The Astrologer's Daughter (11 page)

Newlands suddenly stops. The wood-floored room we are standing in is bounded on the
far side by what appears
to be a heavy curtain, a thin chink of pale daylight coming
through it. My eyes are beginning to adjust. On the far side of the space, in the
corner by the back wall, is a faint glow, too. Subterranean. Maybe stairs.

Newlands lets go of my arm and I sway momentarily in the darkness. I hear him tripping
and cursing, feeling about on the wall. Then he flicks up some kind of metal lever
and the narrow band of light through the curtain grows bright, dazzling, artificial.

Newlands moves forward to tug one edge of the velvet curtain open, and I see old-style
footlights, like glowing white teeth, outlining the edge of a stage. Behind me is
a faded theatre set made up of trees and swings, a hint of bucolic lawn, protruding
out a little way from the wings on either side. We emerge onto the lip of the stage,
blinking, as if we have just emerged from a fairytale wood.

Before me, the shadowed room rises up steeply in tiers of fixed bench seats and tables;
it’s shaped like a small amphitheatre. Everything is painted black, and the huge
crystal chandelier in the ceiling looms unlit; so high off the ground that it hurts
me to look up at it.

‘Oldest operational theatre restaurant in Melbourne,’ Newlands says proudly, helping
me down off the side of the stage. ‘Featuring one of the few surviving star traps
in Australia.’

Newlands points up at an octagonal shape set into
the floor at centre stage. We’re
standing at eye level to the thing, which has eight separate hinges, one for each
section of the asterisk that bisects the octagon. I imagine the lines breaking up,
springing open like a vicious, toothed flower made of wood, disgorging tomfoolery
and hijinks from below.

‘It was a hit when we did a run of vampire shows in the 70s; people couldn’t get
enough of it. Dry ice, flames, you name it, and suddenly the baddie’s right there,
amongst it.
How’d he get there?
Everyone screaming their heads off
.
It was a sensation.
But we don’t use it now because the mechanism jams and there’s no surprise in it
these days. The last person who shot up out of “Hell” to terrorise the living had
a nasty shock.’ The old man’s eyes go distant and opaque. ‘Nearly broke us.’

We follow Newlands up a steep set of stairs at the left of the auditorium towards
street level, passing a deserted bar and ticket booth. He pauses with us by the front
door, just inside the scuffed-looking foyer that still smells of the cigarettes of
yesteryear.

‘I’m here every day, except Mondays, till late, just remember,’ Newlands tells me,
his voice grave, his fingers still curled beneath my elbow. ‘Family have wanted me
retired for years, but retired is another word for dead in my book.’

He lets go of me then, and pulls open the heavily carved
wooden front door, holding
it slightly ajar. ‘Perverts all over these days,’ he says, swinging the door wider
and nudging us out onto the threshold. ‘Can’t be too careful, lovey.’

There are faded black-and-white theatre shots plastered to the windows on either
side of the entrance—people in feather boas and lederhosen and crazy headgear, exaggerated
face paint—and a colony of dead flies lying around on the sills underneath with curled-up
legs and dull wings. Newlands urges, ‘Ask for Uncle Des, understand? Always welcome.
Greyson was like a son to me.’ His voice is sombre. ‘Watched him grow up around the
place.’

Then he shuts the heavy door in our faces.

With a sweeping gaze that takes in the Sichuan noodle house and sushi train joint
on either side, the entrance to the commercial car park just beyond them and the
down-at-heel hotel across the road, Boon turns us left and walks briskly past a bottle
shop, a mini-mart and a travel agent before we cross towards a faded building on
the corner that proclaims itself
Her Majesty’s Theatre
. We cut back into the top
end of Little Bourke Street, still blocks away from home. Boon steers me under a
ceremonial stone gateway, between a matched pair of snarling stone lions with curved
fangs, bulbous eyes and clawed feet.

We walk up a ramp at the far end of a small stone square and enter a set of wooden
swing doors. The young Asian woman at the cash register at the far end of the
foyer
looks up enquiringly before breaking into a smile of recognition. Boon waves airily
and simply proceeds up a set of stairs without payment, although the sign near the
register sets out all the prices quite clearly. ‘Something to show you,’ he says
as we climb.

