The Astrologer's Daughter

by Rebecca Lim

  ‘Why would you even want to know?’ Simon breathes, coming around to my side of the table and forcing me to shove over.

  What follows are pages and pages of notes. How many pets the man had, the stupid things he’d called them. The names of his estranged adult children, the houses and places he’d lived in, the money he’d made and assets he owned. Names of companies, names of old girlfriends, ex-wives, people he thought had swindled him, people he thought he’d swindled. Mum had a way of loosening people up so that they talked and talked and talked. People told her everything: their deepest, darkest secrets, things they’d been carrying around for years. None of it might have anything to do with their actual horoscope, but whatever they told her gave her an idea of the kind of person she was dealing with, and how to frame the message she was about to give them: short and sharp, like a slap, because that’s the way they liked to take their bad news, straight up; or vague and sweet, because anything harsher than that would completely undo them.

  Based on Kircher’s birthdate, he was seventy-one years old and had never been hospitalised, never taken a day off work. He lived to work. He’d ruined just about a million marriages to prove the point. Every woman he’d ever come into contact with hated his guts. The guy had enemies from every walk of life, stretching back decades.

  Mum had drawn a little cartoon in one margin; a small stick-figure dog with a balloon coming out of its mouth that said: He seems proud of this?!

  I can’t resist needling Simon. ‘Play your cards right,’ I say snidely, ‘and one day this could be you.’

  Simon shoots me a dark look and keeps reading.

  At the end of Mum’s running notes on Kircher, we come across a rough sketch of the astrological wheels she’d worked out for him. There is no indication that she’d ever scheduled in the guy for the final face-to-face to give him the news, whatever that had been. Maybe she was working from the drawing I was looking at straight into my laptop. When she…

  I feel a pang. The police can correlate all that. They have my computer.

  ‘Can you read this thing?’ Simon asks, glancing from Kircher’s roughed-out astro chart to me. ‘Those questions he asked, could you answer them, do you think?’

  I nod, but quickly turn the page, to stop myself doing it. It’s none of my business if someone’s got a death wish, or whatever. People are mental. The next two pages are filled with taped-in photocopies of old newspaper clippings. My scalp prickles.

  Simon helps me hold one of the pages flat as I smooth out a large article folded into an upper corner. There’s a date handwritten along the margin in blue biro: 9 July, 1984. It isn’t Mum’s writing.

  ‘Somebody must have given her this,’ I murmur. ‘As background.’

  We start reading the article and I feel myself shrinking in my seat, my face and body going hot and needly with distress. Fifteen-year-old girl found naked, brutalised. Clubbed to death on neighbour’s property.

  Fleur Lucille Bawden would have been around my Mum’s age now, if some sick bastard hadn’t used her like a wet wipe and thrown her away. He’d used a golf club, apparently, in all sorts of inventive ways.

  I fold the newspaper clipping up hurriedly as soon as I’m done, not checking to see whether Simon’s finished because I’m feeling panicky and breathless. I flip backwards and forwards, briefly scanning every article, and he lets me do it, without complaining. All date from a six-month period from mid-1984 to early 1985; there’s nothing later than that.

  I slump in my seat. There is a feeling in the pit of my stomach, an almost pain, for this girl. I can see why Mum would have wanted to take this one on. Sometimes the news made her cry. I would look up from the meal I was balancing across my knees and there would be tears streaming down her face. She’d see me looking and hurriedly pretend there was something in her eye, a big something. Or she’d whoosh to her feet and say she needed to go to the bathroom, and go cry in there.

  She lived like all her nerves were on the surface of her skin. If someone was rude to her at the bank, or in the street, it would hurt her for days. She’d circle back to the incident like a dog worrying at a wound, always resolving to be a better person, saying she must have deserved it somehow, that it was karma coming back on her.

  Someone had called her a chink-lover once, on the streets of Dimboola while she was pregnant with me and walking with Dad. This stranger had leaned over and hissed it right into her startled face. She’d never gotten over it. Such a small, random unkindness, but she could still access the pain fresh, like it happened five minutes ago. Since we moved here, she’d mentioned it more than once, like it was on her mind a lot.

  On the page after the taped-down news stories is a list of names and birthdates, times, all with birthplaces attached. There are four names, all male, ranging from a forty-eight-year-old to someone who would be eighty-seven later in the year. I see Simon’s eyebrows rise when he gets to that one, doing the math as quick as me.

  On the facing page, Mum’s written: All horary readings. Any likelys? Contact Don Sturt for more background. Two instalments, first down.

  There’s a mobile number for Don Sturt, written underneath, but nothing more. No charts, no workings. It was hard to see whether Mum had gotten very far with this one, but easy enough to figure out why someone would still want to know, even after all this time.

