by Minnie Darke
“Wooooo!” hooted Tony, and maneuvered Mariangela into a dance hold.
“Wheeeeeeee!” squealed Mariangela, as Tony twirled her across the checkered linoleum.
It was then that their eldest son, Luke, appeared in the kitchen archway, his pajama pants sloping down over one hip and his dense dark hair quiffed upright by sleep. Tony and Mariangela froze.
“What’s going on?” Luke asked, his eyes still squinty.
Caught completely and utterly in flagrante delicto, his parents hadn’t the first idea how they were going to tell him his grandfather had just died.
Libra
SEPTEMBER 23–OCTOBER 22
September 23 not only marked the Spring Equinox, a brief moment at which the Earth hovered with its axis perfectly perpendicular to the sun; it was also the day when the sun shifted—nominally, if not actually—into the sign of Libra, the scales. And, in this particular year, September 23 was the date set for Drew Carmichael’s fifty-fifth birthday party.
Night was falling as Justine steered her boxy little Fiat 126 along a westbound highway en route to Edenvale, singing along to the 1980s hits that crackled out of her crappy car radio and reaching every few moments into the bag of jelly beans that lay open on the passenger seat, along with several copies of the Huck Mowbray edition of the Star.
Once and once only, Justine had made the mistake of going home with a single copy of a new edition of the magazine stuffed into her luggage. Her father—who had for almost two decades been engaged in a fierce but unrequited battle for supremacy with the Star’s crossword setter, Doc Millar—could spend the better part of a weekend on the cryptic. Occasionally he would groan out loud when he unraveled a wordplay, or exclaim something like “You sick bastard!,” or “Ha, thought you’d get me with that one, didn’t ya, didn’t ya?”
When Justine pulled into Curlew Court, she gave thanks that her car was so very small, because the cul-de-sac was already crammed with Range Rovers, Land Rovers and dual-cab utes. Light and sound from the party spilled around the sides of the Carmichael house, and over its low roof. With a smile, Justine identified the deep throb of Pink Floyd’s “Obscured by Clouds.”
From the street, number seven was a modest and unexceptional brick bungalow. Around the back, however, it became clear just how profoundly Mandy and Drew were committed to parties. The back of the house opened up like a doll’s house, its glass doors folding away so that the living room and kitchen segued into the timber deck, where half the population of Edenvale was now gathered. Justine moved through the crowd, kissing cheeks and greeting aunts and uncles, both honorary and actual, until she got to the far end of the deck. Just beyond its edge, out on the grass, Drew Carmichael presided over the spectacularly overengineered rotisserie that he’d built himself in the farm shed of his older brother, Kerry. The heavily carved remains of an unfortunate lamb revolved over a bed of dwindling coals.
“Happy birthday, Daddo.”
“That’s not? It couldn’t be? Not…Justine Carmichael, staff writer for the Alexandria Park Star?”
Justine was unsurprised to find her father Drew quite drunk, although, to be fair, she knew he got almost as inebriated on the pure fact of having a party as he did from drinking her Uncle Kerry’s stout. By the steps that led down from the deck to the back lawn was a claw-foot bath full of crushed ice, and the necks of stubbies poked up out of it like so many bottled messages bobbing about on an Arctic sea.
Drew called out, “Mandy, where are you? Prodigal daughter’s home! Time to kill the fatted sheep!” He hugged Justine. “Oh, shit. We already did! And we ate a fair bit of it, too. There’s plenty left, though. Kitchen counter, if you’re hungry.”
Mandy appeared through the crowd with a tray of wineglasses.
“Hey, gorgeous girl! How was the drive? You hungry, love? Red or white?” she asked, teetering in a pair of heeled boots that just about brought her up to Justine’s modest height. She leaned in for a kiss and Justine smelled a cocktail of semillon, Miracle perfume and the fake tan Mandy had clearly popped on her exposed, end-of-winter décolletage.
