Star-Crossed

by Minnie Darke

  “So, what’s the story with you and Daniel?” Nick asked.

  “Oh. You noticed.”

  “Maybe. But I can’t say I’m entirely sure that I know what I was noticing,” Nick said. Why, Nick wondered, had Daniel seemed so put out that Nick and Justine were leaving the party together? And, if it pissed him off so much, why hadn’t Daniel offered to walk Justine home himself? “So, you two are…what? Together? Flirting? Over? It was hard to tell.”

  Justine laughed. “I don’t know what we are.”

  “But, are you dating?” Nick pressed.

  Justine’s eyebrows hunched down low over her eyes. “Sort of. How can I put this? I like Daniel, but every time we go out, I find myself wondering if he’s just a little bit too caviar and roses for me.”

  “Because you’re what?”

  “I think I’m a bit more Vegemite and dandelions,” Justine said. “He’s like a proper grown-up, and I’m…not.”

  Nick laughed. “I know what you mean. You and me, we’re just a pair of Edenvale kids at heart, really.”

  “I missed you a lot, you know,” she said. “After you left Edenvale.”

  “I missed you too,” he said.

  “You know, I’ve been wanting to ask you something. Do you remember that time? That Australia Day weekend? In South Australia?”

  Justine kept walking while she said this, and Nick noticed how she kept her gaze on the ground, as if what she was doing was less risky that way.

  “I was beginning to think we were never going to talk about that,” he said. “I thought, maybe, it was a bad memory for you. Or something.”

  “You did?”

  “Well, you made it pretty clear that you regretted it. You wouldn’t even come out of your room to say goodbye to me.”

  “Nick!” she said, stopping in the middle of the path and turning to face him. “We were fourteen!”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to you. It was that I wanted to talk to you too much.”

  Instead of turning away from him, then, and instead of keeping on down the pathway, Justine stayed quite still, looking up into his face, those fierce Carmichael eyebrows of hers pushed together so there was a little furrow of skin between them. Her lips were bright and sugary, and there was a stray shard of crimson toffee on her silver-painted chin. She looked so funny and so vivid that he wanted to laugh.

  He reached for her hands.

  “That was one of my favorite nights of all time,” Nick said, although it wasn’t until he heard himself say this aloud that he realized the absolute truth of it. On the beach, with Justine, half drunk on Stone’s Green Ginger Wine—it had been another of those perfect snapshot moments that Nick knew he’d never, in his whole life, forget.

  “It was?”

  Justine looked up at him, and the scattering of stuck-on stars at the corners of her eyes glittered.

  “Jus?”

  “Yes?”

  “When I’m with you, I…” he began, and then stopped, because he knew that although there were a great many things he would like to say, inside this moment, there were all kinds of reasons that he could not. It wouldn’t be fair. Not to Laura, not to Justine. Because although he wished there were a way of keeping the things he wanted to say in the bubble of this moment, he knew it to be impossible. So he settled for landing a kiss on the top of her silver hair, and said, “I’m so glad you’re my friend, Jus. I’m so glad we found each other again.”

  And then they continued on their way: the blue moon and the shooting star.

  * * *

  At home on the twelfth floor of Evelyn Towers, Justine took a long, cool shower. Runnels of glittery paint and silver stars swirled around her feet like galaxies, then disappeared down the plughole. Justine stood beneath the flowing water until, at last, it ran clear.

  Justine: So, I guess that’s really it, then. He’s glad I’m his friend.

  Brain: I guess so.

  Justine: We gave it our best shot, didn’t we?

  Brain: We did. We absolutely did. And a friend is no small thing.

  * * *

  The day after Halloween was sweltering, and the day after that was hotter still. But this was not a city where the sun shone steadily for days on end from a cloudless sky; this was a place where even a short string of scorchers had to be paid for in thunderstorms and rain. The change came on the Thursday night of that week, with spectacular displays of lightning, and hailstones that pummeled car roofs and hoods. The city’s garbage cans were scattered to the four winds, and more than one trampoline took flight. When Friday arrived, it was gray and wet and tepid, and Justine’s weather-vane hair frizzed like a merino’s fleece.

  It was past six o’clock and Justine had spent a good part of the day trying to inject some spark of creativity into a feature story about the Alexandria Park real estate market, a subject that was inexhaustibly fascinating to the magazine’s readership. Now there was nobody left in the office but Justine, and Daniel. This seemed to be how they had tacitly decided things were going to work: each of them would stay at the office until everybody else had gone home, and then they would have the privacy to talk for a while, or to make plans.

  Tonight, when Daniel came into the staff writers’ room, he dragged Martin’s chair over to Justine’s workstation and sat on it the wrong way round. Leaning over the chairback, he grinned at her in a way that made her imagine what he must have been like as a schoolboy. He sat close enough to her that he could have touched her, but he didn’t. In his hand were two tickets, glossy black with red writing.

  “They’re for the new screen at the cinema,” Daniel said, clearly very pleased with himself. “Orion’s answer to Gold Class. The manager there is trying to cultivate me as a contact.”