As I look in on each floor, I see ceremonial dragons, masks, ancient artefacts. It’s
the museum Boon spoke of to Newlands, but it’s a
Chinese
museum.

I scowl fiercely. ‘Propaganda!’ I mutter, unsure why we’re here, as we emerge into
a light, airy exhibition space on the top floor. ‘Now is
not
the time for me to get
back in touch with my ancestral roots, or whatever. Couldn’t I just wait somewhere
else while you run recon…?’

‘Just see,’ Boon says calmly.

The hall-like upstairs room we enter is filled solely with photographs. By the door
are pictures of kids from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s in all the bad fashions and shocker
hairstyles: quiffs, bowl cuts, shags, mullets, flicks and perms. They’re all Chinese,
or variations on; caught forever in black-and-white or lurid technicolour. I bend
and look at some of the names: Goon and Louey and all the weird bastardisations wrought
by the Gods of Immigration, legalised forever. There’s a Peter Gok Kar and a Shirley
Wing Loon; a whole dynasty of Quong Gongs, poor souls: Shirleys and Maureens and
Denises, big toothy girls with long limbs and long faces, milk-fed skin.

Neither here nor there, just like me.

‘How long do I have to stay here looking, feeling,
belonging
?’ I demand accusingly.
‘Until it’s safe to go home?’

‘Look around for as little or as long as you like,’ Boon says mildly. ‘Just stop
by my shop first, before you head on upstairs to your place? I’ll check the building;
make sure there are no more surprises.’

He pats me on the shoulder, about to turn on his heel, when he seems to recall something.
He takes my home telephone out of my hands and tucks it into my backpack, doing up
the zip so firmly that I’m almost lifted off the ground. ‘You wanted to know,’ he
says from behind me, ‘what was missing from your parents’ apartment? That detective
asked me to tell you, but I can
show
you.’

Suddenly, I’m conscious of this sick, breathless feeling inside me, my pulse hammering
in my inner ear. Boon crosses the carpet and I trail after him, surrounded by a diorama
of grinning Asian faces: babies, toddlers, youths. We pass a section devoted to Chinese
boys in matching football jerseys, posing in the classic, butch, arms-crossed way,
tallest at the back, shortest at the front. Teams from the 50s straight through to
the early 90s. ‘Ethnics’ versus ‘locals’. I can imagine the backchat and niggling
at the sidelines. Must have been awesome.

Boon jabs a forefinger into one of the frames in passing
and says, ‘That’s your dad,
front row, centre. He was short until he turned fifteen, but he was
fast
. His trick
was to keep running: ran all the bigger boys into the ground until they were too
tired to kick straight or hold the ball.’

I bend, peering at the tiny image, heart in my mouth. So it
is
true; I do have his
eyes. We lost all our photos in the fire and, even in dreams, I can’t recall his
face. This is the first concrete proof I’ve ever seen that he even existed.

‘He’s in this one, too,’ Boon says, passing a school formal photo, all the boys in
dodgy 80s tuxes, a scattering of frilled shirts; all the girls in horrid bright
colours like emerald and scarlet and amethyst, with crimped hair and straight bangs,
hideous corsages made of carnations. ‘Dance at the Melbourne Town Hall. Big deal
at the time. To your dad, anyway.’

Dad’s a lot taller in this photo, stiff-looking in a black tuxedo, white shirt and
ruby-red cummerbund, with a bogan haircut: spiky on top, short sides, long, mullety
back. Haircut aside, I am shocked at his lean, tanned handsomeness. I look like neither
of them, it’s true.

Some new animal
.

Boon shoots me a quick look. ‘But you wanted to know about the missing photo?’ he
reminds me.

He stops before a picture in the far back corner: of an olive-skinned little boy
with a broad face, gappy teeth and the kind of terrible haircut that indicates an
actual
mixing bowl might have been involved. The boy has smiling dark eyes and a
sprinkling of freckles across his nose, and is, inexplicably, dressed in a green
Peter Pan costume with green stockings, hands fisted on his hips in a classic Errol
Flynn-style pose. He can’t be more than six or seven, chubby and adorable, posed
against a backdrop of powder-blue photographic curtain made up to look like a cloud-filled
sky.