Justine took a glass of red, and Mandy whispered, “Thank God you got here before your father passes out. He started at two when Kerry turned up with the hogget. I think he’s forgotten this is his fifty-fifth, not his bloody thirtieth.” Then, pulling away, she said, “Your brother’s somewhere about. Aussie? Austin? Austin James Carmichael, where are you? And he’s brought the girlfriend home with him. About time, too. I like this one. I really do. I think we should be angling to keep her. You’ll have to tell me what you think.”
Justine had never entirely got used to the idea of her little brother being a man. He was at least a foot taller than she was, and as broad as Uncle Kerry across the shoulders, and yet, to Justine, there was a part of him that was perpetually five years old with grass-stained knees and an endearing lisp.
Under his arm, tonight, was a girl. A pretty girl. She wore a lacy, deep-red cardigan and her curly dark hair was caught up in a clip, though tendrils of it fell down around her open face.
“This is Rose,” Austin said, clearly very pleased with himself. “Rose, this is my sister.”
“You must be the famous Justine,” Rose said, beaming.
Justine held out her hand, but Rose brushed the gesture away and leaned in for a hug. Over Rose’s shoulder, Justine tried to make eye contact with Austin to gauge whether he thought this kind of effusiveness was normal, or weird. But if his face said anything at all, it was only that this time he was hopelessly in love. Still in Rose’s embrace, Justine felt a surge of sappy, happy-ending emotion that was harder than she expected to swallow back down.
“So,” Justine said, trying to get herself under control, “how are you surviving the Carmichaels en masse?”
“Oh, no problem,” Rose said.
“She’s a wool classer,” Aussie said, without taking his eyes off his girlfriend, “so she knows her way around a pack of half-cut farmers. Don’t you?”
Rose shrugged off the praise, but before any more could be said, Mandy appeared in their midst. “Come and sort the Pavlovas, will you, girls?”
She led the way to the kitchen, where the light was startlingly bright after the brazier-lit ambience of the deck, and Justine squinted as Mandy whipped the Glad wrap off two vast, white circles of meringue.
“Here you go: blueberries, raspberries, strawberries. And there’s a couple of kiwi fruit for you to cut up. A-a-and some bananas. Tin of passionfruit—show Rose where the opener is, Jussy. Knife each, cutting board each. And you’re set.”
“Remind me why it is that Aussie doesn’t have to do the Pav?” Justine asked, only three-quarters in jest.
“Listen to her, would you, Rose?” Mandy said, then put on a whiny brat voice: “It’s Aussie’s turn to unpack the dishwasher; Aussie never has to fold the socks; it’s not fair.”
“It’s not fair,” Justine said, now only half in jest.
“Pavlova is secret women’s business, my girl. Give up the desserts and the salads, and”—Mandy whacked Justine’s bottom lightly with a tea towel—“you’ll spend every barbecue turning sausages and smelling like the floor of an abattoir.”
And with that piece of sage advice, Mandy was gone, platter of cheeses in hand, back out to the deck, leaving Rose and Justine alone in the kitchen.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen my brother quite so smitten,” Justine offered.
Rose’s cheeks colored. “I love him too. I knew straightaway that I would love him. You know? You know how you just…know?”
But Justine, distributing blueberries in a haphazard fashion, thought that it was all very well to know. What happened when the person you knew about didn’t seem to know about you?
Justine didn’t want to envy anyone. Not Aussie and Rose for all the fireworks joy that was coming their way; not her mum and her dad, for
the way they’d worn grooves into each other over the years; not Kerry and Ray, who were dancing together on the deck in the same predictable, confident way that they bickered about whether or not it was going to rain. But tonight, it was going to be hard not to.
* * *
“Something, something, t, something, r, something,” Drew said. “Future? Saturn?”
It was early afternoon and although the Carmichaels’ fridge was crammed with odd-shaped wedges of cheese, half-drunk bottles of white wine, and a large Tupperware container full of slices of charred lamb, the place showed almost no other signs of having recently been the venue for a large party. The back of the house was once again a wall of glass, the indoor-outdoor furniture on the back deck had been wiped clean and restored to right angles, and the claw-foot bath had been pushed back into storage beneath the deck.
