Star-Crossed

by Minnie Darke

  “These,” she announced to Rafaello.

  Rafaello pursed his lips. Scratched his head. “You’re sure? For your engagement party? You want the wedding china of Princess Diana and Prince Charles?”

  Fern nodded happily.

  Raf worriedly ran his hand through the remains of his dark, slicked hair. “But with the numbers we have talked about for your party, there won’t be enough here. Not for everybody.”

  Raf seemed relieved to be able to point this out, Fern thought.

  “Actually,” she said, indicating Caleb’s minivan, parked out the front of the cafe, “I have plenty more where this came from.”

  * * *

  In the Oxfordshire village of Fritwell, Dorothy Wetherell-Scott née Gisborne, former owner of the world’s largest Charles and Diana wedding china collection, woke to find that her husband had already risen. She was puzzled, for Rupert was not, by nature, an earlier riser. She hoped he was not unwell.

  At the base of the stairs, Flossie the border collie waited like a forward scout, and at the sight of Dorothy, she gave a conspiratorial grin before turning tail and trotting into the kitchen, her toenails clicking brightly on the linoleum.

  Rupert was at the stove, cooking eggs.

  “Well, good evening, Mrs. Wetherell-Scott,” Rupert said, with a wink.

  “Good morning, Mr. Wetherell-Scott,” Dorothy said.

  This joke had not, for them, grown tired.

  Dorothy saw that Rupert had set the table with a white cloth, and got out the best silver. There was an envelope waiting at her place, and the dozen red roses on the table were beautifully arranged in a china vase. With a gasp, she realized that it was a Kate and Wills wedding vase.

  “Oh, Rupert,” Dorothy sighed.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day, love,” Rupert said.

  * * *

  The woman slid a fingernail, painted in a shade called Pixie Dust, under the flap of a large, white envelope. Then paused. To the ginger cat, sitting tidily on the kitchen table and watching her every move, she said, “Well, Shithead, here goes.”

  Inside the envelope was a magazine. Hastily, the woman shuffled through its pages. Then she stopped and stared, frozen in disbelief. The clock ticked. The cat’s heart tocked. But the woman did not, for a time, breathe or blink.

  Then: “Eeeeee­eeeee­e!”

  It was official. It was in print. There was proof of it in the small, square photograph: a profile shot, her neck long and elegant, her hair styled by city hairdressers to curl wildly out of the wrappings of a richly patterned headscarf. It was her. It really was. And she was Davina Divine, astrologer to the Alexandria Park Star.

  * * *

  Daniel Griffin let the February edition fall closed on his desk then leaned back in his office chair with a satisfied smile. It was a corker of an issue, even if he did say so himself. Jenna had scooped the press gallery on a new travel expenses scandal that was threatening to unseat a senior member of parliament, and a couple of quotes from Martin’s excoriating column on the state of Australian rugby were going viral. As for Justine, Daniel had to hand it to her. She hadn’t missed a beat since returning to work, and her piece on the retirement of a silver-tonsilled radio shock jock had been so delicately acidic that he’d laughed out loud in several places.

  Just quietly, Daniel thought—as the telephone on his desk began to ring—he, too, deserved a pat on the back. Replacing Leo Thornbury with an unknown like Davina Divine had been a risky move, but if her first column was anything to go by, his punt was going to pay off brilliantly. Davina’s writing was contemporary, spicy, just a little bit sexy and—what was more—her February horoscope had promised spectacular romantic opportunities for the lions of the zodiac. Daniel, still leaning back in his chair, let the phone ring three times, four. Lions, he reflected, responded to demands in their own sweet time.

  “Daniel Griffin,” he said, answering at last.

  “Daniel, hello,” said a woman’s voice. “This is Annika Kirby.”

  Annika Kirby, Annika Kirby, Daniel thought, trying to place the name. It took him a moment, but then he got it. She was the deputy editor of one of those women’s magazines that were wall-to-wall sex and fashion—except for the compulsory back-of-the book think piece about child marriage or land-mine clearances. But what did Annika Kirby want with him?

  “I’m ringing because you’ve been named number seventeen on our list of the nation’s top twenty eligible bachelors,” she said, “and it is my happy responsibility to put together a few column centimeters on, well, on you.”

