Star-Crossed

by Minnie Darke

  The machine whirred, readying itself for action, and then its printer head took off, zooming left to right, right to left, across a page. With each pass, it left a swipe of half words in its wake.

  Pixel by pixel, predictions and advice were spelled out for each of the signs of the zodiac in turn. Reaching the eleventh sign, the fax machine inscribed the following: Aquarius: “Contradiction,” advised Pascal, “is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.” In short, Aquarius, there is nothing for it this month but for you to sit with the prevailing push-and-pull influences of Mars and Neptune. While Mars orders boldness and aggression, Neptune advises caution and reserve. It would be wise to attain clarity before making any major decisions.

  Seconds later, the communiqué was complete, and a single page shot out of the machine and floated down to rest in the out-tray, where Justine—on Monday morning—would find it awaiting her attention.

  Cusp

  In a dimly lit airplane cabin high above the equatorial zone, the little girl’s forehead was hot under the cool palm of Zadie O’Hare.

  “Mummy?” the little girl asked, but now was no time to be correcting her.

  Instead, Zadie—Aquarius, art school dropout turned Qantas flight attendant, collector and proficient wearer of vertiginous high-heeled shoes, bottle-black younger sister to strawberry-blonde pharmacy graduate Larissa O’Hare—swung swiftly, but almost silently, into action.

  With her right hand, she performed a decisive act of reverse origami on a sick bag and whipped it into position beneath the chin of this little girl, whose mother had declared, not two minutes earlier, that she was not about to hurl. Then, with her left hand, Zadie caught up the child’s sleep-mussed hair into a rough ponytail. It was diamond-cut timing. The puke pouring into the bag was frothy and brown, like a chunky Coca-Cola, and it was in no short supply. Zadie could feel the warmth of it through the paper against her palm.

  The little girl’s mother, jerked out of the deluded optimism that had come to her via several mini-bottles of cabernet merlot, was suddenly in action, all zippered pockets and wet wipes, sympathy and remorse. Zadie straightened up and brushed a tiny globule of spew off the skirt of her uniform. She folded the lip of the white bag, tidy as an envelope.

  “You’re amazing,” the mother had the good grace to say. “How did you know?”

  Zadie, composed and competent, flashed the woman an entirely professional wink. “Let’s just say, it’s not my first rodeo,” she said, then strode off down the aisle in her solid navy pumps, as if traversing the marble concourse of a gleaming airport, albeit with a soggy sick bag held between manicured fingertips.

  She had almost reached the curtain that cordoned off the rear galley when she realized she was in trouble. She pushed her way through the folding doors of a bathroom cubicle and hurriedly shot home the bolt that intensified the light into a vicious platinum. Vomit pulsed up her own throat and splashed into the toilet bowl: livid orange, like the unholy love child of an airplane curry and a rogue carrot.

  The carrot in this image, Zadie recognized with a wry grimace, was a lanky New Zealander called Stuart. Stuart who? Stuart what? Zadie didn’t know. Back at the beginning of April—had it actually been April Fool’s Day?—she’d found herself sitting beside him on a high stool in the air-conditioned cool of a Singapore bar. She’d gone there with her colleague Leni-Jane, who’d been characteristically efficient in going upstairs with a lonesome German businessman with a capacious suite. Zadie, left alone so early in the evening, had known herself to be mildly drunk, dangerously bored and quite pretty in a killer pair of Fluevogs and a pale blue halter-neck dress. And so it wasn’t hard for this Stuart, gin by gin, anecdote by anecdote, to gradually insinuate a denim-clad knee between Zadie’s thighs.

  Here, again, it wasn’t her first rodeo, and Zadie recognized in Stuart’s oversized brown eyes, thinning sun-crisped hair and finely wrinkled skin the anxiety of a boy, good-looking from birth, who’d relatively recently cottoned on to the fact that he wasn’t Peter Pan after all.