‘This is just a copy, of course,’ Boon murmurs. ‘The original was inside the frame.
But this is it. This was what was taken off the wall in the apartment.’

Long after Boon’s footsteps on the wooden stairs have faded away, I stand under a
shaft of late afternoon sunlight, just staring at my father as a child.

12

When I’m politely chased out of the museum at closing time, I emerge to find night
has fallen and the female restaurant touts are out on the street, in their slinky,
faux-silk
cheongsams
and Uggs, waving menus at anything living that goes by. As I
trail past the shop with all the Taiwanese-style, pastel-coloured cream cakes lined
up in rows in the window, I’m reminded again that I’ve eaten nothing since an awkward
bowl of muesli with Simon Thorn. Wherever the hell he’s got to.

Boon had told me to check in first, so I do. The bell over the street-facing door
jingles as I enter his shop. ‘
Avicenna
,’ he calls out in warning, but it’s too late,
because the tall, thin guy from the arcade, the one who gave me chase clear
up three
blocks, is leaning against the door in the far wall that opens out into my stairwell.

I yank my mobile phone out, intent on calling Wurbik. But my fingers aren’t working
and, in my panic, I drop the phone onto the hardwood floor. In a red haze of fear
I scrabble for it, but it’s like the phone’s alive: it is slippery, impossible to
catch. It pops through my slick grasp, once, twice, and I’m almost sobbing.

‘Avicenna,’ someone says gently.

I look up, startled to see an elderly woman I hadn’t even noticed perched on the
stool in front of Boon’s counter. She’s slight, bird-boned, and a little bent over,
but from the neck down she could be a twenty-year-old art student in a chunky, grey
marle cardigan over slim, indigo jeans and black leather ankle boots. Her long grey
hair is pulled back in an elegant knot at the nape of her neck and, under her wrinkles,
the structure of her face is lovely. And kind of familiar, even though I know I’ve
never seen her before.

‘I’m sorry we gave you a scare,’ she says quietly, ‘but it was imperative we try
to catch you. To ask, you see.’

I sit back on my haunches to better see her face, which is really quite beautiful.
Ruined, but arresting. There are deep grooves between her nose and mouth, and her
forehead is a patchwork of crisscrossing lines, up and down above the bridge, long
parallel scores, like knife scars, across her forehead. Her eyes appear sunken, like
she no
longer sleeps; the skin below them purple as bruises.

‘Just to talk,’ the old woman adds quickly. ‘To put our case across.’

I look up at the gaunt-looking man by the door and his dirty-green, yellow-flecked
eyes slide away. My brain slowly puts together that the two of them are a package
deal and that I was being
fetched
. I take in the diamond studs in the old lady’s
ears, the heavy, antique rings on her bony hands that breathe
old money
,
exquisite
taste
. She must have been the one getting out of the front seat of the Mercedes.

‘Who
are
you people?’ I rasp, rising from the floor. I scoop my mobile up, too, the
screen lit-up, ready for use if I need it.

Boon’s eyes are apologetic as he brings out his own stool and plants it beside the
old woman. He pats the surface of it before leaving the shop through the stairwell
entrance. The tall man sidesteps to let him pass, then moves right back into place,
darting a look at me before refocusing on his shoes.

‘
Please
,’ the old woman says, indicating the rickety steel stool beside her. I perch
on it reluctantly, my backpack jammed between me and the glass counter, the hard
shape of my home phone digging into my lower back.

‘This is Don Sturt,’ she adds, ‘my companion. Who makes sure I take my pills, and
gets me where I need to go,’ indicating the man by the door. I seem to drop back
into
my body from a great height, understanding all at once.

I turn to the old woman immediately. ‘You’re the mother,’ I say in a weird rush,
recognising Fleur under all the wrinkles and lines and slackness. ‘Mrs Bawden.’

The woman gives a little laugh that doesn’t hold any amusement. ‘Oh, there hasn’t
been a Mr Bawden for many years, dear. I go by Eleanor Charters these days. It deters
the sightseers and amateur investigators. Cranks. They’ve given up trying to track
me down for anniversary interviews. Don’s put a stop to that.’

