The Astrologer's Daughter (10 page)

‘Death of subject indicated,’ I blurt. ‘Sudden, violent and unnatural death indicated
involving spouse and/or some other person related to subject through close business
or professional connections. Travel and water indicated, asset of great value indicated
that is not fixed. Afflictions associated with the blood indicated. Afflictions associated
with swallowing, digestion and lungs also indicated.’

I pause for breath and Kircher snaps, ‘When?
When?
’ His eyes are very wide, as if
he has recognised something in my words that holds no meaning for me. The three men
around the table are leaning forward in their chairs.

I put my piece of paper down and place my shaking hands flat upon my own words, hiding
their awfulness.

‘You have a short window,’ I say weakly, ‘maybe a week, eight days at most? Before
the conditions change. But I’d say that, uh, any time now would appear to be a ripe
time to die.
Act accordingly
.’

I cover my mouth with my hands, knowing I have uttered some kind of death sentence
for this man. But Elias Kircher beams at me as if I’ve just told him he’s won the
lottery. He presses the
stop
button on his voice recorder with a flourish, calling
out to the hovering waiter, ‘Ben?
Ben?
I think a spot of breakfast is in order.’

Wurbik and Simon flanked me silently as we crossed back towards the police complex.
None of us had felt like eating, so we left the waitstaff fawning over Kircher and
his morbid celebratory brunch.

Wurbik tells Simon and me to wait for him in an empty meeting room that looks and
smells almost identical to the one from yesterday. As I fumble my way into one of
the swivel chairs, Simon’s voice breaks into my thoughts. ‘Why don’t you do what
Kircher suggested? You know, do a, uh, reading for your mum? Maybe it could help?
It wouldn’t, like, hurt.’

He slumps down into the chair beside me, and I see that tug-of-war between belief
and disbelief in his expression, too. He’s leaning away from me like he’s almost…afraid.

Instead of feeling triumph—imagine, Simon Thorn, afraid of
me
!—I feel sadness. Mum
got the same reaction, all the time. Like there was an invisible forcefield between
her and the rest of the population. It made her want to reach out even more. She
would talk to anyone, anytime. It embarrassed me so much I would often pretend we
were not out walking together.

I swivel to face him. ‘We are men of
science
, Simo,’ I reply tiredly. ‘How could
it possibly
help
? You saw Kircher’s reaction: he just read whatever he wanted to
read into what I told him, and now he’s going to go fall into a six-star swimming
pool in Bali, or whatever, and drown because he’s convinced himself that’s the way
he’s going to go. I’m interested in finding my mum. I’m not interested in
theory
.
Besides,’ I whisper, picking at some loose stitching on the edge of my chair, ‘I
don’t even know when or where she was born; she made sure of that.’

And I don’t want to do it. Reduce her to symbols. Hold her entire life in my hands. It’s too much.
I don’t say that part out loud.

‘Oh,’ Simon replies, surprised. ‘Well.’

Wurbik comes back into the room with my home telephone. ‘Appreciate what you just
did,’ he says, taking a seat and sliding the machine across the table to me. ‘Kircher’s
been hassling us independently for weeks. Issues with extended family. Thinks they’re
after his money, all out to get him. So when he heard your mum had come up with a
finished chart and you could read it? Well, he wouldn’t take
no
for an answer. Who’d
want to be rich, eh? Whole different set of problems.’

I look at Simon and he looks away, face shuttered.

Wurbik leans forward in his chair, his expression suddenly grave. ‘We’re making progress,
Avicenna. We’ve got her mobile phone moving through a tollgate to the north-west
of the city on the day in question. It pings off a few more towers before going off
the grid, but we’re following that up as a matter of urgency, trying to work out
exactly where she ended up, how she got there. Keep you informed, of course, every
step of the way.’

The room seems to waver in and out. Wurbik and Simon both put a hand out hurriedly,
when it looks like I might pitch forward, face-first. I shake my head weakly to indicate
I’m fine, I’m still listening, hair falling all over my face as I jam the base of
one palm into my eyes.

‘Three other quick things,’ Wurbik says when I finally look up. ‘Good news is you’re
not going to starve. That bank account you gave us details for has just over $40,000
in it. You’re cleared to use it again, but let us know if you notice any discrepancies
between transactions. Strange things coming in or out, that sort of thing.’

I blink. Mum’s monthly take was less than $2000. Even accounting for this month’s
wage, the number he’s just named is astronomical:
five
figures. I’ve never seen five
figures on one of our withdrawal slips, ever. A couple of weeks ago, we had $324.62
to our names, and Mum had warned me sharply to
make it last
.

‘But that’s a fortune!’ Simon turns to me accusingly. ‘You could buy, like, three
new
cars
with that.’