  Seventeenth, he registered. Seventh would have been better. But even so, he’d made the list.

  “I see,” Daniel said, trying not to sound as pleased as he felt. “So, Annika. What exactly would you like to know?”

  * * *

  Len Magellan had been confounded to find himself in Heaven. For one thing, he’d always thought Heaven was bullshit. And then there was the fact that he’d hardly been a model citizen. Often, he’d been a total prick.

  And yet, here he was, sitting in a very comfortable rocking chair, perched on the edge of a cloud. With Della beside him. Her hair was its youthful blonde and styled in the manner of Grace Kelly’s, and she was wearing the pastel lemon skirt suit that she’d chosen as her going-away outfit for their wedding day.

  He’d expected her to be wild with him about his decision to cut their three children out of his will. But, as things transpired, Della hadn’t even mentioned it. Heaven was like that; stuff that had mattered on Earth seemed to matter a lot less up here.

  Now she said, “Look, Len, there’s our Luke.”

  Len could see Alexandria Park, stretching out like a map, with meandering pathways cutting through the green lawns, and the blue splotches of the lakes. Luke was waiting on a park bench, with a nervous air and a tissue-wrapped bunch of tulips partly obscured behind him.

  A girl approached. She wore a pretty peasant dress with long, full sleeves and colorful embroidery, and was surreptitiously wiping her sweaty palms on the back of her skirt.

  Luke, catching sight of her, hurried the tulips behind his back and stood to greet her.

  “Hi,” said Luke.

  “Hi,” said the girl, who was, of course, Phoebe Wintergreen.

  Luke had spent most of January squeezed inside a hot car on a gruesome road trip with his family, and for the last couple of weeks Phoebe had been away at drama camp. Now that they were seeing each other again after all this time, they were—each of them—as nervous as hell.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day,” said Luke, thrusting the bunch of tulips out toward her. God, he was a fuckwit. He’d nearly shoved them up her nose.

  “Thank you,” said Phoebe. “They’re beautiful.”

  Having uttered that completely unremarkable line, Phoebe flipped over the page of her mental script, only to find that the following page was blank. Utterly blank. So she said nothing. Luke said nothing either. There was a silence. And it was an awkward one. In fact, Phoebe was sure it was the most excruciating silence ever in the history of excruciation.

  Then they both, simultaneously, had the same swift and reckless idea. Fuck it, they thought. And kissed.

  Luke kissed Phoebe just the way he had visualized kissing her, and it turned out that her perfume smelled of peppermint. And Phoebe kissed him back just the way she had imagined that she would, and the skin of his cheek felt ever so slightly raspy against her own. The kiss was long and sweet.

  “Yesss!” said Len Magellan, in his rocking chair, as he punched the air of Heaven.

  * * *

  Back on Earth, Justine Carmichael walked down Dufrene Street. Even though the day’s light was falling, she levered her sunglasses down from the top of her head to cover her eyes before making a casual-looking turn into the markets. She threaded her way through to the fruit shop at the back, and
there it was. In big, black, bold letters: ADVOCADOS. Justine took a deep preparatory breath and reached into her bag for the brand-new Sharpie she had swiped from the office stationery closet. This time, it was red.

  Conditions were risky, Justine observed, since customers were thin on the ground. Behind the counter was the grocer himself, wearing a long, striped apron that only just stretched around his formidable girth. Fortunately, though, the avocado stand had been positioned to the far left of the display, and after a quick assessment of the sight lines, Justine decided that she should be able to get in and out, unseen, using a towering pyramid of Granny Smiths as cover.

  She approached, swift and decisive, uncapping the pen as she went. She reached the sign, but instead of crossing out the additional D in ADVOCADOS, Justine sketched a small, bright love heart beneath it. Then she was off, not looking back, out of the markets, across the road, through the wrought-iron gate and into Alexandria Park. Smiling.

  On one side of the park’s meandering path was a flock of tai chi practitioners. In their loose white clothes, and in perfect synchronicity, they flowed from one position to the next. On the other side of the path, down by the bandstand, a girl lay on her stomach, staring into the face of a young man lying on his back, a bunch of tissue-wrapped tulips on the grass beside him. Justine could not help but watch on as the boy reached up and took the girl’s face in his hands, tenderly drawing her in for a kiss. Smiling as she went on, Justine wondered whether Nick would yet be home from rehearsals. She had nearly all of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by heart.