Looking at him now, I see Don is at least a decade younger than the old woman. By
his deferential body language, I don’t think he’s a
companion
in the biblical sense,
but you never know. She could be the world’s oldest cougar.

‘You didn’t have to
run
,’ Don says gruffly, glancing at me then away. ‘I wasn’t going
to hurt you.’

Eleanor Charters grasps both my hands tightly in hers. ‘I’m so sorry about your mother.
It’s the very worst time to be asking a favour, but I’ve waited so long. And when
Don told me that you could read these things, just like her, I needed to know…’

She reminds me of Kircher. Her need, all-consuming, so much greater than mine. I
withdraw my hands, wriggling out of my backpack before opening it up and rifling
through it.

I show her the pages I photocopied out of Mum’s journal. ‘This is all there was,’
I say, pointing at the names and dates, birthplaces and times in Mum’s writing, the
note to call Don Sturt for more details. ‘She hadn’t started. There’s nothing to
really tell you.’

Something happens to Eleanor Charters’ face as she absorbs this. ‘Don?’ she queries
in a funny, high voice. ‘You’re the private investigator. What do you suggest we
do now? I had been led to believe that there were charts,
results
.’

Sturt clears his throat and says, still not really looking at me, ‘So we had an initial
meeting with your mum, right? El and me, and she says she can do it. Produce, you
know, a
hoary
…’

‘Horary,’ I say dryly.

‘Yeah, hoary reading,’ Sturt ploughs on, ‘for these four fellas. It’s a cold case,
see, coming up on thirty years…’

Eleanor’s eyes drop to her knees. ‘And no one’s ever been charged,’ she whispers.
‘Dozens—
dozens
—were interviewed. This was in the days before DNA testing was commonplace,
you understand, so although physical evidence was taken from, from, her body’—Eleanor
swallows but doesn’t look up—‘corresponding…material was not taken from all of the
men who were interviewed, not until much later. But by then the original evidence
was misplaced; people had died, fled overseas, changed their names…’

She gives a small, crooked smile and I catch Don looking at us, a quick sideways
thing with his eyes, before he looks down again.

‘Hopeless,’ she finishes raggedly. ‘Nothing left to do but consult the heavens. Which
saw and would know… everything. The only true witness to
events
.’ Her voice rises
and cracks on the last word and her eyes flick back up to mine. ‘Based on years of
interviews and research by kind people like Don here, we think these are the four
men “most likely” due to strange alibis, responses, inconsistencies. Tendencies.
Things that can’t be explained. And gut feeling.’

Don clears his throat, takes over talking. ‘Dirt on these ones,’ he says, ‘there’s
plenty. All we want is some kind of ’ —the look he shoots Eleanor is hard to read—‘impartial
corroboration. But we didn’t want to burden your mum with all the research it took
to get us here. We didn’t want to predispose her mindset, so to speak. So, as we
knew the material best, we gave her the bare fac—’

Eleanor cuts in. ‘I just want to know if it’s possible.’ Her voice is husky with
emotion. ‘Possible to tell if one of these men was born bad enough to do
this thing
.
That’s all.’

‘She took a down payment,’ Don adds, sounding strained, ‘your mum. We’d
understood that she would call as soon as she had the, you know, hoary readings ready.’

‘And then the police call me,’ Eleanor wails, clasping
her hands together at chest
height, ‘asking if I knew anything about why she might be missing. And then Don tells
me he
saw
you with Elias Kircher, whose issues with family are the stuff of legend,
so naturally I hoped…’

Chilled, I glance in Don’s direction but he won’t look at me, and Boon chooses that
moment to re-enter his shop. I can tell by the gentle lift of his eyebrows that it’s
fine to go back upstairs; I’d worked myself up over nothing.

These people hadn’t meant you any actual harm
were what Boon’s eyebrows were saying.
All they want from you is the name of a killer.

Eleanor bends forward and puts her small, bejewelled hands on my knees. ‘People come
into your life for a
reason
.’ Her voice is beseeching as she looks into my face.
‘I am asking you to finish what she agreed to do. It may mean nothing, but all I
want to know is whether it is possible...’

‘To tell if someone was born bad enough to…?’ I repeat tentatively.