  Time’s like a concertina, Mum said once. It has a habit of folding in on itself. You come back to it, and back to it, the same point where everything went off course. It’s a song with only one verse, one chorus.

  She’d been talking about what happened with Dad. But she could just as easily have been talking about Fleur Bawden, with her long, skinny limbs, long golden hair and wide brown eyes.

  ‘She was unrecognisable,’ I find myself whispering, unable to forget the words. ‘Like she’d been in a bad car accident with no seatbelt on. Blunt force trauma to the body, to the face; but especially the face.’

  ‘They must have been desperate, hey? To consult a, um, ah…’ Simon’s voice trails off awkwardly.

  ‘Witch doctor?’ I say waspishly, regretting it when I see the look on his face. ‘Yeah,’ I murmur. ‘Desperate. They always are.’

  I look back down at the list of names, times, dates, places. To anyone but the Crowes, they would just appear to be a harmless arrangement of letters and numbers, flat and unrevealing. But if there was anything in them, Mum would have been able to find it.

  I turn to the next page and take in the name: Hugh Athelrede de Crespigny.

  Birthdate: 19 October, 1992.

  Birthplace: London, United Kingdom.

  ‘Well, that figures,’ I say automatically, understanding dawning at once. ‘Dickhead.’

  Out of the corner of my eye I see Simon’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘You know this one?’

  ‘He came calling this evening,’ I mutter, ‘while I was on the toilet.’

  ‘What?’

  Mum’s written: Wants a simple radix done—emphasis on wealth, health, love. Paid in total.

  Nothing more beyond that. I flick through a few more pages and they’re all blank. All up, Mum only got a third of the way into the journal.

  ‘Wait!’ Simon insi
sts as I fan through the rest of the book impatiently until I reach the queasy-looking endpapers at the back and shut it. ‘I think I saw something.’

  He takes the journal out of my hands and thumbs carefully back through the end pages. Taped all by itself, on a page near the end of the book, is a small business card that reads:

  I lever the card a little off the page and peer down the gap I’ve created, spotting an address in Little La Trobe Street on the back. It’s about three blocks away from my place.

  ‘I’ve never heard of it before,’ Simon mutters, ‘and I thought I knew—’

  ‘Everything?’ I interject quietly. ‘Keep thinking that, mate.’

  Simon sits back, looking slightly wounded, and I almost say to him: What is it about you that makes me say these things? Instead I close the journal, looking up at the TV without really seeing it. Outside, in the intersection between Russell and Bourke, someone gives someone else a serve on their car horn. I hear abuse, a flare of squealing tires, but I don’t turn.

  She said I would love it here, because she did. She lived here before, with my father.

  The old man, Boon, had let that one slip. Mum had never told me herself that she had any history with this city. When I’d been looking at it all with fresh eyes, like a wide-eyed bumpkin in the big smoke, I’d thought she had been too.

  I lay the flat of my hand against the journal’s cover. ‘I have to give this to the police,’ I hear myself saying faintly. ‘First thing. One of these people may have, may know…’

  It’s the enormity that gets me the most: of her absence. It crowds out everything. I swallow, and the sea beneath the surface of me trembles.

  Simon tugs on my sleeve and I look down at his damaged hand, reminded afresh how weird it is that he is here, of all people. We’re sharing pineapple-pork pides together like we’re friends. If we aren’t defending our positions vigorously, poisonously, we barely talk in class. Just look dagger eyes at each other in a constant struggle for verbal and written supremacy.

  He’s exhausting to be around, pushy. I’m reminded of this as he says, ‘You need to come back to school, finish the talk.’ His voice is low and urgent. ‘Just finish, you’re that close. It won’t take more than an hour, two at most. We’ll get it done—even if it means we have to stake out a corner of the library and I have to put up with your ugly mu…’

  Simon actually tries to suck the words back in, pulling away from me in horror, and I find I’ve got that smile again, the one that draws down a little at the corners that I have trouble holding steady. Abruptly I stand up and jam the journal under one arm, my wallet under the other. Then turn on my heel with a hiccupping sound. This time, he doesn’t try to follow me when I walk away.

  7

  I slept like I was falling into a pit. But something woke me. My alarm clock reads 5.41am and there’ll be no going back to sleep now. I’m on, that’s the way it always is. On till I’m off and have run out of hours in the day.

  The darkness is absolute in my windowless room and immediately the light has to go on, too, or I’ll feel like I’m drowning.

  I can’t just leave it to them to find her.

  The thought makes me sit up. I fumble for my phone, speed-dialling Mum. I go straight to voicemail for, like, the fiftieth time. It’s a long shot—the longest—but I tap open the app, just to see whether she has played. In the absence of an actual life, I play Words with Friends a lot.