Wurbik says quietly, ‘Looking into that, too. Recent transactions include one large
deposit by cheque and a couple of other odd amounts by direct wire. What did she
charge?’

I look at him in confusion, thinking of all the porcelain giftware littering our
rooms, how you could even put a value on that. ‘First consult was free,’ I say finally.
‘Nominally, she charged $135 per hour, but based on her time, and whether or not
the person could pay, it could be anything.’

‘That might explain at least one of the transactions,’ Wurbik muses. ‘And that place
with the funny-sounding description…’

‘
The Ark of A–Z
,’ Simon butts in, with his perfect recall.

Wurbik shoots him a measuring glance before returning his pale-blue gaze to mine.
‘Yeah, that place. It was closed when we sent an officer over yesterday, but it’s
open Mondays to Wednesdays between 12 and 3pm. Strange hours. Some kind of rare-antiques
dealer. You’ll get an update as soon as we find out what that’s all about.’

I’m still thinking about the money when I remind him weakly, ‘And the third thing,
Detective? You said there were
three
things. That’s only two.’

Wurbik sits straighter and his face is suddenly so kind that I know I’m not going
to like what he’s about to say.

‘Reason we had so much trouble establishing identity,’ he says carefully, ‘was that
your mum’s legal name is Joanne Crowe
Nielsen
. Even her work didn’t realise her surnames
were around the wrong way. Caused us plenty of confusion, let me tell you.’

‘But,’ I interrupt hotly, primed to refute and deny, ‘that can’t be right! We’re
all
Crowes
: Bev, Joyce, Jo and me. An unbroken line of women with “the knowledge”.
She used to boast about it. How starcraft was in our blood,
la-di la
. I don’t understand.’

Wurbik slides his chair forward on its castors and his voice is gentle. ‘It may or
may not have something to do with that phone call you got last night…’

‘What?’ I say, confusedly. ‘The mouth-breather? What’s he got to do with Mum?’

‘A man called Erik Nielsen called our hotline yesterday,’ Wurbik continues doggedly,
‘mostly to cover his arse. Insists he’s got nothing to do with her disappearance.
But did claim he and your mother were legally married until she ran away with “a
Chinaman” (his words, not mine) in ’96 and he hasn’t heard about her since. Till
now.’ Something feels wrong with my face when Wurbik adds, ‘And her middle name isn’t
Nielsen
. It’s
Melissa
.’

It takes me a while to arrange the words in the right
order:
Joanne Melissa Crowe
Nielsen
. Okay, got it. Won’t forget it, now that I know. Beside me, I glimpse Simon
closing his eyes, like he’s praying for me.

11

‘So, unlike John Donne’s children, who were merely not formally recognised by their
maternal grandfather for several years until he got over his annoyance at his daughter
marrying a recusant Papist,’ I mutter as Simon and I exit the police complex, ‘I
am actually
illegitimate
, from several new standpoints.’

‘You’re taking it surprisingly well,’ Simon murmurs as he scrolls through a text
that has just come in on his phone. It’s long and rambling, and I watch something
in his face sharpen. ‘It’s from Mum,’ he says suddenly, shoving the phone into a
back pocket of his jeans. ‘She needs help. I have to go. You’ll be right to get home?’

Then he’s gone, taking two lanes against the lights in
his long stride before I can
even draw breath to reply. I don’t even make it to the pedestrian crossing on the
corner before he is back in his car-slash-mobile-home and already three-quarters
of his way through a U-turn.

I watch him roar up St Kilda Road, back towards the city—in the exact direction I
want to go, the bastard. ‘No,’ I say aloud to myself at the deserted tram stop. ‘Actually,
you’re
the bastard. A proper one. Get used to it.’

I board the next tram, still cradling my home phone against my chest like it’s a
pet that startles easily. The tram is crowded with interstate footy fans, irritated
locals and tourists. I end up strap-hanging over this thin woman with sleek hair
in gradated shades of brown, cut short in a kind of gravity-defying, rich art-dealer
kind of bob. She glances down, annoyed, as our feet tangle together, toes touching.
The woman is dressed in a sleek scarlet suit and black, open-toed stilettos with
red soles, and her mouth is surrounded by those vertical lines you get from too much
lip pursing and cigarettes.

My pack is crouched on my back like a giant carbuncle, and I wish to God I’d put
the answering machine away before I got on, the plastic now slick in my one-handed
grip. The tram sways back up the road towards the city, more people getting on than
getting off, and it’s close inside, stuffy, smelling of wool and polyester and unwashed
people. As I scan all the faces, I wonder if he could
be one of them—Erik Nielsen,
Mum’s
husband
, shit—and whether I’ve ever passed him on the street, looked him in
the eye, and not known. Without warning, the bobbed woman stands and spears me in
the foot with one of her stiletto heels. It’s jammed down squarely between my flesh
and the side of my runner as she swings a designer leather tote off the floor.

