The Astrologer's Daughter

by Rebecca Lim

  On the mat is a flat metal box. Some sixth sense tells me not to touch it as I run back down to my pack, throat working with bile, to retrieve my Maglite. I don’t even make it back to my landing before I’ve got the torch on, sweeping the bright arc of light in the direction of my door. The parts of the box that aren’t rusty or a matte-grey from age and hard use pick up the light, throwing it back in my eyes.

  As I draw closer, slowly, as if I’ve cornered a viper, I see a picture of a castle, no, no, a house—a big, grand, Englishy house—on the flat face of the case. And there’s that dark-blue label, across the front of it, with white writing, in capital letters that say: THE OXFORD SET OF MATHEMATICAL INSTRUMENTS.

  ‘Boon!’ I scream, already running down the stairs. ‘Boooooooon!’

  I leave Malcolm Cheung and his team at my place with their dusting powder and illuminating devices, recovery kits and recording equipment. My gut feeling? They won’t find anything inside my place. But I invite them to knock themselves out. ‘If you see Simon Thorn,’ I tell Mal, grabbing my pack as I leave, ‘tell him to call me when the circus has left town.’

  ‘Will do,’ Mal says, getting a technician to bag up Mum’s box of compasses. ‘Don’t go too far away.’

  But I can’t get far enough away. Mum’s box didn’t just find its way back to me on its own.

  I insert myself into the edge of the small crowd that has gathered to watch the police come and go from my building with their two-ways and hard cases. Down the block, a news crew is miking up, and I lose myself in the arcade over the road, not dialling until I get to the hot-bread shop on the other side. By tonight everyone will know where I live. They’ll see the pictures and go: ‘Isn’t that the place right next to the dumpling house, two doors down from the sheepskin slipper emporium? God, I walk past there all the time.’

  Before I can change my mind, I call Hugh de Crespigny’s number and bark: ‘What do you want me to see?’

  What I need to see is something beautiful. I’m not usually so impulsive, and I already regret what I’ve done. But he makes me feel anxious and angry and alive, and so full of want that I’m able to forget, just for a while. He doesn’t think we’re done, and I’ll go with it, do my own pretending, breathe that rarefied air until I’m no longer necessary.

  I can’t face the people I do know. I can afford to make a fool of myself with Hugh, whose laser-like gaze, for now, is on me.

  ‘Avicenna? Hugh replies, startled. ‘You called back. I didn’t think you would.’

  More calmly than I’m feeling, I advise him that I appear to have had a brief window open up, and he says he’ll cut Econometrics and be right there, give him fifteen minutes. Heart racing, I tell him which street corner to find me on, replying in a detached voice I’m proud of: ‘Whatever, I’ll be waiting.’ And then I hang up.

  20

  He drives the kind of car I always imagined Simon would drive. A black, low-slung European coupé with tan leather seats and a 10-CD stacker with surround sound. Conscious I haven’t dressed for the occasion, I lever myself down, wincing as I misjudge how far down I have to go, the hardware on the back pockets of my jeans squeaking across the leather.

  Hugh’s in retro aviators and a sleek open-necked shirt and jeans, hair styled as if by wind machine. How, I think, do people in his vicinity actually concentrate?

  ‘I just get this feeling,’ he says in a rush, ‘that you can help me with what happened,’ and the words seem to come at me from somewhere remote so that it takes a moment to assemble them into the right order. I think I’m watching his mouth in a predatory way, and I have to remind myself to look out my window and breathe. It’s like I’m bathing in fire.

  Something is very familiar about the route we take. There is that toffy boys’ school, seen from another angle, the Shrine and the mad, multi-lane intersection near the hospital, the same strip of shops that normal people in their right minds would never shop at, everything sent over by plane or boat from France, Spain and Italy, hand-crafted by small and merry bands of artisans.

  Of course, I think, as we turn into Eleanor’s wide street of walled estates. Of course we would be coming here.

