by Minnie Darke
While Annabel did her work in the surgery down the corridor, Patricia stayed in the office, trying as hard as she could not to think about the contents of the heavy-duty plastic bags that would later that day be slung into the tray of a council ute.
By midmorning on this particular terrible Friday, Patricia’s wastepaper basket was overflowing with used tissues. She’d loved that old sheepdog, Esther. She would have taken the dear old girl home with her, if it weren’t for the fact that she’d promised Neil that she wouldn’t bring home every lost cause that tugged at her heartstrings.
Patricia plucked another tissue from the box and removed the thick rubber band from around the middle of the day’s stack of mail. She noticed the letter immediately. It was large and fat, and the envelope was of thick and expensive-looking paper stock: not at all the sort of letter that was usually received by the Dogs Home. It came, she saw, from the venerable law firm Walker, Wicks and Clitheroe.
The first thing Patricia noticed when she opened the letter was that the rather regal signature at the bottom of the page was that of Don Clitheroe himself. Whatever this letter had to say, she reasoned, it must be important. She pushed her glasses higher on her nose and read on. It seemed that a client of Clitheroe’s, a gentleman named Len Magellan, had recently died and bequeathed his entire estate to the Dogs Home. His instructions were to liquidate all his assets so that the Dogs Home might have access to the capital in the most immediately useful form. The amount that might be expected to be garnered from the sale of Mr. Magellan’s assets was in the vicinity of…
“Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
Patricia’s scream filled the reception area like a siren. It spread down the corridor, through the tearoom and the toilets, finally penetrating the surgery where Annabel had just drawn up a measure of Lethabarb to be plunged into the leg of a scruffy, one-eyed terrier. The scream left the building to set off the entire canine population of the Dogs Home into a cacophony of barking, yapping, yowling and howling, amid which Patricia stood up and performed some motions that were perhaps distantly related to those of a rain dance. Then her eyes went wide, and she set off at a run down the corridor in her bright-colored sneakers.
“Annabel! Annabel! Annabel!” she yelled. “Stop! Stop! Stop! Don’t do any more!”
But Annabel Barwick and Jesse Yeo had already stopped, and were peering nervously out of the surgery door, prompted by the scream to wonder if a gunman, or similar, was on the loose in the Dogs Home. Instead they saw a bright-eyed and tearful Patricia O’Hare coming down the hallway brandishing the sheet of creamy-white paper that would mean the Dogs Home could afford to give Brown Houdini-Malarky—now panting in relieved reprieve on the newspapered floor of his pen—another chance at life.
* * *
Fifteen-year-old Phoebe Wintergreen—Leo, serial though reluctant favorite of classroom teachers, drinker of lime milkshakes, only child and omnivorous consumer of books, lover of Shakespeare and impassioned bathroom-mirror performer of grand soliloquies—was angry. She’d been angry all afternoon. She’d been angry in maths, where she’d solved quadratic equations with sufficient violence to break three leads in her mechanical pencil, and also in PE, where she’d thrown herself into interval training with the red-faced vigor of a boxer preparing for the revenge bout of their career. She’d turned up to her after-school music lesson flushed and fuming, and attacked her warm-up scales as if her cheap, borrowed saxophone were in fact a dangerous, inflexible snake that she must wrestle into submission.
Phoebe was angry all the tiring way up the steps of the highway overpass, and angry all the way down the other side, her book-filled backpack jouncing painfully on her spine and her sax case knocking against the side of her knee. She was angry as she climbed over the low, broken gate at the front of the ugly, rented brick bungalow where she lived. The cloud of rage that hung almost visibly about Phoebe’s form was enough to send Tiggy the cat streaking away to a safe place under a hydrangea bush. Oh, yes, Phoebe Wintergreen was angry.
