by Minnie Darke
When at last she felt a little more settled, she made her way to work. At the front gate of the Star, she saw that someone had propped a bicycle against the fence. It looked a lot like Nick’s. She passed beneath the yellow peril and walked up the front steps.
Cecilia was at the photocopier in the hallway.
“Morning, Cecilia,” Justine said.
“Hey, Justine,” Cecilia said.
Justine passed the open door to Barbel’s office.
“Morning, Barbel,” she called.
“Morning, Justine,” Barbel called back.
And then Justine came to the open door to Daniel’s office. She was about to call out a cheery “Good morning, Daniel,” but then she saw that Daniel was not alone. In Daniel’s office, wearing Lycra shorts and his Where the Wild Things Are T-shirt, was Nick Jordan. His face was serious, and so was Daniel’s. On Daniel’s desk, filled with what appeared to be a semimangled bunch of dandelions, was Nick’s bike helmet. And beneath the helmet was a scattering of pages that Justine recognized immediately.
“Justine,” Daniel began.
But Justine had already turned and fled.
* * *
Justine: Being eaten alive by piranhas.
Brain: Being burned at the stake.
Justine: Being given to Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon as a test dummy.
Brain: Tongue-kissing a fistful of human excrement.
Justine: Ew!
Brain: What’s the problem? I thought we were supposed to be making ourselves feel better by making a list of everything we could think of that would be worse than what just happened?
Justine: Yes! But there’s no need to be revolting about it.
Brain: Oh, okay. Um…being tickled for forty-eight hours by a tap-dancing five-year-old who sings the Happy Birthday song the whole time, but slightly out of tune.
Justine: I don’t know…I think I might even take that one over what happened this morning. I’m going to lose my job, you realize. And nobody will ever employ me again. At least, not as a journalist. I’ll have to go work at McDonald’s. Or maybe I’ll have to spend my whole life holding up those SLOW and STOP signs on the roads. And Nick’s going to hate me now. And so will Daniel.
Brain: Was that a knock at the door?
Justine: No.
Brain: Justine, it was a knock at the door.
Justine: Was not.
Brain: You know it was, right?
Justine: It was a knock at 12B’s door.
Brain: Ah, nope. Your door.
Justine: I don’t want to answer the door. I don’t want to see another living human. Ever again. For as long as I live. Or even talk to one. That’s why I drew the curtains and locked the door and switched off the phone.
Brain: You’re going to have to open the door, Justine.
Justine: Maybe it’s just Mormons.
Brain: I hate to tell you this, my friend, but you’re in denial.
Justine: So, who is it then?
Brain: Most likely, it’s Daniel. Or Nick.
Justine: No, no, no! I don’t want to see either of them. Which one of them is it?
Brain: Which of them would be worse?
Justine: Nick.
Brain: Then that’s who it will be. It’s just that kind of day.
On this occasion, however, Justine’s brain was wrong. At the door was Daniel, his shirtsleeves rolled to the wrist, his tie loose at his collar, and his brave face held on with the metaphorical equivalent of dollar store sticky tape. Justine flushed with shame.
“Can I come in?”
Justine nodded and opened the door wider.
Daniel looked around the apartment as if it were the first time he had ever seen it. Or perhaps as if he were trying to see it, and her, anew.
“Can I get you a cup of tea?” Justine ventured.
“No, I’m fine.”
“Coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
He didn’t sit. Instead, he leaned against the edge of her dining table. From the tabletop, he picked up the plastic bow that had been part of Justine’s Halloween costume. She watched him as he turned it over in his hands, testing the resistance in its string.
“So,” he began, and Justine—perched on the arm of the living-room couch—waited for him to continue. She felt like a prisoner in the dock, waiting for her sentence to be pronounced.
“So…you understand that I have to suspend you. From the Star.”
“Suspend?”
“Far out, Justine. You’re lucky I don’t—”
“I know, I know. That’s what I mean. I mean, you’re only going to suspend me? That’s amazing. That’s more than I deserve. It’s—”
“I’m going to suspend you, on half pay, while I decide what to do. It might still be the case that I have to let you go.”
“Oh.”
“And for what? Over the bloody stars? Justine, what the hell were you thinking? I can’t believe that a writer with so much promise could be such a…dumb arse.”
“I’m sorry, Daniel. I’m really sorry.”
But Daniel waved her apology away as if there were no longer anything she could say that he would believe.
Justine said, “The last thing I want to do is give you any dog-ate-my-homework excuses. I know that everything I did was just plain wrong. And I’m sorry. But is there anything I could say that would convince you that—”
“Given all the circumstances, I’m the wrong person to make the final decision. I can’t think clearly about this one. So, I’m going to delegate to a higher authority.”
“Jeremy?” Justine whispered, and the mere thought of her former boss’s disappointed expression was enough to bring on a fresh wave of shame.
“Yes. And in the interests of full disclosure, I’ll also have to tell him that my relationship with you has been, well, less than professional. I thought we could do this, Justine. Maybe I’m just a hopeless optimist, but I thought we’d be okay.”
