Star-Crossed

by Minnie Darke

  Brain: Good morning!

  Justine: Good morning? Good fucking morning?

  Brain: Um, curtains? They’re open.

  Justine: Shit!

  Clutching at the fronts of her cardigan, Justine crept, crablike, around the walls of her living room and hastily tugged the curtains over the French doors.

  Brain: That’s better.

  Justine: Better? Better than what? Better than the complete fucking disaster we’re in the middle of? We were supposed to be going to the grand final, not to bloody bed! What were you thinking? I finally get the reporter’s job I’ve been waiting for—for years, I might add—and I just slept with my new boss? What the hell?

  Brain: Can we have coffee before we talk about this?

  In the kitchen, Justine clumsily spooned coffee grounds into her gas-top percolator.

  Brain: Ahhhh. That smell. I feel better already.

  Justine: This is bad, this is bad, this is very, very, very bad. How could we be so stupid?

  But her brain went silent when Daniel arrived in the kitchen and wrapped his bare arms around Justine’s middle. His hand, warm and dry, slipped inside her cardigan. She felt skin on skin over solar plexus and it was meltingly nice.

  “Good morning,” Daniel said softly.

  Justine: Um…help?

  But there was no answer from the brain. There was, instead, Daniel’s other hand on her thigh. And his lips on the back of her neck. She turned around inside his arms and kissed him properly.

  “Scorpio,” he whispered into her ear.

  “Afraid not,” she said.

  * * *

  What did one wear to work on the Monday after a weekend during which one accidentally slept with one’s new boss? This was the question Justine pondered as she stood in front of her bedroom mirror wearing nothing but underpants and a bra.

  She picked out a black dress and held it up against her body. It was one of those dresses that looked simple, but fitted Justine in a special way that made it an irreplaceable, die-hard favorite. Nevertheless, it was not an option. It had a lace panel at the back, between the shoulders, that might be interpreted as a little bit sexy. So, no. No black dress.

  Maybe the gray pants and the cobalt blue shirt with the ruffles and the bell sleeves? Nope. It was an outfit that said casual. It said comfortable. And comfortable said I’m okay with everything that happened. And thinking, now, about everything that had happened was enough to make Justine blush. The couch, the rug, the kitchen counter…they were never going to seem quite the same to her again.

  Daniel had stayed for the better part of the day. He’d kissed her goodbye at the front door, and then, before she could close it behind him, he’d turned back.

  “We should probably talk about how it’s going to be,” he’d said. “At work.”

  “How is it going to be?”

  “We’re adults, right? And we’re smart people. Work is work, and play is play. We can just keep them…separate.”

  “Of course,” Justine had said. “Smart. Separate.”

  “Hey?”

  “Yes?”

  “The play part. I liked it. A lot, okay?”

  After he’d gone, Justine had gone into the bathroom for a shower, and, throwing off her cardigan, she’d noticed in the mirror the purplish bite mark at the base of her throat.

  Brain: Classy.

  Justine: Oh, you’re back now, are you? Any ideas?

  Brain: We could always freak out.

  So freak out they did. Tenaciously. For all of Sunday evening, and for most of the night. And now it was Monday morning, Justine was operating on perhaps three hours of sleep, and she had nothing to wear to work. When her wardrobe was half empty, and her bedroom chair lost beneath an avalanche of fabric, she finally settled on a pair of tweedy brown pants, and a burnt-orange jumper with the cuffs, collar and hem of a white shirt peeking out. And she would tie a narrow silk scarf around her neck to hide that mark, just to be on the safe side.

  It was still early when she reached the far side of Alexandria Park, but she was feeling too strange and nauseated to enjoy stopping in at Rafaello’s, so she wandered in to the markets. Today, it was not with any joy, nor the usual satisfaction of the spelling vigilante, that Justine crossed out the rogue D in ADVOCADOS. Today, she was just irritated. She felt a little stab of pain in her temple, too. She hoped she wasn’t coming down with something.

  * * *

  “Justine?”

  Daniel stood in the doorway to the staff writers’ room, and although his expression was carefully inscrutable, neither Martin nor Roma looked up from their work to see it.

  At last, Justine thought, glancing up at the clock on her computer screen. It was almost five o’clock, and until now Daniel had made no effort to engineer even a moment to be alone with her. And all day, she had been distracted by this fact, even though she knew it ought not surprise her. Work was work, he had said, and play was play. He was only being true to his word.

  “Can I see you in my office?” he asked.

  Justine nodded, equally inscrutably.

  Brain: See, I told you so. You just had to wait.

  Justine: Okay, smarty-pants. So, you were right.

  But, having followed Daniel into his office and taken a seat, Justine had the distinct impression that this was not going to be the kind of moment alone that she had been hoping for.

  “What do you reckon the chances are,” Daniel began, looking serious as he leaned back in the chair that Justine still thought of as Jeremy’s, behind the desk that Justine still thought of as Jeremy’s, inside the office that was a good deal tidier now that it was no longer Jeremy’s, “that ‘Davina Divine’ is a real name?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “This morning I opened a letter from someone calling herself Davina Divine,” Daniel said, handing across the desk a sheet of folded letter paper. “I’m interested to know what you make of it.”

