by Minnie Darke
Hillary and Jane had met Simon on a number of occasions and been faultlessly cordial to him on every one of them. Tansy had been quite open, told her friends all about him: how she had met him at the bain-marie window in the hospital cafeteria, and how he had suggested she and he have lunch at a cafe rather than put themselves through a plate of gluey rice and crusted-over green chicken curry. But she had not told either Hillary or Jane that it was on this makeshift first date that Simon had, without any prompting at all, correctly identified that Tansy bore a remarkable resemblance to Diana Rigg in her Avengers phase. And although Tansy had allowed Jane and Hillary to understand that the sex was plentiful, she had not gone on about it. Jane’s husband’s virility had been a short-lived little thing, and Hillary’s husband’s attentions had for over two decades been diverted to his secretary. It could only have been seen as rubbing it in if Tansy had disclosed that one of Simon’s first gifts to her was a pair of close-fitting, black leather driving gloves which she had, more than once, worn in the bedroom.
Tansy took a deep breath and landed her left hand on the white linen tablecloth, beside the cheese platter. The low, curving profile of the gem shimmered in the afternoon sun that streamed in through the restaurant’s waterside windows. Hillary froze, a crumb of cheese clinging to her lunch-smudged lipstick. Jane’s eyebrows shot up under cover of her thick, russet fringe.
“Simon’s asked me to marry him,” Tansy announced. She knew her color was high, and that she was likely going all blotchy in the décolletage.
“Marry him?” Hillary asked.
Jane looked at the ring and reared back a little. “Oh my God, what is that? Quartz?”
“Tourmaline,” said Tansy.
“Virtually the same thing,” Hillary said, then took out her glasses and leaned in for a good look. “There’s a lot of work in it. It probably wasn’t cheap.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Tansy said, with a smile.
A small look passed, then, between Hillary and Jane, and Tansy caught a distinct whiff of premeditation.
It was Jane who went first. “You do realize, Tansy, that even if it was expensive, it’s a small investment. Considering what he stands to gain.”
For just the briefest second, Tansy took this as a compliment. Then her eyes narrowed. “What are you trying to say?”
Hillary said, “Put it this way. If there was a wealthy male doctor, a specialist, and he was targeted by a pretty, penniless little nurse, fifteen years younger than he, what would you think? That she was dazzled by his lovely personality?”
“No,” Tansy said, with a laugh. “Simon’s not—”
Jane held out a hand and enumerated on her fingers. “No car, no house, staring down the prospect of turning thirty-five with nothing behind him, and here’s this older doctor, single, worth a mint…”
She trailed off. Tansy’s mouth moved like a guppy’s.
“What I don’t understand is what he’s been doing with his life,” said Hillary. “I mean, why doesn’t he have any money? He works, doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he even have a car?”
Jane looked at Tansy sharply. “The other day”—she paused—“you said you were thinking of trading the Volvo, that you were going to test-drive something. Did he suggest that?”
“Yes. Yes, I suppose he did, but—”
“What kind of car?” Jane asked. The look on her face suggested that everything hinged on the answer.
“An Alfa Romeo Spider,” Tansy whispered.
Hillary tittered. “Oh, Tansy. An Alfa Romeo? That’s so not you.”
“He said I deserved it. That I work hard. That I should have what I want.”
“But who wants it, really? You? Or him?” Jane said, as she drained what was left of the white wine into Tansy’s glass and motioned to the waiter for a second bottle. There was a brief and crowded silence.
“I still can’t work out what he’s been doing with his money,” Hillary ruminated.
“He has traveled,” Tansy offered.
“It could be gambling,” Hillary said, then her eyes widened. “Or…maintenance. Where did you say he was from?”
Tansy told them. Jane’s mouth puckered.
“I think you have to admit, Tansy. He’s just NLU,” she said.
Tansy didn’t recognize this acronym. She looked in puzzlement from one of her friends to the other.
“Not Like Us,” Hillary said.
“Another way to put it would be”—and here Jane paused for effect—“gold digger.”