‘Rape and murder my daughter, yes,’ Eleanor says fiercely. ‘Once I have that knowledge,
you leave the rest up to me. You are done, you are finished, and I will never bother
you again.’

As Boon escorts me up the internal staircase after Eleanor Charters and
her private investigator have gone, he says suddenly, ‘These things are dangerous.’

‘What? Horoscopes?’ I answer, surprised.

He nods, adding solemnly. ‘You don’t—how do you say—tempt fate.’

‘I know, I know,’ I reply. ‘I agree. I violently agree. People are so suggestible.
It’s the last thing I want to do. But Mum took their money. I’m honour-bound to finish
what she started. She would have wanted that.’

Sounding faintly hysterical, Boon says, ‘I warned her. I told her many, many times,
do not muck around, this is not joking here.’

‘You’re just being superstitious!’ I snort. ‘Plus, you’re freaking me out. It’s just
a bunch of flat diagrams on a page that the subjects will never even know about.
And maybe if Eleanor gets what she thinks she wants, it will lessen her pain, I don’t
know; anything to help that poor woman.’

But I knew what Eleanor asked of me wouldn’t lessen her pain. Now I had an inkling
of what it must feel like to be her: with this indefinable thing sitting below the
heart and stealing your breath away at the slightest provocation. A song, a smell,
the back of some stranger’s head could push on that phantom pain, making it blossom.
The wild, lost look in Eleanor’s eyes reminded me of
me
.

Mum said once, hugging me fiercely, that the worst
thing in the world would be to
lose a child. But to lose a mother? I’m too young to have these feelings, and I make
a small, gobbling noise of grief, which I somehow turn into a cough. But Boon shoots
me a look of concern, like he knows exactly what I am doing. I’m a crap actress.

As we pass the closed doorway to my parents’ old apartment, Boon mutters, ‘I could
not make your mum understand that three things govern all forecasts. I told her:
you must only proceed on that basis, and then only with extreme caution.’

He sticks a pointer finger upright in the air for emphasis, so that I am forced to
look at him.

‘One: Nothing is accident, Avicenna. Every effect has a cause, and every effect gives
birth to another.
Every outcome is already ordained.
This we disagreed about the
most. She tells them they have a “choice”, but they do not. Their fate is already
written; she merely, how do you say, delivers the message. Your mother’s disappearance
is a direct consequence of some link in this chain. Find this link, this cause, and
you will find your mother.’

‘Right,’ I snap back. ‘That sounds easy enough. I’ll make sure to tell Detective
Wurbik.’

‘Don’t be disrespectful,’ Boon answers sharply. ‘These are our beliefs.’ He makes
a sideways Victory-sign with his hand. ‘Second: Nothing occurs on its own; everything
is connected. So, if you finish what your mother started,
whatever touched her will
touch you.’

I feel a chill at that word,
touched
. My beautiful mother, with her alabaster skin.

Boon and I pause outside my door as I dig wearily in the side pockets of my pack
for the key. He adds with a sense of finality, ‘Everything that has happened before
will happen again.’

‘Sorry?’ I say sharply, glaring into his troubled face. ‘What’s happened before happens
again? That’s the third “thing”?’

He nods, without elaborating, and I snap, ‘Well, that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
My father and mother met. Then he died, and she vanished. The dying and the vanishing
are terrible once-offs, Boon, in a straight linear progression from boy-meets-girl.
See any second chances there? No? Because there are none.’

‘Nevertheless,’ Boon replies as I shove my front door open and flick on the hallway
light, ‘this is what we believe. Time is infinite, all life moves in cycles. Bad
things that happen will happen again. She didn’t believe me either, and see where
it got her?’

After I let him out, still muttering about fate and divination, I kick off my runners.
Half-heartedly, I fold up all the blankets I’d dragged out for Simon, setting them
in an untidy pile on the couch. The moment I plug the phone back into the wall socket
in the kitchen, it
starts ringing. But with the volume turned down low the sound
is almost comforting. It means I’m not completely alone. Someone’s thoughts are bent
on me. The last thing I hear as I disappear into my bedroom with a bowl of microwaved
dhal is a man’s deep voice whispering into the voice recorder:
Do you shave your
legs, girl? Well, do you?