The Astrologer's Daughter

by Rebecca Lim

  Wurbik shrugs as he points his key at the car. There’s a deet, deet and blink of headlights. ‘Mr Preston has been very sick, still is. Doing us a favour, from what I can see.’

  The Closed sign is still up on the door, but Wurbik curls his fingers confidently around the femur-shaped door handle and gives it a push. The lights are on this time: three dim pendant lights—beautiful, antique Moroccan lamps in shades of rose and emerald green and old gold—and I look for the tall man with the long, silver hair and blue, blue eyes. But I’m confused when a small, elderly man in a white shirt and gold-framed glasses greets me from the back of the shop with a raised hand.

  I stop dead before I’ve even taken three more steps. There’s a Mariner’s Compass set into the centre of the marble floor, in veined shades of variegated blues and reds, outlined in thin bands of gold. Its outlines are interrupted by stacks of old newspapers and protruding bookcases set at weird angles, but for a moment I feel like the ground’s pulling away from me.

  Wurbik grabs me by the arm and says, ‘Steady on.’

  ‘Do you see it?’ I murmur helplessly. ‘The Mariner’s Compass?’

  He nods. ‘Is that what it’s called? It was one of the things I wanted to ask you—whether she made those pillows because she saw this first, or whether it was just a coincidence. Some New Agey thing I’m not aware of.’

  ‘Those pillows aren’t new,’ I say breathlessly, lurching forward again in the direction of the small shopkeeper whose expression is now concerned, rather than welcoming. ‘She hasn’t worked on anything like them, all the time we’ve been living here. It’s just an old design. People have been making them for centuries, Mum said.’

  Wurbik and I come up to the counter and I see the black book set neatly to one side, its spine tantalisingly out of view, mottled, unevenly cut pages facing me.

  ‘R. Preston?’ I query, my voice sharpened by a weird anxiety I can’t name. ‘Mr Preston?’

  The old man is shorter than I am; his grey skin, with a sweaty sheen to it, slack over his facial bones. I can see his flaking scalp straight through his sparse white comb-over.

  The old man nods. ‘Call me Robert,’ he says huskily, spittle shining at the corners of his mouth. ‘And you must be Avicenna.’

  He hesitates next, as if he’d like to shake my hand, but I take an infinitesimal step back and his own hands drop flat onto the white blotter I recognise from this morning. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he says slowly, perspiration shining old gold under the light overhead. ‘If I can help in any way?’

  The act of speaking makes him cough and cough.

  ‘If you could show her the entry?’ Wurbik queries after the man has stopped dabbing at his face with the back of one shaky hand. ‘She might be able to explain it to me in, ah, layman’s terms.’

  I glance sideways at Wurbik as the old man brings up a blue, leather-bound journal from under the countertop. He turns to a page marked with a gold ribbon and I see it’s some kind of ledger, filled with book-keeping entries in blue fountain pen, flowing copperplate handwriting.

  ‘Here it is,’ Robert Preston says, frowning. ‘It’s in my hand, certainly, but I can’t understand how I would have sold her that particular one. If—as you say—she was a professional astrologer, this one would have been nigh well useless to her. It’s a bit of a mystery. I’m sorry, but I don’t recall…’ The rest of his sentence is cut off by a fit of coughing.

  The entry says, as far as I can make out:

  Sold—the Kairwan-school (mistake) Astrolabe.

  $2200 (excl. GST).

  ‘Mum bought an astrolabe?’ I exclaim. She’d shown me an encyclopaedia entry once, years ago, of what an astrolabe was, and what it could do. Used for determining latitude on land, it was essentially some kind of manual calculator or star taker; that was literally what it meant. If you knew how to read it, the thing you held in your hand could predict the positions of celestial bodies: determine time, latitude, the future. We’d never been able to afford one.

  I explain all that to Wurbik as Preston comes around his counter to fetch one out of the front window for us to look at. It’s made of brass: a flat, disc-like thing on a sturdy fob chain, slightly bigger than my palm. It looks kind of like a manually manipulated compass—the kind that shows magnetic north, not Mum’s kind, with the arms—with a rotating bar or ruler in the centre that moves over an ornately designed, stylised map of what looks like an ecliptic plane. With a pointer finger misshapen by terrible arthritis, Preston shows us how the map itself can be rotated over an underlying plate engraved with clusters of circles, like a web.

  Layers on layers; all moving and circling. I see immediately the elegance of it, the genius. How, years before computers were invented, you could use one to take the measure of your place in the universe, provided the map, and the pointers, reflected your slice of the horizon.

  ‘She’s always wanted one,’ I say aloud, tentatively touching the face of the thing Preston is holding out to us. It swings a little on its chain, when I push it. It’s surprisingly heavy for its size.