For a girl born and raised in a prospecting town, this was a powerful word, and Tansy’s reaction was violently physiological. The blush she experienced seemed to have its epicenter in her solar plexus; it was a flood of shame so excruciating that it made her throat burn and her cheeks flame, her nose throb and the backs of her hands prickle.
“Oh, oh, I’ve just remembered.” Hillary riffled through her capacious leather handbag to extract a copy of the Star. She laid it on the table as if it were a crucial piece of evidence in a court case.
“Who’s she?” asked Jane, tapping an immaculate gel nail on the cover. “Do we know her?”
“She’s the granddaughter of that woman who used to run the dress shop behind the Alexandria Park Markets. Daughter of the youngest son, the one who married that…I don’t know. What was she? Greek? Macedonian? Anyway, I think it’s ridiculous. She’s only fifteen and they’re letting her play Juliet at the Gaiety. I can’t imagine what that would do to a child’s studies,” Hillary said.
“She’s beautiful,” Tansy said.
“Of course she is,” said Jane. “She’s fifteen. Every girl in the world is beautiful at fifteen. Unless she isn’t.”
“Anyway, the point is,” Hillary said loudly, “I just read this yesterday. And I thought of you when I saw it. It’s amazingly apt. Oh God, I adore Leo Thornbury. He’s always on the money. Just wait until you hear this. Where are we? Aquarius, Aquarius. Here. Listen. You come this month, water bearers, to a crossroad of the heart. But which direction should you take? The stars urge you to be wary of disingenuous love. ‘If only,’ mused Katherine Mansfield, ‘one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools.’ You would do well to listen closely to the whisperings of your secret heart, and seek out the counsel of those you trust most.”
Jane raised her eyebrows as if in the presence of profundity. Nodding grimly, she gave her verdict on Simon Pierce: “Toadstool.”
Tansy felt as if she had been punched in the stomach. Those you trust most. Hillary and Jane had been her bridesmaids, her daughters’ godmothers. They would never lie to her.
“Have I been that blind?” she said, her voice low and strained.
“Well, here’s a question,” Jane said coolly. “Has he ever asked you for money?”
“I did pay off his credit card debt,” Tansy admitted.
“Did he ask you to, or did you offer?” Hillary asked.
Tansy couldn’t really remember. Not precisely. He had been talking about how it didn’t seem sensible for him to be paying all that interest if there was another option. But she had invited that comment of his, surely. Don’t worry about money, she had said, I’ve got more than I know what to do with. Oh God, how had it happened?
“Who suggested it is irrelevant, Hill. Just the fact that he told her he had a credit card debt is enough for me.”
“I just don’t think he could…pretend,” Tansy said. “He’s not like that.”
She remembered how, the first time she had politely faked an orgasm with Simon, he had stopped, regarded her with a cheeky smile, and said, “Wouldn’t a real one be better?”
“I’m sure he feels for me,” Tansy insisted. “I’m sure he does.”
“That’s the trouble with you, dear heart,” Hillary said. “You’re just so trusting. You never saw it coming with
Jonathan, either, did you?”
How had it happened? She didn’t know. But she did know she’d just gone into the bank, all glowing and postorgasmic on Simon’s arm. Primed. She’d been primed. And she’d made a bank transfer of thousands of dollars. Oh God, she was a total idiot. She thought of those women on television, their faces blacked out and their voices altered, who weepily confessed to having been stupid enough to hand over their life’s savings to Nigerian internet love rats.
Tansy twisted the ugly ring off her finger as if it was burning her and set it on a linen napkin. The three women regarded it, a tiny little catastrophic car crash at a safe distance.
“Oh my goodness,” Tansy said. “I have to end it, don’t I?”
Hillary said, “Poor you.”
“Make sure you invoice him,” Jane said. “For everything.”
And Tansy Brinklow smiled politely.