Alice Wintergreen—Gemini, Woolworths night-shift shelf packer and workplace union organizer, youthful single mother and television cooking show addict—was not angry. She was tired, but only in the way that the bodies of shift workers learn, almost, to accommodate. And she was a little fretful—about the electricity bill, about the suffering of the displaced people on the television news, about the rising price of groceries, about the erratic behavior of the increasingly demented Mr. Spotswood from next door, about global warming and the cost of Phoebe’s saxophone lessons and the broken seat belt in the car—but here again, it was only in a way that was now so familiar to her that it was hardly worth remarking upon. Baking helped, and right now Alice was making a batch of candied chili and double chocolate cookies. She was chopping the chocolate and monitoring the finely sliced chilies that simmered in a sugary syrup on the stove, when she heard the front door being wrenched open, then slammed closed.
“Enter, stage left,” she whispered to herself, just before her daughter swept in.
“I hate him,” Phoebe wailed. She dropped her saxophone case to the floor and flung off her backpack.
“Hello, love,” said Alice.
“I hate him! I hate him more than any person, living or dead, has ever hated anybody. In the entire history of hatred, there has been no hatred as great and terrible as mine for that cream-faced loon!”
“Tea?” said Alice.
“I despise him. I loathe, detest, despise, abhor, and…um…abominate him. You should see how he reads Shakespeare. Thinks he’s so clever, but he wouldn’t know an iambic pentameter if it crawled up between his buttocks and died there. He doesn’t even deserve to live.”
“Who’s this?”
“Luke…Foster,” Phoebe spat. “That’s who.”
“Who’s he?”
“New boy.”
“At this time of year?”
“His parents couldn’t afford St. Gregory’s anymore, so they pulled him out and inflicted his moronic presence on us. On me! I ask you, I ask the universe: What is it about me that makes whatever deity that sits on high believe that I deserve suffering of this magnitude? For what sin, I ask you, am I being forced to share a drama class with such an ill-favored bolting-hutch of beastliness. Such a swollen parcel of dropsies, a huge bombard of sack, a stuffed cloak-bag of guts…”
“What’s that from?”
“Henry IV, Part One,” Phoebe said in an aside, then continued: “I curse him. And I not only curse him, but his sire and his dam to boot. I curse every single one of his forebears whose lustful stupidity landed this whoreson obscene greasy tallow-catch in my drama class! I hope redback spiders lay their hatchlings in his scrotum! I hope he gets a rare and disgusting skin disease that means he has to stay at home and never, ever—”
“I wish you wouldn’t check yourself out in the mirror while you’re ranting,” Alice said.
“What? There isn’t even a mirror in here!”
“Honey, I’m not blind. I can see you admiring yourself in this.”
Alice tapped a floury knuckle on the dark-glass door of the microwave, leaving a smear like a quotation mark. “It ruins your performance, love. Always did. Even when you were three.”
“Mu-u-um. This is serious. He ruined my drama exam! Ruined it! And now I’m going to fail. And when I do, it will be entirely because of that loathsome, shriveled dugong’s pizzle and his iPhone.”
“I thought it was only the internal exam.”
“How is that relevant? It’s my best subject! I mean, who on earth has ‘Bad to the Bone’ for a ringtone who is not concurrently a total…carbuncle!”
“Hang on. You hate this Luke…because his phone rang in the middle of your drama exam?”
“He spoiled her. My beautiful Juliet. You know how hard I’ve worked! I’d just got to and shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth, so I was ju
st really winding into it, and then—da da da da da, there’s this blast of George-arsehole-Thorogood. I completely lost concentration and I just couldn’t get it back again.”
“Oh, Phoebs,” Alice said. “I’m sorry, love.”
Under the light touch of her mother’s sympathy, Phoebe deflated like an unknotted balloon. She subsided into a chair and her upper body capsized onto the kitchen table. Her light brown curls spread out over the tablecloth.
“I will hate him forever,” she said.
And that was when the doorbell rang.
“Oh God,” Phoebe said, rolling her eyes. “That’ll be Mr. Spotswood, won’t it?”
“Probably,” said Alice, with a tight smile.
“How many times today?”
“Three already.”
“I suppose you want me to get it,” Phoebe said.
“Would you? Please?”
“O-kay,” she said, and hauled herself back onto her feet.