  As we go past her property, the gates actually open and Don Sturt, in the delivery van, slides out. He stops to give way, his eyes widening as he sees me seeing him. There is an electric shock of recognition in the way he’s frozen at the wheel his head turning just like mine is, as I drive by.

  Then we’re climbing uphill. Hugh stops the car at a huge set of stone gateposts topped by Victorian carriage lamps bigger and heavier than my head, and steps out. Through the sound of the running engine I hear him shout into an intercom, ‘Stainer, it’s Hugh de Crespigny, just a quick visit to the grounds.’ Then the heavy steel gates swing inward and we’re following a bluestone drive—through stands of English trees, leaves and conkers beginning to fall—that goes past the façade of a double-storey Italianate mansion with graceful arches all along the upper floor.

  ‘The man who laid out the Royal Botanic Gardens had a hand in this place,’ Hugh says, assuming I know what he’s talking about. Where the driveway turns back around a large, three-tiered, cast-iron fountain, Hugh parks his car and leaves his sunglasses on the dash, hopping out and opening my door for me. I edge around him, clutching on to my mangy backpack as if it also functions as a shield.

  ‘It’s just over here,’ Hugh says, body language anxious, a world away from the guy who faced down Wurbik in my apartment.

  We walk across the emerald lawn, past beds of winter blooms, weaving between massive boles that reach up and up into the steel-grey sky, until we come to a pretty summerhouse, made of iron and glass, painted a blinding white. The structure is old, but well maintained, with wooden bench seats that go all around the inside walls like that scene out of the musical where the girl and her Nazi lover are having a lovely pas des deux in a rainstorm.

  Where have you gone? my brain asks itself, because Hugh’s just said something, and I saw his mouth moving, but I didn’t actually understand what came out of it.

  Being here with him is a huge mistake, because he says again, weirdly eager, ‘So what do you feel?’

  ‘W-what do you mean?’ I stammer, trying to work out what he’s really asking.

  You don’t want to overcommit here, some small, still-functioning part of my mind says dryly. It’s a bit early to be talking about feelings, isn’t it? But I’m blushing like a stop sign. I am an all-out unflattering red. I look up into the struts and panes of the summerhouse roof, wondering if there is a camera capturing every torturous moment, as if I’m being punk’d by the hottest guy on earth. Overhead, the clouds—massed and brutish-looking—move rapidly, like surging waves.

  ‘Walk around,’ Hugh urges me, actually propelling me by my back with the flat of his hand. ‘What do you feel?’ Again, there’s that weird emphasis.

  I walk around because he’s making me do it, but all I see are lovely old wooden floorboards, adrift with dead leaves at the edges near the two entryways that face onto each other. ‘Uh,’ I reply uncertainly, ‘cold?’

  The wind chooses that moment to pick up, and it gives a whistling howl, sweeping through the summerhouse doors, the concentrated gust moving straight through me. I actually shiver as Hugh stares
down at me with this look on his face that is—disappointment, fury, grief—all rolled into one.

  Not the look of love. Not that I’ve seen it enough to recognise it.

  Then I get it. Why I’m here. I stop dead, shocked.

  ‘I’m not, uh, actually psychic, Hugh. If that’s what you mean. I don’t feel anything.’

  Except maybe underdressed and soul-wounded, in this lovely place made for undying declarations. What a putz I am. I could slap myself. Feel. Every word can have more than one meaning; everything is open to interpretation. I’ve known that since I was five and could read to myself.

  ‘But you can see death,’ Hugh says, his eyes so dark and fixed and tragic he could be drunk. ‘It said so on the internet. It’s what you Crowes are famous for. You must feel something. Especially here.’

  I hug my pack tighter, actually lifting first one foot, then the other, as if I’ve blundered into a pool of blood, every part of me cold. ‘You’ve got the wrong girl,’ I say savagely when he stands there just gracing me with that look. ‘For “psychic girl” you’d need to look under “P”, mate, in the phone book. Feeling stuff is not part of my skill set, but my maths? My maths is really good.’