* * *
Len Magellan—Aquarius, curmudgeon, resident of the Holy Rosary nursing home, fundamentalist atheist, sufferer of Parkinson’s disease, father of three and grandfather of seven, lover of spicy pickled onions—was dying. Death was inside him, seeping out of his pores and discoloring his skin in lifeless shades of brownish purple and green. He could smell death in his own breath as he leaned a quivering hip against the basin in his en suite bathroom and tried to apply a toothbrush only to his teeth, and not to his nose and chin. He did not believe in an afterlife, or that there would be any reckoning for his mistakes (he would never have used the word “sins”). He did not believe he would be reunited with his dead wife, or that he and Della would sit with their rocking chairs perched side by side on the edge of a cloud where they could peer benevolently down on the earthly doings of their children and grandchildren. He believed his consciousness would simply cease and his body would rot in a box.
Each Tuesday, a volunteer came to sit with Len. She came to him not because he asked for her, but because the nuns who ghosted the corridors had noticed the infrequency of visits from his family. The volunteer was a middle-aged woman with thinning hair and a name badge that said GRACE. He was tempted to remark that having a name badge that said grace would be quite handy at dinnertime, but he couldn’t be bothered.
Len was repelled by how easy it was to see Grace’s pink, scaly head-skin through her graying curls. The fact that he could see how she had tried—with backcombing and hairspray—to cover up her scalp was for Len too personal a thing to have to notice each Tuesday at 11 a.m. The hair thing was almost more repellent to him than the benign pity in her unremarkable gray-blue eyes. But he figured that since he pitied her for her hairlessness, for her taupe lace-up shoes, for her sexless figure and plain face, her pity and his effectively canceled each other out.
It was Len’s habit to screen Grace out with the television. To show her just how little he wanted her there, he would grip the remote control and force his convulsing thumb to select the shopping channel. Vacuous Americans trying to sell him acne cures and abdominal muscle crunchers, he would have Grace know, were actually preferable to him than her pious small talk. Although to be fair, he didn’t know that she’d actually make pious small talk, since he’d never conversed with her at all. She would just come each week, and sit, for half an hour, while he watched television. And she would smile, as if she believed her mere presence was somehow doing him good.
On this particular Tuesday, however, Len’s strategy was flummoxed by the remote control. It failed to respond. And this was all the fault of his daughter, Mariangela. Cheap useless batteries she’d bought. Len scrabbled in the top drawer of the cabinet for replacements, but found none.
“Jesus,” he muttered, hoping to offend Grace.
Batteries, like whisky, and spicy pickled onions, were things he had to rely on relatives to bring in for him. It was like being in an Indonesian bloody prison, only there was no black market. It didn’t matter that he was loaded—he hadn’t managed to find a bent nun willing to duck out to the Bottle-O for him.
“Perhaps I could read to you from the newspaper? Or a magazine? Mrs. Mills down the hall always likes that,” Grace suggested.
“Fuck Mrs. Mills,” Len muttered.
“Sorry?”
“Nothing.”
So Grace took a copy of the daily paper from her bag and began, primly, to read.
“Why don’t you piss off and read Bible stories to some illiterate natives or something?” Len suggested, but Grace only kept reading.
It seemed to him that she was choosing carefully what she read to him. There were no crimes, no car accidents, no deaths in her newspaper, only stolen miniature ponies reunited with their owners and celebrities shaving their heads for charity. Len pretended to nap. Through a quarter-opened eye he watched Grace fold the newspaper and put it back in her bag. But she wasn’t done. She also had a copy of the Star.
“What’s your star sign, Len?”
Len faked a snore.
“Len!”
There was a hint of unexpected spirit in her voice that made him snap his eyes open.
“I asked what sign you were born under.”
“Don’t go in for that hocus-pocus.”
“Well, when’s your birthday?”
“Can’t remember.”
“Oh, rubbish,” she said.
Len grunted.
“I can find out, Len.”
He cocked his eyebrow, daring her. So she peacefully reached for the medication chart in the wall-holder by the side of his bed. Christ on a crutch. He hadn’t thought of that. Grace flipped open the chart and giggled.
“What?”
“Len is short for Valentine? Born, let me guess…February the fourteenth? Oh yes.”
