The Astrologer's Daughter

by Rebecca Lim

  I blink. Mum’s monthly take was less than $2000. Even accounting for this month’s wage, the number he’s just named is astronomical: five figures. I’ve never seen five figures on one of our withdrawal slips, ever. A couple of weeks ago, we had $324.62 to our names, and Mum had warned me sharply to make it last.

  ‘But that’s a fortune!’ Simon turns to me accusingly. ‘You could buy, like, three new cars with that.’

  Wurbik says quietly, ‘Looking into that, too. Recent transactions include one large deposit by cheque and a couple of other odd amounts by direct wire. What did she charge?’

  I look at him in confusion, thinking of all the porcelain giftware littering our rooms, how you could even put a value on that. ‘First consult was free,’ I say finally. ‘Nominally, she charged $135 per hour, but based on her time, and whether or not the person could pay, it could be anything.’

  ‘That might explain at least one of the transactions,’ Wurbik muses. ‘And that place with the funny-sounding description…’

  ‘The Ark of A–Z,’ Simon butts in, with his perfect recall.

  Wurbik shoots him a measuring glance before returning his pale-blue gaze to mine. ‘Yeah, that place. It was closed when we sent an officer over yesterday, but it’s open Mondays to Wednesdays between 12 and 3pm. Strange hours. Some kind of rare-antiques dealer. You’ll get an update as soon as we find out what that’s all about.’

  I’m still thinking about the money when I remind him weakly, ‘And the third thing, Detective? You said there were three things. That’s only two.’

  Wurbik sits straighter and his face is suddenly so kind that I know I’m not going to like what he’s about to say.

  ‘Reason we had so much trouble establishing identity,’ he says carefully, ‘was that your mum’s legal name is Joanne Crowe Nielsen. Even her work didn’t realise her surnames were around the wrong way. Caused us plenty of confusion, let me tell you.’

  ‘But,’ I interrupt hotly, primed to refute and deny, ‘that can’t be right! We’re all Crowes: Bev, Joyce, Jo and me. An unbroken line of women with “the knowledge”. She used to boast about it. How starcraft was in our blood, la-di la. I don’t understand.’

  Wurbik slides his chair forward on its castors and his voice is gentle. ‘It may or may not have something to do with that phone call you got last night…’

  ‘What?’ I say, confusedly. ‘The mouth-breather? What’s he got to do with Mum?’

  ‘A man called Erik Nielsen called our hotline yesterday,’ Wurbik continues doggedly, ‘mostly to cover his arse. Insists he’s got nothing to do with her disappearance. But did claim he and your mother were legally married until she ran away with “a Chinaman” (his words, not mine) in ’96 and he hasn’t heard about her since. Till now.’ Something feels wrong with my face when Wurbik adds, ‘And her middle name isn’t Nielsen. It’s Melissa.’

  It takes me a while to arrange the words in the right order: Joanne Melissa Crowe Nielsen. Okay, got it. Won’t forget it, now that I know. Beside me, I glimpse Simon closing his eyes, like he’s praying for me.

  11

  ‘So, unlike John Donne’s children, who were merely not formally recognised by their maternal grandfather for several years until he got over his annoyance at his daughter marrying a recusant Papist,’ I mutter as Simon and I exit the police complex, ‘I am actually illegitimate, from several new standpoints.’

  ‘You’re taking it surprisingly well,’ Simon murmurs as he scrolls through a text that has just come in on his phone. It’s long and rambling, and I watch something in his face sharpen. ‘It’s from Mum,’ he says suddenly, shoving the phone into a back pocket of his jeans. ‘She needs help. I have to go. You’ll be right to get home?’

  Then he’s gone, taking two lanes against the lights in his long stride before I can even draw breath to reply. I don’t even make it to the pedestrian crossing on the corner before he is back in his car-slash-mobile-home and already three-quarters of his way through a U-turn.

  I watch him roar up St Kilda Road, back towards the city—in the exact direction I want to go, the bastard. ‘No,’ I say aloud to myself at the deserted tram stop. ‘Actually, you’re the bastard. A proper one. Get used to it.’

  I board the next tram, still cradling my home phone against my chest like it’s a pet that startles easily. The tram is crowded with interstate footy fans, irritated locals and tourists. I end up strap-hanging over this thin woman with sleek hair in gradated shades of brown, cut short in a kind of gravity-defying, rich art-dealer kind of bob. She glances down, annoyed, as our feet tangle together, toes touching. The woman is dressed in a sleek scarlet suit and black, open-toed stilettos with red soles, and her mouth is surrounded by those vertical lines you get from too much lip pursing and cigarettes.

  My pack is crouched on my back like a giant carbuncle, and I wish to God I’d put the answering machine away before I got on, the plastic now slick in my one-handed grip. The tram sways back up the road towards the city, more people getting on than getting off, and it’s close inside, stuffy, smelling of wool and polyester and unwashed people. As I scan all the faces, I wonder if he could be one of them—Erik Nielsen, Mum’s husband, shit—and whether I’ve ever passed him on the street, looked him in the eye, and not known. Without warning, the bobbed woman stands and spears me in the foot with one of her stiletto heels. It’s jammed down squarely between my flesh and the side of my runner as she swings a designer leather tote off the floor.