  It was the kind of paper that you’d get in a stationery set: the kind you might buy for a teenage girl when you didn’t know what else to get her for Christmas. The page had a thick border of blue, purple and aqua swirls, amid which tiny mermaids frolicked. Justine could see the matching envelope, neatly sliced open, lying on top of a manila folder right in front of Daniel. The letter had been addressed to the editor; the writing, on the envelope and the letter itself, was in sparkly purple ink, the scented kind. Justine could smell it: sweet but nasty, like half-chewed bubble gum.

  “Read it,” Daniel urged.

  To the Editor,

  I am writing to you in the hope that you will send my letter on to your astrologer, Leo Thornbury. I would have written to Mr. Thornbury directly, but for all my trying, I have not been able to find an address for him. I, too, am an astrologer, though of course I am not anywhere near in the league of Mr. Thornbury. I hoped he might be kind enough to explain to me where I am going wrong with the star sign of Aquarius, since for the past few months, his readings for the water bearer have been very different from mine—almost opposite in some cases. I know that I must be getting something wrong, but I don’t know what it is, and I earnestly hope that Mr. Thornbury might give me some advice that will help me in my career.

  Yours faithfully,

  Davina Divine

  Dip Astro (FAA), Adv Dip Astro (FAA)

  Justine was only about one sentence into the letter when her heart began to trot. Two sentences in, and it was cantering. By the time she reached the sign-off, her pulse was in full gallop. The kitsch mermaid letter paper quivered in her hand.

  “So, I’m wondering,” Daniel asked, “whether you can offer me any insights into Ms. Divine’s inquiry.”

  From within a rush of adrenaline, Justine tried to evaluate the situation. Daniel had received a letter from a crazy star lady. That was all. That, on its own
, couldn’t mean anything much. But then Daniel opened the manila folder in front of him, and there, inside, was a stack of papers that Justine recognized only too well. As Daniel fanned out the contents, Justine saw Leo’s faxes, most of them a bit crumpled, and all of them speared through somewhere near the middle with small ragged holes. Daniel had been back through the contents of the document spike.

  Brain: Not good.

  Interleaved with the faxes were pages torn from the Star. The horoscope pages. On both the faxes and the clippings were hot pink stripes of the kind made by a highlighter pen. Aquarius, Aquarius, Aquarius. The word jumped out at Justine from several places at once.

  Brain: Seriously not good.

  On Leo’s faxes, Justine glimpsed the highlighted words “new path with determination” and “prevailing push and pull” and “Saturn urges you.” In the clippings, other words—Justine’s own words—had taken their places: “Paradise unpaved,” “God’s way of remaining anonymous,” “mushrooms from toadstools,” “Boldness be my friend.”

  Daniel, observing that Justine had seen and registered the contents of the folder, closed it. “Why did you do it?” he asked.

  Justine attempted speech, but her tongue felt as if it had been anesthetized. Helplessly, she shrugged.

  Daniel continued to watch her, and as he did so, Justine became intensely aware of the kinds of problems one faced after sleeping with one’s boss. You could be in the middle of being very badly busted for tinkering with the horoscope column, but remembering how sweetly he’d kissed your nose. Or having the inappropriate thought that you knew exactly what your boss looked like at the moment of orgasm. Which was, in Daniel’s case, wide-eyed, like a tawny version of Astro Boy.

  “I’d have thrown the letter in the bin,” Daniel said. “Except I remembered that morning, right after you were promoted. When I got to the office, you weren’t at your new desk. You were at your old desk, typing in the stars. To help Henry, you said.”

  Justine felt utterly seen-through.

  “But I do have a theory,” Daniel said, “about why you did it.”

  He toyed with a pen as he spoke, threading it in and out of his fingers. He looked serious, but slightly pleased with himself, a bit like a detective about to cleverly explicate a whodunit.

  “It’s only ever been Aquarius. None of the other signs,” he said. “Which is what makes me think that you…well, let me put it this way. My theory is that by altering Leo’s horoscopes, you were attempting to promote your better self, to quash the more materialistic parts of yourself, perhaps even help yourself recover from a failed love affair, but certainly go after what it is that you really want in life. To chase your dreams. Because you’re the Aquarius, aren’t you, Justine? And you’ve been trying, through Leo’s column, to change your own fate.”

  Brain: Actually, Justine, that’s genius.

  Justine: I know. And way better than the truth.

  Justine fixed her face into a mixture of contrition and admiration.

  “Wow,” she said to Daniel. “That’s amazing. Because you are absolutely right.”

  And was she imagining it? Or did Daniel’s gym junkie chest swell ever so slightly?

  “Okay, then,” Daniel said. “I’m glad we’re getting somewhere.”

  He didn’t exactly smile, but his facial muscles made a gesture in that direction.

