Star-Crossed

by Minnie Darke

  “Oh, Brown. Did you do a Houdini again?” Annabel asked the dog. And then, to the man, “Can you bring him this way?”

  With Brown lying on a consultation room table, it didn’t take Annabel long to identify that the dog had a very badly broken leg and a slightly less badly broken jaw. She also suspected there was a bit of internal bleeding in the picture.

  “It’s not good,” Annabel told the man. “I mean to say, I can probably save him, but the question is whether or not I should.”

  She explained that Brown Houdini-Malarky had been in and out of the Dogs Home for most of his life. He’d been given more than a fair chance of being rehomed, but with his missing eye and…well, he wasn’t exactly an oil painting…nobody had ever opened their heart to him. He’d already been on death row once, she said. That he hadn’t been put down already was miraculous. All things considered, if she phoned the Dogs Home to ask them what to do, they’d probably tell her to—

  “No.”

  “No?”

  The guy took a deep breath. “Look, I have to get going. I’m already really, really, disastrously late for where I’m supposed to be. But if you can do the surgery, I’ll pay.”

  “You realize we could fix him up, only for him to be put down in six months, or a year? If no one adopts him. And surgery’s expensive. I mean, I’ll discount it as much as I can, but…” Annabel trailed off.

  “He really is ugly, isn’t he?” the guy said, scratching the dog fondly behind the matted fur of one ear.

  “He’s a shocker,” Annabel confirmed.

  At another time, Nick Jordan might have made a different decision. But right now he was high on applause and full of confidence in himself and the elasticity of his bank account.

  The opening-night crowd at the Botanic Gardens, amazed that Sideways Shakespeare had managed to make the show go on with a substitute Romeo, had leaped to its collective feet at the end and given the cast and crew a standing ovation. And not only that, when Nick had stepped forward to take his bow, the applause had intensified yet further. There had been shouts and whistles and fist pumping. He had been a hero. He had been the hero.

  “I don’t care what it costs. I’ll pay,” Nick promised.

  * * *

  Nick took the stairs to the front entrance of the Galaxy casino two at a time, and after pushing through a revolving door that seemed to take forever to turn, stepped into the sparkling ambience of the casino’s foyer. One wall was taken up with a vast water feature that appeared to drop curtains of diamonds. All around were women in glittering dresses and men in clouds of cologne.

  Nick, with his blood-splattered shirt, untied tie and scruffed-up hair, was attracting attention. But he didn’t have time to worry about that right now. Patting the pocket of his rumpled jacket, he reassured himself that even though his phone was at the bottom of a lily pond, Laura’s engagement ring was still safely in his possession. Nick found an elevator and hammered impatiently on the Up button, and at last the twin doors opened.

  The word BALLROOM was etched into the metal beside the topmost button on the control panel. Nick pushed it and he was away. Almost: just before the doors sealed in the center, they halted with a jerk, and slid back open. Nick felt a spike of frustration as a teenage girl and boy hurried into the lift with the air of two kids who’d just found a really good hide-and-seek spot. Seeing that they weren’t alone in the lift, they tried to compose themselves, but neither one of them could get the silly grins to disappear entirely from their faces.

  They were too young to be here, Nick observed. And they’d had a bit to drink. In fact, Nick was pretty sure that the neck of a bottle was sticking out of the girl’s grubby patchwork shoulder bag. She had a bob of dense sandy-colored hair and was pretty in an off-center way that had something to do with her eyes, which were blue-green, and very large.

  The girl made a small lurch forward, as if she were going to speak to Nick, then checked herself. Nick remembered that he probably looked a bit alarming in his bloodstained shirt, so he tried to exude a nonimpatient and nonthreatening vibe as he gestured to the control panel and asked the kids, “Which floor?”

  “Um…ballroom,” the boy said.

  The elevator’s three external walls were made of slightly tinted glass, and as the whole structure slid up over the face of the building, Nick and the lift’s two other passengers were treated to an increasingly impressive view. The usually open spaces of the city—the parks and gardens, the civic squares and riverside esplanades—were tonight cluttered with humanity.

