The Astrologer's Daughter

by Rebecca Lim

  But Simon’s not sloppy like the rest of us. He’s not content just to coast. He lives by his own set of internal guidelines, and occasionally you get glimpses of the iron that rules him. But only glimpses. He cuts through the rest of us like an icebreaker on its way to leaving the known world behind.

  He looks too hard and too clean. He wants to know everything from every angle and he wants to know it now. And he never stops trying to crush me in public. It’s like a blood sport with him.

  He’ll be here, any moment and he can’t see how I live.

  Where is his damned book?

  The last time I felt normal levels of anxiety it was Wednesday afternoon and I was in the Leppitt Gymnasium, painting a crowd scene. Lots of pink, tan and brown faces. Fuckin’ fifty shades! Ozzie Palomares had grunted, down on his massive knees—each one thick as a Christmas ham—beside me, amongst the paint pots.

  I had made one of the spectators red-faced, and frizzy-haired, just for him, and Ozzie had given the woman he was painting enormous tits, as a gesture of affection for me and my D-sized rack. We’d grinned at each other like lunatics then, and proceeded to paint moustaches on all the women.

  Slow down, rewind. Gym. Start there.

  I was already in the gym before the working bee started. I’d helped move the balance beam out of the way to get the backdrop down.

  Everything has to be in my sports bag. The one prominently marked with the word Champion on both sides, which must operate as some kind of visual joke once I’ve got the thing slung over my shoulder.

  I pull the duffle out from under my bed and squat beside it, before undoing the long zipper that runs the length of the bag. I toss out my wallet, shin guards and the plastic box-on-a-rope that holds my bright yellow mouth guard, digging down through tracksuit, socks and dirty runners until I hit the smooth cover of a textbook.

  There are others beneath it, and I tip everything out onto the floor. The weight and motion of upending the bag puts me on my arse on the carpet and two things leap out at me: Simon Thorn’s bloody poetry Compendium and a dark red, A4-sized journal, bound in fake leather with gold scrollwork.

  I feel like I’m on fire as I grab hold of both, and my wallet, and my house keys. Slamming the door behind me, I run, shaking, down the stairs to head Simon off at the pass.

  It’s chilly now, in a way I’ve only just started to recognise as the way night falls in Melbourne in autumn—bitter and immediate, from sun to shade in a heartbeat—and my feet are soon frozen lumps inside my Explorer socks. But it isn’t long before Simon materialises out of a crowd of start-of-weekend, out-for-thrills street traffic in his usual worker-chic garb—six foot plus of wiry, rock-solid muscle, a fresh bruise under one eye—and I don’t bat an eyelash or even say, Hi.

  I just ram the compendium into his sternum so hard he gives an audible ouf, then step off the front stoop of my building, job done, crib protected, crisis averted, and turn on my heel to cross the street. The arcade over the road is only open until midnight, but beyond it, one block over, is a 24-hour grease-pit where I can sit and feel like I’m part of the living, but still be left alone with Mum’s journal, a lamb gyro and something to drink with sugar in it.

  I’m so hungry, so grainy-eyed and tired, I’m lightheaded. Or maybe it’s the feel of the journal, burning like acid into my palms. I have to resist opening it right now and devouring it while I walk.

  ‘Hey, wait, wait,’ Simon growls, grabbing my arm just as I’m about to step onto the road. His hand is red-raw, so damaged from doing time on the bags at whatever designer gym he frequents that the knuckles are practically smeared together into a single puffy line. Simon’s hands are the ugliest part about him, and I don’t want them near me.

  ‘How dare you come here!’ My voice sounds thick and strange with rage. ‘How dare you touch me. And how,’ I add, elbowing him in the ribs to make him let go but getting only a small, ragged intake of breath in return, ‘do you even know where I live, you creep?’

  Simon’s fingers bear down harder around my arm as he snaps, ‘I can’t believe you bent the front cover of my book right back!’

  I’m not a short person, but he makes me feel short, and so angry I see stars. Running on instinct, I reach below my left armpit with my right hand and pull out sharply on his battered little finger. It’s a trick Mum taught me. Simon gives a wounded bellow and lets go.

  ‘Now it’s two for two,’ I snarl, and a taxi blares in passing as we tussle for a moment on the edge of the bluestone kerb.

  ‘I’m not going to carry you!’ he shouts, and an Asian girl coming our way, in fluffy Mukluks, skinny jeans and a black hooded puffer, opens her eyes wide and swerves around us.

  ‘And I’m not asking to be carried,’ I splutter, ‘and especially not by you. I’m out, you’ve won. There’s nothing now standing between you and the R. M. Tichborne Prize! Field’s clear, best of luck with your life.’

  It’s true: I don’t care anymore; he can have it, that thing we both wanted so badly. Suddenly, I feel lighter: One less thing to consume me. Simon is so shocked that he drops my arm and I’m across the road before he can work out a reply.

