‘Well… kind of. I mean, I’ve got an app on my phone and I was doing online dating and I thought it would be kind of interesting to see what happened if I went out with guys with different star signs.’
She raised an eyebrow, a skill I’d never mastered and always envied. ‘An app on your phone. That’s not very scientific, is it?’
‘It uses data provided by NASA,’ I said defensively. ‘And it’s actually been surprisingly accurate. In fact, on the day I met Jude, it said…’ I tailed off, because I couldn’t actually remember what Stargazer had said on that particular day, only that, with hindsight, it appeared to have foretold exactly what had happened.
‘Indigo’s all over that stuff,’ Jude said. ‘She reads tarot cards and does palmistry and everything. She used to do readings at parties to earn extra cash at uni.’
‘Until I realised that I shouldn’t cheapen my gifts in that way. Now I just practise occasionally, as a favour to friends. I could do your charts, if you like? See how compatible you are on a deeper level?’
‘I… thanks for offering,’ I said.
I wasn’t sure why, but suddenly the dark room, Indigo’s shadowy face and the stifling air was making me feel slightly sick and definitely unsettled. I sipped my fizzy wine and tried to fix the bright smile on my face again.
‘That would be amazing,’ Jude said. ‘Come on, Zoë, you’re up for it, aren’t you?’
‘Of course.’ It was nothing, I assured myself – just a bit of fun. What did that matter? Jude and I were together. He’d told me he loved me and I’d told him back.
Indigo did the same trick she’d done when she sat down, only in reverse. It was like there was a string running from the top of her head to the ceiling, allowing her to raise and lower herself without any apparent effort. That, or she did shedloads of yoga or Pilates or something that made her both enviably strong and enviably bendy. She drifted over to a teetering pile of books in a corner and ran her finger down the spines, before pulling one out. The rest of the pile wavered and fell, but she ignored that, returning to her place on the cushions.
‘Now, Zoë, the date, time and place of your birth,’ she said.
I told her, although I wasn’t sure exactly what time I’d been born and had to make it up.
‘And you’re the twenty-ninth of May, ten minutes past one, in Bristol,’ she said, with a smile at Jude.
Bloody hell, how did she know that? Presumably she’d done his horoscope before. They’d known each other for years, after all, and it was clearly a bit of a party trick of hers. But how had she remembered? Was there more between them than friendship? But I wasn’t going to be jealous – I wasn’t going to allow myself to be the insecure girlfriend who quizzed her man about his past relationships and his current friendships and made myself miserable over comparisons that were only in my own head.
Even if she did look like Christina Ricci.
‘Okay?’ Jude whispered, giving my thigh a reassuring squeeze.
I nodded and squeezed his in return. Indigo was flicking through the pages of her book, her head bent so her black hair touched the page, cigarette smoke curling up around her head. She paused and ran a not-very-clean fingernail down a page. Don’t judge, I told myself, your fingernails probably wouldn’t be all that clean either if you were living in a place with no hot water. She’s Jude’s friend – you’re meant to like her, not feel all defensive and resentful.
‘Well, this is interesting,’ she said. ‘Of course, as you know, Gemini and Aquarius are normally an excellent match. Your shared curiosity about the world, your passion for causes you care about, your quirkiness and willingness to turn your backs on convention make you well suited. But there are some strange things in this particular chart.’
Jude laughed. ‘Go on then, Ind, hit us with it. Stop being all mysterious. We’re not a hen party you’re trying to impress.’
‘I won’t go into detail. But, Zoë, your chart has some anomalies. It’s Saturn in your rising sign. It suggests that, in fact, you have a yearning for stability and a leaning towards convention that’s unusual in an Aquarian. Unusual in any air sign, in fact.’
I remembered the words on my app. It’s okay to admit that you’re a bird who’d be happier in a cage. Most of the messages it sent me I’d forgotten almost as soon as I read them, but that had stuck with me for some reason – possibly because whenever I thought about it, it reminded me of poor battery chickens, and made me feel guilty about every single fried egg I’d ever eaten. And then thinking about fried eggs made me really crave one, which made me feel guiltier still.
Indigo might have said she didn’t intend to go into detail, but detail was exactly what she went into. Smoke curling up around her face between her curtains of dark hair, her finger tracing the lines on the page, she proceeded to tell Jude and me what the stars had in store for us.
‘Your need for security can lead you to stifle those you love, Zoë,’ she said, her voice low and solemn. ‘Do you ever find yourself driving people away because you consider your own needs above their own? I thought so. You see, Jude, like most Geminis, needs an escape from the mundane. And for him, with that Libra ascendant, it’s even more important to strike a balance. A relationship such as yours, which has burned so hot and intensely at first, can easily be smothered to nothing, if you don’t keep on fanning the flames.’
‘That doesn’t sound too bad, does it?’ Jude said. ‘Zoë can be my stability, and I can fan her flames. Win–win.’
Indigo did the eyebrow thing again. ‘Then there’s nothing to worry about, is there? Unless you’d like a tarot reading, just to be sure?’
‘Maybe next time,’ I said. ‘But I’d love to hear more about your art. That painting is amazing – you’re seriously talented.’
And that was the end of the mysticism talk, thank heavens. Indigo chatted away, a lot more normally, about how she sold her paintings online and at car boot sales, and even asked me a bit about my work, and Jude listened and occasionally made a flattering comment about one or the other of us. We finished the cava, Indigo opened a bottle of red wine and Jude suggested ordering a takeaway, but it turned out Indigo was on one of her fast days, so we didn’t.
And at about nine o’clock we finally said goodbye and left.
‘Do you think she was right, about us not really being compatible? In terms of astrology, I mean?’ I asked Jude, as we started the long descent of the stairs.
He laughed. ‘Oh God, don’t give it a second thought. Ind loves a bit of drama. Besides, it’s…’
‘All bollocks really?’
‘Exactly! Although I’d never say that to her, because she’s a mate and stuff. But the main thing is, you and me, we’re good, right?’
‘Well, I will be, once I’ve had something to eat.’
So we stopped off at a Turkish restaurant on the way home and had loads of falafel and chips and salad, and then we went back to my flat and were both too knackered to do anything other than fall into bed and hold each other close.
But once Jude was asleep, I found myself wondering what Indigo had really meant. Maybe she genuinely believed what she’d said was true. But I doubted that, somehow. I’d noticed her looking at Jude with something like hunger, which might of course have been down to the fast day. (I mean, really. The longest I’d ever gone without food had been twenty-four hours, when I’d had a killer stomach bug, and by the end of that I’d practically been climbing the walls.) I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was as suspicious of me as I was of her, and for the same reason.