‘
Owwwwwww
,’ I howl, because it bloody hurts.

Her heel is still inside my shoe, grinding down on the edge of my left foot as she
snarls, ‘Well,
move
then,’ and my eyes fill with tears at her unkindness, at all
the random unkindnesses of strangers.

Mum wasn’t called a
chink-lover
in Dimboola, I realise suddenly. Dimboola was just
a story—no, a cypher—she used to illustrate a point. It must have happened here,
when she was out walking with Dad, in the city where I was
born
. Maybe it was this
woman, or someone just like her, who ground her forefinger into my pregnant mother’s
breastbone and made her want to leave, starting the chain of everything that has
led right back to now.

For a heartbeat, the woman and I seem suspended in time. She isn’t even looking at
me, face averted in distaste, although the entire packed tram seems to be staring
at us, waiting to see what I’ll do, the two of us standing in the middle of a giant,
sucked-in breath of anticipation. Then time restarts the moment the woman rips her
high heel
out of my shoe and shoves her way forward, through the sea of eyes and
faces.

She’s going to get away with it, I realise. And I know I will return to this moment
again and again for the rest of my life, with regret and anger and sorrow; this moment
where I did nothing, and said nothing, and was made nothing because of it.

My home phone drops out of my hands onto the floor with a hard
thunk
and before I’ve
thought it through, I’m lunging forward, reaching out and grabbing the woman by her
narrow shoulders, fingers digging hard into the slim shoulder pads of her suit jacket.
I spin her around, so that she will see
me
. And her bright red lips fall open, eyes
widening fearfully, when she catches sight of my face; my flaming, melted skin.

In the packed tram, people have cleared the space around us as if by magic, and I’m
bawling at the top of my lungs, ‘I. AM. NOT. MY.
MOTHER.
’ Only, by the time I get
to the word
mother
, I’m actually roaring like a lion, the word just devolving into
this long scream of sound, and the woman jerks out of my grasp, stumbling to get
away from me. The tram doors are only half-open, but she’s leapt right off the step.
I watch her running on the tips of her ridiculous heels through the crowd waiting
to get on and realise that the forcefield between me and the rest of the world is
up, it’s
on
, because all I see are shocked
faces turned my way, bodies leaning sideways
to avoid me touching them.

I pick my telephone up off the floor, and walk slowly towards the exit and it’s like
I’m the filthy, crazy, muttering person on the tram that no one wants to be near.
I might as well be stinking of urine and raving about Armageddon, the way everyone’s
looking at me. But you know what? I
did
something. I reacted. If time is a concertina,
then I will
never
return to this memory with a feeling of shame.

Embarrassment, maybe. But not shame.

As I get off the tram a block past the Three Kings’ Bakehouse, I think I hear someone
applauding. Or maybe it’s just my heart, beating, steady as a drum.

I’ve almost reached the Little Bourke Street exit to the arcade opposite my building
when something strange happens. A man leaning against the wall beside the TattsLotto
shop gives a start as I pass by, and then speed-dials a number on his mobile. It’s
not my imagination; the two things are connected, Action A leading to Action B. When
I look back, his eyes drop down to a little black notebook he’s holding in his other
hand, but I swear I hear him mutter my name.

Mum named me after a famous Persian astronomer from the 11th century:
No Bevs or
Joyces for my girl
, she would say grimly when I complained about someone giving me
stick again, at my latest school. No one ever says
Avicenna
, just in passing. It’s
not a place, it’s not a thing, and it’s got four syllables. So I notice, when it
happens.

The guy’s tall and gaunt and weather-beaten with short, iron-grey hair slicked close
to his skull. He’s decked out in fancy lace-up black brogues and tan slacks, and
a collared shirt worn under a heavy blue jumper. Doesn’t look or smell homeless;
never seen him before in my life.

I take it all in in a millisecond, picking up speed, almost tripping over the power
cord to the answering machine as I make it out into Chinatown. I’ve exhausted my
confrontation quotient for the day. Hell, I’ve exhausted my talking-to-strange-old-guys
quotient for the day.

I look back over my shoulder and the man looks away, still talking about me, I just
know it.

I’m so
close
.

The
Mei Hua Bean Sprout Company
sign is winking at me from across the road in the
brilliant sunlight. Somehow it turned into a beautiful day. I’m only twenty metres
from my door but instead of crossing over, the way I want to, I go right. Continue
up the hill from my place, towards the two-storey Yum Cha palace with the bright-red
pagoda façade at the front, intending to go around the block and
come back from a
different direction, just in case.

Because, as Mum used to say grimly:
People possessed with ovaries can never be too
careful, pet
.

‘Hey!’ someone calls out from behind me. ‘You, there.
Girl
. Stop!’

