The Astrologer's Daughter

by Rebecca Lim

  But a tiny, unreasonable part of me is telling me a happy ending is still achievable. Even in the face of whatever’s happened to Mum, I can’t squash it down and I can’t kill it. Every so often it will rear up—the way it’s doing now—and proclaim, like one of those cheesy motivational posters with a flying eagle on it: Believe in the power of you.

  The inner voice—my eagle voice—had taken one look at Hugh the last time and said: There’s your dream guy, Cenna, just grab him. How often does the dream guy come along? This is the guy. Do something, fast.

  It’s saying now what Eleanor had told me inside Boon’s store: People come into your life for a reason.

  I imagine that chirpy, positive voice; how it would look if it were, say, a pink butterfly instead of an eagle. Then I imagine myself grinding the pink butterfly into the concrete stair tread and call up, sharply, from the landing below mine, ‘I’m officially retired, Hugh, as of today. Shop’s shut.’

  He doesn’t reply.

  I lean against Mum and Dad’s old apartment door for support, bellowing, ‘I told an old man on Sunday that he was going to die sometime during the next eight days. And you know what, Hugh? He just did. His yacht exploded. I’m not safe to be around.’

  There’s shuffling on the floorboards upstairs, but Hugh still doesn’t respond.

  I force myself to keep walking, but as I come to the last flight of stairs, Hugh’s standing at the top of them with a second guy who is dark, fine-featured, preppy. Handsome: but with a stocky frame, logos all over his clothes. He’s a lot softer-looking, a lot shorter. It must kill him to have a friend who looks like Hugh. Both of them are standing there, lit up all ghostly from the mobile phones in their hands. I flick my own Maglite on.

  ‘Is this her?’ There is laughter in the shorter man’s voice, and my skin seems to shrink back as I recognise it instantly. Rosso. When Hugh still doesn’t say anything, Rosso says snidely, ‘She’s “the last in a long line of soothsayers with whom Death walks”? You have to be kidding me. You think she has the power to settle our longstanding bet, once and for all?’

  I have no idea what Rosso’s talking about. But the way he’s looking at me actually makes me want to cover my body in a burqa, or hide.

  ‘If it’s a question of payment,’ Rosso drawls, his eyes never leaving me, running up and down me like spiders, ‘we’ve got plenty of money, right Hughey?’

  Both men have the grace to back up when I mount the stairs towards them. Hugh actually seems apologetic as he holds out a clear plastic slip cover full of papers. I look down at it in his hand, but I don’t take it.

  ‘We talked to Jacqueline…’ he says, running his free hand through the fringe of hair hanging over his face.

  ‘My sainted mother,’ Rosso interjects sardonically.

  ‘And she gave us a little background on your mum and your family and how—’

  ‘She’s devastated, by the way,’ Rosso interrupts again, ‘my mother. Took to her bed this afternoon when she heard the news. She raved about your mother, raved.’

  I gaze at him, bewildered, the pain rising up and rising up, until Hugh catches the look on my face and says roughly, ‘Shut up, Rosso, let me speak.’

  ‘What I want to know,’ Hugh continues in a wild rush, shaking the plastic slip cover, ‘is whether one of these men is a killer. I mean, could you tell if one of them might actually have killed someone?’ He corrects himself sharply, ‘Murdered someone.’ Rosso shoots him a hard look.

  I glance at the packet of papers Hugh is holding, still not understanding a word that’s coming out of his mouth. ‘What…bet?’ I say weakly.

  He pushes the documents at me and I finally take them. The top page has two sets of birthdates, birthtimes and birthplaces scrawled across the top of it in Hugh’s bold hand in black permanent marker. No names.

  Hugh shoves that lock of hair back again off his face. It’s weird, but he seems almost nervous.

  ‘You want me,’ I finally reply, ‘to do a horary reading for each of these…men?’

  Hugh nods while Rosso just watches me with his silver eyes, mouth quirked up hatefully at the corners.

  Okay, so the two subjects are men.

  Even though I don’t intend to actually follow through on Hugh’s request, part of me is trying to understand the question I’m receiving right here, right now. I look down at my watch automatically, making note of the time: 8.03pm.

  ‘You want me to tell you if one or both of these men deliberately…murdered someone?’

  Hugh nods. I do the mental arithmetic on the birthdates and come up with both men being in their early sixties. There’s a roughly two-year age gap between them; that’s all I can glean.

  ‘Just look at everything that’s there and then call me?’ Hugh says, almost pleadingly. ‘My number’s in there. As Rosso said’—he gives Rosso a hard hip and shoulder from the side—‘we can pay; that’s not a problem. It’s just that what you said the other day, about my father, got me thinking about—’

  Rosso goes, ‘No names, Hughey, shit,’ and Hugh actually grabs him by his shirt and half lifts him off his feet, pushing Rosso into motion so that he stumbles forward towards the stairs.

  ‘Call me?’ Hugh says. ‘Once you’ve read everything. I hope you’ll do it. It’s, it’s…’ He closes his glorious eyes briefly. ‘It’s stuffed up my entire life, not knowing.’