In the years that their elderly neighbor, Mr. Spotswood, had been losing his memory, Phoebe had learned a thing or two about how best to accommodate him in conversation. If Mr. Spotswood confided that he was planning, once again, to vote for Robert Menzies, Phoebe would tell him she was certain this was a good decision. And if Mr. Spotswood remarked upon his surprise that he’d just this day turned on his television set to discover the pictures now appeared in color, Phoebe would simply agree that these new advances in technology were amazing. On her way to the door, Phoebe limbered up her mind in readiness for improvisation. When she opened the door, however, what she saw was not Mr. Spotswood, but Luke Foster.
Phoebe gave a slight shake of her head, as if to displace the obvious hallucination that there was, on her doorstop, a teenage boy with thick, devilish eyebrows and a serious cowlick in the middle of his forehead.
“I, um, asked Maddie where you lived,” Luke said, holding out a tall, white milkshake cup bearing the logo of a fancy boutique cafe that Phoebe had heard of but never been to.
Getting no response from the stunned Phoebe, he continued on hurriedly, “She said you liked milkshakes. It’s lime-flavored. I hope she wasn’t taking the piss.”
He tilted the cup slightly, by way of invitation to take it. But Phoebe only continued to blink, unable to get any words to flow mouthward from her racing, cluttered brain.
“It’s an apology,” Luke said. “For today. I’m so sorry for being such a fuckwit. And not only because you were so angry about it, but because your monologue was the only thing worth listening to all day. You’re really talented.”
There was no great distance between the front door of the Wintergreen residence and the 1970s electric stove in the kitchen, where Alice Wintergreen stood stirring her candied chillies. So Alice heard most of what passed between Phoebe and Luke. She heard Luke tell Phoebe that Romeo and Juliet was going to be performed at the Botanic Gardens in the summer, and that he would get her a ticket, if she liked, as a proper apology, and she heard Phoebe make a stuttering acceptance speech. When Tiggy announced her presence on the kitchen windowsill with a gossipy meow that might almost have said, You’ll never guess who’s showed up at the front door, Alice gave the cat a Cheshire-sized grin.
“I do believe, Miss Tiggy,” said Alice, changing the direction of her stirring to counterclockwise, “that our girl will henceforth be in need of a good countercurse. Don’t you agree?”
Scorpio
OCTOBER 23–NOVEMBER 21
When Halloween arrives each year, with the bones of the pagan festival of Samhain still visible through its ragged cloak, it prepares the people of the northern hemisphere to hunker down for the life-and-death test that is winter, and reminds them to make their peace with the dead. But in the southern hemisphere, where Halloween comes just before the start of the cricket season, at a time of year when sunscreen sales are on the up, the night of the dead is really just an opportunity to break out an outrageous costume and concoct brightly colored alcoholic beverages.
For the staff at the Alexandria Park Star, Halloween was a big event because the advertising manager, Barbel Weiss, always threw a party—a big party. During her childhood, Barbel’s nomadic European parents had settled for a time in Minnesota, where young Barbel had loved the annual festival of pumpkin carving, costumes, scary stories and trick-or-treating. So each October 31, she and her wife, Iris, hosted a Halloween party at their Austinmer Street home, and invited a large circle of friends and colleagues. Year by year, the party’s reputation had grown, and the guests took their costumes seriously.
Justine’s preparations had involved buying a children’s bow and arrow set from a toy shop and digging out from her suitcase of travel memorabilia a Statue of Liberty headdress made of mint green foam. She had dipped the starry headdress into PVC glue and then pressed it into a baking tray spread with silver glitter.
That year, Halloween fell on a Tuesday, and at five o’clock Justine was making her way along Rennie Street in the direction of home, talking to best-pal Tara on the phone.
“Well, it’s nice,” Justine said.
They were discussing Daniel. More specifically, they were discussing dating Daniel, which Justine had been doing over the past few weeks.
“Nice?” Tara repeated. “Any advance on that?”
