by Minnie Darke
Nick didn’t speak to Justine for a full three days after she upstaged him by appearing on national television for that famous spelling contest of hers. On the fourth day, however, he’d been unable to help himself and had come out of his sulk to punch Jasper Bellamy, who’d been calling Justine a nerd. After that, things between the two old friends had returned, effortlessly, to normal.
But when Justine was ten, and Nick was just about to turn eleven, everything changed. Mark Jordan took a job on the far side of the country, so the Jordans sold up and left town. Despite everybody’s best intentions to stay in touch, the late-night phone calls between Mandy and Jo became less and less frequent, and correspondence dwindled to the obligatory Christmas letter tucked inside a card featuring Santa at the beach in his budgie-smugglers.
The families didn’t completely lose touch, though. Because there had been that Australia Day long weekend, in the January of the year that Nick and Justine would each turn fifteen. The Carmichaels had gone west, and the Jordans had come east, for a midpoint reunion in the baking heat of a beachside holiday park in South Australia. Despite the fact that Justine had spent the entire stuffy car trip to their destination playing out in her mind the film-worthy scene in which she was reunited with her childhood best friend, she had, upon seeing him, seized up like a terrified cat in the presence of a dog.
Nick, she saw immediately, had stopped being a slightly goofy boy and had morphed into a young man, almost absurdly good-looking—one of the kind that Justine knew from experience it was safest to avoid if one did not wish to suffer the excruciating embarrassment of rejection. So for all of the Saturday, and all of the Sunday, she had skulked about moodily, thrashing on her Sony Walkman the So Fresh compilation she’d got for Christmas and pissing everyone off by locking the bathroom door so she could moon about in privacy, changing her earrings and trying different shades of eye shadow. Nick had been equally aloof, setting off on long runs down the beach, or hanging out at the pool.
And then, on the Sunday night, their parents had pulled rank and dragged the two of them, sullen and resentful, up the beach to a pop-up amusement park. Maybe it was the nostalgic smells of hot dogs and cotton candy that broke them back down into the kids they really were. Or perhaps it was the jarring collisions in the bumper car arena that jerked them out of their self-consciousness. Whichever it was, they had ended up on the beach together late at night, alone, feeling the disco beat of the amusement park music as it throbbed through the sand.
The following morning, Justine was still in bed when the Jordans came over, en masse, to say their farewells. Through the cardboard-thin walls of the holiday cabin, Justine heard everything that was going on—her brother Aussie tearing around with Jimmy, Piper bawling about being left out, Mandy’s and Jo’s voices going up and down like scales on a violin, Drew’s and Mark’s voices providing the bass notes.
She heard her mother say, “I’m sure she’ll be up in a minute, Nick, love. I know she’ll want to say goodbye.”
But even when Mandy came into the bedroom and reached up to the top bunk to shake her daughter’s shoulder, Justine had only hunkered down further beneath the covers. She was too overcome with embarrassment even to show her face. Because she was sure that everyone in her family, and Nick’s, would be able to see how her lips were swollen from all that kissing, how her cheeks had been rubbed raw by the rasp of Nick’s faintly stubbled cheek. And, even worse, she felt sure that everybody else would be able to see on the outside of her what she could feel on the inside: something new and worrying, delicious and mortifying, intoxicating and weird. It was as if something had burst open, like multicolored popcorn. She didn’t think she would ever again be able to cram it back down to size.
* * *
He probably doesn’t even remember, Justine’s brain said to her. Then it said the same thing over again, just in case she hadn’t heard the first time.
Brain: He probably doesn’t even remember.
Justine: Will you be quiet?
Brain: Why would he remember? All those pages of your diary that you filled, while he probably just went home and forgot all about it.
But even while Justine was holding a silent dialogue with her brain, she was also managing to keep up her end of a perfectly polite conversation.
“And how’s your mum?” she asked.
“No different,” Nick said. “She doesn’t even seem to age.”
“I can imagine.” Justine pictured the lovely Jo, with her big white smile and her long brown hair that always smelled of caramel. Jo had been Justine’s first hairdresser. She would sit Justine on her kitchen bench and bribe her with jelly beans to sit still through the fringe-trimming part. “Wurls”—that’s what Jo had called Justine’s unpredictable, weather-sensitive blend of waves and curls. Jo had also been the one to talk Mandy into letting Justine watch Star Wars when she was seven years old, even though it was rated PG. And Jo who had defended Justine when she had got in big trouble for calling her grade three teacher a bitch. Justine had overheard Jo telling Mandy, “Ease up on her, Mands. You have to give a girl points for accuracy.”
“And Jimmy?” Justine asked.
“Professional tap dancer, believe it or not. It’s Piper who followed in Dad’s footsteps.”
“Oh?”
“Fullback for Carlton in the AFLW. She’s a wall of muscle—I wouldn’t take her on anymore. What about your folks?” Nick asked.
“In Edenvale, same as ever.”
“Don’t tell me your mum’s still the weather girl?”
“No, these days she’s the general manager at the local council. I cannot tell you how much she loves being the boss. Dad’s retired, though. He bought himself a Cessna Skycatcher but all he does is fly about and look at crops. Old habits die hard.”