  Nick checked his watch.

  It was 11:55.

  There was still time, he thought, to make this a night to remember.

  * * *

  It was Fern Emerson’s firmly held view that New Year’s Eve was the most anticlimactic, disappointing and bogus celebration ever invented. This was in large part because, back in her early twenties, on three consecutive New Year’s Eves, Fern had ended up in hospital.

  The first time, she’d gone out for the night wearing brand-new high-heeled shoes that had hurt like hell. It had been well before midnight when she’d admitted defeat, taken the horrible shoes off, and left them on a park bench. But then she’d stepped, in bare feet, on a rather large shard of broken glass that had needed to be removed under local anesthetic.

  The following year, Fern had been helping a hopelessly inebriated girlfriend into a taxi when the friend had accidentally kicked out with an uncoordinated foot and sent Fern flying into oncoming traffic, where she collected a decent concussion.

  The year after that, in an attempt to break the jinx, Fern had got the hell out of town. With a few friends, she’d gone up the coast to a tropical resort where she planned to see in the New Year with mai tais and a spot of midnight skinny-dipping. That was why Fern had been completely starkers when she had stepped on the venomous spines of a stonefish. She’d been rushed to the local hospital, in agonizing pain and wrapped in a towel, vowing and declaring that she would never again, not ever, under any circumstances, celebrate New Year’s Eve.

  But this year, she had felt that resolution dissolve into nothingness as Caleb Harkness had looked at her nervously across the Hello Petal counter and said, “I don’t mean to be forward. Or maybe that’s a lie. Maybe I do mean to be forward. But, what are you doing tonight? I don’t suppose there’s a snowball’s chance in hell you’re free. To go out. With me? It’s probably a bit late to get tickets to the concert at the Galaxy. But, for those in the know, there’s an overspill venue. Very exclusive.”

  And that was how Fern found herself at 11:45 p.m. on the roof of the Galaxy casino, huddled by the side of a large air-conditioning vent from which poured the gorgeous voice of Blessed Jones. Beyond the edges of the rooftop was a 360-degree view of the pulsing, night-lit city. Everything was perfect. Almost.

  Fern shivered. It was an occupational hazard of hers to be always a little bit damp, and the cardigan she’d thrown over her working blacks was only thin.

  “You’re cold,” Caleb observed. He helped her to her feet and led her to a plant room that sat on the rooftop like a recently landed TARDIS. The door was unlocked.

  “Is it always this easy?” Fern asked, amazed. Their journey to the roof had taken them in and out of elevators, up flights of stairs and through doors bearing signs that warned of dire consequences. And yet, Fern realized, they’d encountered barely any obstacles.

  “Almost always,” Caleb said, holding open the plant-room door.

  “How do you know this stuff?”

  “Misspent youth,” Caleb said, with a smile that hinted, truthfully, at his extensive repertoire of funny, crazy, stupid, true stories.

  Inside the plant room, the air hummed with electrical noise. All around were mechanical things whose precise functions Fern could not have guessed at. There were levers and pulleys, and large wheels that were turning, wire coiling o
r uncoiling as they moved. All along one wall were huge metal cupboards, their doors wide open to reveal panels cluttered with switches, knobs and wires.

  Caleb shut the door and stood there uncertainly, his hands in his pockets. It seemed to Fern that now they were inside, in this brightly lit space, neither she nor Caleb had any idea what to say, or how to be. She endured a few more seconds of awkwardness, then took a deep breath, and a risk.

  “Were you really looking for me?” she asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Really?”

  “Why so surprised?”

  “Things like that don’t happen. Not to me.”

  “They do, actually. Here, look, I can prove it.”

  From his wallet, Caleb drew out a well-thumbed scrap of paper and handed it to Fern. It was a list of all the florist shops in the city. “Now I’m starting to worry that you’ll think I’m a stalker.”

  Fern read through the list: the Tilted Tulip, the Bloom Room, Mother Earth, Laurel…and on, and on it went.

