The Astrologer's Daughter (16 page)

Looking through the ward doors, I see that the ICU is full. I don’t recognise any
of the still and shadowy shapes strapped to rhythmically beeping machines as having
anything to do with Simon Thorn. And because I’m nothing to him, or to the ill and
the dying in that room, the nurses won’t let me past the night desk.

There is nothing left to do now except call Malcolm Cheung from a quiet place. But
I can’t make myself do it. Unsure what I’m even doing here, I head in the opposite
direction to
quiet
, backtracking towards the public cafeteria, which is lit up like
a bad dream and packed with people. I’ll need to be with someone, anyone, when I
hear what I’m supposed to hear in its proper
context
.

The air smells of hot pies. Something by The Carpenters is playing and it’s like
a sign. Mum loved The Carpenters; loved that tragic, anorexic singer with the voice
like liquid caramel. I join the queue at the window for hot food and the woman behind
me says out loud, nudging me, as if we’re in the middle of a conversation: ‘Isn’t
it sad? Such a beautiful smile. Such a beautiful woman.’

I turn and look at her and her tight, grey perm and lilac velour tracksuit, tan comfort
shoes. ‘Sorry?’

The woman takes a step back when she clocks my face but she points up, gamely, above
the counter, at a TV
screen. It has white, computery text running along the bottom
of the picture which I recognise as tele-text for deaf people. Put on especially
for those cafeteria patrons who like to watch their news while enjoying The Carpenters
singing of
rainy days and Mondays
; even though it’s a Tuesday today, and fine out.
The text says:

–blood-stains found in a clearing, several kilometres from the main hiking trail
close to the summit.

I see people in orange jumpsuits, boots and hard hats with miner’s lamps emerging
from the trees with the characters
SES
emblazoned across the front on a glowing white
band positioned at chest level. A slightly out-of-focus man in a police-issue jumpsuit
holds up a plastic bag with something white inside. The words continue:

–and emergency workers with assistance from the Queensland police cadaver dog squad
recovered what appears to be an item of clothing. Homicide detectives are pursuing
several lines of enquiry–

The text makes way for the newsreader saying brightly, ‘In other news…’ and my eye
is drawn to the photograph behind the newsreader’s shoulder: a head and shoulders
shot of an elderly businessman in a navy suit. He looks younger in this photo because
the neat pencil moustache
is not yet completely white. It’s the kind of photo you’d
see on the wall of an office building, or in an official report. No red-eye, a snowy
white background; the subject deliberately angled towards you in a firm, reassuring
stance.
Your money is in good hands.

The photo is followed by images of several rescue boats motoring around the partially
submerged hull of a big yacht. Blue water; open water; waves. The sea under bright
sunlight, dazzling: like the eyes of the giant, in the curiosity shop. Police divers
in sleek wetsuits and face masks.

‘Excuse me,’ the old woman nudges me again, less friendly this time. ‘Were you going
to
order
?’

I can feel myself beginning to tremble, already starting to gasp, so I step to one
side so the woman can get at her pre-heated pastry items without delay. Face tilted
towards the screen, I keep reading, the blood roaring in my ears:

Mr Kircher, a non-executive director of several ASX top 100-listed companies and
founder of biotech powerhouse Emer-Tech, is survived by six adult children from several
marriages, and
five grandchildren–
Foul play–
Homicide–
Contract hit gone wrong–

17

I think I might have screamed, or maybe my knees buckled. Many hands push and pull
me to a table in the corner near a stand full of packaged chips and someone shoves
my head down between my knees and people are saying:

Take a deep breath!
Take it easy, love.
Settle down, it’ll soon pass.
Can I call your mum for you?

All on top of each other: so that it’s a mess of instructions, a mess of well-meaning
voices. A cruelty of kindnesses. I almost dig out my phone and thrust it at them,
wanting to scream:
You try! You try calling my mum because I can’t seem to get through
to her.

But I place my head on the table instead, the surface pressing into my cheek. There
are hard crumbs still on it, which are hurting my scars and mixing with the tears
leaking out of my eyes. And I could just about close them tight and sleep here, shut
them and never wake up, never make the call, when I hear someone say—in a voice I
recognise, but sort of don’t, because it’s thick and awkward and tight, not smooth
and assured—‘I’ll take care of her from here, thanks. Nothing to see.’

