The Astrologer's Daughter (6 page)

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 insists 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.

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.

‘What are you
doing
here?’ I hiss, already backing away. This must be an outer ring
of purgatory, and somehow I’m stuck sharing it with Simon Thorn.

He’s wearing a heavy plaid Bluey jacket and grey knitted beanie, and he keeps pace
with me easily as I power down Little Bourke Street, cooking smells already staining
the early-morning air.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says awkwardly, ‘you know, last night? I didn’t mean to say—’

But I hold up one hand as my phone rings, knowing very well what he meant to say.

‘Avicenna speaking.’ My voice is clipped, unfriendly, spikes in all directions.

I pull the zip up higher on my hoodie and turn left towards the Three Kings’ Bakehouse
as the man on the line says, surprised, ‘Did I wake you? I just meant to leave a
message.’

‘Who
is
this?’ I reply, brushing off Simon’s outstretched
hand as I stub my sneakered
toe in a tram track and almost go down face-first.
God
.

‘Detective Senior Sergeant Stan Wurbik,’ the man responds apologetically. ‘We need
you to come in to the St Kilda Road Police Complex this morning. Some questions.
Need to talk options. Get more consents. And your laptop, we’ve looked at it. You
can have it back. Expect you need it.’

Wurbik gives me directions as I duck into the bakery and breathe in the smells of
super-refined flour loaded with lard, sugar and other goodies. Paolo sees me and
waves from the back where he’s de-bagging coffee beans, pouring them in a
tinking
steady stream into the grinder. Like mine, still damp from the shower, his hair is
out, all down his back in dark waves.

As Paolo comes forward, I catch this look on his face—when he works out that Simon
and I are together—that is a shade more elegant than surprise. Paolo raises a speculative
eyebrow at me in a perfect arch, and I grimace back, telling Wurbik hurriedly that
I’ll be there by eleven: things to do first, won’t be late,
see yuz
.

There’s this feeling, tight in me as I hang up, that Wurbik’s going to tell me something
I won’t want to hear.

I shove my phone into my pocket and Paolo stands facing me across the chrome and
glass counter. We’re exactly the same height, and I’ve told him before that it’s
a sign we were meant to be together. It always makes Paolo laugh when I mention it.
But I can’t seem to bring it up today, or even remember what it feels like to smile.
It’s like a nerve’s been cut, somewhere in my brain. So I stand, slack-faced.

‘
Bella
,’ Paolo says in his thick, not-from-here accent that’s so good you could bathe
in it, ‘today, we are like the lions,’ giving his mane a shake for emphasis.

Then he comes around the counter and plants two kisses on me, one on either side
of my face, the way he always does, even when there is a line behind me all the way
to the door. As he does, his dark eyes never leave Simon. And it all feels a little
off today, the flirting, because it’s difficult to pretend that Simon’s not Paolo’s
type. He likes a hard body.

Paolo drifts back behind the counter and picks up a set of tongs, clacking the arms
together lightly like the fairy godmother of pastries as he moves towards the cake
display that runs almost the whole length of the shop. He slides a couple of miniature
chocolate
cannoli
into a white paper bag then fires up the coffee machine. ‘Usual?’
he says as an afterthought.

I nod, and he slides his eyes in Simon’s direction. ‘No thanks,’ Simon replies, loud
and nervous over the high-pressure hissing and squealing. ‘Already wired.’

Paolo mock sniffs then pushes my long
macchiato
across the counter at me, together
with change from my tenner. ‘Didn’t I say you have the good taste in men?’ he reminds
me archly. ‘But remember, I am the first.’

I jam the coins into my pocket, juggling the coffee and the little bag as I back
up. ‘The one and only, Paolo,’ I say in a rush. ‘You can have this one; I can’t get
rid of him fast enough.’

Paolo grins at the discomfort on Simon’s face. I turn and say over my shoulder, the
way I always do, as if this is a normal day, ‘See you next week; have a good week.’
But my voice sounds joyless and mechanical, even to my own ears.

Paolo reaches out and stops me, hand on my elasticised cuff. ‘You tell your mother,
the
occhi di bue
will be back on Monday, eh?’ He gestures behind him at the pastry
display. ‘She was asking.’

My fingers go nerveless and I almost drop my coffee. Paolo can’t know, because if
he did it would be cruel to say what he’s just said, and he’s the kindest man I know.

‘When?’ I say breathlessly. ‘
When
was she asking?’

Paolo’s head tilts right. ‘Tuesday?’ My insides loosen then tighten as he says, ‘No,
Wednesday. Yes.’

He can see I want more and his head tilts further. ‘It was morning, not afternoon;
she looked very tired. She bought the big one, not the regular.’ He points at the
two sample coffee cups taped to a corner of the countertop. ‘She
never
buys the
big one, and never a latte, only
espresso—double, no milk—but it was a latte, I’m
sure,
two
sugars. I wonder to myself,
Will she finish it?
She is like the doll, your
mother. And she wanted three
biscotti
—you know, with the apricot jam—but we sold
out.’ Paolo’s eyes rake my frozen face. ‘
What?
What is it?’

I shake my head, unable to answer, and he says more kindly, ‘You tell her; I will
keep some. You tell her to come back, okay?’

I don’t remember leaving the shop. All I know is that I suddenly find myself halfway
up the hill towards the State Library, bawling down the front of my jumper while
Simon holds my coffee and cake like a trained circus animal.

‘Jesus Christ!’ I howl, snatching them off him, throwing both in the bin so hard
that the coffee cup bounces up off the steel rim and splashes me with hot liquid.
Mum never snacked. She didn’t like sweet stuff, and she ate like a bird.

She never had milk in her coffee
.

‘What are you going to do?’ Simon says cautiously as I scrub angrily at my wet front,
then at my face with the back of one sleeve.

‘Finish having a small breakdown,’ I mutter, too ashamed to look at him, ‘and then
I’m going to copy the entire freaking j-journal…’ I wave my other arm uselessly in
the direction of the balding, bird shit-infested lawns outside the State Library.
‘Because I can’t just leave it to
people who don’t know her to find her. Then I’m
going to hand it in to the police. That’s what I’m going to do and why do you
care
?’

It feels like there is a balloon just under my skin, slowly inflating. I stand here,
clenching and unclenching my hands, struggling to get air into my lungs while the
balloon goes up and up, squeezing me out of my body.

She told me everything: that was how things worked. Mum was a talker; you couldn’t
shut her up. But she never told me that
the eventuality
would end up claiming me,
too.

I feel Simon slide my backpack off my rigid shoulders. He barely touches me, but
it hurts my skin; that he should be here, seeing me like this.