by Minnie Darke
The jumper was of soft gray wool, still warm from Nick’s body, and it smelled faintly of sandalwood.
“Who else comes up here?” Nick asked, pacing the park-side length of the rooftop.
“I’ve never seen anybody else,” Justine said. “Just the occasional bird.”
“There’s so much you could do with it,” Nick said.
She watched him test the handle of the clothes line, and tug experimentally at its slack lengths of wire. He squatted down by the floodlight, investigating its workings, and Justine—feeling that she was at a safe distance to say something that was possibly too close for comfort—took a breath.
“Nick, you know that promise you made? To your girlfriend? Look, I watched you on stage with Verdi the other day. I used to watch you on stage when we were kids, too. Back at school, you know…you have…you just have…more candlepower than other people. It’s your gift.”
He came toward her then, the wrecked remains of the floodlight’s bulb in one hand.
“Candlepower,” he said, with a small laugh. “How about I get you a new lightbulb? It can be my gift to the rooftop.”
“Thanks,” she said, but she wasn’t quite ready to let the conversation slip away. “But are you actually hearing what I’m saying?”
When Justine looked up at his face, it wore an expression of such vulnerability that it embarrassed her.
“Jus, how do you know…” he began, then started again: “I mean, how do you trust that it’s right to follow your calling? Like you, with your writing. You’re a brilliant writer, but you’ve had to wait. You’re still waiting. But how do you keep trusting?”
If it had been anybody else asking, Justine might have been able to say something sage or reassuring. But, since it was Nick who was asking, she found that her brain had been reduced to a mess of misfiring synapses. She shrugged helplessly.
Nick sighed. “Last month, Leo said—”
At the mention of Leo’s name, Justine’s heart kicked up a gear.
“I know, I know. You’re not into the stars,” he said, “but just hear me out. He predicted I would come to a crossroad. And he said, wouldn’t it be great if it was as easy to tell true love from false as it is to tell mushrooms from toadstools?”
Although Justine could hear her pulse beating fast in her ears, she counseled herself to remain still and quiet, to leave space for Nick to say more. While she waited, her ears filled with the conglomerate sounds of the city’s nighttime traffic, and the noise of wind brushing through the branches of the big, old trees in the park across the road.
“Well, I’m freaking scared of mushrooms,” he said at last. “I would never in a million years just eat one I found growing in a field. Or a forest. Know what I mean? Because I’m exactly the kind of dickhead who’d eat a toadstool by mistake and end up in hospital getting my stomach pumped. What I want to know is, does someone really love you when all they ever want to do is change you into something that you’re not?”
It had worked, Justine realized. Her horoscope had absolutely worked.
Cocooned inside Nick’s oversized woolen jumper, she was hardly able to believe that it had really, actually, properly worked to set off some doubts that were already there, lurking in his mind. Justine breathed the sweet-but-not-too-sweet smell of the sandalwood jumper, and silently blessed Katherine Mansfield, and all the toadstools and mushrooms of the world as well.
“Laura’s amazing,” Nick said. “She’s such an achiever. All polish and organization and rigor. Always. Believe me when I say she doesn’t take weekends off from being good at every bloody thing there is to be good at.”
“But there’s something you’re really good at, too,” Justine said. “And, speaking as your old friend, I’m telling you that I really, really think you ought to call Alison Tarf.”
“But—”
“Calling her doesn’t commit you to anything,” Justine argued. “It doesn’t mean you’ve broken any promises.”
“That sounds a bit like a technicality,” Nick said, looking doubtful.
Justine shrugged. “It’s just a phone call.”
“Just a phone call,” Nick echoed, and Justine watched the corner of his mouth twitch until at last he gave in and smiled properly.
* * *
On the morning that Justine came into her office to find that Leo’s newest batch of horoscopes had arrived, she sat for a moment and stared at the page that lay, facedown and inscrutable, on the fax machine’s out-tray. She had no idea how she intended to proceed. But perhaps, she thought, her own stars might offer a clue.