  Justine had already told Daniel that something she loved to do was to go to the Orion and take potluck with whatever was screening. Her favorite way to see a movie was with no preconceived ideas and no hype. In fact, the less she knew about a film before she sat down to watch it, the better.

  “Shall we go see something neither of us has ever heard of? Have dinner at Afterward? Walk in the rain?”

  “All that sounds very nice,” Justine said. And it did.

  “Right you are, then. I’ll go get myself organized.”

  Justine powered down her computer, tidied her desk and shrugged on her coat. She picked up her teacup with the intention of emptying out the dregs in the tearoom sink. But on the way down the hall, she passed the open door to Henry Ashbolt’s office and saw a sheet of paper lying in the out-tray of the slender white machine on the desktop.

  Brain: Ahem. Resolution One states that there will be no tampering with the horoscopes.

  Justine: I don’t think it says anything about just reading the horoscopes.

  Brain: In other words: I’m just going to get the bottle out of the liquor cabinet?

  Justine: I’m not going to do anything. I just want to see what Leo has to say.

  Brain: To Nick? Or to you?

  Justine: Maybe a little of both? Come on. Just a little sneak preview. Please? You’re curious, too. I know you are.

  Brain: A preview, you say?

  Justine: Yes. Nothing more. I’ll take the fax into the tearoom and read it, and when I come back past Henry’s office, I’ll put the fax right back where it is now.

  Brain: You promise?

  Justine: Faithfully.

  Beyond the back window of the tearoom, the purple blooms of a stunted jacaranda tree were drooping under the weight of so many raindrops. Justine set the fax down on the counter beside the sink, so that she could read it while she rinsed out her cup. Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sag—

  “Hey,” said Daniel, joining Justine at the sink. He had the handles of several coffee
mugs threaded through his fingers.

  Justine dropped her teacup and it landed with a clang in the sink.

  “Oh, shit. Sorry,” she said.

  Brain: The fax, Justine! The fax!

  Justine: I know, I know. What should I do? What should I do?

  Brain: Fold it up and put it in your pocket before he sees it.

  Justine: But it will get all creased! I can’t put a creased page back on the fax machine!

  Brain: Good point. Um…you can photocopy it later, and put the uncreased version back on the machine.

  “Nice weather for ducks out there,” Justine said, nodding toward the window.

  Justine: Oh my God. I’m talking about the weather. Even worse, I’m talking about the weather like my dad’s golf mates. Daniel’s going to see right through me.

  Brain: Pocket, Justine! Pocket!

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine. Totally fine,” she said, and, smiling as innocently as she could manage, she folded Leo’s fax and slipped it into the pocket of her coat.

  * * *

  At 3:47 the following morning, Justine—alone in her bed at Evelyn Towers—woke with a horrible thought at the front and center of her mind. Usually, when she woke with horrible thoughts in her mind, she fairly quickly worked out they were irrational. That the apartment was actually a huge Pringles chip cylinder, and somebody was suffocating her by putting the lid back on was, patently, fairly unlikely. That she had lost the PIN number to her underpants drawer, or forgotten to recharge her liver were not particularly convincing scenarios, once she’d had a waking moment to think about them. But this morning’s horrible thought was not as implausible as her usual 3:47 a.m. thoughts. This one was scarily realistic. Could she really have come home from the cinema without her coat?

  Justine got out of bed and looked at the pile of garments on her bedside chair. No coat. She went out into the living room, but there was no coat slung over the back of a dining chair or crumpled on the kitchen counter. It was not in the bathroom, and she hadn’t dropped it by accident on the twelfth-floor landing. And the more she thought about it, the more clearly she could picture herself laying her grandmother’s pink-purple coat over the seat of a stool at the Orion cinema bar. Was it possible that, after the tapas and the drinks, Justine had stood up and just left it there?

  When the Orion opened its doors at eleven that morning, Justine was already waiting in the street. Although the guy behind the ticket counter initially insisted that he be the one to look through the coats in the cloakroom and check the lost property box, he eventually gave in to Justine’s pleas and allowed her to conduct her own search. But although she went through the cloakroom with absolute thoroughness, looking under every other abandoned coat to make sure that hers wasn’t hiding beneath it on a hanger, and although she hunted through every cubicle in the ladies’ room and in the men’s, and although she successfully begged to be allowed back into the fancy new part of the cinema where she and Daniel had watched a crazy Mexican film about a chauvinist dickhead deserted by his long-suffering wife, it was no use. Justine’s coat was nowhere, which meant that so too were Leo Thornbury’s latest horoscopes.

  Justine: I am up shit creek.

  Brain: And I’m afraid to say that the paddle count is nil.

  Back at her apartment, Justine made herself a cup of tea and compiled a full and unexpurgated list of all her options. This didn’t take long, for the grand total was two. The first was to tell Daniel that she had lost Leo’s horoscopes along with her coat, and that someone would need to contact Leo and ask him to send another copy. This course of action had the advantage of being honorable, but the serious disadvantage of Daniel knowing that she had taken the fax in the first place.

