The Astrologer's Daughter

by Rebecca Lim

  ‘Rape and murder my daughter, yes,’ Eleanor says fiercely. ‘Once I have that knowledge, you leave the rest up to me. You are done, you are finished, and I will never bother you again.’

  As Boon escorts me up the internal staircase after Eleanor Charters and her private investigator have gone, he says suddenly, ‘These things are dangerous.’

  ‘What? Horoscopes?’ I answer, surprised.

  He nods, adding solemnly. ‘You don’t—how do you say—tempt fate.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I reply. ‘I agree. I violently agree. People are so suggestible. It’s the last thing I want to do. But Mum took their money. I’m honour-bound to finish what she started. She would have wanted that.’

  Sounding faintly hysterical, Boon says, ‘I warned her. I told her many, many times, do not muck around, this is not joking here.’

  ‘You’re just being superstitious!’ I snort. ‘Plus, you’re freaking me out. It’s just a bunch of flat diagrams on a page that the subjects will never even know about. And maybe if Eleanor gets what she thinks she wants, it will lessen her pain, I don’t know; anything to help that poor woman.’

  But I knew what Eleanor asked of me wouldn’t lessen her pain. Now I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be her: with this indefinable thing sitting below the heart and stealing your breath away at the slightest provocation. A song, a smell, the back of some stranger’s head could push on that phantom pain, making it blossom. The wild, lost look in Eleanor’s eyes reminded me of me.

  Mum said once, hugging me fiercely, that the worst thing in the world would be to lose a child. But to lose a mother? I’m too young to have these feelings, and I make a small, gobbling noise of grief, which I somehow turn into a cough. But Boon shoots me a look of concern, like he knows exactly what I am doing. I’m a crap actress.

  As we pass the closed doorway to my parents’ old apartment, Boon mutters, ‘I could not make your mum understand that three things govern all forecasts. I told her: you must only proceed on that basis, and then only with extreme caution.’

  He sticks a pointer finger upright in the air for emphasis, so that I am forced to look at him.

  ‘One: Nothing is accident, Avicenna. Every effect has a cause, and every effect gives birth to another. Every outcome is already ordained. This we disagreed about the most. She tells them they have a “choice”, but they do not. Their fate is already written; she merely, how do you say, delivers the message. Your mother’s disappearance is a direct consequence of some link in this chain. Find this link, this cause, and you will find your mother.’

  ‘Right,’ I snap back. ‘That sounds easy enough. I’ll make sure to tell Detective Wurbik.’

  ‘Don’t be disrespectful,’ Boon answers sharply. ‘These are our beliefs.’ He makes a sideways Victory-sign with his hand. ‘Second: Nothing occurs on its own; everything is connected. So, if you finish what your mother started, whatever touched her will touch you.’

  I feel a chill at that word, touched. My beautiful mother, with her alabaster skin.

  Boon and I pause outside my door as I dig wearily in the side pockets of my pack for the key. He adds with a sense of finality, ‘Everything that has happened before will happen again.’

  ‘Sorry?’ I say sharply, glaring into his troubled face. ‘What’s happened before happens again? That’s the third “thing”?’

  He nods, without elaborating, and I snap, ‘Well, that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. My father and mother met. Then he died, and she vanished. The dying and the vanishing are terrible once-offs, Boon, in a straight linear progression from boy-meets-girl. See any second chances there? No? Because there are none.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Boon replies as I shove my front door open and flick on the hallway light, ‘this is what we believe. Time is infinite, all life moves in cycles. Bad things that happen will happen again. She didn’t believe me either, and see where it got her?’

  After I let him out, still muttering about fate and divination, I kick off my runners. Half-heartedly, I fold up all the blankets I’d dragged out for Simon, setting them in an untidy pile on the couch. The moment I plug the phone back into the wall socket in the kitchen, it starts ringing. But with the volume turned down low the sound is almost comforting. It means I’m not completely alone. Someone’s thoughts are bent on me. The last thing I hear as I disappear into my bedroom with a bowl of microwaved dhal is a man’s deep voice whispering into the voice recorder: Do you shave your legs, girl? Well, do you?

  Fucking psychos. Something like this draws them all out, like writhing worms disgorged from the earth after a rain.

  On my bed, I construct an unsteady fort out of piles of Mum’s threadbare almanacs and sit in the middle of it, pulling Don Sturt’s list of four names, birthdates and birthplaces towards me.

  For a long time, I just eat and stare, afraid to begin. Mostly I think I am afraid that, despite my best efforts, I might be becoming her. Finally, setting aside the bowl, on a blank page of a jotter pad I write:

  Mallory Fielder Bloch, Shanghai, China.

  9 September 1946. 9.47pm.

  On the next I write:

  Geoffrey Andrew Kidston, Melbourne, Australia.

  17 July 1965. 7.21pm.

  Then I headline the following two pages with:

  Lewis Griffinn Boardman, Sydney, Australia.

  5 December 1957. 7.21pm.

  Christopher John Ferwerder, Edinburgh, Scotland. 29 May 1927. 5.06am.