Sagittarius, she read. With Venus in Cancer, and Mercury in Virgo, this coming month brings conditions perfect for the flowering of the career success that has been budding throughout the year. At the same time, you find yourself at a peak of personal attractiveness, though it remains to be seen whether the attention you attract is of the kind that you wish to encourage.
“Ha!” said Justine aloud. Personal attractiveness…what a crock of shit. Compared with Laura Mitchell, she was about as attractive as a peahen.
Skipping over Capricorn, she landed on Aquarius. With Mars in Leo, the entry said, you may wish to put off provoking any major confrontations, but this same astro-energy will bring developments in your romantic life into sharper focus. Later in the month, Venus opposite Saturn urges you toward careful husbandry of your assets: time and money being the greatest of these. It would not hurt, at this juncture, to carefully take stock of your financial position.
Justine frowned as she clipped the fax to the document holder. She transcribed each of the entries from Aries through to Capricorn, but when she came once again to Aquarius, she paused.
What to do, what to do? Perhaps she and Katherine Mansfield had already made enough of an impact. Maybe even more than enough. Perhaps it was time to stop meddling and let destiny simply unfold.
With Mars in Leo, she typed, faithfully.
Brain: Chicken.
Justine: What did you say?
Brain: You heard.
Justine: He’s already in a relationship. And I don’t think it’s particularly honorable to mess with that. There’s a thing called the sisterhood, you know?
Brain: Ri-i-ight. And would this sisterhood have Lizzie Bennet leave Darcy to wimpy old Anne de Bourgh? Have Maria deliver the captain into the hands of the Baroness von Schräder? Have Juliet tell Romeo to piss off back to Rosaline?
Justine: I don’t even know Laura. I don’t want to make an enemy of her.
Brain: But you don’t have to be Laura’s enemy in order to be a friend to Nick’s career. Just restrict your comments—to the professional.
This was a good point. What if…? Justine wondered. What if, in much the same way as she had come up with a protocol for opening and closing her curtains, she could make up her own rules? An ethics of horoscope adjustment? A set of guidelines that would permit advice in relation to career matters, but rule out any mention of affairs of the heart?
“That could work,” she whispered to herself. Then she pressed the delete button, and Leo’s words were returned to the void.
Justine thought for a moment, riffled through her memory bank, then began to type.
“All we have to decide,” wrote Tolkien, “is what to do with the time that is given us.”
* * *
While the curtain protocol required that, on weekend mornings, Justine open the curtains at whatever time she got up, it was usually the case that she did a good many things first. On this particular Saturday, she:
had a shower,
got dressed in skinny jeans, fitted paisley shirt (a Fleur Carmichael 1960s vintage original), and cropped orange cardigan,
laced up her red boots,
applied mascara and lip gloss,
changed the paisley sh
irt and cardigan for a cobalt blue shirt with bell sleeves,
unlaced her red boots,
zipped up her fur-lined tan boots,
blow-dried her hair,
plumped her couch cushions,
folded her throw rug,
reapplied her lip gloss,
slid a Joni Mitchell CD into the stereo,
pressed Play.
It wasn’t as if she expected, the minute she opened her curtains, to see Nick Jordan sitting on a chair on his balcony with a pair of opera glasses. Nor did she think he would particularly care about the placement of her throw rug, or be especially impressed by the color of her boots. It was just…well, it was just a touch of window dressing.
When she did at last fling back her curtains, she saw—fixed with clothespins to the airer on Nick’s balcony—a sheet of white paper bearing a message. At the top of the page was the letter J and in the middle of the page was a sketch of a lightbulb. Under the lightbulb sketch were the words Give me a shout.