  ‘That’s it?’ he calls, frowning over the rooftops of the cars passing between us. ‘One bad thing happens and you give it all up? You don’t come back? Where’s your fight? You’re supposed to be a fighter.’

  I turn and look back at him, hugging Mum’s journal to me. Beneath it all—the big hair, the swagger, the sarcasm-as-full-body-armour—I’m no better than any of them, the people inside her book. I am the sum of my vanities and my faults, my cravings and my weaknesses, just like they are.

  All I want is my mother. I need her to come back.

  One moment Simon is standing there, glaring at me, and then the sea, the sea that is in my eyes, washes him away, and there are only colours. I don’t hear him cross the road, but then he’s right in front of me, stepping up under the bright white of the arcade signage, and I can’t understand why he isn’t glad. The Tichborne Prize is worth $10,000 to the top student in their final year. It’s a no-strings, no-questions-asked windfall. You can use it to fund your tertiary studies or your raging coke habit. For the lowlifes of Collegiate High, it’s a big, big deal; no one’s ever seen that kind of money in their lives. But I am prepared to walk away.

  That’s what I tell Simon, mumbling the words in the vicinity of his chin. He stares down at my scar tissue with fascination and I feel it burn. Up close, it’s like crocodile or ostrich hide, quite alien.

  ‘It’s bad, really bad what happened with your mum,’ he says in a low voice. ‘But we have until Wednesday, and it’s important. Dalgeish got me your details and gave us an extension because of the circumstances. It’s a joint thing, remember? Marks given for ability to work with others. Which indicates more than one person must participate. We’re the last two. That’s what I came to tell you: there’s still time.’

  I tap the back of the journal. ‘Maybe for you,’ I tell him jerkily, ‘but time’s everything in cases like this. This was Mum’s. We’ve been looking everywhere for it. It was in my gym bag!’

  He can hear the confusion and bitterness in my voice, and frowns.

  ‘I must have scooped it up with everything else on th
e kitchen bench before I left the house that morning,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘It could tell me everything, or nothing, but this is where I turn and swim out, partner.’

  I don’t care that I’m not making any sense, flinching as he moves forward until he’s so close I can smell the sandalwood and citrus and sweat on his skin. I don’t really want to know anything more about him. We two are ships. I hold his gaze as I back away.

  Eventually, Mum liked to say, hands on hips, surveying the mess of our possessions as we geared up for yet another move, you have to give things up, even if it hurts.

  I know I will have to give up Mum’s book, but not yet. Not when I’m the only one in the whole world who spoke the same language she did, and can maybe read this thing to work out what happened to her. It’s almost as if I was created to do it, and I will not fail.

  I look up into the clear, cloudless black of the night sky, the muted stars, and say fiercely, ‘I do not submit.’ Then I turn and enter the glaring white tunnel of the arcade teeming with late-night shoppers heading home, uncaring of whether Simon is with me or not.

  6

  Simon looms at my shoulder as I queue at the sweaty display window of fried foods and ask for the special of the day: a Turkish pide stuffed with shanklish, pickled pineapple and pulled-pork. My mouth is watering so badly I can barely get my order out. It sounds like all kinds of wrong: salty, sour, sweet, meaty, and loaded with carbs and melted cheese. But it’s the only meal I’m going to manage today, and it covers every one of the food groups, so, hey.

  For a moment grief overwhelms me. I close my eyes and lean my chest and belly against the hot glass on the pretence that I’m feeling cold. There’s the sound of a vacuum seal separating, and a rush of warm air against my face, as the mournful-looking man behind the counter takes the pide out of an oven nearby. The background clatter of falling cutlery could almost be Mum, fumbling haphazardly around our kitchen for something to boil water in because she burnt through the bottom of another kettle. She could literally burn water, my mum. Didn’t I say she was magic?

  I smile, but it’s a smile that pulls down at the corners, like I’m going to cry. In my head, I can hear her tutting: You’ve got to take better care of yourself, love. I make a small noise, like a hiccup, before I get my throat under control.

  ‘Drink?’ the man barks and I open my eyes, pointing to a fluoro-coloured jumbo bottle of sports drink in the fridge behind him, which covers all the food groups, too.

  The front door’s just about rusted open at this place, and tonight the draft is fierce, so I settle for an inside table against the far wall, near the swing door to the toilets. Taking a seat where I can see the flat-screen TV screwed into the wall, I uncap my bottle, distracted by grainy CCTV footage on the news, of a tall man in a cap and tracksuit robbing a servo. Behind me, Simon’s voice is diffident, jokey. ‘I think I might be related to that guy.’

  I turn, skewering him with a look of disbelief. ‘Mr Clean? No way.’

  I don’t remember telling Simon he was welcome to join me, but he does anyway, sitting across the table over his own mound of oozing meat and pastry. He slides the compendium out of the space between us—its bent cover sticking up at a weird angle like an accusing finger—and I centre Mum’s journal in the space it has vacated. The journal doesn’t quite lie flat because there are things interleaved through the middle.