“I’m so sorry. I—”
“I’m going to have to talk to Leo Thornbury, too.”
“You will? What will you tell him?”
“Just the facts. As I see them.”
Justine nodded.
“One other thing,” Daniel said, not looking at her. “Not a work-related thing.”
“Yes?”
And now he did look at her, very directly.
“How long have you been in love with Nick?”
Justine could see how much it hurt him to ask that question. She understood, too, that it was a privilege to be allowed to know anyone well enough to see their tenderness and pain leaking out around the edges of their brave face. She’d been careless with his feelings, and the least she could do now was to tell him the absolute truth.
“For as long as I can remember, I think,” she said.
Daniel held the bow up between his two hands. “Sagittarius, hey?”
“Yes,” Justine said.
“Free-spirited.”
“Yes.”
“Impulsive.
“Often.”
“Honest to a fault.”
Justine winced. Daniel stood up straight, and set the bow back down on the table.
“I’ll be in touch,” he said. “And, Justine?”
“Yes?”
“Happy birthday.”
* * *
In the days that followed, Justine stayed indoors and kept the curtains of her apartment closed. At first, she told herself all that was required for her misery to be complete was for Nick Jordan to come to her door and yell at her. But after a while she began to think she was wrong. If anything, a bit of yelling would come as a welcome relief. At least it would be something. But Nick did not come to her door. And he did not phone.
&nbs
p; She would have liked to call best-pal Tara, and to tell her the whole terrible story, but she didn’t know if she could bear the disappointment of a single other person whom she loved or admired. So Justine locked herself away at her home, subsisting on the meager offerings in her fridge and pantry.
Soon, the powdered milk supply was exhausted, which made tea and coffee unappealing, and after that the bread in the freezer ran out, which made toast an impossibility. The freezer was empty except for the ice trays, the fridge contained no eggs and no yogurt, and all that remained in the fruit bowl was an orange that was in the process of transforming into a green. Eventually, Justine was forced to confront the reality that it was going to be necessary to leave the apartment in search of provisions.
Her sunglasses were nowhere to be found, and when Justine stepped out onto the street after these days spent in semidarkness, the sudden summer glare was blinding. For quite some time, she stood on the stoop, blinking. When at last her vision cleared, she saw a small removal van parked out the front of the ugly brown-brick apartment block next door, its rear doors thrown wide open. Two men were lifting packing boxes into the van, while a third man formed them into stacks.
Immediately, she knew what was happening. She knew it in her gut even before she saw the familiar two-seater couch being loaded into the back of the van. When she saw Nick coming out of the front door with a suitcase in either hand, Justine felt the impulse to go to him, to talk to him, to explain. But just a little stronger was her impulse to turn in the opposite direction and hurry away up the street.
When Justine returned with her groceries, the van was gone. Upstairs, she pulled back her curtains and saw just what she expected to see: Nick Jordan’s apartment was more or less empty. Where the wheat-colored rug had been laid out, there was now nothing but green carpet. In the bathroom, the shower was once again without a curtain. And lying on the concrete floor of her balcony, as if it had been thrown there, was the lighthouse keeper’s basket. The string line that had connected the two apartments was gone. Whether it had been untied—or cut through—Justine didn’t know.
Cusp
Tansy Brinklow stood in the archway at the edge of her practice’s waiting room. In her arms she held a clipboard, and her glasses were low on her nose as she scanned down her list of appointments with a lightly furrowed brow.
“Giles Buckley,” she announced.
She watched as a tall man stood, adjusting his braces as he did so. She met his eye and acknowledged him with a facial expression that was just short of a smile.
“Mind your head on the arch,” she said, and then set off down the hallway toward her consulting room.
Her room was furnished with leather-and-polish gravitas. She was not the sort to put silver-framed pictures of her daughters on the desktop, or set out a humorous flip-over calendar. She did supply tissues, but these she kept in a drawer.
At her gesture, her patient sat. She sat, also. She opened a file and folded her ring-less hands together on top of the papers within.
“Let’s get straight to the point, shall we, Mr. Buckley?” she said. “Your tumor is benign.”
“Sorry?”
“It’s good news, Mr. Buckley. The tumor is benign. It’s only that it’s made its home in a rather awkward spot in your lung. Hence the shortness of breath, the wheezing, the blood when you cough.”
She spoke for a time then, about surgery, and surgical risk, and recovery times, but Tansy could see that Mr. Buckley was not entirely present with her. He sat, staring at the palms of his immense hands. Every now and then he shook his head ever so slightly, as if disturbing an insect that had landed on his hair.
“Mr. Buckley?” she prompted. “Do you have any questions?”
He looked at her, his brow furrowed. “So, what do I do?”
Tansy blinked. It was not every day that she had good news to deliver, and yet this poor man looked more confused than relieved.
“Do? You mean about the surgery?”
He went on, “No, no. Not that. I mean, what would you do, Doc? If you just found out that you still had the rest of your life? That it was still yours, after all?”