  ‘But the one she purchased was useless,’ Preston wheezes, laying the astrolabe flat on the white blotter. He peers over his glasses at it. ‘It was never properly assembled. I mean, the tympan’—he points at the flat plate with etched circles on it that lies beneath the two moving layers—‘is of no known azimuth or altitude. The celestial sphere it represents certainly doesn’t correspond to our horizon. And the stars that are the subject of the pointers on the rete are completely unrecognisable, at least to me…’

  Preston twirls the ornate upper layer of metal that lies beneath the movable ruler-like arm. ‘I bought it cheap out of a private collection, on that basis: that it was some kind of elaborate 18th-century fake. It’s certainly old, but almost a joke astrolabe. A mistake. That’s what I called it, you see here?’ He points again at the journal entry, from about a month back. ‘It’s Tunisian in origin—of the Kairwan school—cast metal, antique, rare; but a joke, nevertheless. Just someone’s interpretation of a sky I have never seen. Probably worthless but, because of its age, and the delicacy of its manufacture…’

  Wurbik thanks Preston for his time and the old man nods, clearing his throat before saying, ‘Any time, Detective, any time. If I can be of any further assistance…’

  The old man starts turning off the lights as we head back towards the door, but I stop and turn, remembering the tall man in black with the gleaming hair and skin like marble, who was reading the old book that still sits to one side of the blotter. There’s no giant now, though the book’s here, it’s as solid as I am. If I don’t ask, I will never know.

  ‘Do you have any assistants, Mr Preston,’ I call out, ‘who might have seen my mum or maybe talked to her? You don’t remember selling her that astrolabe, but there was a man here this morning…’ I describe him, and it’s Robert Preston’s turn to look startled. I see his right hand pause over the book beside the blotter, then come to rest protectively on it.

  He shakes his head. ‘No, it’s just me these days. It’s not a going concern of much consequence, you understand,’ he rasps. ‘And since I started my last course of treatment, well…’ He shrugs.

  Baffled, I point at the book under his palm. ‘But he was rea
ding that book,’ I say. ‘And then he turned and left by the back door.’ I indicate a spot to the left of the bookcase, unable now to spot the egress through the dim of the shop.

  The old man looks down sharply at the leather-bound book and turns it over. ‘This book?’ he queries, again surprised. ‘I confess I’ve been dipping into it lately, as I’ve been much…preoccupied with the things it speaks of: death, time, love, God.’

  I feel a cold trickle down my spine as he murmurs, ‘Donne’s Songs and Sonnets of 1635. A rare edition, hand-cut pages; I would never dream of selling it or letting anyone handle it. You must be mistaken,’ he adds, patting the shelving behind him with pale and twisted fingers that almost shine in the gloom. ‘There’s no back door here; never was. These are handmade shelves; solid jarrah. I had them put in back in 1978; cost me almost as much as my car in those days. Behind them? There’s a wall of rendered double brick. And behind that? A block of flats, some trendy warehouse conversion. The side door’—he points to a spot just behind my right shoulder—‘leads to Boundary Lane. It’s where I park…’

  His voice trails off, baffled, and turns into coughing that sounds draining, fatal. I reach out blindly to Wurbik, who I’m sure can feel strong tremors in the hand that’s resting on his sleeve.

  ‘Thanks again!’ the detective calls out as the door with the leg bone for a handle swings shut behind us.

  14

  ‘What was that all about?’ Wurbik says as he steers the car back into Exhibition Street.

  We’re only minutes from home, so I babble through my recollections of the morning. ‘I know what I saw,’ I insist fiercely. ‘He had to have been at least seven feet tall. He was standing there like you’re sitting there, reading that black book. Then he disappeared through a wall.’

  ‘Grief does strange things to people,’ Wurbik mutters, firing up the siren long enough for us to get past a turning bus.

  ‘I know what I saw,’ I repeat numbly. ‘He was real. He looked at me and he shook his head.’

  Wurbik stops the car outside my building in a No Standing zone, because he can, and I suddenly remember the word Mum played: always. Thinking about it again sends a shiver straight across the skin of my belly and I clutch at it as if I have just been knifed. Eagerly, I hold up my mobile to Wurbik’s scrutiny. He peers intently at the screen, then pulls his notebook out of a side pocket in the car door, jotting down the word; the time and date it was sent.

  ‘I passed on my turn,’ I say shakily, ‘in the hope that she’d play something back straight away, but she didn’t.’

  ‘It could be a spasm in the system,’ Wurbik says cautiously, handing my mobile back. ‘Word was maybe sent a lot earlier, but it came through on delay. My wife plays this,’ he adds, sounding resigned. ‘Gets locked out all the time; up to a day, even two. She’s always getting invited to play phantom games with strangers who resign without making a single move, days later. Drives her bananas. The system seems to just, I dunno, generate things.’

  But he can see the whites of my eyes, feel my desperation, and says hastily, ‘But we’ll double, triple check, okay? It’s important, and I’m glad you told me. But it’ll depend on where the server is. If it’s run out of another jurisdiction we’ll have trouble getting a straight answer. But someone will be on it right away.’

  I nod, shoving my phone back into the pack at my feet. ‘Well, thanks for the lift. Saved me walking.’

  I’m pulling on the car door with fingers that won’t work properly when Wurbik says from behind me, ‘They’re organising a line search for tomorrow, Avicenna. Nothing definite yet, but I’ll call you the second we know anything.’