  The second option was more complicated. It would involve getting hold of a typewriter, and making up the horoscopes for all twelve signs of the zodiac. Then she would have to go into the office late at night, photocopy the typed page so that it looked like a fax, and slip the photocopy onto the machine in Henry’s office.

  Justine: Why the hell did you let me pick up that fax?

  Brain: My control over your impulses is, as you well know, flimsy at best. And, by the way, have you considered that Leo’s faxes have that little header showing the number of the sender? Of course, it’s in a completely different style to the typing on the rest of the page…

  Her brain was right. But, she could find one of Leo’s old faxes. And photocopy that. And snip out the header. It would be a simple matter to glue the number to the top of her typewritten page and photocopy the two things together, but slightly more complicated to make the lines around the glued piece of paper disappear entirely from the photocopy. It could probably be done, though, Justine figured, with the help of Wite-Out and some adjustment to the copy brightness setting on the photocopier.

  But where would she get one of Leo’s old faxes? It was unlikely that she’d find one on Henry’s document spike; probably, they were all in that manila folder of Daniel’s. So, in addition to all of the fraudulent things that option two involved, it also included stealing from Daniel’s office.

  Justine bit off a fingernail, took a sip of cold tea, fired up Google, and typed: where can I buy an old-fashioned typewriter?

  * * *

  It was midafternoon on Sunday when Justine arrived home with a refurbished Olympia SM9 manual typewriter, a ream of paper and a commensurately depleted bank account. Out of all the machines that she had seen in the suburban home of a semi-professional typewriter enthusiast, she had chosen the Olympia SM9 because the typewriter enthusiast had told her that Don DeLillo had owned one. Apparently, he had written all of his novels, including Libra, on just such a machine; Justine had chosen to take it as a sign.

  Although it was ahead of schedule, she closed the living-room curtains. The Olympia SM9 was quite pleasing to look at, with a rounded pale gray body and shift keys in the same bright green as the cursive brand name that appeared in the center of the top cover. Justine poured herself a large glass of wine, and threaded a sheet of paper into the machine.

  How was she going to do this?

  She was no astrologer. She’d be hard pushed to put the planets of the solar system in their correct order, let alone know where these celestial bodies were hanging out in the sky, right now. And even if she did know where they were, and how they were positioned in relationship to each other, whether they were direct or retrograde, she wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what any of that was supposed to mean. Justine felt like she was standing in the wings, and her cue was any minute, except that she didn’t know her lines, or even which play she was supposed to be in.

  Brain: So just don’t mention any planets. Keep things…vague.

  Then Justine had an idea. She remembered something that best-pal Tara had told her about radio. The secret of radio, Tara had said, was not to think that you were speaking to a whole heap of people out there in Listener Land, but that you were speaking to one person only. That person might be a friend, or a relative, or some kind of invented ideal listener.

  “I can work with that,” Justine whispered to herself.

  All she had to do was think of a person, one for every sign of the zodiac, and write them a message, a personal message. Justine flexed her fingers and began.

  For Aries, she thought of Nick’s mother, Jo Jordan, and wrote her a message about old friends, and how they never disappeared entirely from your heart. For Taurus, she told Tara that the world was her oyster, and for her mother, the Gemini, she predicted that there would soon be a wedding in the family. Roma Sharples was her Cancerian, and Justine told her that she should definitely continue mentoring the young people in her workplace. She was beginning to enjoy herself, searching up relevant quotations and impersonating Leo’s quasi-mystical tone. The keys of the typewriter felt so different from computer keys, but there was something pleasing in the trot
ting-pony feel of it, and in the extra effort that it took to get the letters evenly inked onto the page.

  But then came Leo.

  Leo, she typed, and she knew that her model for the lion had to be Daniel Griffin.

  But what should she say to him?

  She took her hands away from the typewriter keys, and thought for a time.

  At last, she wrote: The British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote that real life was, for most people, “a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.” But you are a lion, and lions do not compromise. Whether this applies in the workplace or your home, your romantic life or your friendships, it is the season for you to let go of anything that you wish was ideal, but that you know is merely possible.

  This was sad, but also true.

  Carriage return, carriage return.

  And now she was up to Virgo. Her brother was a Virgo, so here she let it rip on the subject of love, and quoted Elizabeth Barrett Browning. For her Libran father, she wrote that games of skill and tenacity, possibly even word games, would feature prominently in the coming weeks, and although Justine’s favorite Scorpio—her grandmother—was no longer living, this didn’t mean she couldn’t write her a message about how much other people admired those who lived their lives to the full.

  Having no Capricorns close at hand, Justine paused for a time at the tenth sign. Then she remembered Nick telling her that Laura Mitchell was a Capricorn, so she wrote a message about how hard work and natural talents would bring success and joy. And that, momentarily, made Justine feel rather honorable. The twelfth sign of the zodiac, Pisces, was far easier, since Jeremy Byrne was a fish person. To him, she wrote about new phases of life and taking pleasure in simple things.