  Zadie woke in her hotel bed the following dawn with her usually smooth jet-black hair tangled into a classic Medusa, and with her parched tongue all swollen and useless in her mouth. It took a few seconds for her saliva glands to kick in, and also for her mind to register the salient facts: where she was, why she felt raw between the legs, how many different and unusual positions they’d tried, and that she was the only person in the bed, or indeed in the room. Perhaps he was in the bathroom? She swung herself out of bed and peeped around the door. But no. Stuart was gone.

  Zadie cracked open a bottle of water from the bar fridge and downed most of it in one slug. She was relieved, she decided. Yes, relieved. As she cast her eyes about, she realized that in the whole beige-on-beige hotel room, the only visible sign of her tryst with Stuart—other than the rumpled bedsheets—was the condom that was lying like a worm casing on the plush carpet. And now that she looked at it, she could quite clearly see that it was split down the side. Shit.

  Zadie pressed Flush, and the violent, sucking rush of the airplane toilet’s evacuation made her clutch an instinctive hand to her stomach. In her nightmares, this was how it was going to sound, on Thursday at noon, when she presented herself for the procedure. That was what the woman on the phone had called it. They were good at euphemisms, down there at the “fertility control clinic.”

  In what was surely the world’s least forgiving mirror, Zadie checked herself out. Her hair was okay, but her skin was shitty, with determined pustules pushing up through the foundation she’d slathered on her forehead and chin. And there was no hiding the way the bodice of her dress was straining over her swollen, tender breasts. Last week, she’d had to cancel lunch with Larissa, because if anyone was going to be alert to sudden and alarming changes to your physiology, it would be your highly observant and academically brilliant sister. The one who would never find herself standing in an airplane bathroom, inconveniently pregnant at the age of twenty-three, trying to weigh up which of two whacking great big evils was supposed to be the lesser.

  This would never have happened to Larissa, because Larissa would have been on the pill. Because as well as being on the pill, Larissa would have been carrying a supply of superstrength, steel-reinforced, antimicrobial condoms in her purse. For their whole lives, Larissa had been careful, and Zadie had been curious. But this, their mother Patricia was fond of saying, was only right. Larissa, after all, was a Capricorn, which accounted for her calculating and sure-footed cleverness, while Zadie was an Aquarian, destined for travel and adventure, exploration and experimentation.

  But where was this haphazard Aquarian quest of hers leading her now? With her peripatetic job, she couldn’t even have a bloody cat, let alone a baby. She had nothing to fall back on: the only items of any value that she owned were a Kia hatchback, thirty-six pairs of beloved high heels and a first-generation iPad. A single mother, unemployed and without prospects, stuck in the arse end of a cul-de-sac in the far reaches of Nowheresville: that’s who she’d be if she chose to have the baby. But the only other option available to her was the fertility control clinic at noon on Thursday. And that, as a destination, felt at least equally terminal.

  Zadie’s thoughts were broken open by urgent tapping on the cubicle door. Fucking passengers. Couldn’t they read? Occupied, she wanted to yell. Ock-you-pied.

  “You ’right, doll?” It was Leni-Jane. Who must have seen Zadie’s dash into the bathroom. Who didn’t miss a trick. Who, while sweet and hilarious and fun to party with, was potentially the least discreet human alive. Shit.

  “Yes, hon. Out in a minute,” Zadie said.

  Zadie made an effort to pull herself together and straighten up the bathroom. The little girl’s sick bag was still sitting soggily beside the basin. With great care, Zadie wedged it down into the bathroom trash, then washed her hands with way too much soap. To mask the
smell of spew, she sprayed her face with something labeled “freshening mist.” When at last she stepped out of the cubicle, it was within a personal cloud of chemically rendered lavender.

  Leni-Jane was waiting for her in the galley, leaning against the storage units with eyebrows raised. Short and plump, with bird-bright eyes and an accent that could have been nicked from Cilla Black, she studied Zadie carefully.

  “You sure you’re ’right? Look like death warmed up, you do. Come on in ’ere and sit yourself down.”

