by Minnie Darke
“What are you talking about?”
“All pretty on the surface. Beautiful. Gorgeous. But have you ever turned a waterlily upside down? Nothing but those straggly little roots. Nothing. Going. On. Underneath.”
Nick shook his head in disappointment. “You know, I see this all the time. Women always hate Laura. It’s because she’s beautiful. They hate her, even before they get to know her.”
“Excuse me?” Justine said. “I don’t hate her. And even if I did, it wouldn’t be just because she’s beautiful. You may be totally obsessed with the way people look, but I’m not.”
“Obsessed, am I?”
“Have you ever stopped to consider that what you two really like about each other is that you look just the same?”
Brain: No, no, no, no. Do not go where you’re heading. Abort mission! Abort mission!
“I mean…what’s your relationship really all about? Because it’s certainly not about what’s best for you, Nick. What is it about? Actually? Hm? Some weird desire to reproduce by osmosis?”
“What?”
“Imagine how perfect your children will be!” Justine’s voice was dripping with scorn.
“What are you talking about? You don’t know the first thing about my relationship with Laura.”
“I know it’s not right for you. The right relationship for you wouldn’t be with someone who thinks you’re cut out to be a freaking model.”
“What do you care, anyway?”
“You know what? I don’t. Go marry Miss Waterlily. Advertise cheap wine. Bold and audacious, you are. Truly.” Justine had gone beyond the point of being able to rein herself in. Her brain had retreated to its inner quarters—a plush padded cell where it could rock from side to side and mumble incoherently. “Pour your talent down the toilet! Because that’s where you’ll be taking the plunge, Aquarius!”
“I’m not standing here listening to this crap,” Nick said. He turned away from her and headed for the stairwell.
“There’s nothing more to listen to!” Justine called after him, but there was no answer except the sound of his footsteps on the stairs.
* * *
Justine sat, shell-shocked, on her couch, and looked across the gap at the darkened windows of the next-door apartment. When her phone rang a few moments later, she pulled it out of her pocket hopefully, but the screen did not say “Nick Jordan.” It said “Dad.” She considered not answering, but she knew that this would make her dad worry that she hadn’t made it safely back to the city.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Your father is a genius,” Drew said.
Justine sighed. Inaudibly, she hoped. “Because?”
“Leave! Crazy old fart. I have solved it,” he crowed. “So, clever daughter of mine: a six-letter synonym for ‘leave,’ if you please?”
“Too tired, Dad.”
“Okay, I’ll make it easy on you. A six-letter synonym for ‘leave’ is…depart.”
“Excellent,” Justine said, slumping further into the couch cushions.
“Now, we must ask ourselves—what are the possible anagrams for depart? And what might any of them have to do with flatulence?”
“I feel sure you’re about to tell me.”
“Aha! Not only does the Middle French péter mean ‘to break wind,’ it is also the etymological origin of the word ‘petard.’ And ‘petard,’ as you—being my daughter—will already have worked out, is an anagram of depart. And there you have it. Your father is a genius. The word is ‘petard,’ my crossword is complete and Doc Millar can go dip his left eye in hot cockatoo shit.”
“Truly, you are a scholar and a gentleman,” Justine said.
“Incidentally, do you know what a petard actually is? I’ve always imagined it was a kind of gantry or hangman’s gallows. Something one could be ‘hoist’ by. But, it turns out that a petard was a sixteenth-century war machine used for breaking down walls. Essentially, a kind of bomb. Fart the walls down! So what that expression means, ‘hoist by one’s own petard,’ is that the victim is raised up into the air by being blown up, exploded, by one’s own device.”
“Well, thank you for the edification, Father.”
“You’re home safely, then?”
“I am.”
“Leave you to it then, chickie. Just wanted you to be able to sleep, safe in the knowledge that there are no blank squares in the crossie. Tell Doc, if you see him, that I will not be beaten.”
“ ’Night, Dad.”
Justine, still incapable of standing up, looked again in the direction of her French doors. The windows of the opposite apartment were still dark. Boldly and audaciously, Nick was going to propose to Laura Mitchell.
Hoist by one’s own petard, Justine thought.
Ka-boom.
* * *
In the dying days of September, Justine decided that it was time to make a few out-of-session New Year’s resolutions. The first of these was that she would leave Leo Thornbury’s horoscope column alone. No matter if she arrived at work early one morning and happened to see Leo’s fax perched invitingly on the out-tray of the machine in Henry’s office; no matter if she stayed at work late one evening and heard the fax machine begin to shudder and print. No matter the time of day, no matter the circumstances, there was no way she was going to tinker with Leo’s predictions. Not ever again. Never. For she had proven to herself that she was the worst counterfeit astrologer the world had ever seen.
Her second resolution was to accept the fact that Nick Jordan was destined to be Laura Mitchell’s husband, and the Chance wines guy, and that she, Justine, would admire him on billboards and send a set of His and Hers tea bags as a wedding gift.
Her third resolution was to apologize to Nick.
In the week that followed the making of these resolutions, Justine had most success with the first. She did not once, or in any way, interfere with Leo Thornbury’s horoscope. She didn’t see his fax, go looking for it or enter Henry’s office. Ten out of ten. So far, so good.