Grace giggled some more and Len clutched at the remote control, hoping against reason that it would fire up the television and fill the room with testimonials for a diet pill or a remedy for erectile dysfunction. Fuck it. And fuck his spoiled kids and the three kidneys’ worth of private school education that had failed to teach any of them that it was a false economy to spend money on cheap fucking batteries. Grace, meanwhile, cleared her throat.
“Aquarius,” she began.
Later that day, some hours after Grace had gone off to read to Mrs. Mills and whoever else was on her list, the words of the horoscope were still circling Len’s brain. Mushrooms, toadstools. Disingenuous love. Not one of his bloody children loved him half as much as they loved the prospect of carving up the spoils on the lid of his rosewood coffin. A collective sense of entitlement the size of the bloody Taj Mahal. That was their problem. Which was also his.
The trouble was—and Len could see this clearly now—that he’d been too equitable, and too open. His current will set down that upon his death, his assets (nicely diversified among stocks, shares, bonds and property) would be liquidated and the final sum divided equally between his three children. His children, knowing this, had no incentive to suck up. Had he played his cards closer to his chest, he might’ve been able to set up some kind of bidding war of sycophantic behavior. Too late for that now. But not too late to teach those indulged and ungrateful little toadstools a lesson.
Should he, or shouldn’t he?
What was it that the hocus-pocus column had said? Those you trust most.
Len reached for his cordless phone, and—with a great deal of effort—punched in his solicitor’s number.
* * *
Nick Jordan was sitting on the floor of the rehearsal room, an open script on his lap and a half-eaten sushi roll in his hand, when Verdi got back from her lunch break in a tizz of excitement.
“Look!” she said, sitting down beside Nick and thrusting something right under his nose. It took him a moment to realize that what she was showing him was the cover of the latest edition of the Alexandria Park Star. “It’s me, it’s me! It’s both of me.”
“Hey!” Nick said.
“You look amazing.”
“Don’t I?”
She did. The cover of the Star was entirely taken up with her mirrored faces. Flicking to an inside page, Nick saw a third and more neutral version of Verdi, full length this time. She wore a green shirt over gray leggings and sat back to front on a bentwood chair, her feet bare, her chin resting on folded arms. Her gaze was direct, slightly flirtatious, utterly unafraid. The headline read: A FACE TO WATCH. And beneath it was the byline: JUSTINE CARMICHAEL.
From just the first two paragraphs of the story, Nick could see that Justine had captured his co-star perfectly, giving the reader a subtle glimpse of the young actor’s innocent arrogance, but leaving them in no doubt about her promising talent.
Being around Verdi was a mind-fuck for Nick. One minute she was almost freakishly mature, but the next moment her self-possession would evaporate and she’d be like an eight-year-old child after a sugar hit. It was just as their director, Hamilton, had described: as if someone had squeezed Minnie Mouse and Helen of Troy into the body of one fifteen-year-old schoolgirl.
“She’s a really good writer,” Verdi said.
“Always was,” Nick said, with an unaccountable little flush of pride.
When he was only halfway through the article, Verdi tugged the magazine out of his hands.
“What, I can’t finish it?” he asked.
She sighed. “Well, can you, like, do it really quickly? I want to show the others.”
“All right, all right,” he said. “I’ll read the article later. But, before you take it away, can I at least read my stars?”
“Your stars?”
“My stars.”
“You want to read your stars?” Verdi said, hugging the magazine to her chest.
“I do.”
Verdi chewed her gum noisily as she weighed the situation up.
“If you can guess what sign I am, first go, then yes,” she said.
Nick thought, but not for very long. She was changeable, versatile and energetic—it was nothing for her to come to rehearsals after hip-hop dance class, and then dash off to swim training when it was over. And after she’d been interviewed for the Star, she’d loved bringing back to the whole cast the gossip that the journalist was an old friend of Nick’s. He remembered the way she’d laced the word “friend” with subtext, and also the way this had annoyed and pleased him, in equal measure.