  Still confused, I watch the two guys manhandle each other down and around the corner and out of sight before lowering my Maglite. I must have looked like a crazy person, standing there with my jammed-down beanie and unbound, witchy hair, lit torch in my raised hand, like a stake. I can still hear their feet on the stairs below when something suddenly occurs to me.

  ‘Who?’ I scream down the stairwell. ‘Who are these men supposed to have killed?’

  ‘That’s classified,’ Rosso shouts up, straight away. ‘You don’t need to know that.’

  ‘But it’s not enough,’ I say furiously. ‘I need something more: a date, a place. Was it a woman? A man?’

  There’s a scuffle of sound from below, murmured voices, low and angry.

  ‘Do you want to know or not?’ I hear Hugh snarl.

  ‘If he finds out you’ve been airing very private dirty laundry with a cheap palm reader, he will kill you himself,’ Rosso snaps back. ‘And I will stand back and let him. I can’t believe you’re actually going through with this.’

  More scuffling, then: ‘The 9th of July, 1984,’ Hugh shouts, as the street door opens and slams.

  I go weak, momentarily unable to fit my key into the lock. My hand is shaking too hard because I know that date.

  I know that date.

  PART 3

  Don’t allow the past to poison the present. Fight it.

  18

  Now that I am home, and in my pyjamas, the tears won’t come.

  The rock I am hauling seems heavier than ever, but I lift it effortlessly as I unplug my home phone before taking cans of creamed corn and stock out of the kitchen cupboards, dumping their contents into a saucepan. Then I microwave a hunk of frozen chicken until it’s hot on the outside, but still frozen in the middle, c
hopping it up haphazardly and throwing it in until I have something resembling soup going. I season the whole mess and stir an egg through it so that the white flares out into streamers resembling drowned blossoms, before turning the flame down and washing up. The whole time I tell myself I must be a bad daughter because I do not cry.

  The tears still do not come as I lay out blankets and pillows on the couch avoiding the squat, blank shape of the TV in the corner. The worst has already happened; there’s no need for the relevant footage, or an accompanying voice over; blow-by-blow coverage:

  SES volunteers found her bloodied shirt, hanging in the lower branches of a tree–

  Disturbed undergrowth–

  Strange circular impressions in the topsoil–

  Police sources say the blood trail went for almost six hundred metres up the mountainside before abruptly ceasing.

  While I’m cleaning my teeth and trying to brush out the worst knots in my hair, my mobile goes off on the vanity unit beside me. It’s Simon, with a two-word text that says only: I’m outside.

  Ignoring the reams of missed calls and messages—Wurbik and Vicki amongst them—I let Simon in. Neither of us speaks. We are both bad children, for our eyes are dry. I know that nothing could ever surprise us again. We will be impervious.

  He sways a little on the spot and I put my arm around his waist gingerly—conscious of all his wounds, both visible and invisible—and lead him to the made-up couch in the living room. He lets me hold him lightly for a second, then his plastic bags slide out of his fingers and he lays down with his back to me, fully clothed. I douse all the lights except for the lamp that turns everything in its vicinity a soft orange. Even from the darkened kitchen I can see his outline, shaking. There’s the soup, of course, but nobody wants it. So I turn off the gas and put the covered pot in the fridge.

  As quietly as I can, I slide Hugh’s packet of papers off the kitchen bench and take it and my phone into my bedroom, closing the door behind me. I’m not doing these readings for Hugh, I tell myself fiercely, who is nothing, and can never be anything to me. I am doing it for the person who was murdered—it wasn’t an accident, Hugh made that clear enough—on 9 July more than a decade before I was born.

  Already the problem has arisen of what I should do if the answer, in the case of either man, is: Yes. But I park that for later because I’m good at compartmentalising. Grief has taught me that: how to batten down the hatches; seal off the affected areas.

  Setting aside the two sets of handwritten details, I fan the rest of the papers out across my nubbly bedspread. There’s a URL crawling along the bottom of each page from an obscure astrology website I’ve never heard of; research from the internet that Hugh thought was important for me to read, as background.

  What had Mum said once? They show you the darndest things, Avi.

  And they do. I’ve had more windows into my mother’s life than I could ever wish for, and yet she remains mysterious, out-of-reach, unknowable. When I think of her now, she comes bathed in that soft, red-gold light of my dream, as remote as the stars.