It was more difficult to measure progress toward meeting her second resolution. How did one know when one had got hold of a hope and totally, completely, utterly and finally extinguished it? Justine wasn’t certain, but she knew she was doing her best not to think about Nick in any way that exceeded neighborliness and friendship.
Then there was the third resolution. Justine apologized to Nick in several formats. She called him and sent him a series of apologetic text messages—but Nick neither picked up her calls nor responded to any of her texts. Moving up a gear, she wrote a groveling letter and popped it into his mailbox. But there was no response.
Getting yet more serious, Justine took a pair of sturdy kitchen scissors and walked the streets of Alexandria Park until she found a hedge of young olive trees growing in the front yard of a stately mansion. She cut off a decent-sized branch, took it home and sent it in the lighthouse keeper’s basket over to Nick’s side of the gap. The next day, however, the olive branch was still in the basket, apparently untouched. And there the branch remained, withering a little more each day, all through the week that followed: the week in which Justine’s city was held fast in the ticker-tape grasp of the Australian Rules football grand final.
Throughout the suburbs, flags were affixed to street front windows and fences, cars flew tassels of streamers from their aerials, and people wore their striped footy scarves to work, to the supermarket—anywhere, everywhere—even though the weather was mild.
On the morning of the day before the game, Huck Mowbray phoned Daniel Griffin to offer him the chance to watch the big event from the comfort of a corporate box. But he didn’t invite only Daniel Griffin. He invited Daniel Griffin, plus one, and Daniel called Justine into his office to explain that it was only reasonable, since she had done all the hard work on the Star’s Huck Mowbray cover story, that she be the one to accompa
ny him.
“Well?” Daniel said. “What do you say?”
He was standing behind his desk with a brightly striped scarf slung about his shoulders. It was in the colors of an AFL team that had been bundled out of the contest in the second qualifying final. Justine’s team—which she followed with complete loyalty but a low level of interest—hadn’t even made it to the finals, having played disastrously all season.
Justine: Is he asking me in a date way, or a work way?
Brain: Assuming the latter, it could be seen as a good opportunity to network. There could be interesting people in that corporate box.
Justine: Assuming the former?
Brain: In the context of Resolution Two—to stop thinking about Nick Jordan—this might be just what you need.
“Thank you, Daniel,” Justine said. “I’d love to come.”
* * *
As it turned out, the experience of watching a football final from a corporate box was a dismal disappointment to Justine. As a networking experience, it would only have been profitable if she’d been planning to purchase an air-conditioning unit or insure a sports car. Accompanying the air-conditioning salesmen and sports car insurance agents were women who were either pregnant or trying to be, and Justine found that she had very little to contribute to their conversations about episiotomies and folate. To keep herself occupied, she’d eaten too many of the team color jelly beans that were in little bowls on every shelf and table, and then had to spend time in the ladies’ room scrubbing the garish colors off her teeth. Really, she’d rather have watched the game from out in the open seating with a tomato-sauce-laden pie and a beer, rather than indoors with the antipasto and chardonnay.
With two minutes left in the game, by which time it was clear that the competition’s perennial underdogs had the premiership cup firmly in their grasp, Huck Mowbray—having drunk several liters of premium ale—leaped to his feet, raised his stubby and spouted a snippet of Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in a rousing baritone.
“When can their glory fade?” he intoned. “O the wild charge they made!”
At the final siren, the stadium was a vortex of noise, and Justine imagined that the sudden updraft of cheering might be enough to knock the hovering television network helicopter off its course. Down on the field, the winners leaped into each other’s arms, feeling no pain, while the vanquished sat on the muddied turf with their arms about their knees, feeling a double helping of it. The stadium’s sound system thundered out the tub-thumping song of the winning team, and Daniel had to lean in close to make himself heard. Justine could feel the warmth of his breath against her ear.
“Shall we sneak off for a quiet drink somewhere?”
Justine laughed. “Where do you propose to find a quiet spot in this city tonight?”
“I know just the place.” He grabbed her by the hand, apparently out of a desire not to lose her in the crush. But even when they were well beyond the stadium, making their way through streets crazy with football fever, Daniel still had Justine’s hand in his. And she found that she was not, for some reason, making any attempt to retrieve it from him.
“Where are we going?” she asked him.
“Zubeneschamali,” he said.
“Say again?”
“Zube-ne-scha-mali,” he repeated. “It’s a chartreuse bar. Down by the river.”
And Justine, not wanting to seem ignorant, kept her next question to herself.
It turned out that a chartreuse bar was a bar specializing in chartreuse, which, up until this evening, Justine had not known to be anything other than a wanky name for a shade of greenish yellow.
Zubeneschamali was indeed down by the river, on the uppermost floor of a warehouse building, and reached by a half-hidden staircase that gave the place the feel of a speakeasy. Inside, while there were one or two striped scarves to be seen, there was no colossal television broadcasting the postgame agonies and ecstasies, and for the first time since Justine and Daniel had left the stadium they could hear nobody at all singing the winning club’s song.