“And you? You live near here?”
“On the other side of the park. Nan left her old city bolt-hole to my dad, bless her. You?”
“I’m kind of between addresses, but yeah, this is a good city. I’d say it’s home.”
Justine peered critically at Nick’s silver lamé fish suit. “So, what exactly is the story with the outfit?”
“It’s all to do with the oysters,” he said, glancing over at the fishmonger’s ice-filled cabinets. “There’s a special promotion, as part of which I walk around saying things like: World’s your proverbial, buddy. Hey, mate, French kiss a mermaid, you know you want to.”
Justine winced. “I heard you went to drama school.”
Nick explained to her how hard it was to make a living as an actor, how he supplemented his erratic wages with stints as a barista, waiter, catalogue delivery boy, school holiday drama tutor, brickie’s laborer.
“That’s a lot harder work than being a fish,” he said, “but less humiliating. And you? You, what? Patrol the fruit and vegetable signs of the city for correctness? That’s a career path, is it? For kids who win television spelling contests?”
He remembers the spelling contest, Justine said, somewhat smugly, to her brain.
“I work at the Alexandria Park Star.”
“You write for the Star? I love the Star. Would I have read anything you’ve written?”
“Well, I haven’t really—” Justine began. “I’m only…”
Justine searched for the right words, but before she could find them, Nick said, “Hey, it’s actually kind of weird having this conversation from inside a fish suit. I’m finishing up in ten minutes, though. We could, you know, if you weren’t busy…we could grab some fish and chips, head over to the park? Catch up on the rest of the news? But, you know, no pressure—just if you’re not expected anywhere, or anything.”
She was hungry, and fish and chips would hit the spot. Even so, Justine managed to pause. She tilted her head and let him see her think.
“If it’s not a good time, or…”
She smiled.
“I’m not expected anywhere.”
* * *
A crisp evening breeze made a Mexican wave through the upper leaves of Alexandria Park’s grand old trees as Justine and Nick passed between the wrought-iron pillars of the eastern gate. Nick pushed a beaten-up bicycle with one hand, and though he was out of the fish suit by now, a marine whiff clung to his shorts, his Where the Wild Things Are T-shirt, and his skin.
After-work joggers pounded the park’s thoroughfares and small dogs with expensive collars chased balls across the grass. Nick picked a spot on a gently sloping bank that gave a view down over the city, and where the grass was coppery in the falling sunlight. He set his bike against a planter box full of frilly, ornamental cabbages, and stretched out on the grass. Propped on one elbow, he unceremoniously tore open the white paper parcel of their meal and took a huge handful of steaming chips.
“Sorry, not very restrained, I know. But I haven’t had fish and chips for years,” Nick said, his mouth half full.
Sitting across from him, Justine took a chip and tested the end of it with her teeth. She was famished and the chip was perfect—crisp and light brown on the outside, all white and fluffy in the middle.
Nick was on to his second handful of chips when he said, “So, the Star, hey? What’s it like working there? What was your last big story?”
Justine sighed. “No big stories. Yet. At this point in history, I’m just the copy-runner.”
“Isn’t that like…?”
“Yes, it’s exactly like. I am, officially, the shit-kicker. I’d hoped that a real job would have come along by now, but…”
“Speaking of the Star, isn’t it about time the new edition was out?”
“In stores tomorrow,” Justine said, in her best advertising voice. “Although, it’s occasionally possible to get hold of an advance copy.”
She pointed to her bag, out of the top of which poked a brand-new, rolled-up magazine. Nick’s eyes widened in genuine, childlike delight.
“Can I?” he asked.
“Be my guest.”
Absentmindedly, he cleaned his greasy fingers on his T-shirt before reaching for the magazine. He opened it from the back and thumbed through the pages to land—quite expertly, Justine thought—at the horoscopes. With a smile, she remembered his teenage obsession with astrology: the one that she’d assumed he would outgrow, just as he had done his lemur suit.
It was strange, Justine reflected. On the one hand, she felt entirely comfortable with Nick, as if she’d known him forever. Which, in a way, she had. But on the other hand, he was virtually a stranger to her. He was perhaps only a little taller than she remembered him to be, and only a little less gangly. But his face. His face was different. How? she asked herself, as if she had a pen in her hand and it was her job to capture precisely the subtle differences in this new, older Nick Jordan.
At first, she thought of a set of nested Russian dolls. Perhaps looking at this Nick was like looking at the biggest doll in a set, when you were familiar with the slightly smaller, slightly different one that was hidden away inside. But no, Justine thought. It wasn’t quite like that. Rather, it was as if older-Nick had pushed out through the fabric of younger-Nick—jawbones, cheekbones and brow bones becoming more obvious and defined. His eyes were still wide and blue, his features still mobile and expressive, his smile still slightly sideways on his face.
He read intently, his dark eyebrows shuffling together in concentration. At last, he closed the magazine and tapped his fingers on its back cover. He looked puzzled, then shook his head slightly, as if to clear his thoughts.
“What’s he like?” he asked Justine.
