Today a rival has an eye on your prize, Aquarius. If good fortune was yours for the taking, remember that it can be snatched from you just as easily.
‘This is our stop.’
I followed Jude down the steps to the lower deck of the bus, clinging tightly to the handrails, because the vehicle was still moving. We were in a part of East London I’d never visited before, part of the old docklands, except, unlike most of the area, this bit hadn’t been redeveloped and taken over by shiny glass skyscrapers. Here, it looked as if nothing had changed for forty years: the grubby high-rise apartment blocks, the scrubby patches of grass where children kicked footballs between swathes of broken glass, the washing lines strung haphazardly across balconies, the cars parked on the grass verges on the rims of their wheels, rusting quietly to death.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘How long has your friend lived here?’
‘Only a couple of months. It’s not permanent – she’s acting as a property guardian, looking after a flat in a building that’s due to be knocked down. It would have happened years ago, but the residents put up a fight, and rightly so. They’ll be moved out to God knows where, the whole community ripped apart.’
I noticed the sun glinting off a pile of used nitrous-oxide canisters outside a boarded-up pub and wondered whether, if it’d had an Alice to rescue it, breathe new life into it like the Ginger Cat, it would have changed anything at all. Somehow I couldn’t picture it.
‘It’s a shame,’ I said. ‘So much underinvestment in infrastructure for so long. How sad.’
‘It’s become a dumping ground for forgotten people,’ Jude agreed. ‘Refugees, the long-term-unemployed, people with substance abuse and mental health problems. I’ve worked in communities like this, volunteering at food banks and stuff, and you never get used to the hardship.’
‘But this is a social call, right?’ I tried my best to lighten the mood. ‘We’ve brought wine and everything.’
‘And Indigo can’t wait to meet you.’ Jude looked down at me and smiled, his face softening. ‘You two will get on really well, I just know it.’
‘Are you sure I look okay?’
I felt woefully unprepared for my first official outing as Jude’s girlfriend and first introduction to one of his friends. Just the night before, I’d mentioned that I had the evening off, and he’d said, ‘Cool! We can go and see Indigo,’ and before I’d been able to gain much more intel than that they’d been at university together and she lived not that far away, he’d whipped out his phone and WhatsApped her, and now here we were.
‘It’s this one, I think,’ Jude said. ‘Pettigrew Tower.’
We looked up at the sign on one of the concrete walkways, which was missing all its letters bar the ‘T’s and ‘E’s, and could just about make out the less-stained shadows where the others had been.
‘Must be,’ I said.
‘There’s no lift. Well, there was, back in the day, but not any more. So we’re walking up to the eighth floor.’
I laughed. ‘Just as well I’m wearing flat shoes. That, and I hit the gym almost every day.’
Even so, I was properly out of breath by the time we reached our destination, and had to stop and wipe sweat off my top lip. Meeting Jude’s oldest friend was nerve-wracking enough without being a panting, perspiring mess.
‘Are you sure I look okay?’ I asked.
‘You look gorgeous. You couldn’t look any other way if you tried.’
Reassured by his words and his hand gripping mine, I fixed a friendly smile on my face as Jude tapped on the door of Flat 805. But I felt it waver as soon as Indigo answered the door. It wasn’t so much that she was attractive – although she was properly, knock-out beautiful – it was the particular type she was.
She was tall, slender almost to the point of gauntness, with pearl-pale skin and long, poker-straight black hair that matched her all-black, trailing clothes. She had enormous bluey-green eyes fringed with lashes so thick and dark they looked false, although I was ninety-nine per cent sure they weren’t. See also her full, perfectly curved lips that I was willing to bet had never been near an aesthetician’s needle. She looked exactly the way fourteen-years-ago emo me had dreamed of waking up looking, through some random overnight miracle that would transform a short, curvy ginger girl into a tall, slender dark one. It had never happened, of course (barring the one time, best forgotten, when I’d attempted to dye my hair black using a kit in a box from Boots) and I’d long since grown to accept and even like the way I looked. But still, Indigo awakened teenage insecurities I’d thought were long gone.
‘Hello!’ She reached out and hugged Jude, then hugged me too. She smelled of fags and musky perfume. ‘Come in! Welcome to my humble abode! You’re my first visitors.’
‘We brought a bottle of cava,’ I said, humbly offering it.
‘Lovely.’ Indigo led the way into the flat. Although the day was bright and sunny, in here it was almost dark. Only thin slivers of light managed to slip through the edges of the windows, which were hung with heavy drapes in various mismatched pieces of fabric. There was no furniture apart from a single upright wooden chair, a pile of cushions on the floor and an easel holding a portrait of a woman with a green face, who bore a passing resemblance to Indigo herself.
‘Make yourselves comfortable,’ she said. ‘I’ll just get some glasses.’
Jude and I sat down on the floor, our backs against the wall, and he put his hand on my knee and squeezed it reassuringly. After a couple of moments Indigo reappeared with the open bottle and three empty jam jars.
‘I’ve used these for paint water,’ she said. ‘But they should be reasonably clean. I’ve cold running water but no hot, so I have to borrow friends’ showers.’
I almost said politely that she was welcome to add me to the roster, then thought better of it. The last thing I wanted was this woman floating alluringly round my flat in nothing but a towel.
‘So how did you two meet?’ She lowered herself gracefully down onto a cushion without using her hands, splashed wine into the jars and passed one to each of us.
‘At the climate-change demo a few weeks back,’ Jude said. ‘It was love at first sight, wasn’t it, Zoë?’
I laughed. ‘Lust, maybe. But then I’d just fallen over and taken all the skin off my knees and I wasn’t myself. Jude rescued me.’
‘And Zoë insisted on knowing my star sign before she’d get on the train with me,’ Jude said.
‘And we’ve been together ever since,’ I said, omitting to mention the four-week hiatus when I’d neither seen nor heard from Jude.
It was the first time we’d talked about this to anyone apart from each other, and I could imagine the story becoming a familiar one, which we’d embellish and improve over time – part of the mythology of us. The thought was an odd mixture of thrilling and comforting, and I guess Jude must have felt it too, because we met each other’s eyes with a smile that was as intimate as a caress.
‘Cute,’ Indigo said, not very enthusiastically. ‘So you believe then? In the science of the stars?’