“I think I’d be prepared to go so far as ‘very nice.’ ”
Drawing level with the windows of a real estate agency, Justine halted. A large poster in the front window described a bay-windowed mansion as being in a “highly sort-after address.” Cradling her phone against her shoulder, she reached into her bag and pulled out her Sharpie. The pen made a squeaking sound as she wrote, straight onto the window glass: I think you may mean “sought-after.”
“According to every bit of press gallery gossip I’ve ever heard,” Tara continued, oblivious to the fact that the world was, even as she spoke, being saved from homonymic spelling crime, “Daniel Griffin is entirely gorgeous. Also charming, smart, good at his job, funny and totally ripped. You, yourself, said the sex was good. But now you’re only drinking expensive wine with him and snogging on the doorstep at the end of a date? I don’t understand that. What’s really going on, here?”
Justine sighed. “It’s such a weird situation. When we’re together away from work, we have a really nice time, but then something comes up, like this party tonight. Everyone we work with will be there, so we’ll pretend nothing’s going on. It makes me really uncomfortable. I suppose there are reasons that it’s not considered world’s best practice to shag one’s workmates.”
“Oh, come on,” Tara said. “Everybody does it. Everybody’s been doing it for as long as everybody’s been…doing it. I suppose the real question is: why don’t you want to do it?”
This was a good question.
One night, Daniel had taken her to dinner at Cornucopia (where she had been gratified to see that the fettuccine on the menu now had its full complement of “t”s and “c”s), and she had thought that this was quite lavish enough. But he had surprised her by paying the bill at the end of the main course and taking her to Raspberry Fool for dessert wine and cheesecake. Then he’d commandeered a water taxi to take them on a longer-than-necessary ride on the river that eventually landed them at Clockwork, where they had coffee and chocolate. Daniel hadn’t let Justine pay for a thing, not even the coffees, and she knew that the whole night must have cost a bomb.
On a Sunday, he’d driven her out to a seaside vineyard for lunch. The grapevines were greening up nicely, and the whole place smelled sweetly of springtime grass. Daniel and Justine drank a different wine with every course, and spent a few hours after lunch lying on beanbags under shade sails in a sea breeze that was neither too hot nor too cold, too strong nor too flimsy. It was, all of it, just right.
Even so, Justine couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d been on the same date numerous times. Each time th
e food was lovely, the wine was the very best, the conversation was entertaining and Daniel was entirely chivalrous. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, not to like.
“It’s hard to explain,” Justine said weakly.
“Try,” said Tara.
“I feel like there’s something missing.”
“What?” Tara pressed.
Justine: What am I trying to say, exactly?
Brain: Sorry. No clues up here.
“Maybe…” Justine began. “Maybe I don’t know because the thing that’s missing is something I’ve never had before. It might not even exist, for all I know.”
Justine heard Tara sigh heavily. “Not content with having Daniel Griffin’s affections on a platter, my best pal wants a freaking unicorn to boot.”
* * *
When Justine’s grandmother died, she had left nothing to chance; her will had gone on for pages, and pages, and pages. To Justine, she bequeathed a lovely selection of earrings and pendants, bracelets, rings and items of impossibly fragile Belleek china. But far more than any of these, Justine valued the two other things she’d inherited from Fleur Carmichael, and those were: a wardrobe full of vintage clothes and a petite figure that enabled her to wear them.
Although a very well-dressed woman, Fleur had not believed in fashion, or in buying garments that would last only a season. She had always bought good-quality clothes and expected them to do her a lifetime. This was why she had never thrown out her 1960s embroidered gingham sundresses, tailored coats and evening dresses, or her high-waisted pants or Liberty print blouses. Justine liked wearing these clothes, not only because of the way they looked, but also because it felt like carrying around a part of her grandmother with her.
For Barbel’s Halloween party, Justine had decided to wear a garment of her grandmother’s that she’d never before had the opportunity to take out for a spin: a narrow knee-length dress in sparkling silver Lurex. It was a little scratchy against the skin, but for tonight’s purposes it was perfect. And it seemed especially appropriate to be wearing one of her grandmother’s dresses tonight, since October 31 had been Fleur’s birthday. Had she still been alive, she’d have been notching up eighty-eight years.