  And I begin to chart, bearing in mind the specific question received and understood by me at precisely 5.56pm today:

  Did you, on 9 July 1984, between the hours of 9.30pm and 11.59pm, rape and murder Fleur Lucille Bawden?

  Hours later, my mobile gives off a muffled ping and I look up to see it is 4.13 in the morning. Out of instinct, I check to see whether anyone’s played me a word. Vicki’s still stuck on sluts, because I never played anything back. She hates waiting and is going to be supremely pissed, but I have no appropriate comeback handy at this juncture. I’m so tired that I am devoid of meaningful language, only symbol.

  I see that Changeling_ 29 has intersected the t of his last word, qat, with a new word: death. I tell myself sternly that it is not a sign; that it means nothing and is merely the coming together of a randomly thrown-up, system-generated conglomeration of letters.

  I look at the last game, the game with Mum. It takes me a whole, consciousness-altering second to work out that it’s my turn. My turn.

  Appalled, barely able to locate the word on the teeming electronic gameboard, I see there really is a new word waiting for me. I’m not deceiving myself. Mere wishing has not made it so.

  There’s no accompanying message, nothing to say if it’s really from her. Just the word. It was played on Saturday, at 12.24 in the morning. With a pang, tears streaming down my face, I see that the word is: always.

  13

  I call Wurbik before it’s decently light, trying to tell him about the word—My God, she played me a word! But he tells me to hold that thought, saying he’ll meet me outside Collegiate High at home time with updates. ‘Because you�
��re going to school today,’ he says. ‘You don’t put your education on hold for anything.’

  ‘Even homicide?’ I query, fear and curiosity piqued. ‘Does it mean she’s still alive if she’s playing words?’

  ‘Go to school,’ Wurbik insists. ‘If I had a kid I would be telling her the same thing.’

  Before I can say anything else, he hangs up.

  Next I make a call to Don Sturt’s mobile and go straight to his message bank, which is only mildly annoying because there’s something about the man that gives me the willies. The way he can’t look me in the eye.

  I had spent hours on the charts before I’d noticed the anomaly—my heart sinking because the first two were almost done. ‘Are you absolutely sure,’ I say now, slowly and loudly into the dead air of Don’s voicemail, ‘that the two Australian-born suspects were born at exactly the same time? There are a lot of minutes in a day. I mean, it seems a bit weird, but not entirely out of the question. Call me back, okay?’

  In my ear, as I’m pulling on my clothes in the bathroom, I hear Mum murmur: Every minute counts, Avi. And I feel a spurt of acid in my heart that she could honestly believe that all that separates the psychopaths from the rest of us are mere minutes, mere revolutions. But here I am, doing it, following in her footsteps: giving comfort to the desperate and gullible and deranged.

  The morning is icy, but sunny. Unwilling to face another packed tram of bald-faced, staring people, I pull my beanie down low over my ears and unbound hair, beginning the long uphill walk to school against a slicing wind.

  On autopilot, I almost trudge past Little La Trobe Street. But somehow I find myself turning in, already looking out for numbers.

  Specifically, 232A. A part of me is actually expecting to see a giant wooden boat marooned somewhere in the middle of the street by the right hand of God, but of course there isn’t one. Instead I come across a dim, Victorian-era shopfront.

  On the windows, outlined in faded gilt, I read:

  Behind the grubby glass, there are mysterious-looking brass scientific instruments on display; a full-sized human skeleton on a stand wearing a feathered, tricorn hat; stuffed birds and animals under bell jars; shells; corals; weirdly shaped pieces of tusk and horn; lumps of rock; found objects; liver-spotted nature lithographs in dusty, unmatched frames.

  I wrinkle my nose, thinking, Ugly junk, unable to imagine what more Mum could possibly have wanted to add to our already festering collection. The place looks neglected, but eccentric. Expensive, too.

  But then I remember the $40,000 sitting in our bank account and crowd closer to the window. There’s a crooked Closed sign hanging in the top glass pane of the locked front door. I’m about to turn away when I see a flash of movement behind the dirty glass.

  The shop is unlit. But I get an impression of long silver hair trailing down over a black-clad shoulder; a high forehead and stern, straight nose. Someone is leaning over the countertop at the far end of the shop, studying something on the white blotter pad before him. Most of his face is hidden, just the palely gleaming crown of his head, but it’s a man, I’m sure of it: tall and broad-shouldered, almost blending in with the overflowing case of antiquarian books behind him.

  It is hours before the official opening time. But he’s here, and I’m here, so I tap on the door, peering around the sign, but the man doesn’t look up from what he’s doing. I tap some more, sure he can hear me, sure that he’s just being phenomenally rude, but he still doesn’t look up. His gaze is intent. As if he’s memorising something out of the thing that’s open before him.

  Pressing my nose right up to the glass I see that it’s a thick book, bound in black, as black as his clothes. The man’s long-fingered hands are marble-white against the covers. He looks up, suddenly, straightening behind the counter, still holding the book open, a frown pleating his brow. And I see that his eyes are sharp on me, as blue as the daytime sky. Despite the fall of silver hair over the man’s shoulders, his face is young, sharply planed. It’s possibly the most arresting face I have ever seen.