  I’m already withdrawing from the moment, from his hand, from the summerhouse. I am actually walking back across the pretty green lawn and he is practically chasing after me. What a dumb, dumb error, I’m thinking as I swing my backpack onto my shoulder.

  ‘He was fifteen years older, you know,’ he calls out in this feverish, broken, confessional way. ‘Already a lawyer, but he told anyone who would listen that one day he was going to marry her. People remember that; I’ve had it from more than one person. And he was supposed to be at our place in Portsea—I’ve worked that much out—but he drove back and she had a friend drop her here so that they could meet up when she was supposed to be at a party, and then something happened—something really bad—that changed everything. I would have had a different life. My father spends six months of the year in London, off his face on painkillers. And when he’s here, he’s not here. I hardly know him.’ Hugh grabs me by the back of my right elbow, swinging me around so that I’m forced to look up at him. ‘I hardly know him!’ he yells.

  Well, boo hoo, I almost retort, looking around at the shockingly lush and expansive grounds, the white mansion set in their midst, as big as a cruise ship, you rapist-murderer-harbouring, rich crazies. But I don’t have any proof, not really, so I bite my tongue when the words threaten to slip out: hard enough to sting.

  Hugh’s breathing harder than a short walk across a pretty lawn would credence. ‘No one will talk to me about it,’ he hisses. ‘The official line is that he never left the beach house at all. The family protected him, every single one.’

  ‘All I can tell you,’ I say as gently as my fear and outrage will allow, ‘is what I’ve already told you. Tell your father to see a priest. I can’t help you anymore; I’m sorry.’

  I’m shrugging Hugh’s hands off—those big hands I had wanted on me—when a shout rings out across the grounds. There are two men hurrying our way, twisting and running between the stands of trees, trying to cut me off before I get to the car.

  As they get closer I recognise the short, stocky one as Rosso and a wave of dislike breaks through me. The taller man with the hard body and head like a close-shaved bullet—in suit pants, shirtsleeves, leather shoes and corporate-looking tie—is a stranger. A stranger who could easily put you in a chokehold, facedown on the turf, and accidentally kill you on purpose.

  Hugh doesn’t let me go, but his hand on me relaxes a fraction as he says, ‘Stainer. Ross.’

  Rosso barrels right up to us and I see, with dull satisfaction, that I’ve got maybe an inch on him, the twerp. ‘What’s she doing here?’ he says furiously.

  ‘The cat’s mother,’ I say more lazily than I’m feeling, ‘was just showing herself out.’

  I wrench my elbow right out of Hugh’s hand and start for the gates, which are closed. Something I’ll worry about when I reach them, because I’ll climb them if I have to. I have no dignity when I’m cornered.

  ‘Miss,’ the man called Stainer says, business-like, ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you out until we clear this up.’

  I swing back around to face the three of them, standing there in a tight semicircle of belonging and easy familiarity, realising with fury that this must be Rosso’s house. Maybe his credulous, social butterfly of a mother, Jacqueline, is prostrate inside that pile right now at the news of my own mother’s disappearance.

  I am enervated by misery at my own stupidity. Like some rich, hunky dude would seriously ferry me across town to his pretty summerhouse so that he could, what? Kiss me, then totally fall to his knees and declare undying love? Please.

  I am my own worst enemy. I am, I am, I am.

  ‘That man,’ I spit, doing an air-jab in Hugh’s direction, ‘brought me here so that I could “lay my hands” on that summerhouse to see whether his father raped and murdered a young girl in there.’

  Rosso actually reels backwards at my words, as if he’s lost his footing. Then I remember that the only person who has so far connected Fleur Lucille Bawden to this place, in so many words, is me. Shit. But I’m looking more and more right, and I don’t like it.