  Zadie allowed Leni-Jane to settle her into a fold-down seat and cover her with a blanket. She gratefully accepted a plastic cup of soda water and a peppermint. She was tired, so tired. Tired in a way she’d never felt in her entire life. It was as if her soul had suddenly turned to lead, or her own personal gravity had quadrupled. She imagined herself falling, like a medicine ball, through the fold-down seat, through the floor of the plane, to earth. Making a crater in it.

  “Now, what’s going on, then?” asked Leni-Jane, her head on one side. With her shoes shucked off and arms crossed, she seemed especially short and wide, like a mother hen on high alert.

  “I’m fine, thanks, hon. Truly. It’s just that when that little girl chucked, it completely turned my stomach,” Zadie said, with a stretched smile. “I’ll be ’right.”

  “Ri-i-i-ght,” echoed Leni-Jane, with a suspicious furrowing of the eyebrows. “Hmmmm. You just tuck yourself in there for a harf hour, and we’ll see if you’re feeling better then.”

  Leni-Jane crammed her small, wide feet into her shoes and shook back her shag of fair hair. Before setting off into the low light of the cabin, she dropped a magazine onto Zadie’s lap.

  “Here. It’ll take yer mind off things,” she advised, with a piercing look that was a little too knowing for Zadie’s liking.

  What happened next Zadie would later remember with absolute clarity. She would remember the weighty feel of the high-quality stock on which the magazine was printed, and the bright red caricatured nose of the cartoon prime minister on the cover. Zadie would also remember other random things: the color of the red dirt in a Jeep advertisement, the weird retro font used for the headline DIVORCE IS THE NEW BLACK, the black-and-white picture of the magazine’s craggy-faced astrologer.

  Astrology was not, particularly, Zadie’s thing. It was more her mother’s thing. Patricia O’Hare did not follow astrology in a mystical way, but rather in a practical, straightforward fashion. Her sign was a fact, like the color of her hair, eyes and skin, and she believed that her Virgo-ness neatly explained everything from how she folded fitted sheets (she did it just like Martha Stewart on that YouTube clip) to the well-equipped first aid kit she carried in her handbag.

  Right now, what Zadie would have liked most in the world was for her mother to be here beside her, handing over a steaming facecloth and giving her a stern, loving talking to. But in the absence of Patricia O’Hare, Zadie had to settle for Leo Thornbury and one pithy paragraph of star-divined advice.

  Aquarius: This month is auspicious for Aquarians at the beginning of new creative endeavors. This sense of rightness and flow extends into all spheres of your life, triggering seemingly coincidental meetings and events. But, for Einstein, coincidence was merely God’s way of remaining anonymous. When the universe sends you a message in the language of chance, it is wiser to open the door than to close it.

  Zadie, reading these words, felt her head begin to spin. Mummy? that little girl had said, like it was a question. And then there was the mail-order mix-up that meant she’d received a box containing half a dozen bamboo cotton baby suits instead of the push-up bras that she’d ordered. This had happened on the same day that she’d received in the mail a prospectus from her old school, with a covering letter outlining the process for putting your baby on their waiting list. But all these were just coincidences, surely? They didn’t mean anything. Did they?

  Zadie closed her eyes to steady herself, and it was as if she had somehow rotated her eyeballs inward, to look upon a whole new world. She appeared to be hollow, like a massive geode with distant walls of glittering crystal. But this interior of hers was vast, truly vast, as if she might in fact hold the entire universe within the shimmering walls of her private cavern.

  The universe sends you a message…The words drifted through Zadie’s internal cosmos as if skywritten in stardust. Shimmering, kaleidoscopic, they formed and re-formed themselves, diminished and then magnified. The universe sends you a message. And that was when Zadie felt it, deep in the pit of her stomach. It wasn’t only that she imagined feeling it, but that she actually felt it: an explosion of potential, a detonating firework of existence, a personal Big Bang. And it was in that moment, and no other—she would later think—that her child’s life truly began.

  * * *

  Charlotte Juniper—Leo, graduate in law and political science, former student union dictator (largely benevolent), proud owner of a crowning glory of waist-length auburn hair, childhood gymnast, occasional wearer of no underpants to nightclubs—stood naked in a nighttime kitchen that was not her own. She opened the cupboard in which she would have stored the drinking glasses had this been her vintage 1950s-decorated loft apartment. But she found only a dismembered food processor. She tried another cupboard but it turned out to be full of tea and coffee supplies. Then another. Booze.