  “But your shop wasn’t listed in the yellow pages,” Caleb said.

  “I missed the cut-off date.”

  “And all for that,” Caleb said, “I might never have found you.”

  “Just think, though,” Fern said, her mind boggling. “Someone threw out all that Charles and Diana china. If they hadn’t, you’d have just gone out the door with your Pixies LP and we’d never have even talked.”

  “You remember which LP I bought,” Caleb said, grinning.

  Fern, her arms still wrapped around her cold shoulders, grinned back.

  And there, in the plant room on the rooftop of the Galaxy casino, at 11:55 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, Caleb Harkness kissed Fern Emerson for the first time. The kiss began gently, but didn’t take long to warm up. Soon Fern was tugging at the buttons on the front of Caleb’s shirt, and Caleb was reaching up under Fern’s black skirt to discover that her black stockings were held up with garters.

  “Oh, man, that’s sexy,” Caleb said.

  Soon Fern and Caleb were a tangle of arms and legs and tongues. They staggered backward and Caleb’s foot landed on the head of a broom; the broom handle fell sideways into the open switchboard cupboard. There came a series of rapid, electrical-sounding bangs. Sparks flew, and, unbeknownst to Caleb and Fern, one of the Galaxy casino’s glass elevators came to a shuddering halt somewhere between the twenty-third and twenty-fourth floors of the building.

  Caleb held Fern protectively to his chest as a faint burning smell wafted through the air of the plant room.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  “Fireworks,” said Fern.

  * * *

  Nick felt the elevator pull up short, and then bounce a couple of times like a box on a string.

  “That’s not good,” said the girl with the patchwork bag, looking up at the lift’s ceiling.

  Nick hammered on the button marked Ballroom, but to no effect. He tried the buttons for G, LG and Mezzanine. Desperately, he pushed a sequence of random numbers, and also the button that was supposed to make the doors of the lift slide open. But the doors did not open. Nor did the lift budge a millimeter. The only thing that happened was that the soothing tones of Ben Lee’s “We’re All in This Together” continued to seep in through the speaker above the closed doors.

  “Fuck!” Nick said.

  Then he remembered that his mobile phone was most likely being nibbled on by carp.

  “Double fuck!” he yelled, and kicked at the door.

  The boy and the girl each took a step closer together, then sprang apart as if they’d given each other an electric shock.

  “Oh, shit. Sorry. Look, it’s all right. I’m all right. I’m sorry,” Nick said. “I’ve had a pretty strange night, yeah? And, along the way, I lost my phone. We’ll have to use one of yours.”

  The boy and the girl looked at each other.

  “Mine’s flat,” the boy said. “I mean, totally.”

  “And I don’t have one,” the girl said.

  “Are you serious? What kind of teenagers are you?”

  “Impecunious in my case,” the girl replied, with a shrug. “Disorganized in his.”

  “Sorry. Sorry. Shit, I’m sorry. It’s just…look, I’m several hours late to meet my girlfriend, and I’ve got this massive ruby in my pocket and she’s expecting me to put it on her finger tonight, and I really wanted to see Blessed Jones, and by now the concert’s probably all over, and this was supposed to be a really, you know, important night…”

  “It can’t be long, though, can it?” the girl asked, trying a sequence of buttons for herself. “They’ll get the lifts moving again soon, won’t they?”

  “Look,” the boy said, pointing.

  Further along the face of the building, Nick saw another of the casino’s glass lifts trundling upward with ease.

  “Triple fuck,” Nick said, though not angrily this time.

  “Why?” the girl asked.

  “Because humans are lazy bastards. If all the lifts in the place were down, someone would notice almost immediately. But one stuck lift? You’d just go get in another one. Wouldn’t you? We could be here for a while.”

  “We could try the emergency phone,” the boy said meekly, and Nick felt himself color a little, knowing that he’d so far failed to be the responsible adult in the situation. He located a button showing the symbol of a telephone and after he pressed it, the speaker beside it let out a series of extended beeps. The bleeping went on, and on, and on. And then, abruptly, stopped.