Justine stepped out into the cold, trying to work out what, exactly, she ought to shout. Hello? Nick? Coo-ee? But before she had made up her mind, Nick stepped out through the sliding door wearing rumpled pajama pants and a soft-looking T-shirt. His dark hair was sleep-mussed and shaving had clearly not been part of his life for several days.
“Morning, neighbor,” he said.
“Morning.”
“For you.” In Nick’s hand was a small box—a lightbulb box. “For the rooftop. It’s definitely the right fitting, and it was the brightest one I could find.”
Justine was impressed. He’d said he was going to get her a new lightbulb, but he’d actually gone and done it.
“Hey, that is so nice of you,” she said. “I don’t know when I would ever have got around to it. And I have something for you, too.” She ducked back inside her apartment to pick up a copy of the newest edition of the Star.
“It only came out yesterday,” she said, holding it up to show him the cover: a black-and-white head shot of the country’s most famous coal magnate, her brutal features incongruous with the delicate diamond-bow necklace she wore at her throat.
So there stood Nick, with the bulb. And there stood Justine, with the magazine. And there, between them, between the buildings, was the gap.
“I don’t think I should throw this,” Nick said.
“Probably not,” Justine agreed.
Nick suddenly held the box to the top of his sleepy-head hair. “Lightbulb moment! We need a little basket, like in The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch.”
“Oh my God. I haven’t thought of that book for years.”
“How many times did we read it?”
“Well, I know that during our year, the kindergarten had to replace its copy at least once.”
It had been such a simple idea, but such an irresistible one: that tubby little picnic basket, filled with food, being snapped onto a wire and sent out over the sea to the lighthouse keeper.
“A mixed seafood salad,” Nick quoted, in a faintly piratical accent.
“Iced sea biscuits!” Justine returned.
“Peach surprise!”
“Could we really have one?” Justine said, half seriously.
Nick raised his eyebrows in amusement, and Justine braced herself to be mocked. But instead, he said, “I’ve got string.”
“I’ve got a basket. Mum keeps cotton balls in it,” Justine said.
By means of some moderately accurate throwing of the basket, some semicoordinated catching of the ball of string and a bit of nifty knot-tying, Nick and Justine rigged a simple string loop that enabled the basket to be transferred to either side of the gap.
And so it came to pass that a lightbulb made the first recorded journey, by basket, to the twelfth-floor balcony of Evelyn Towers from the twelfth-floor balcony of its ugly neighbor, and a copy of the Alexandria Park Star made the inaugural journey in the opposite direction. And inside that magazine, running down the gutter edge of a verso page toward the back, were the horoscopes. By Leo Thornbury. Mostly.
Cusp
Dorothy Gisborne—Aquarius, Anglophile, longtime resident of Devonshire Street, widow of five years’ standing, proud owner of possibly the most extensive collection of commemorative Charles and Diana wedding china in Christendom and fastidious ironer of sheets, tea towels and underpants—typed an address into a Google Maps search field. On her screen, a blue dart appeared in a grid of pale gray that filled out, in fits and starts, into the village of Fritwell in Oxfordshire. It was against the advice of their dating site that she and Rupert Wetherell-Scott had exchanged real-world information so swiftly, but at their age…well, there was so little time to lose.
Aware of her quickening breaths, Dorothy clicked Street View. And there it was, his actual house, just as it had looked on a cloudy day sometime in the not-too-distant past when the Google car had crawled down his street. The house was modest: a conjoined and pebble-dashed terrace so unexceptional that almost nobody in the world but Dorothy Gisborne—born in the Australian dust, yet raised on the dewy cowslips, green hedgerows and pert hedgehogs of Beatrix Potter illustrations—would be likely to find it remotely charming. But charmed she was, both by the undemanding coolness of the wintry light, and by the vague hint, in the picture’s background, of green fields, dormant bluebells and talking rabbits.
It was 2 p.m. in Dorothy’s sunbaked salmon-brick bungalow unit, but it cost her now-practiced mind almost nothing to calculate that it was 5 a.m. in the far-off English summertime. Rupert would still be asleep, his body a single lump under the covers of the double bed that his wife was no longer around to share.