  Thankfully, none of them have seen the look on my face, because Rosso has already turned on Hugh, grinding his finger into Hugh’s chest and shouting, ‘What did you fucking do? It’s gone beyond a joke now. She wasn’t supposed to come here; it was just meant to be a “reading”, a stupid piece of paper. It’s fucking hearsay, you fuckwit. You don’t bring people in off the street and give them fucking family rumours as truth and then release them back into the wild again. Are you out of your mind?’

  Stainer is looking at both men with a touch of uncertainty that sits very uneasily on his face-of-granite hardness.

  ‘Don’t you wanna know?’ Hugh bellows, getting right into Rosso’s space. ‘It’s been hanging over all of us for years. It’s fucked up all our lives, not knowing.’

  Rosso drives his fist into Hugh’s stomach, shocking us all. Staggering backwards, Hugh coughs and coughs as Rosso screams, ‘Why would you want to jeopardise everything, you stupid fuck?’ Panting, his fists still clenched, Rosso snarls, ‘If he catches you here, doing this? Digging up past shit? Past unsubstantiated shit? He will fucking kill you. He’ll rip your head off and feed it to you, or get someone to do it. Blood or no blood.’

  Hugh suddenly rears up and grabs Rosso by the shirt collar and throws him to the ground, then they’re laying into each other, wrestling and clawing and yanking and punching like they mean every blow, years and years of bad blood leaking out. I start backing away again, pleading with Stainer, ‘If you’d just let me out now, I’d really appreciate it. Nothing to do with me, mate. Please.’

  Shaking his head, Stainer points a small remote control in the direction of the gates, before moving to separate Ross and Hugh, and I hurry through the widening gap without looking back.

  21

  Hugh passes me at the tram stop on Toorak Road and doubles back. There are no trams to escape into, so all I can do is stand and watch the chrome grille of his coupé drawing closer. It reminds me of cartoon shark teeth.

  He slide
s in at the kerb, right next to me, and lets the engine idle while the drivers in the cars behind him all pile up, beeping their horns and leaning out their windows, the effings flying. Still, Hugh just stares fixedly at me through the half-down passenger window, refusing to move along until I get in beside him.

  I have a high embarrassment threshold and have every intention of looking the other way for as long as it takes, before getting on a tram. But the wind is really rising now, keening like a funeral mourner. Rain imminent.

  I hate the cold. In all the moving around we’ve done, it’s been the one constant—how much I hate it. The whole time since Dad died, I suddenly realise, Mum has been working her way down the eastern seaboard, working her way back from when we were warm and safe in the north, the three of us together, to this. Closing some kind of circle that’s ending in wind and rain.

  To a chorus of shouted oaths, kicking myself at my weakness, I get in, still hugging my backpack. Sitting with knees drawn primly together—as if that will somehow minimise my general surface area and volume—I catch sight of my reflection in the glass and grimace. My hair is hanging in tangled dreads all down my back and shoulders and my cheeks seem thinner, the bones and scars more prominent. I look like one of the witches out of Macbeth.

  There are grass stains on Hugh’s torn shirt and red marks on his face, but all he says in a normal-sounding voice is, ‘The least I could do is drive you home,’ and then he guns it, the coupé’s engine roaring like a caged animal at the bottlenecks.

  I study his profile, his downturned mouth, the line of his neck and jaw when he isn’t looking. He’s the kind of guy I would sleep with in a shot, I decide. I would give it up for a guy like this, no questions asked, because I’m as shallow as the next person. But Wurbik was right. Even if he could see past the scars, Hugh’s not for me; he’s not one of my kind. Being with him keys me up to a pitch that only dolphins can hear. Nothing would ever be easy. Around a guy like Hugh, I would always be falling over my feet and saying the wrong thing and kicking myself and kicking myself and kicking myself. I’d be flavour of the minute, not the month; I’d never even make it into the guy’s fucking fifth-house stars, that’s how fast he’d be through with me, and I might never recover. That’s nothing to aspire to.