Predictably, perhaps, the bar was decorated in shades of chartreuse. The walls were painted thus, the stools were upholstered thus and the booth seating was piled with cushions in all the colors of a jaundiced rainbow. In the glassed-in shelves above the bar were bottles upon bottles, each of them filled with liquids in every possible shade of yellow through to green, while hanging down beneath these shelves were bunches of what looked to Justine to be dried herbs.
Daniel ordered two tasting flights at a price that made Justine’s eyes go wide.
“Ever drunk chartreuse before?” he asked, when a series of six shot glasses appeared before each of them.
“Not to the best of my knowledge.”
“A herbal concoction. Historically, made by French monks. It’s supposed to contain something like a hundred and thirty different botanicals,” Daniel explained.
The drink was, to Justine’s palette, sweet and syrupy and violently alcoholic. Nevertheless, the contents of all twelve glasses seemed swiftly to evaporate as she and Daniel talked—about Alexandria Park and house prices and good places to eat, about Jeremy Byrne’s retirement and Radoslaw’s driving, about the Star and Daniel’s plans for it. When the flights were done, Daniel sent for more of the yellow chartreuse that Justine had liked the best.
“So,” Justine said, “are you missing Canberra?”
“Not really. I mean, it’s better than it was, but it’s still essentially a pretend city in a cow paddock. Quarantine for politicians and their hangers-on.”
“Such as press gallery journalists?”
“They’re the worst of all,” Daniel said, with a self-deprecating grin.
They talked politics and movies, books and music, about whether you could simultaneously be a Brontë person and an Austen person (Justine said yes, Daniel no—he was all Brontë, he said). And as they talked they drank more chartreuse, which, just for good measure, they followed with more chartreuse.
“Better to be full of chartreuse than full of shit,” Daniel said, taking another slug. “That’s what I always say.”
“Is that so?” Justine said. “I heard it’s pretty well known around the Canberra press gallery that your motto is ‘charm to disarm.’ ”
Justine watched Daniel lose a touch of his composure. “Who told you that?”
It was Tara who’d dropped this little tidbit of information into Justine’s lap. Apparently, Daniel had quite a reputation for softening up his prey with charm before delivering the sucker-punch question.
“So, it’s true?” she pressed. “ ‘Charm to disarm’? Isn’t that a bit manipulative?”
“Oh, do we say manipulative? Or do we say strategic?”
“I say tomayto, you say tomarto?”
“But seriously, who was it? Who told you that?”
Justine laughed. “A good journalist never reveals her sources.”
“Fair enough,” he said. He took another sip of the bright yellow liqueur, and thought for a moment. “What this does indicate, though, is that…you’ve been checking up on me.”
Justine’s eyebrows leaped upward in her defense. “I’d hardly say checking up.”
“But, you cannot deny that you have been talking about me. Which would seem to indicate some level of interest?”
There was a silence, in which Daniel looked at Justine, very directly. Almost too directly. It gave her an inkling of what it might be like to be a zebra, separated from its pack, out on an African savannah. Daniel moved a little closer to her, his elbow on the table.
“I like you, Justine,” he said simply.
Justine blinked.
Was she about to kiss her new boss?
It appeared that she was.
* * *
Justine: Hello?
Silence.
It was morning. Probably late morning, Justine thought, given the intensity of the light that was seeping through a crack in the curtains. For a moment, she thought she was late for work, until the distant knowledge somehow dawned that this was Sunday.
Justine: Hello?
More silence.
Were they her own curtains? she wondered, trying to orient herself in space. Yes, they were. That was a good sign. And, over there, hanging on the wall above a dressing table: it was her very own map of the world, speckled with red pins for all the places she had been, and forested with green pins for all the places she wanted to go. Mongolia, Newfoundland, Norway, Finland, Buenos Aires, the Galapagos Islands, Jersey, Lucknow…yes, it was definitely hers.
Justine would have liked to go back to sleep, but she was too thirsty. Also, her teeth felt as if they were sprouting a coral reef. And she needed to pee, which meant that even though it seemed like a perilous mission, she was going to have to try to get out of bed.
When she sat up, Justine was overcome by an intense feeling of land-sickness, as though she’d been at sea for several years and was now struggling to cope with a world that was not swaying, but holding dangerously, disorientatingly, still. She closed her eyes, but the sensation didn’t abate. She opened her eyes, and saw that she was not alone.
Shit.
Daniel Griffin was in her bed. He was lying on his stomach, the bare skin of his shoulders uncovered by the quilt, one olive-skinned arm dangling toward the floor. His hair was thick and lush and messy against the white of her pillowcase, and just in case Justine was in any doubt about how he and she had spent the night, a deluge of images poured forth. This hand, here. That tongue, there.
Justine: Hello? HELLO?
But her brain didn’t answer. The fucking thing had gone on holiday. To Chartreuseville, presumably.
Justine edged out of bed. From her bedside chair, she snatched up a pair of thick socks that would do for slippers and a long, light cardigan that would work as a makeshift dressing gown. Via the bathroom, she went to the kitchen, still in a state of low-level panic. It was not until she had dissolved and consumed some aspirin that her brain, at long last, made an appearance.