  Nick pressed the button again. But for a second time the emergency phone failed to put Nick in contact with anybody who could help.

  “It’s New Year’s Eve,” the boy said, with a shrug. “Busy night, maybe?”

  A few blocks away from the casino, a bank of electronic billboards—shimmering with images and flashing lights—made a tall peak in the city’s skyline. On a square screen in the center was a display of diminishing numbers that Nick presumed to be a countdown of the seconds until midnight. There were 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

  “Well, happy New Year, guys,” Nick said glumly, and as he spoke, the sky beyond the bank of billboards filled with the sparkling blooms of fireworks—bright white, pink, red, blue, green.

  “Go on,” Nick said. “Kiss your girlfriend. I won’t look.”

  The boy blushed beetroot. “She’s not, um…we’re just friends.”

  And although the boy was too absorbed with his own discomfort to notice for himself, Nick quite clearly saw the heartbroken expression that spread outward, sudden as fireworks, in the girl’s blue-green eyes.

  * * *

  Two hours west of the city, in the town of Edenvale, Justine Carmichael sat at the optimal end of her parents’ leather couch—the one closest to the coffee table, upon which was a depleted bottle of gin, a small plate of partly dried-out lime slices and a bottle of flat tonic water. She wore what looked like, and in fact were, her pajamas: an oversized pink and white striped T-shirt with the word Dream emblazoned in gold letters across the chest, and a pair of black leggings with a large, ragged hole in one knee. As the clock ticked over from 11:59 to 12:00, Justine was alone, except for the gin and tonic in her hand, the snoring spaniel on the living-room rug, and the live footage of the city’s fireworks display that was playing on the screen of a muted television.

  Earlier in the evening, Mandy Carmichael, wearing a too-short nurse’s uniform, and Drew Carmichael, in a pair of aviator goggles and an ancient leather flying jacket, had tried to entice Justine to come with them to their New Year’s Eve party. It was being held out in the MacPhersons’ shearing shed and the theme was “what you want to be when you grow up.”

  “I don’t have anything to go as,” Justine had said, aware that she was failing to prevent herself from sounding petulant.

  “Bu
t you can just go as anything, darling,” Mandy had said. “Anything at all. It’s not like I ever wanted to be a nurse. I figured that if all you’ve got left is nice legs, you might as well show them off, hey?”

  “Mac’s doing a whole forty-four-gallon drum of his punch,” Drew had put in.

  Pissed fifty-year-olds, conversations with proud parents about Justine’s old school friends and their weddings and babies. Hay dust. Sneezing. The underlying smell of sheep shit and lanolin.

  “I don’t think I can face it, Daddo. Not tonight.”

  And now it was midnight, and a new year. Justine took a slug of gin and tonic. On the television, revelers sang and leaped and kissed, and overexcited reporters said things through brightly lipsticked mouths, while potassium nitrate burned all over the sky. The world was going on without her, but Justine didn’t need to know. She hit the Off button on the remote, went out onto the back deck, and dragged one of her mother’s indoor-outdoor couches closer to the edge of the timber decking where it gave her a better view of the sky.

  To the stars, Justine whispered, “Let’s try to do better this year, shall we?”

  * * *

  Below the stalled glass elevator on the side of the Galaxy casino, traffic lights turned green, amber, red. Cars accelerated and stopped. A lit-up Ferris wheel wound on and on, conveying each new carload of passengers ten minutes into their futures. Nick pressed the emergency telephone button again, and again, and again, until at last he gave up and sat down.

  The girl brought the bottle out of her bag, and—although it appeared to be close to empty—offered it to Nick.

  “Stone’s Green Ginger Wine?” Nick asked. “Seriously? I can’t believe you kids still drink this crap.”

  Nevertheless, he took a deep slug. The burning sweetness at first made him wince, but then it triggered a small flash of memory. Beach sand, and the distant thump of bass, and a teenage version of Justine leaning against his chest as she pointed up at an indigo sky. What was it that she had said?