  Scrapbooking with the stars, Mum would mutter as she pasted in the backstory to some stranger’s life. It was crazy the stuff they thought was important to show her. I remember one woman bringing in a cake-baking trophy, another one a Grade 5 piano certificate. Like it had any bearing on the outcome of her life.

  I stare at the cheap leatherette cover, wolfing down the pide so quickly that I’m missing my mouth and hitting my chin, wanting to get the eating out of the way so that I won’t leave stains on the pages. Simon raises his eyebrows, fascinated, as I chug half the bottle of electric-blue drink in one hit before wiping my hands clean. But then I hesitate over the journal like it’s a live grenade.

  ‘You won’t know if you don’t open it,’ Simon observes mildly through a mouthful of chewed food.

  Stung, I flip the journal open so forcefully there’s a hollow clap as the cover hits the Formica tabletop. There are marbled endpapers pasted on the insides of the book in a vomity pattern of pale blues and reds, like an oil slick on water. On the facing page, over the general impression of vomit, I see that Mum has taped a small diagram. It’s an astrological chart without any identifying attributions: no name, date, natal longitude, latitude.

  Just a bleached-looking photocopy, so pale it could be a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy. But the drawing is in Mum’s hand, and the chart must have been important to her because it’s the very first thing in the journal. I can’t stop myself from reaching out and touching it as though it might speak to me and tell me where she has gone.

  But, of course, it doesn’t.

  ‘It could be for anyone, from any time,’ I say aloud, my eyes running across the signs and annotations.

  Simon swallows loudly, leaning forward with interest, and I swear I almost hear his fearsome, gigantic brain kicking up a gear, ready to suck down and master something new. ‘What—?’ he begins.

  I make a duck beak with my hand to shut him up, the same way Mum and I used to silence each other, and he actually laughs. Flushing, I run my finger over the photocopied glyphs, one after the other, and I’m talking before I realise I’m talking. ‘Sun in Aries and the fourth house indicates ambition, obstinacy, restlessness, brilliance, sensitivity, quickness to anger, a desire for greater security, a strong maternal influence.’

  Simon has stopped eating now. The usual faint expression of scorn he wears around me is curiously absent. What did he declare once, during Physics? Oh, yeah: He who dies with the most skills, wins. I feel a savage satisfaction that he will never, ever get this the way I do.

  ‘Moon in Capricorn,’ I continue, ‘and Capricorn ascendant indicates a reserved person with few friends.’ The words tumble out of me as if I am channelling her voice. ‘Pisces and Saturn in the fourth house says the person may be marked for life by a tumultuous upbringing, and this area here?’ I jab at the sign:

  ‘It’s roughly moon square Saturn indicating a disturbed relationship with the maternal; family problems, abandonment, lack.’ I run my finger over the chart, seeing this pattern repeated in Saturn square the ascendant. ‘Life will be difficult for this person, and solitude will be forced upon them, rather than looked for, or wanted.’

  It’s like I’m reading it all aloud from a book. Except that I am the book and the words are somehow written in my blood. All these years I have denied the knowledge, as Mum rather grandly called her skill, but it soaked in anyway, because I’m a freak.

  Things come back to me, all the time. I’ll be asleep, and then I won’t be; and there will be these words in my head: from an advert or a song, or a book about time travel that I haven’t held for years. I might look them up, hours later, and see them repeated on the internet, or on the page, word-for-word, and feel a wave of absolute coldness.

  Like the time I passed a woman asking her friend if a movie she’d seen was any good, and the friend had replied, ‘Shit yeah! It’s really deep, and it’s got all these underlying themes and s
hit.’

  That happened years ago, before I’d even grown boobs, on a train platform in Nowra. All I’d done was walk past these two women and now those words are stuck in my head, for always. Whenever I see a deep film—one with themes and shit—I’ll think about those two women and wonder what they’re doing, whether they’re still engaging in filmic discourse, on a distant train platform, in the sun.

  Snippets eavesdropped from strangers: all that’s in me, along with the jingles and the songs, the poems and the passages. I can’t run away from the words. I carry them with me, like a carapace: my curse, and my armour, growing heavier and heavier.

  With a groan, I plunge my hands into my heavy fall of loose, wavy hair and shove it back again over my shoulders, making sure my left ear is covered. Simon pushes his plate away, even though he’s only eaten half his meal. He wipes his mouth carefully, steepling his fingers together on the table in front of him. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘that could be me you’re talking about. No shit.’ My eyes fly to his over the top of the photocopied chart. His mouth quirks up at the corners when he sees he has my attention. ‘Brilliant, ambitious, friendless, marked by tragedy.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I say sharply. ‘This can’t be yours. She didn’t know you. She never even met you. You have plenty of friends. You’re the school freaking captain.’

  To forestall him saying anything more, I turn over to the first of the internal pages of the journal. It’s headed by an underlined name: Elias Herman Kircher. Under it, Mum has written: Horary reading. Date he is ordained to die? And how.