Drew, with rumpled hair and more wrinkles beneath his brown eyes than Justine had properly noticed before, was in his armchair with his copy of the Star folded open to the crossword puzzle. Mandy was at the kitchen bar, with her magazine wedged into a recipe holder as she wrote out the ingredients that would be required for Dermot Hampshire’s pear and hazelnut tart.
Justine had woken late, assembled an odd outfit from clothes she’d left in the drawers of her old bedroom, given in to her mother’s entreaty that she eat a large serve of eggs on toast and taken the family’s ancient spaniel, Lucy, for a very, very slow stroll around the neighborhood. On their walk, they had passed the place where Nick Jordan, aged eight, had broken his collarbone falling off his skateboard while showing off to an unimpressed Justine. Half a block from there, Justine and Lucy stopped for a moment in the echoing mouth of the storm drain where Justine and Nick used to practice demonic laughing.
“Mwah, ha, ha, ha, ha,” Justine tried, for old times’ sake.
Lucy was now lying on the rug beside Drew’s chair, and she was so still that it was hard to be certain she wasn’t dead. Justine sat beside the old dog, absentmindedly stroking her furry belly and finishing off the last cup of tea she planned to drink before setting off for home.
“Come on, smarty pants,” Drew said. “Something, something, t, something, r, something.”
Justine had already contributed the words “tesserae” and “gazpacho” to this month’s crossword. Now she only shrugged.
Drew sighed. “Meters? Miters? Motors?”
“What’s the clue again?”
“Leave! Crazy old fart.”
“So, ‘Crazy’ means there’s an anagram.”
“Yes, yes. Thank you for that, Einstein. But an anagram of what?” said Drew. “This Doc Millar of yours. He’s a sadist. You know that, right? He enjoys suffering and pain.”
“You’re the masochist who does the puzzle,” Justine said, draining the last of her tea.
“Leave! Crazy old fart,’ ” Drew tried. Then, “Leave! Crazy old fart.”
He shook his head.
“Well, I’ll have to leave you to it,” Justine said. “For city life calls me away.”
“You’re going? Already?” Mandy said from the kitchen bar, making a cartoon sad face.
“Things to do, people to see, places to go,” Justine lied.
Drew took off his reading glasses, hauled himself out of his chair and said his goodbyes in the living room, but Mandy walked alongside Justine, down the front path to the curb. She watched as Justine loaded her bag into the Fiat, then took hold of her daughter by the shoulders and looked into her eyes.
“You didn’t seem altogether yourself last night. Anything I should know?” Mandy asked, and for once, she actually waited for an answer.
“Well, I think I can tell you that you’re going to have a lovely new daughter-in-law any tick of the clock,” Justine said.
“I was asking about you,” Mandy said, her brow furrowed with concern.
“It’s just that…Aussie and Rose. They’re so happy, and—” She stopped before the ache in her throat got any worse.
“Darling girl,” Mandy said, drawing Justine in for a hug. “Your time’ll come.”
“I just have to keep believing that, don’t I?” Justine said into her mother’s shoulder.
“You do,” Mandy said. “And it will. You never know what’s just around the corner.”
* * *
It was evening by the time Justine reached Alexandria Park and backed her tiny Fiat into the worst car space in Evelyn Towers’ ridiculously tight parking allotment. There the little car might remain for weeks, or even months—its red Duco continuing to fade to the color of rust, its hood crusting over with wattle blossom and starling shit—until Justine’s next trip home. Duffel bag hoisted on her shoulder, Justine fought her way past the unpruned lilac bushes that lined the side path to the street.
When she reached the twelfth-floor landing, she found Nick standing at her front door. It was about now that Justine wished she’d not dressed herself from the ragbag of her Edenvale closet. And she wished that she’d brushed her hair. Or, at the very least, put on a little bit of mascara.