“Oh,” said Tansy. “Well. That’s hard to say. What do you…enjoy, Mr. Buckley?”
He held his hands up and out like he might have been about to start juggling fruit. “If you’re given a second chance, then shouldn’t you, you know, do something with it?”
A lump thickened and expanded in Tansy’s throat. Inexplicably, she thought of Simon Pierce’s soft hands, as different as a man’s hands could be from Giles Buckley’s. It was as if she could suddenly feel Simon’s touch in six different places on her body, all at once.
“What would you do, Doc?”
“I would buy an Alfa Romeo. A convertible,” Tansy Brinklow said out loud, surprising herself by doing so. Then she closed her mouth firmly before the other part of her response could escape her lips. And I would marry Simon Pierce.
* * *
“Not that one,” Laura said, with a little laugh. “This one.”
She led the way to the considerably shorter queue—the one for first-class and business-class passengers. But being in the shorter queue didn’t change the fact that it was stupidly early in the morning, and Nick was suffering from the slightly cold, creaky, unoiled feeling—of body and soul—that he always felt when he was forced to be awake before dawn. They were heading to South Australia on an early morning flight, to spend several days posing for the cameras amid alleyways of grapevines. He’d emailed to Chance all his measurements so that they could have his tight-fitting moleskin pants at the ready. And an Akubra hat in the right size.
“Are you okay?” Laura asked.
She’d asked him this once already, at the apartment. Although he had officially moved back in with Laura, the cardboard boxes that contained most of his possessions were still piled up in the entrance hall. During the period they’d been apart, Laura had arranged for almost all the picture hooks in the place to be removed and for the walls to be repainted, so Nick’s production posters remained stacked against a wall. None of his books, CDs or DVDs had as yet found a home either.
“Why don’t we just wait and see what we actually need,” Laura kept saying, “before we go cluttering the place up again?”
With Christmas just days away, the airline’s check-in counters were festooned with scalloped loops of silver tinsel and clusters of red and green baubles. In front of Nick in the queue was a woman in a zebra-print playsuit with aggressively spray-tanned shoulders. Nick could see how the chemicals had rubbed off on the fabric at the shoulder straps.
“Nick? Are you okay?” Laura repeated, putting a gentle hand on his arm.
In the time-honored fashion of people who are not yet ready to say why they are not fine, Nick said, “I’m fine.”
It didn’t make Nick feel good to behave this way, but he felt safest to be locked inside himself for the moment. Even though he didn’t know precisely what was wrong with him, he did know that, right now, letting out his thoughts and feelings could do nothing but harm.
“Okay,” Laura said, and she shrugged as if to say suit yourself.
Nick and Laura reached the front of the queue, and as they stepped forward to check in their bags, the girl behind the counter looked hard at Laura.
Here we go, thought Nick.
“Are you…aren’t you? It is! You are! You’re on the Waterlily ads,” the girl said. “Oh my God! Those ads are so amazing.”
And Laura—whose shining dark hair was caught back in a simple ponytail, whose makeup was restrained but still perfect, and who didn’t in any way look the least bit pre-dawn—smiled winningly.
“I don’t suppose?” the girl asked, pulling her iPhone out of the pocket of her airline-issue jacket. “Would you mind?”
It amazed Nick that Laura never did mind this kind o
f attention. She was always entirely generous and patient when people wanted to take pictures of her, and with her. As the girl came around to the customers’ side of the console, grinning and blushing, Nick saw Laura effortlessly switch on her modeling face, which was just ever so slightly different from her everyday face. It was as if she were somehow able to solidify her features, or standardize them. It was her business, Nick supposed, to know precisely what to do with her eyes, her cheeks, her lips, in order to get a completely predictable, gorgeous result.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Laura asked, once she and Nick had reached the far side of the security checkpoint, and taken their seats at their gate lounge.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Nick said again.
“It’s just that you seem…”
And she was right, of course. He did “seem.” Because he was.
“I think I’ll go get something to read on the plane,” Nick said. “Do you want anything from the shop?”
Laura smiled a little sadly. “Just a more cheerful you.”
At the concourse newsagent, Nick picked up a packet of black currant pastilles and the year’s final edition of the Alexandria Park Star. The cover was a Ruthless Hawker cartoon, and Nick gave a little snort of laughter as he decoded its message. The scene was set in a Christmastime living room. At the hearthside, a small table held a crumb-scattered plate, a near-empty brandy balloon and a nibbled carrot. At the center of the image, dressed in onesie pajamas, was the child version of the nation’s prime minister, and he was reacting with unconstrained delight to what he had discovered had been left for him, overnight, on the mantelpiece. For there, strung in loops, just where you would expect the bulging stockings to be hung, were small bouquets made out of the testicles of the nation’s five most influential union bosses, each little bundle tied with a red bow and garnished with a sprig of holly.
Nick opened the magazine to the page where Leo Thornbury stared out from beneath his thick, shaggy eyebrows.