Dorothy’s hand, on the mouse, trembled.
“Fool,” she told it. “Be still.”
Dorothy peered at the house on her screen. She noted the tidy front yard and the letter slot in the front door, the daisy bush in a large stone urn at the side of the narrow steps. If she were in fact to go, if indeed she were to say yes, then that was the door she would come home to, and that was the mat she would wipe her feet upon. And those were the daisies that she would pick to put in a vase on the bathroom sink.
She glanced up at the top corner of her screen. 2:05 p.m. 5:05 a.m. Still two hours and fifty-five minutes until she could expect the Skype chimes to come pinging through the ether like a pair of electronic meditation balls in a watery tunnel. Then there he would be, Rupert, the angle of his laptop screen making him appear slightly more jowly than she assumed he really was, and accentuating the cravats he wore, tucked like colorful paper napkins inside his shirt collar.
“Morning, Dorothy,” he would say.
And she would say, “Evening, Rupert.”
It was a small joke, and not especially funny, but it was a sweet and comforting way to begin their daily exchange.
Now it was 2:12 p.m. 5:12 a.m. Dorothy sighed, and did a slow 360 through the street view. Was that a little bridge down there at the end of the street? Yes, she thought it was. Then they would cross that bridge, she and Rupert, as they walked that street on their way to the old stone village church on a Sunday morning, or to the pub for a shandy on a Friday afternoon. His border collie would follow at his heels, low as a fox, and she, Dorothy, would wear Wellingtons and tweed, and a scarf over her hair, just like the Queen at Balmoral.
“Don’t be daft,” she muttered, realizing—too late—that she was putting on an ever so slightly British accent. Hot-faced, she closed her browser with a definite click and shoved back her chair.
From beyond her front windows, she heard the zoom and pause of the postman’s motorbike. When she stepped outside, her gaze was drawn to the ugly holes in her garden beds where all the daphnes and rhododendrons had toed up from thirst. That would never happen in Fritwell, Dorothy thought, as she wriggled the new edition of the Alexandr
ia Park Star out from the slot of her mailbox.
Back indoors, Dorothy arranged upon a tea tray the Star, a Charles and Diana one-cup teapot, and a single chocolate biscuit. From a large and laden dresser, she gentled down the gilt-edged Queen Anne china cup in which cameos of Charles and Diana were encircled by gold bands, framed in their turn by Tudor roses and fleur-de-lis. However, she could just as easily have selected the Crown Trent cup, upon which Charles and Diana nestled inside a vibrant red heart beneath a golden lion. Or, for that matter, an Aynsley, a Royal Stafford, a Royal Albert or a Brosnic. Alternatively, a Wedgwood, Royal Doulton or Spode.
Dorothy’s Charles and Diana wedding china collection covered the shelves and filled the cupboards of two large dressers in her living room. While it included expected things like cups, plates, vases and jugs, it also incorporated china trivets, thimbles, trinket boxes, candle snuffers, ashtrays and bells. Wedgwood issued commemorative jasperware in several shades, and Dorothy had tracked down every Charles and Diana wedding item in both the blue and lilac colorways (though she elected to pass on the ocher). There were years when Dorothy’s chief pastime had been writing away to china collectors in England and America. But then came eBay, and, after Reg died, Dorothy organized for his shed to be lined with shelves that would accommodate the new influx of previously unimagined treasure made in honor of the great nuptials of July 29, 1981.
Dorothy sat down at the round table in the bay window nook that overlooked her backyard. She poured her tea and nibbled her biscuit. On the front cover of the Star was that dreadful coal industry heiress. Really, Dorothy thought, you could see in that woman’s eyes what the love of money did to a person’s soul. She flipped the Star over and, for a moment, rested her hand on the back cover as if she could absorb meaning through the paper stock.