  I look above the lintel at the name edged in faded gold, surprised that someone as ordinary-sounding as R. Preston, prop. could have a face like that.

  He’s a giant of a man, I’m guessing even taller than Simon. As we stare at each other across the crowded, dusty expanse of the shop, I see a look of recognition, or maybe consternation, cross the man’s face.

  His gaze on me never wavers as I now pound on the door in earnest. He doesn’t look away or make a move forward. He just continues to hold the large, open book in his hands, weighing me up steadily through the dirty glass as if I’m a particularly noisome bug.

  ‘Please!’ I yell, pushing on the fixed handle of the front door, which I see with a jolt of revulsion is shaped like a long human femur, cast into unyielding bronze. ‘What do you know?’ I cry, shouldering the door. ‘What do you know about my mother? Please!’

  I’m sure he can hear me, because the man shakes his head sharply, closing then placing his book down on the countertop. With a suddenness that shocks me, he turns and vanishes through a door set into a gap in the back wall that I hadn’t known was there.

  He doesn’t return, though I wait and wait until I’m sure I’ll miss the first bell at school, even if I sprint the whole way to get there.

  ‘Everyone’s talking about it,’ Vicki confides from the corner of her mouth with relish. ‘They’re just too afraid to bring it up. Honestly, it’s like you’ve got actual leprosy.’

  All morning, the personal forcefield we Crowes carry around with us has been up, sizzling away; Vicki the only person proof to it. Even the school principal and the school counsellor couldn’t get at me with their long, sad faces and offers of help because, as Wurbik himself had said resignedly: ‘You can’t make a person do something they don’t wanna do, right?’

  I’m aware of the awareness about me. Everywhere I go, spaces open up; people draw together in groups of two and three, the air filling with sibilant waves of: That’s her, there she is, she’s the one.

  I overhear Glenn Tippett confidently telling Miranda Cornish as I pass right by that: She sure got hit with the ugly stick, hey? I turn on him immediately and he actually shrinks back—all pimply, flaky-skinned, sandy-hued, six feet of him—even though he meant for me to hear.

  ‘Hey, double consonant,’ I snarl. ‘Glen with two ns. Where’s Simo? You know, Lucky-as. Where is he? Seen him?’ I don’t know why I’m asking, but I am. And from Vicki’s startled body language, I can see she isn’t sure why, either.

  Glenn, recovering himself and standing up straighter, shakes his head, tight-lipped. I turn on Miranda with her size-six ballerina’s body, doe eyes and long caramel hair. ‘You know?’ Miranda looks at me with something approaching hatred and pulls Glenn away by the sleeve.

  Vicki murmurs, ‘And she scores, with another delicious instance of foot-in-mouth. Rumour has it that Simon Thorn dropped the divine Miss M last week because she couldn’t spell, can you believe it? I give them three weeks, max. Glenn always takes Simon’s slops, and it always ends badly. The parties concerned should all know better.’

  Vicki takes me by the arm and steers me in the direction of Maths Methods, through a sea of rounded eyes and mouths. ‘If Thorny stays away long enough,
will you split the Tichborne with me?’ she says, laughing.

  But I think of cups of just-add-water instant noodles, towels gone grey and frayed from the repeat ministrations of coin-operated tumble dryers, and I don’t reply.

  After school, plenty of people see me getting into the bright blue unmarked police car (that screams police car) with the grim-faced, grey-haired man at the wheel. They point and stare. A few hold up their mobiles and take pictures. Mum has been everywhere. Every news concession stand I pass, every newsbreak, features that heartbreaking photo of my big-eyed, grinning mother in which my tanned right arm makes a cameo.

  ‘Let’s give them something to go with, hey?’ Wurbik says under his breath as he fires up the red-and-blue flashers on the dashboard and the siren, giving it a few more loud whoops until we reach Royal Parade and turn right into city-bound traffic, before switching it off. ‘People can be shits,’ he says into the sudden impression of silence. ‘Just hold your head up, the way you’re doing. She would be proud.’

  My skin prickles because he’s using the past tense again, but maybe I’m just being too goddamned sensitive. ‘So, “updates”?’ I say, trying to sound upbeat, chatty.

  ‘First things first,’ Wurbik says, letting the siren have its head again until we cut up through Elizabeth Street into La Trobe. ‘Need you to make sense of something for me.’

  I recall R. Preston, prop. ‘Did you speak with him?’ I say eagerly as Wurbik turns into Little La Trobe Street: a stub-end more than a thoroughfare, really, of crouching, mismatched buildings.

  Wurbik nods, braking. ‘A very helpful man. He’s agreed to stay open just to speak with you.’

  I frown in the act of getting out of the car. ‘But he wouldn’t even let me in this morning!’ I grumble. ‘And we were both right here. I was throwing myself at the door like a lemming. Could have saved himself the trouble.’