Nick himself was clearly fresh out of the shower, his dark hair all shiny-wet. Under a rather sharp-looking sports jacket, he wore a pair of nicer-than-average jeans and a pale blue print shirt that was bordering on pretty.
“And where are you off to this fine Sunday night, Mr. Jordan, all dressed to kill?”
But Nick seemed distracted. He ran a hand through his wet hair. “How was the party?”
“Great,” she said. “It was…great.”
During the drive back, she had been looking forward to telling Nick all the news from home—how their primary school bully had found Buddhism, and how pillar-of-the-community Nora Burnside had got caught shoplifting toothpaste from the supermarket—but now that she was standing here, she could see that this was not the right time.
“So, there’s something I need to talk to you about,” Nick said.
Justine: Is this going to be good? Or bad?
Brain: Well, we generally don’t like the phrase “there’s something I need to talk to you about.” It’s too much like “I hope you won’t mind me saying, but…”
“I’m not doing it,” Nick said.
Justine knew, immediately, what he meant. Even so, she heard herself ask, “Doing what?”
“I’m not auditioning. I can’t.”
Inside her chest, Justine felt that sinking feeling again. Down, down, down. Down through layers of blue.
“I thought—”
“I’m really sorry,” Nick said. “I know you wanted me to, and I know you went out of your way to give me an in with Alison Tarf. And I wanted to audition. I did. But it turns out I’m going to be traveling for a lot of the summer, and there’s no way I can make the scheduling work, and, look, I wanted to tell you in person.”
“Traveling? Because?”
“I’ve got a new job.”
“An acting job?” Justine asked hopefully.
“I’m told it’s like acting without all the lines,” Nick said drily.
“Oh?”
“Laura and I, we’re going to be the Chance couple. You know, the winery? They want to sign us for five years to do a series of ads. Television, print, internet. You would not believe what they’re willing to pay me to wear an Akubra hat and hold a wineglass.”
“Modeling?” Justine said, not trying very hard to hide her disdain. “You are going to be a model?”
“Let me explain,” Nick said, looking pained.
Knowing that there were too many emotions leaking out of her, Justine couldn’t work out where to look, how to stand, where to be. “You don’t have to.”
“I need you to understand. I don’t know if you’ve read the horoscopes. Probably not, but you’ll never guess who Leo quoted at me this month. Go on. Guess.”
Justine shook her head miserably.
“Shakespeare,” he said. “Shakespeare. Can you believe it?”
She could.
“ ‘Boldness be my friend! Arm me, audacity.’ That was the quote. From Cymbeline.”
Justine considered. Carefully, and even though she knew she was sailing close to the wind, she said, “And this couldn’t have meant, for instance, that you should have the courage to audition for Alison Tarf’s new, um, Shakespeare company?”
Nick sighed. “No, I don’t think so. I really don’t. Because that wouldn’t take real courage. See, that doesn’t really frighten me. It doesn’t rock me to my very soul. But to give up something that really matters, for the woman I love? That hurts. That takes real fortitude. Actual guts.”
Justine waited for him to go on.
“ ‘Boldness be my friend! Arm me, audacity.’ That’s what Leo said. So I’m going to do the bravest thing I know how to do. I’m going to sacrifice something I want, something I really want, to give Laura something she really wants.”
“Which is, what?”
“All of me, Justine,” he said, with total sincerity. “Every last bit. Leo said I have to take it to the next level. ‘Take the plunge, Aquarius!’ That’s what he said. So that is what I’m going to do. I’m going to ask her to marry me.”
Brain: I strongly advise that you do not say anything at this point.
Justine said, “Sagittarians are supposed to be blunt, right?”
Brain: No, no, no, no. Mouth shut, Justine!
Nick said, “Well, forthright. Yes.”
Brain: Justine! Shut. Up.
“Well, let me be forthright. It does not surprise me in the least that Laura is the face of Waterlily perfume. That’s just perfect. Actually, it’s beyond perfect.”