She was lost. “He, who?”
“Leo Thornbury,” Nick said, as if this was beyond obvious.
It took a few seconds for Justine to register. When reading the Star, she tended to skip over the regular features she found pointless, like the gardening column. And the horoscopes. Which were written by the supposedly eminent astrologer Leo Thornbury.
Justine knew only three things about Leo Thornbury. One was the way he looked in the black-and-white thumbnail picture that topped his column, which hadn’t to the best of her knowledge ever been updated. It showed him with a sweep of silver hair and a prominent brow over deep-set eyes, looking—she had once decided—like a cross between George Clooney and Frankenstein’s monster. She also knew that he had a special fondness for including in his horoscopes quotations from famous writers, philosophers and wits. The third and final thing she knew about Leo Thornbury was that he was a notorious recluse.
“I’ve never met him,” she said. “I don’t think any of us has.”
“What? Never? None of you?”
“Well, maybe Jeremy. Back in the day. He’s the editor. But the rest of us, no. Leo Thornbury doesn’t even come to the Christmas party. And that is the most suspicious thing of all. The food at the Star Christmas party is so good that even the gardening writer gets over her social anxiety once a year. Apparently, Leo lives on an island, but I don’t think we’re supposed to know where exactly.”
“But what about the phone? Someone must speak to him, at least.”
“I don’t think so,” Justine said. “I’ve never heard anyone say that they did. To tell you the absolute truth, I’m not certain he’s exactly…real. Perhaps Leo Thornbury isn’t so much a man as, maybe, a machine. A computer in a room somewhere, spitting out random phrases.”
“Oh, you cynic.”
“Cynic? I thought I was a Sagittarius.”
Nick thought for a minute. “So you are. Born on the twenty-fourth of November,” he said.
He remembered her birthday. He remembered her birthday. Hey, did you hear that? Justine said, even more smugly this time, to her brain. He remembered my birthday. Feeling a prickle of warmth rising up her neck and into her cheeks, she gave silent thanks that the day’s light had dwindled into dusk, and Nick wouldn’t be able to tell that she was blushing.
Nick flipped back through the Star to the horoscopes. The low light made it more difficult for him to read. But then some invisible switch, somewhere, was flicked, and the lights of Alexandria Park—frosted spheres held high above the pathways on wrought-iron poles—began to glow.
“Ah, thank you very much,” Nick said. “Where are we, where are we? Libra, Scorpio…Sagittarius. Here we go. Brace yourself, archers. Throughout this year, Saturn in your sign continues to set off seismic activity deep in your belief systems; be prepared, this month, to experience minor tremors. Late March is auspicious for career advancement, but it is likely that workplace change will continue to be a theme throughout the coming months.”
Nick looked over at Justine and nodded, as if impressed with her achievements.
“So?” she asked.
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it? I’d have thought it’s very good.”
Justine snorted. “Seismic activity in my belief systems…what’s that supposed to mean?”
“No, I mean the career advancement. The workplace change.”
“Nothing changes at the Star. Nothing. Except maybe that Jeremy surprises us by coming to work wearing a tie.”
“Well, Leo says workplace change. And Leo knows everything,” Nick said, and although there was a hint of self-mockery in the smile, Justine got the distinct impression that he was, at least in part, serious.
“So, what profundities did Leo have for you this month?”
“Yeah, I don’t really know what he’s trying to say,” Nick admitted. “It says: Aquarius. ‘What a frightening thing is the human,’ wrote Steinbeck, ‘a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.’ For water bearers, this is a month of readjustment in which you recognize that it is not only the inner workings of others that can be mysterious, but also the machinations of the self. In quiet moments
of watchfulness, you may recalibrate your understanding of what it is that truly drives you. What do you think that means?”
Justine shrugged. “Um…that Leo Thornbury’s quote generator is up to S for Steinbeck.”
“No, what do you think it means in my life?” Nick asked, but Justine did not think this was a question that was genuinely directed at her.
Then, just before she could launch into a small monologue about the generic nature of astrological predictions, and how the art of them was in making up sentences that applied to just about any person, in any kind of situation, she saw a thought arrive in Nick’s mind: it showed up on his face like the notification of an incoming email.
“Hang on,” he said.
Nick fished his phone out of his pocket, and Justine watched as he thumbed a query into Google and scrolled down the results at speed.
“Yes, yes, yes!” he said. “I’ve got it. I know what Leo’s trying to tell me!”
“Well?”
“He’s telling me to play Romeo!”
Justine frowned. “Romeo?”
“Yes, Romeo,” said Nick. “Leo wants me to play Romeo.”
“I’m sorry? You figure that how, exactly?”
“The quote. The quote!”
“The quote is from Steinbeck,” Justine reminded him.
“Yes, yes. But,” Nick said, and here he tapped the screen of his phone with vigor. “Not just any Steinbeck. It’s from The Winter of Our Discontent.”
Justine thought, then shook her head. “Sorry.”
“Winter of our discontent. Winter of our discontent. You know where that comes from, right?”
“If memory serves…it comes from Richard III.”
“And?” Nick asked.
“And what?”