  Mum’s one of them, one of the friends, that’s how hard up I am for mates. She’ll be sitting out at the meals table—working!—and I’ll be in my bedroom—working!—and we’ll be playing each other. I’d hear her shriek, right through the wall, whenever I got her a beauty.

  Blinking furiously, I see that the game I’m playing with Vicki is open and she has sent through the word sluts for 22 points. Her message in the message window reads: You and me, baby!

  She’s intersected it with her previous effort—nudes—because getting naked with anyone, anywhere, is on her mind a lot.

  I’ve got great letters, I could get her in a million different ways right now, but I flick out of the game we’ve got going on and tap into the one I’m playing with Mum. With a catch in my breathing, I see that it’s still her turn. Nothing has changed.

  Her last word was peptide and her message had been: You’re lucky I couldn’t use my Z, darl.

  My screen is telling me to give her a nudge because it’s been two days! So I do. I nudge my missing mother, heart in my throat. And I know it’s completely irrational, but I actually hold my breath as I do it, in case she shoots something back. Which is crazy, right? Because she’d completely forget to come home, or even tell me where she is, but she’d keep on playing?

  But there’s nothing; even though I wait through an entire chunk of adverts then the news and weather bulletins on the radio, praying over my screen for the sparkly bling sound that will tell me she’s sent me a word, that she’s back.

  Disgusted at myself for even looking, I flick to the last game I’m playing.

  Changeling_ 29 has sent through: qoph for 46 points. Hebrew alphabet, 19th letter. Classy.

  Nice. I message him. But the day you beat me is the day the world ends, buddy.

  Unable to stop myself, I stab the word teetered into the screen for 78, using up all of my letters in one hit on all the good squares, together with one of his.

  But he’s right back with qat for 32.

  I look at the clock. It’s 6.09am.

  When I’m on, he’s always right there, ready to go, like he’s been waiting for me. He never seems to sleep. I think that if I didn’t live for our games so much, it would kind of freak me out: how much we play, how much time me and Changeling_ 29 actually spend together, our thoughts bent on each other and total domination.

  I crouch over the small pane of luminescence in my hand, studying my options. It’s close this time, only nine points the difference. I wait for the taunt, the sledge, that any normal person would make. But it never comes, because Changeling_ 29 never writes me messages. He just plays.

  I don’t know him. He’s just some random who challenged me to a game a few days after I started at Collegiate and we haven’t stopped playing since. We’ll finish a game and one of us will call an immediate rematch, setting up the first killer word for an early advantage the way a decent chess player will always go for white over black: to set the pace; to niggle and press and destabilise. It’s not that white is inherently better, you understand. It just always gets to go first.

  The games with Changeling_ 29 are always close. But it’s been months, and he hasn’t been able to crack a win against me, and I love that it must be killing him. I think of him as a him, because deep down I’m as desperate as Vicki is: even if it’s just some lovelorn nerd-boy wanting to rub his consonants against me. I don’t know how he found me, it’s not like I have my gamer name—Cenna—tattooed onto my forehead, but I no longer care. He’s my longest relationship, ever. And he plays bloke words like pec and scrotum, so QED, right?

  Bastard, I write absently into the message box, before setting my phone down. What am I doing playing games with ghosts?

  I suck in a horrified breath. Take it back, take it back.

&nbs
p; I roll over the side of the bed, landing on my hands and knees on the fat floor cushions lined up along the side. Mum laid those down for me herself the day we moved our belongings in. With the rocking, I often fall out of bed and she’d said: Soft landings for you, my darling, always. They’re red and orange, like a sunset. Or a fire. It always comes back to that.

  Eyes welling, I jump under the freezing shower water that tastes of iron, scrubbing myself a raw pink as the water warms up. By the end, it’s always searing, and I give myself an extra five minutes because there is no one else to conserve the heat for.

  I climb into the same passion-killing outfit from the night before, then shove my phone, wallet and Mum’s journal into my pack that still smells of bananas. It’s not yet 6.30, but it’s a Saturday, and Paolo will be opening up at the bakery on Swanston Street that I’ve designated as my local.

  I have a thing for Paolo, with his coffee-coloured skin, curly man-bun and dancer’s body. Whenever I order a coffee and something loaded with custard, he makes me feel pretty, if only for the time it takes me to dig out the right change. That’s our deal: a little light flirtation for $7.80. Just seeing him is better than the caffeine, and if I don’t get my regular hit of him I get cranky.

  I feel forward with my toes down three gloomy flights of stairs towards the pool of streetlight coming in through the glassed-in street door. After it slams behind me, I breathe out. A cloud that’s white, like dragon’s breath, against the dark sky.

  ‘Good morning,’ someone says beside me and I swear to God I leap two feet in the air. He’s leaning against the red-brick wall beside the bean sprout company plaque and his nose doesn’t look quirky or interesting in the streetlight; it looks broken.