There is good fortune in the stars today, Aquarius. Just don’t expect any of it to be coming your way, okay?
‘Zoë? Earth to Zoë?’ Robbie poked me in the ribs with a wooden spoon and I jumped like he’d given me an electric shock.
‘What? What do you want?’
‘I’ve asked you four times if you want coffee, twice if you want to use the posh honey we got from Archie in the blondies or the standard stuff, and three times if you wanted to take some of those butternut squash and sage bruschetta out for Maurice and the boys to try, or whether I should do it and get the glory. And you’ve been completely blanking me. I know you’re a bit long in the tooth at almost twenty-eight but it’s a bit early to be going deaf, surely?’
‘Sorry. I was miles away. Yes to coffee, we may as well go ahead and use the posh honey, and I’ll handle the quality control. Thanks, Robbie.’
‘No worries.’ He switched on the coffee machine, its full-throated roar convincing me that I wasn’t in fact going deaf.
I had been lost in my thoughts, and I was still. I picked up the plate of toasted bruschetta topped with rich roast squash, drizzled with sage oil and sprinkled with nduja crumbs and carried them out to the bar, where Maurice, Terry, Sadiq and Ray were beginning their dominoes game. Alice was behind the bar; Kelly was down on her knees with a dustpan and brush cleaning up the crumbs left by the mums and tots group. Fat Don was on his usual stool, sipping his pint. Frazzle was spread out on the chaise longue in a patch of sun.
The Ginger Cat felt the same as it did on any Wednesday morning: bright, cheerful and serenely busy. But I felt different. I felt like I’d been hollowed out inside. It wasn’t hunger; Robbie had insisted I ate a bowl of granola when I got in that morning after fussing over me and demanding to know why I was looking like a vampire’s cold leftovers, and I’d confessed that I’d had no supper the night before and almost no sleep.
‘Are you going to tell us what those are, love?’ Ray asked. ‘Or are you just going to stand there staring at them?’
‘Sorry, sorry!’ I’d walked across the room to the dominoes table on autopilot, my mind in another place entirely. ‘They’re a new snack we’re thinking of putting on the autumn bar menu. What do you reckon?’
I put the plate on the table and stood there as I always did, waiting for their verdict.
‘What’s this brown stuff then?’ Terry poked a suspicious finger at the top of one of the bruschetta.
‘It’s an nduja crumb.’
‘And what’s that when it’s at home?’
‘It’s a kind of spicy spreadable sausage. Like salami only softer. And we’ve fried it with some breadcrumbs and sage so it’s crunchy. It’s got pork in it, sorry, Sadiq.’
‘Nduja really want to hurt me,’ Terry sang tunelessly. ‘Nduja really want to make me cry?’
They all cracked up, and I couldn’t help laughing too. Maurice picked up a piece, tucked a paper napkin into his collar and took a crunchy bite.
‘Delicious,’ he said. ‘Really autumnal flavour. I’m going to tell Wesley about this nduja stuff; it would work a treat with rice and peas.’
‘Cor, that doesn’t half blow your head off,’ Ray said. ‘Ought to come with a health warning.’
But he finished his piece and immediately took another.
‘I’ll take that as an approval, then,’ I said, leaving them to their game as Alice approached the table with a tray of drinks.
I made my way back to the kitchen, feeling my mind drift back into the tangle of thoughts that seemed to envelop it, tangled and clinging like the fake cobwebs Alice had arranged in the windows for Halloween, which had paper spiders ensnared in them.
For months, I reflected, shaping sourdough into loaves, I’d let myself be governed – or at least steered – by what the Stargazer app had told me to do. I’d followed its guidance on dates and relationships and my own life, not slavishly exactly, but faithfully enough. And now, thanks to Mike, I knew the truth.
I’d read through various threads on Twitter, outlining the story of how Fabian had launched the app, using fake downloads and fake reviews to get it trending. How he’d made all sorts of claims about the authenticity of its predictions being based on genuine astronomical data, when all the time a content mill of writers in Manila had been writing the daily horoscopes based on nothing but a stringent style guide.
I’d read how, when Fabian had unilaterally cut the fee he was paying to the business owner in the Philippines, the writers’ already rock-bottom wages had been cut, too. Threatened with losing their jobs if they objected, they’d taken matters into their own hands, writing horoscopes that were darker and more depressing than before, pushing one another to see how far they could take it before the editors noticed.
I imagined them – highly educated graduates working for pennies from their laptops at home, or at shared desks in a café if they had no space or quiet at home – exchanging messages over Slack or glances across the table, taking a bit of glee in getting one over on their exploitative employer. Because the Stargazer brand was all about being edgy, about sending out push notifications that were acid almost to the point of being brutal, it took a long time before anyone noticed. Hell, I’d barely noticed myself. I’d assumed that the app simply knew me well enough, through some mysterious algorithm or through genuine astrology, to reflect my thoughts back to me.
If I hadn’t been so invested, I’d have found it funny. But now I couldn’t shake the sense of dislocation, of something having changed in my world so significantly that I no longer fully understood it.
The rest of that morning passed in a blur. I worked, I chatted to Robbie, I listened to music on my headphones. But I couldn’t remember a word of our conversation afterwards. I could barely taste the food, and had to keep passing the spoon over to Robbie for him to confirm that the seasoning was right. When a new song started on my playlist, I couldn’t have told you what the previous one had been.
Robbie seemed distracted too, I noticed. He kept glancing anxiously at his phone, and when it buzzed with an incoming alert he pounced on it like Frazzle on a feathery toy, only to put it down again, disheartened. And then, when the opening bars of ‘Half a Man’ came through the speaker, I heard the thunk of his wooden spoon falling to the floor and a choking sob.
‘Shit, Robbie! What’s wrong?’
‘It’s Rex.’ He mopped his eyes on a tea towel.
I put my arm round his shoulder and shushed a bit, my mind whirring. What could have happened? Some sort of horrible accident? Rex turning out to have a wife and kids on the side? Or just Robbie getting ghosted, when things had been going so well?
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ I asked.
‘I can’t believe what he’s gone and done,’ Robbie gulped. ‘The bastard!’
‘Ssshh, you poor thing. Whatever it is, you’ll be okay.’ And, remembering saying almost exactly the same to Dani, I added in my head, And dump his sorry arse so he can never hurt you again.
But Robbie went on, ‘He says he wants us to be official. Like, boyfriend and boyfriend. The deadass headass.’