  I turn back to face him. ‘That’s the update?’ I whisper.

  He nods, his eyes never leaving mine. ‘Mount Warning National Park.’

  I look at him blankly. Never heard of it; never been there. I would remember, I know I would.

  ‘It’s in New South Wales, near the Queensland border. They’ll start at first light. Her phone goes offline inside its boundaries just before 9pm on the Friday. Your dad, you know, the anniversary of the fire, would have been the Saturday. But if the place had any special significance to her, we’re struggling to find it. She was’—he stares out the windscreen for a second, then back at me—‘a long way from home. That’s all I want to say at this point. I’ll tell you more when I know more.’

  I do the math like I’m standing underwater with concrete shoes on.

  Friday was three days ago. Although it was sent on Saturday—the anniversary of the fire?—I saw her word today. Any way you look at it, by the time it reached me, the word was already a lie.

  It didn’t mean always, as in love always, be home soon.

  It meant gone for always, dead for always.

  I find myself shrieking, pounding on Wurbik’s chest. ‘You need to work on your delivery! Your delivery sucks!’

  Then I slam my way out of his neon-bright car and into my building, a raging, noisy, tearful bull, blundering up the stairs in the dim afternoon light, bouncing off the turns and railings like a pinball. I don’t notice the young man leaning against the wall outside my front door until I’m almost on top of him. But the sight of him chokes me silent. I stare at him appalled, face smeared, tears still clumping my eyelashes together, as he pushes off the wall, crossing his arms like the explanation I’ve got for him had better be good.

  He is honestly…breathtaking. I see that right away. It’s unavoidable, how good-looking he is, like a hand seizing you around the throat.

  My gaze snaps away from his face, then back again. I can hardly stand to look at him, having to take tiny, incredulous, up-from-under-the-eyelashes peeks. People like this actually exist? It’s an insult to the rest of us.

  The guy is tall, and built along these perfect lines. Early twenties, I’m guessing. Dark-blond, tousled, collar-length waves, great shoulders, great bones; slim-fit jeans with torn knees under a dark-grey flannel shirt open at the collar and rolled up tight at the elbows to reveal forearms corded with veins and lean muscles. Artfully maintained two-day growth shadows his jawline and he wears a shark tooth pendant around his neck. A leather satchel with a black jacket and grey-toned scarf draped over it sits near one boot-shod foot.

  I blink as the stranger begins moving towards me with a languor that doesn’t quite match the fury in his dark eyes. I figure he must have blundered his way into my stairwell by mistake until he demands harshly, ‘Who are you? Where’s Joanne?’

  A sneer curls his beautiful mouth as he looks me up and down, his eyes narrowing momentarily on my scars. ‘She told me to come back today for my reading, so I came, preparing to be read to, and no one was here. Do you know how long I’ve waited?’

  An awful thought is forming.

  Ish Hee-yoooooo.

  I’d completely forgotten about him. What had I promised him the other night, to make him go away? My hands rise up to my face in horror and I shrink back in the direction of the stairs as he draws closer, snarling, ‘You’re crooks, aren’t you? Scammers? It was you the other night, in the bathroom, wasn’t it? Not Joanne. I thought she sounded funny, different.’

  I’m shaking my head as he spits, ‘Where is it? My so-called “fortune”? She
hasn’t done it, has she?’ He pushes his hair back off his forehead. ‘What you people don’t understand,’ he adds slowly, like I’m stupid, ‘is that I’m not your usual brain-dead spiritualist who’s easy to put off and con. Unless I see every cent of my money back, I’m going to report you charlatans to the police.’

  The shouted word reverberates, hanging there in the still, cold air of the stairwell, and for a churning instant—when he extends his hand in accusation—I think he’s going to touch me. Or hit me.

  Then there’s a sudden clatter of shoes on the stairs and I back straight into a hard male chest, my scream freezing in my throat as a large hand falls on my shoulder and gives it a squeeze. I slump where I stand, recognising the tobacco-raddled scent of the man’s aftershave.

  ‘The police are already here,’ Wurbik says laconically from behind me, causing the young man to blink and straighten in surprise. ‘What seems to be the issue, Sport?’

  Inside my apartment, Wurbik refuses to hand me back the bag I’d left in his car until he has established to his own satisfaction who it is he’s looking at. But when he realises that he’s actually in the presence of the last client named in Mum’s journal—in the flesh—not a single muscle moves in his face. I can almost hear him thinking: Well, that’s all of them then, come forward. Kircher, Bawden, de Crespigny.

  While Wurbik’s distracted, I grab my pack out of his big callused hand and kick it under the overhanging lip of the kitchen bench, giving him a speaking look with one eyebrow that says: Thanks, Dad, I can take it from here with the angry hot guy.

  But Wurbik steps around me and opens my fridge door. He peers at a bowl of collapsed and weeping tomatoes with every appearance of interest, saying casually, ‘So, Mr de Crespigny, you haven’t seen or heard any of the blanket media coverage regarding Joanne Nielsen Crowe’s disappearance last week?’