  ‘Owwwwwww,’ I howl, because it bloody hurts.

  Her heel is still inside my shoe, grinding down on the edge of my left foot as she snarls, ‘Well, move then,’ and my eyes fill with tears at her unkindness, at all the random unkindnesses of strangers.

  Mum wasn’t called a chink-lover in Dimboola, I realise suddenly. Dimboola was just a story—no, a cypher—she used to illustrate a point. It must have happened here, when she was out walking with Dad, in the city where I was born. Maybe it was this woman, or someone just like her, who ground her forefinger into my pregnant mother’s breastbone and made her want to leave, starting the chain of everything that has led right back to now.

  For a heartbeat, the woman and I seem suspended in time. She isn’t even looking at me, face averted in distaste, although the entire packed tram seems to be staring at us, waiting to see what I’ll do, the two of us standing in the middle of a giant, sucked-in breath of anticipation. Then time restarts the moment the woman rips her high heel out of my shoe and shoves her way forward, through the sea of eyes and faces.

  She’s going to get away with it, I realise. And I know I will return to this moment again and again for the rest of my life, with regret and anger and sorrow; this moment where I did nothing, and said nothing, and was made nothing because of it.

  My home phone drops out of my hands onto the floor with a hard thunk and before I’ve thought it through, I’m lunging forward, reaching out and grabbing the woman by her narrow shoulders, fingers digging hard into the slim shoulder pads of her suit jacket. I spin her around, so that she will see me. And her bright red lips fall open, eyes widening fearfully, when she catches sight of my face; my flaming, melted skin.

  In the packed tram, people have cleared the space around us as if by magic, and I’m bawling at the top of my lungs, ‘I
. AM. NOT. MY. MOTHER.’ Only, by the time I get to the word mother, I’m actually roaring like a lion, the word just devolving into this long scream of sound, and the woman jerks out of my grasp, stumbling to get away from me. The tram doors are only half-open, but she’s leapt right off the step. I watch her running on the tips of her ridiculous heels through the crowd waiting to get on and realise that the forcefield between me and the rest of the world is up, it’s on, because all I see are shocked faces turned my way, bodies leaning sideways to avoid me touching them.

  I pick my telephone up off the floor, and walk slowly towards the exit and it’s like I’m the filthy, crazy, muttering person on the tram that no one wants to be near. I might as well be stinking of urine and raving about Armageddon, the way everyone’s looking at me. But you know what? I did something. I reacted. If time is a concertina, then I will never return to this memory with a feeling of shame.

  Embarrassment, maybe. But not shame.

  As I get off the tram a block past the Three Kings’ Bakehouse, I think I hear someone applauding. Or maybe it’s just my heart, beating, steady as a drum.

  I’ve almost reached the Little Bourke Street exit to the arcade opposite my building when something strange happens. A man leaning against the wall beside the TattsLotto shop gives a start as I pass by, and then speed-dials a number on his mobile. It’s not my imagination; the two things are connected, Action A leading to Action B. When I look back, his eyes drop down to a little black notebook he’s holding in his other hand, but I swear I hear him mutter my name.

  Mum named me after a famous Persian astronomer from the 11th century: No Bevs or Joyces for my girl, she would say grimly when I complained about someone giving me stick again, at my latest school. No one ever says Avicenna, just in passing. It’s not a place, it’s not a thing, and it’s got four syllables. So I notice, when it happens.

  The guy’s tall and gaunt and weather-beaten with short, iron-grey hair slicked close to his skull. He’s decked out in fancy lace-up black brogues and tan slacks, and a collared shirt worn under a heavy blue jumper. Doesn’t look or smell homeless; never seen him before in my life.

  I take it all in in a millisecond, picking up speed, almost tripping over the power cord to the answering machine as I make it out into Chinatown. I’ve exhausted my confrontation quotient for the day. Hell, I’ve exhausted my talking-to-strange-old-guys quotient for the day.

  I look back over my shoulder and the man looks away, still talking about me, I just know it.

  I’m so close.

  The Mei Hua Bean Sprout Company sign is winking at me from across the road in the brilliant sunlight. Somehow it turned into a beautiful day. I’m only twenty metres from my door but instead of crossing over, the way I want to, I go right. Continue up the hill from my place, towards the two-storey Yum Cha palace with the bright-red pagoda façade at the front, intending to go around the block and come back from a different direction, just in case.

  Because, as Mum used to say grimly: People possessed with ovaries can never be too careful, pet.

  ‘Hey!’ someone calls out from behind me. ‘You, there. Girl. Stop!’

  I just walk faster, darting a quick look backwards as the lights change on the corner. Behind me, the front passenger door is starting to open on an early-model Mercedes the size of a boat: royal blue, well preserved, car wax gleaming in the sun. Can’t tell who’s coming out. Male? Female? I feel my adrenaline spike and keep rising.