  There are computer-generated astrological charts interspersed amongst the pages Hugh provided, the symbols coloured in baby pinks and blues and greens. Curious, I backtrack until I find the last relevant subheading, helpfully outlined in green highlighter:

  CASE STUDY 3

  The Descendants of Beverley Eunice Crowe,

  Astrologer (Australia)

  Every hair on my body standing on end, I read:

  Beverley Eunice Crowe was the first in a recorded matrilineal line of soothsayers with whom Death was reputed to ‘walk’. She was said to have told one querent that Death had blue eyes and a calm and cultured demeanour, who ‘is a great personal comfort’. When her body was discovered in bizarre circumstances in a client’s apartment in Manly, New South Wales, Australia, in 1962, there were allegations of occult practices that were never substantiated and no culprit was ever charged. But when her only daughter, Joyce, hung up her own shingle, many practitioners in this branch of horoscopic astrology—

  My eyes fly down the page and two passages leap out at me as if outlined in flames:

  Joyce was known to have credited seeing Death at several critical junctures in her life. Like her mother, Joyce also died before she reached the age of forty-five and it is well known that she foretold the exact date and circumstances of her premature and tragic death based on the Pleiades rising in opposition to her ascendant in conjunction with the sun in baleful opposition to Mars.

  Joanne is said to have surpassed both her mother and her grandmother in intuitive ability, but her life has been marred by more than its fair share of grief and tragedy due to a prolonged period of that well-known condition ‘Saturn hunting the moon’. It is also well known in the horary community that Joanne found, then swiftly lost, her soul mate—a man whose natal Venus, it may be added, was conjunct that most fated of indicators, her natal vertex. After his death, she is said to have been ‘destroyed’, but as Pluto is her planetary ruler, together with the calming influence of Neptune—marrying transformation and arcane power with wisdom, sensitivity, vision, empathy and compassion—Joanne did recover and continues to do great work in the field of—

  There’s one natal chart for Bev, one for Joyce.

  One for Mum and one for…me.

  Refusing to look at the charts— our charts!—I fire up my laptop and type in the URL for one of the pages I’m holding and it’s really there, all out there, for people to see. We Crowes are a case history accessible to every wacko spiritualist nut-job on the planet with WiFi. There aren’t any direct hyperlinks to our names, thank God, so we’re unlikely to ever trend on Google, but some astrology tragic in Chicago, Illinois, has compiled a Ridley’s on the best-known horary practitioners in recent history, and as I scroll through paragraph after paragraph of lunacy, I see that I get a mention, too:

  It remains to be seen whether Joanne’s daughter Avicenna (named auspiciously after the great Persian polymath) manifests any—

  Mum wouldn’t even tell me her birthdate, but her chart, her chart, is right here. On the screen and in my hand. Wurbik would have seen this already, and Mal; anyone else who’d cared to look. Suddenly, all the weird little questions, the glances between the two men that day at the police complex, they all make sense.

  I shut my laptop down and push everything aside for later, only keeping the piece of paper with Hugh’s handwriting on it in front of me. I tell myself that after today, I will never do this again. Because no one in Chicago, Illinois, or anywhere else in the world, has the right to know whether I manifest a common cold, let alone ‘the knowledge’. After these two readings are done, I will never again frame a question for the heavens to answer.

  Some things may have no answer, see. I accept that. But some questions should never be asked. Boon was right: this thing we Crowes can do is dangerous.

  I hesitate for a while over whether to assign the quesited thing—the issue of another’s murder—to the seventh house governing other people and open enemies, or to the fifth house governing sex and pleasure.

  Something—the murder date, or maybe the weird frisson of discord between Hugh and Rosso, or just the way Hu
gh had looked: kind of wild and sick and desperate—makes me plump for the fifth house. The house and its ruler will largely determine the quesited thing, the answer, and I hope this gut feeling is right.

  It takes me a few hours to progress the men’s natal charts to the night in question. After I finish annotating the transits into the outer wheel for each man, it becomes clear that the two are implicated in some personal grief or misfortune for the same day and time period. The older one was physically injured—that much is obvious from the afflictions to Mars and Uranus and his progressed sun, with trouble coming through siblings, or family connections. But the younger man…

  I lay my pen down and rock for a long time, my knees drawn up under my chin, hoping that none of what I’m looking at is true. At birth, the younger man’s natal stars show multiple afflictions affecting his natal sun and moon. There are harsh aspects between Mars and the sun conjunct Venus, between Mars and the ascendant, between the moon and Jupiter, between both the luminaries and Mars. The ‘potential’ outlined in the man’s radix is for abuse coming through the male parent, with deep hostility or neglect on the female side. Couple those stars with multiple afflictions to natal Mercury—governing the mind—and what you have is the ‘potential’ for a walking time bomb: an individual who is at once argumentative, secretive, destructive, deceitful and hypersensitive, but also exceptionally well spoken, intelligent, ambitious and decisive. Cunning, but resourceful. A survivor.

  Okay.

  Now progress the natal conditions forward to the evening of 9 July, 1984, throw several unusual conjunctions between Pluto and other fateful nodes into the mix—stimulated by transits of malefic Mars and Saturn—and this much is obvious: the younger man had some kind of meltdown that night, reaching a dangerous turning point. Violence and force were involved. While the man’s own death is not indicated in his eighth house stars, death is indicated in that house via afflictions to Venus and the moon from a number of sources—Jupiter, for one, and the transiting lunar nodes. The man lost someone he considered a loved one (female); and the indications are that the loved one’s destruction came by his own hand in a singular instance resembling madness.