  “It was deeply stupid of you, though,” he said, and Justine let the contrite part of her expression come to the fore. “You probably thought, ‘It’s only the stars.’ And, you know, you’d be right. It is only the stars. But Leo Thornbury is one of our oldest, most distinguished contributors. Because you’re smart, you probably calculated that the risk of Leo ever noticing the discrepancies was virtually nil. But, Justine, what if he had got a copy of the magazine? What if he had seen the changes you made? What you did was disrespectful in the extreme. Not to mention unethical.”

  “I know,” Justine said. “And I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

  “Bloody oath, you won’t do it again,” Daniel said. “Because if you did, I’d have to send you back to the salt mines of copy-running at the very least. Let you go, at the worst.”

  Work is work, Justine thought ruefully.

  “So, no, you are not going to do this again. And to make sure you’re not even tempted, I want you to know that although I’m not going to tell Henry anything about your editing experiment, I am going to tell him that when this month’s stars arrive I want him to pay special attention. I’m going to tell him I expect 100 percent accuracy in transcription. And that I may even be checking up.”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “Just you and me,” Daniel said. “And I think it’s best if we keep it that way.”

  “Thank you.”

  “All right then.” Daniel picked up a pen and drew an absentminded line across the page in front of him. “And, Justine?”

  “Yes?” she said, longing for him to say something, anything, that would confirm to her that they had actually spent half the weekend in bed together. That he liked her.

  “You’ve got the makings of a really good journo,” Daniel said. “Don’t do anything dumb like this again, will you?”

  The question stung, even though it was entirely fair. She had been stupid. She had been stupid to tinker with the stars, and she had been stupid to get involved with Daniel.

  “I won’t,” she said.

  “Promise?”

  “Promise,” she said. And she meant it, too.

  * * *

  Arriving home that evening, Justine felt spaced out and fogged up. Every joint in her body ached and she couldn’t tell whether she was hot or cold; her cheeks were burning, but she was shivering. Did she have a fever? No, of course not. Getting sick was just nothing but inconvenient.

  She went to close her living-room curtains, and there on the balcony opposite was Nick Jordan wearing his sandalwood jumper and sheepskin boots, and he was taking the olive branch out of their lighthouse keeper’s basket. Looking up and seeing Justine, he smiled, put one hand to his heart, and held out the withered branch as if it were a rose.

  Justine opened the French doors, and the evening air made her shiver quite violently.

  “Was this once an olive branch?” Nick asked.

  “It was once a very big sorry.”

  “I’ve been away,” Nick said, letting the branch fall to his side.

  “So far away that you couldn’t return any of my phone calls?”

  “Maybe not that far. But I needed a bit of time to process that little conversation of ours.”

  “I really am sorry, Nick. For all the stupid things I said.”

  “They weren’t stupid.”

  “Yes, they were. And rude. I should not have said the waterlily thing. I lost control of my mouth.”

  “That happens to Sagittarians.”

  “I thought you were never going to speak to me again,” Justine said miserably. There was a painful lump in her throat.

  “Hey, are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m…no, maybe. Look, I don’t know,” Justine said. “My head. And now, my throat.”

  “You’re sick?”

  “No. I hate being sick. It’s boring.”

  Nick shook his head, indicating that he thought she was being hopeless. “Go inside and get warm. I’ll be over in a tick.”

  “I’m fine,” Justine insisted, but Nick was already on his way.

  It hadn’t been that long since Justine had last seen Nick. It was only a matter of weeks, really. And yet there was something about seeing him at her front door—after this lapse of time—that made her want to speak German. Unheimlich. That’s what Nick was. He was just like himself, only slightly more himself, as if he were too sharply outlined or all his colors were turned up to supersaturated. Unheimlich
: unfamiliar in a way that could only make sense if whatever was unfamiliar was also, simultaneously, completely familiar. By God, but the Germans had good words.

  Justine smelled the sandalwood scent of Nick’s jumper and began to worry that she might do something irrational, like throw herself against the warmth of him, and cry, and confess. About Daniel ticking her off. About the stars. About…

  “You really look like shit,” Nick said.

  “Thanks,” she managed.

  “Have you got any lemons?”

  “There might be a very sad one at the bottom of the fruit bowl. Why?”

  “You, couch. Right now. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Justine curled up at one end of the couch, and pulled the throw rug over her. From the kitchen, there came the sound of drawers opening and closing, and cutlery clinking on crockery. At last, Nick emerged to hand Justine two painkillers and a mug that was full of hot yellow liquid that looked like it was sprinkled with some of Lesley-Ann Stone’s certified organic dirt. Justine sipped at it experimentally and made a face.

  “What the hell?”

  “Lemon and honey,” Nick said, sitting on the ottoman not far from Justine’s feet. “The usual suspects. But also crushed garlic and a sprinkle of cayenne pepper. I know, I know. But it’ll make you feel better.”

  She took another sip, but the foul brew had not improved.

  And here, Nick did something strange and nice. He reached out and touched Justine by putting the back of his hand to her forehead. It had the odd effect of making tears rush up underneath Justine’s eyeballs.

  “Drink that brew. And I mean all of it. Take the tablets, and head off to bed, hey?”

  And then he took his hand away.

  “I really am sorry, Nick. I hated you being angry with me.”