I just walk faster, darting a quick look backwards as the lights change on the corner.
Behind me, the front passenger door is starting to open on an early-model Mercedes
the size of a boat: royal blue, well preserved, car wax gleaming in the sun. Can’t
tell who’s coming out. Male? Female? I feel my adrenaline spike and keep rising.

As I’m looking back, the man from the arcade runs out into the street, throwing a
hand up in the air. He starts hurrying up the footpath behind me, eyes intent, dodging
pedestrians and couriers pushing trolleys stacked with boxes of bottled spirits.
I’m jogging now, begging people to get out of my way under my breath. The man starts
jogging, too. I’m almost running crab-ways up the street trying to see how much distance
we’ve got between us when I see him cross Russell Street against the lights at a
full run, long legs pumping, horns blaring. He’s closing the gap.

Everything’s moving: breath sobbing in and out of my body, pack bumping from side
to side against my shoulder-blades, boobs, pot belly, all jiggling around under all
the sweaty layers. I trip repeatedly over the telephone cord,
getting it caught between
my knees and around my legs, but it doesn’t stop me taking the Exhibition Street
crossing at a full run, too, until I barrel into someone standing on the other side.

The man rocks backwards, then grips me by the upper arms. I’m beating at his chest
with the telephone, while at the same time trying to twist out of his grasp. The
sun’s in my eyes as the man growls, ‘Avicenna! Avi-
cen-
na!’ He’s really shaking me
now. ‘Pull yourself together.’

All I can make are animal noises of distress. ‘It’s Boon,
Boon
,’ he adds, voice sharp
with concern. ‘What’s
wrong
with you, girl?’

I focus on him with difficulty. ‘Le-me-go, le-me-go,’ I finally wheeze out in terror,
still trying to pull away. I’ve got kilograms and inches on Boon, but he is as immovable
as a tree. ‘There’s a man,’ I blurt, ‘following me and I don’t know why.
I have to
go
.’

Boon looks over my shoulder and his expression shifts. Before I understand what’s
happening, he has propelled me down a narrow cobblestone alleyway and into… a commercial
kitchen.

‘
Dai Gor
,’ someone yells out in surprise as Boon and I skid across the slick tiled
floor. All around are clouds of steam rising from pans and woks that smell of braised
meats; stainless-steel bowls filled with yellow noodles, glassy vermicelli, mounds
of cut, pre-washed green
vegetables. Men in cook’s whites and check pants that have
gone dingy from repeat washing look up in surprise as we pass by. Over the sound
of running water and sizzling woks, Boon continually calls out in greeting, but we’re
through to another alleyway at the back of the restaurant before I can draw breath.

Here it is quiet, reeking of rotting food and beer; exhaust fumes from the commercial
car park that runs alongside it. There’s no one in sight, but Boon keeps going, taking
us in through the back screen door of another old building off the alley on the opposite
side. The kitchen we’re in now is dimly lit, and at first I think there’s no one
in here until I spot, through a bank of steel shelving, the burly figure of a bald
old man in rolled-up blue shirtsleeves and jeans consulting a wall chart.

Boon takes us up the central kitchen walkway, island benches on either side, calling
out confidently, ‘Newlands! My apologies. Just passing through, my friend.’

This place smells like baked-on, caked-on apricot chicken and meatloaf, goulash,
hash browns and boiled vegetables with an overlay of hospital-strength disinfectant.
It smells like The Caf at school. Newlands turns his head in angry surprise until
he sees who it is and comes forward to shake Boon’s hand. He eyes me interestedly.
‘Of course, and you’ll have good reason,’ he says calmly.

‘There’s a man following my goddaughter,’ Boon
replies with an ease that, for a second,
makes me wish it were for real. To be someone’s daughter again. Newlands’ expression
sharpens under his bushy white eyebrows.

Boon adds, ‘This is
Greyson’s
child.’

Newlands’ face brightens, then falls immediately, like the two old men have discussed
my father’s sad demise many times over cups of coffee.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ is Newlands’ simple response. He squeezes my free hand
in greeting, or sympathy. ‘What would you like for me to do, Boon?’

Boon shakes his head. ‘She can wait at the museum while I check our building. Nothing
for you to do, old friend. As I said, just passing through.’

‘Offer stands,’ Newlands responds mildly, leading us out of the quiet kitchen and
into a suffocatingly dark space on the other side of it. He puts one of his hands
under my elbow in a way that isn’t creepy, just solicitous, like he’s known me forever.

In the darkness, linked between the two old men, I feel the consistency of the floor
suddenly change beneath my feet: from the dull feel of burnished concrete, to the
warped and pitted wood of old floorboards. Our footsteps have a hollow echo now,
as if the space has grown cavernous, and I ask, suspicious, ‘What
is
this place?’