d loosened his tie—the one they had settled on after a forty-five-minute debate. Hot pink, they’d decided in the end, as a gesture of support for families affected by breast cancer. Not that any such families would ever see or interpret the silk-coded message, Margie thought, with a twinge of frustration.
Flicking through the FM stations on the stereo, she wondered if all of them were playing the same song.
“What star sign are you, Marg?” Dave asked.
She had to think for a minute before answering, “Aquarius.”
Dave gave a mild snort of laughter.
“What?”
“It figures.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You know. That kinda Woodstock vibe of yours,” Dave said. “Do you want to hear your stars?”
“Go on, then,” Margie said.
Dave began to read: “Were we not beseeched by songbird Joni Mitchell, at the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, to leave our apples spotted and our Paradise unpaved?”
When he’d finished reading the horoscope, he burst, falteringly, into song. As he reached the last line of the chorus of “Big Yellow Taxi,” Margie joined in. Together, they filled the car with the final, dropping note.
There followed a small silence. Margie’s eyes flicked from the road, to Dave’s pink tie, to the narrow, left-hand number panel in her mind. It was going crazy; inside their racing columns, numbers were appearing, disappearing, reversing, imploding. She gave her head a little shake, wishing it would stop, and tried her best to ignore it.
“ ‘Big Yellow Taxi.’ Now there was a song,” Margie said, by way of distraction.
As Dave sang a little more, Margie remembered Joni’s chords being plucked on an acoustic guitar at someone’s backyard barbecue, back in the bell-bottomed days of her youth. Oh Joni, Joni.
Catching sight of her deeply lined face in the rearview mirror, Margie’s mind flashed up an image of a much younger self, with dirt on her cheeks and hair like a messy angel’s. Her wrists were chained to the front grille of a dozer, her legs in the mud. Yes, that had been her. Almost as fair and fey as Joni herself.
So how, exactly, had pure-hearted forest protester Margie McGee become a woman who read stock market reports to help her make important decisions about her life? When, exactly, had her job turned into advising greenies on which tie to wear to their press conferences? And when, for that matter, had greenies become the kind of people who wore ties? It was time to get out. Time to get out of the office and chain herself to a dozer again. Camp up a tree. Get real. And if her retirement savings didn’t hold out, she’d go on the pension. And if that meant eating dog food, well, she’d eat dog food until she couldn’t take it anymore and then look up a recipe for a pill to end it all. She looked into her mind just in time to see the left-hand panel minimizing itself into nonexistence. She had decided.
“Dave?”
“Yes, Marg.”
“I quit.”
“You what?”
She grinned at him via the rearview mirror. “I quit! I completely and utterly quit.”
Not next year. Not in five years or ten years. Now. Right now.
Dave, in the mirror, looked utterly startled.
As Margie sang the boppy little refrain of “Big Yellow Taxi,” she felt younger than she had done in years.
* * *
Nick Jordan, perched on a stool in the front window of Rafaello’s, tried unsuccessfully to eke another sip from the cappuccino he’d finished about a quarter of an hour earlier. Out on the street, Saturday afternoon passersby huddled themselves deeper into their coats, or struggled along behind umbrellas that seemed to have their own ideas about which way to go.
In front of Nick were several newspapers—all of them open to the To Let pages—and also a copy of the Alexandria Park Star. The magazine was looking dog-eared
and water-rumpled, because for over a week Nick had been carrying it around with him, trying to understand. But he didn’t get it, no matter how many times he read and reread Leo’s words.
Aquarius. Were we not beseeched by songbird Joni Mitchell, at the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, to leave our apples spotted and our Paradise unpaved? This month, you experience a powerful surge of nostalgia for what once was, which also doubles as an intuition of what yet might be. In further news, a change of abode may be on the cards, or at the very least a modest makeover chez water bearer.
At least the last sentence was clear. In just over a week Nick’s housesitting gig would come to an end and he would be homeless. So, yes, a change of abode was on the cards. But, as for the rest of the horoscope? It didn’t make sense. He stared into Leo’s deep-set eyes. Really? he asked, silently. You really want me to go back there?
It was true that Nick’s Laura-less days had often been lonely and despondent. But he’d also enjoyed not having to worry about keeping up Vogue styling standards. He’d fished out a pair of tracksuit pants that he’d almost forgotten he owned, and eaten a scandalous amount of food that registered at the wrong end of the glycemic index.
Nick stared at Leo. But now you want me to go back? To Laura?
Was it nuts to make a decision like this based on the stars? Justine would certainly have said so. Justine, he thought. What was going on with her? Having not seen her even once for over a decade, he’d now seen her twice in a month. It wasn’t possible, was it, that Leo’s powerful surge of nostalgia referred to Justine, and not to Laura?
No, it wasn’t, Nick realized. Because Leo had also chosen to hammer this sentiment home via the words of Joni Mitchell. It really did seem that Leo was telling him, even after everything he’d been through, to call Laura Mitchell and give it another chance.
Nick dropped his head to the cafe counter and banged his brow to the timber three times. Quite hard. On the third bang, he left his forehead touching the magazine. A woman sitting further along the bar looked at him with a mixture of concern and alarm.