  As I’m looking back, the man from the arcade runs out into the street, throwing a hand up in the air. He starts hurrying up the footpath behind me, eyes intent, dodging pedestrians and couriers pushing trolleys stacked with boxes of bottled spirits. I’m jogging now, begging people to get out of my way under my breath. The man starts jogging, too. I’m almost running crab-ways up the street trying to see how much distance we’ve got between us when I see him cross Russell Street against the lights at a full run, long legs pumping, horns blaring. He’s closing the gap.

  Everything’s moving: breath sobbing in and out of my body, pack bumping from side to side against my shoulder-blades, boobs, pot belly, all jiggling around under all the sweaty layers. I trip repeatedly over the telephone cord, getting it caught between my knees and around my legs, but it doesn’t stop me taking the Exhibition Street crossing at a full run, too, until I barrel into someone standing on the other side.

  The man rocks backwards, then grips me by the upper arms. I’m beating at his chest with the telephone, while at the same time trying to twist out of his grasp. The sun’s in my eyes as the man growls, ‘Avicenna! Avi-cen-na!’ He’s really shaking me now. ‘Pull yourself together.’

  All I can make are animal noises of distress. ‘It’s Boon, Boon,’ he adds, voice sharp with concern. ‘What’s wrong with you, girl?’

  I focus on him with difficulty. ‘Le-me-go, le-me-go,’ I finally wheeze out in terror, still trying to pull away. I’ve got kilograms and inches on Boon, but he is as immovable as a tree. ‘There’s a man,’ I blurt, ‘following me and I don’t know why. I have to go.’

  Boon looks over my shoulder and his expression shifts. Before I understand what’s happening, he has propelled me down a narrow cobblestone alleyway and into… a commercial kitchen.

  ‘Dai Gor,’ someone yells out in surprise as Boon and I skid across the slick tiled floor. All around are clouds of steam rising from pans and woks that smell of braised meats; stainless-steel bowls filled with yellow noodles, glassy vermicelli, mounds of cut, pre-washed green vegetables. Men in cook’s whites and check pants that have gone dingy from repeat washing look up in surprise as we pass by. Over the sound of running water and sizzling woks, Boon continually calls out in greeting, but we’re through to another alleyway at the back of the restaurant before I can draw breath.

  Here it is quiet, reeking of rotting food and beer; exhaust fumes from the commercial car park that runs alongside it. There’s no one in sight, but Boon keeps going, taking us in through the back screen door of another old building off the alley on the opposite side. The kitchen we’re in now is dimly lit, and at first I think there’s no one in here until I spot, through a bank of steel shelving, the burly figure of a bald old man in rolled-up blue shirtsleeves and jeans consulting a wall chart.

  Boon takes us up the central kitchen walkway, island benches on either side, calling out confidently, ‘Newlands! My apologies. Just passing through, my friend.’

  This place smells like baked-on, caked-on apricot chicken and meatloaf, goulash, hash browns and boiled vegetables with an overlay of hospital-strength disinfectant. It smells like The Caf at school. Newlands turns his head in angry surprise until he sees who it is and comes forward to shake Boon’s hand. He eyes me interestedly. ‘Of course, and you’ll have good reason,’ he says calmly.

  ‘There’s a man following my goddaughter,’ Boon replies with an ease that, for a second, makes me wish it were for real. To be someone’s daughter again. Newlands’ expression sharpens under his bushy white eyebrows.

  Boon adds, ‘This is Greyson’s child.’

  Newlands’ face brightens, then falls immediately, like the two old men have discussed my father’s sad demise many times over cups of coffee.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ is Newlands’ simple response. He squeezes my f
ree hand in greeting, or sympathy. ‘What would you like for me to do, Boon?’

  Boon shakes his head. ‘She can wait at the museum while I check our building. Nothing for you to do, old friend. As I said, just passing through.’

  ‘Offer stands,’ Newlands responds mildly, leading us out of the quiet kitchen and into a suffocatingly dark space on the other side of it. He puts one of his hands under my elbow in a way that isn’t creepy, just solicitous, like he’s known me forever.

  In the darkness, linked between the two old men, I feel the consistency of the floor suddenly change beneath my feet: from the dull feel of burnished concrete, to the warped and pitted wood of old floorboards. Our footsteps have a hollow echo now, as if the space has grown cavernous, and I ask, suspicious, ‘What is this place?’

  Newlands suddenly stops. The wood-floored room we are standing in is bounded on the far side by what appears to be a heavy curtain, a thin chink of pale daylight coming through it. My eyes are beginning to adjust. On the far side of the space, in the corner by the back wall, is a faint glow, too. Subterranean. Maybe stairs.

  Newlands lets go of my arm and I sway momentarily in the darkness. I hear him tripping and cursing, feeling about on the wall. Then he flicks up some kind of metal lever and the narrow band of light through the curtain grows bright, dazzling, artificial.

  Newlands moves forward to tug one edge of the velvet curtain open, and I see old-style footlights, like glowing white teeth, outlining the edge of a stage. Behind me is a faded theatre set made up of trees and swings, a hint of bucolic lawn, protruding out a little way from the wings on either side. We emerge onto the lip of the stage, blinking, as if we have just emerged from a fairytale wood.