  When she was almost at the far side of the park, the path curved around so that she was looking directly at Evelyn Towers. On each side of its shallow front steps, young elm trees cupped the last of the day’s light in the curves of their slightly yellowed leaves. Inside the arched moldings of the entranceway, a pair of leadlight doors glowed invitingly through glass wedges of pale pink, apricot and green. Justine quickened her pace.

  In the living room, its walls newly decorated with theatrical production posters, Justine found a note lying on the dining table. In his scrawly capital-letter handwriting, Nick had written COME UPSTAIRS. Justine kicked off her work shoes and shoved her bare feet into a pair of Nick’s old thongs. You minx, you, she thought, as the rubber soles made schlepping sounds on the steps that led to the rooftop.

  When she opened the door, she saw all the parts of the scene at once and laughed with delight. The banana lounges were angled together under the wiry shade of the clothes line, which was hung with foil stars. There were a hundred of them, or more, dangling on lengths of string and twisting in the breeze, their silver surfaces sparkling, the floodlight having been angled just so.

  On one of the star-spangled occasional tables were a bottle of sparkling wine and a pair of Vegemite-jar glasses. There was the wagging tassel-topped tail of Brown Houdini-Malarky as he ran on short, twisted legs to greet her. And then there was Nick Jordan—Aquarius, lover and friend—reclining in one of the banana lounges with a battered straw hat pulled down low over his forehead. At the sight of Justine, he struck a cheery chord on the ukulele in his grip.

  As Nick sang the first few lines of “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine,” Brown pricked up his ears and joined in with a good-natured howl.

  Justine swiped the hat off Nick’s head and ruffled his hair before kissing him in the middle of the forehead. He put down the ukulele and shifted over, and she lay down beside him. But Brown wasn’t going to miss out.

  “Oooof,” said Nick, as the full weight of a nicely fattened street terrier landed unceremoniously on his stomach.

  “Sit down, you goofy dog,” Justine said, and Brown flopped into a pose of utter contentment, his paws on Nick’s chest. The bamboo lounge was not especially comfortable, and Brown’s hot breath was not entirely pleasant to smell, but nothing made Justine want to move from where she was.

  “So what do the stars say tonight?” Nick asked.

  Justine squinted upward.

  “They say, Aquarius, that your life has never been better.”

  “Is that right?”

  “It is,” Justine said.

  Above Nick Jordan, Justine Carmichael and Brown Houdini-Malarky, a constellation of foil stars sparkled and spun. And above those scraps of brightness, beyond a layer of man-made fog and cloud, the real stars also turned.

  Acknowledgments

  My huge thanks to Johnny Jones and Morris Jones, for penning the lyrics to “Hidden Shallows”; Wallace Beery, for advice on cryptic crossword puzzles; Sarah LeRoy, for advice on Shakespeare; the Picky Pen, for exquisite pedantry; Gaby Naher, for being this book’s golden star; and Beverley Cousins, Hilary Teeman, Francesca Best, and Dan Lazar, for all their faith, hard work, and brilliant ideas.

  Writing would be harder without: Freda Fairbairn (Taurus, best of all readers), Sugar B. Wolf (Leo, pathfinder and soul sister), Jean Hunter (Leo, Renaissance chick), Lagertha Fraser (Sagittarius, infallible compass), Pierre Trenchant (Scorpio, knight in shining iArmor), Marie Bonnily (Cancer, nurturer and true believer), Lou-Lou Angel (Leo, happiness-maker), the Noo (Canis Major, footwarmer and faithful companion), Alaska Fox (Gemini, luminous star of my sky), Dash Hawkins (Capricorn, hug machine), Tiki Brown (Capricorn, miracle), and, most especially, Jack McWaters (Aquarius, my love).

  About the Author

  Minnie Darke—Gemini with Virgo Rising, Scrabble cutthroat, knitter, and lover of books, freshly sharpened pencils, and Russian Caravan tea—wrote this book to amuse herself and to entertain you.

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