  “Ugh,” she said with a shudder.

  Charlotte had been woken at around 1:30 a.m. by a throbbing in her temples that was the harbinger of a hangover, and by the crush of the future inside her head. Her skin oozed with the aniseed tang of sambuca and her drying sweat gave off the salted scent of celebratory sex. Today Charlotte had been offered, and had accepted, a job. A real job, a grown-up’s job. A job that was rare and wonderful and hers.

  Everyone else she knew who’d entered the job market with a degree in politics or law had soon discovered that they had to be the bad guy if they wanted to make money. The jobs with ideals came with commensurate pay cuts. And yet, an opening had presented itself, due to the early retirement of Margie McGee. Very unexpectedly, the dedicated Margie had quit her job with the Greens to go back to frontline environmental activism. She was planning an epic tree-sit in Tasmania, so Charlotte had heard. Whatever. Thanks to Margie’s surprise change of heart, Charlotte now had one of those rare jobs in which she would be handsomely paid to be the good guy. She would have enough money to buy some grown-up clothes, and maybe even drink wine out of bottles.

  Charlotte Juniper, adviser to the Greens. Specifically, to Senator Dave Gregson. Dave Gregson, the rockabilly sideburn–sporting activist-turned-politician. Dave Gregson, a former musician and current partner of country and western singer Blessed Jones, who was right at this moment in New Zealand touring her new album. Dave Gregson: upstairs in his bedroom sleeping off the sambuca and the sex. Dave Gregson, who—unbeknownst to Charlotte—had left his phone on silent in his jacket pocket, where it had for several hours now been steadily collecting texts and voice messages from Blessed Jones, who’d come down with the flu, canceled the tail end of her tour, and was coming home on the late-night flight. The same Dave Gregson who clearly didn’t keep drinking glasses in any sensible part of his kitchen.

  Charlotte jerked open the fridge door, filling the room with chilled fluorescence. A blast of cold, dry air instantly evaporated the tiny patches of sweat nestling in the curves of her clavicles and beneath her heavy, blue-veined breasts. She took a swig of orange juice straight from the bottle. And that was when she heard the unmistakable sound of a key turning in a lock.

  The door of the apartment swung open to reveal the petite, backlit outline of Blessed Jones. She looked just like she might have done on an album cover, wearing a nipped-waist dress with a fulsome skirt, dainty ankle boots, a trilby perched on the wild nest of her tightly curling hair, a guitar case in one hand, and all of her haloed by spears of amber light. Charlotte lowered the orange juice
bottle down over her pubes. Her nipples pulled tight from the shock.

  The silhouette of Blessed Jones made a small noise, a sharp intake of breath.

  “You’re Blessed Jones,” Charlotte said helplessly. “I love your songs.”

  * * *

  Bricks and planks—Price? Delivery?

  Picture hooks (stick on)

  Clothes airer (small)

  Sink plug (55 mm)

  Light globes (bayonet)

  Shower curtain

  Nick Jordan, riding his bike to the hardware store, tried to imagine what a reasonable person would make of his list, if they happened to find it blowing about on a street, or crumpled up by their feet on the bus. Might they mistake it for an experimental poem? Or, if they accepted it at face value, might they be able to reconstruct the personal circumstances of the list maker?

  Would the finder of the list surmise that it had been made by someone who’d just moved into a rental property, which—like every other rental property of his life—had not a single picture hook on the walls? Would they be able to imagine the stark smell of damp white paint? But also the undertone of mold? Would they be able to imagine the living room with its murky green carpet, still slightly damp from the steam cleaner, and his block-mounted production posters all leaning up against the walls at knee height? Would they imagine the stacks of books, CDs and magazines with nowhere to go? And the list maker’s bank balance, too—the size of which would mean that bricks and planks would have to do, yet again, in place of actual shelves?