Someone pulls out the chair at the head of my table, sits down heavily, and there’s
the grumble of people talking in low voices moving away. I can feel him trying very
hard not to touch me because he’s not a toucher, and neither am I, not really, and
it would be—

‘This is fucked,’ is all he says. Knowing as well as I do that saying
sorry
actually
doesn’t cut it in cases like ours. Neither of us caused it. Neither of us can take
it back, or change the outcome. For a second I get what Boon was saying about how
everything is connected and this, we two, are just links in a chain of awfulness
that stretches on forever. Atoms bashing against each other in a vast vat of bashing
atoms.

‘Put Malcolm out of his misery and call him,’ Simon says in that tight, scratchy
voice I recognise as the voice that comes after too much crying. ‘He’s even called
me
looking for you, which is desperate.’

‘What, the way the hospital called
me
looking for
you
?’ I shoot back, taking my head
off the table and actually squealing because Simon’s face is a pulpy-looking mess:
grey-green eyes, small and puffy, set in a mass of bruises over a split lower lip
with a jewel of bright blood hanging right in the centre. There is an open gash across
the bridge of his already broken nose and purple bruises in the shape of thumb marks
on either side of his windpipe.

‘What happened to your
face
?’ I breathe and Simon laughs, wiping the blood away,
although it’s clear it hurts him to laugh. ‘Not telling,’ he says, ‘until you tell
me what happened to yours because you never did say…’

My tears dissolve into a smile that dissolves back into tears. I bury my face in
my fleecy sleeves and tell him how I just saw the submerged hull of Elias Herman
Kircher’s luxury yacht sticking up out of the water. On the television.

‘Death of subject indicated,’ I whisper. ‘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.’

Simon, too appalled to answer, says nothing.

‘But that’s not the worst part,’ I sob, my words so hard to make out that he is forced
to lean forward. I know,
because his breath is stirring my hair. ‘I think they found
something of
hers
!’ I wail, recognising for the first time what my conscious mind
had refused to countenance: searchers emerging from thick scrub, a dense, old-growth
forest, at sunset. ‘They used
cadaver dogs
.’ I’d never heard of them before, but
the words need no explanation.

Simon does touch me then, just a warm, lean hand on my shoulder. And I do something
that’s brave, even for me. I twist a little in my seat and grab that hand, which
causes him to give a yelp.

It’s not the reaction I was expecting, and I loosen my grip, looking down at his
grazed and oozing knuckles resting across my palm, understanding something at last:
that Simon never worked out with punching bags at some designer gym. He
was
the punching
bag. No one sleeps in their car for fun. Something must have come to a head; some
critical, terrible thing that has ended with his mother lying motionless in a hospital
ward, rapidly shutting down.

‘I’ve been so wrong about you,’ I say in a low voice.

Simon doesn’t draw away, saying awkwardly, ‘You should have seen the other guy. The
de facto human being
who supplied her, and bashed her, and called it
love
. If he
decides to press assault charges maybe they’ll just cancel each other out?’ He gives
this rattly laugh that might be a sob.

For once I don’t rush in fearing the silences. I let him
talk: about how every window
in the house was broken and there was actual human shit on the carpets; how his mum
weighed less than a fourteen-year-old girl because she’d forget to eat, but never
to shoot up; how her corneas were still good enough to donate, though the doctors
would have to get in, to know for sure, about the rest. But she’d be okay with that.
Underneath, she’d been a good person. She just loved these dangerous men she could
never walk away from.

He looks up into my eyes, pleading, ‘How do you make someone want to
live
?’

‘You can’t,’ I say, getting a catch in my breathing as the awareness suddenly blossoms
between us that
we are holding hands
. I can feel it through the skin of his palm,
the new tension. So I withdraw mine gently first, because defence is always the best
form of attack, right? ‘You can’t make anyone do anything,’ I whisper, hot and confused,
the thoughts struggling to come. ‘You can’t really ever know them; only what they
choose to show you.’

I am talking about his mum, but I’m also speaking of mine.

‘Call him,’ Simon urges over my bowed head.

I look around then: at the three nuns in top-to-toe white at a table across the room;
at the old man and his wife squabbling over a bag of lolly-coloured pharmaceuticals
they’ve got spread out between them; at a sad-faced
teen and his exhausted-looking
mum having a silent, solemn early dinner.

‘Good a place as any,’ I agree.

Malcolm picks up almost as soon as I put the call through. I don’t need to actually
say anything because he’s had a statement prepared for hours in anticipation of just
this moment. They need to run tests, of course, but they think they got her blouse
and I will, at some stage, have to come in to formally identify it. ‘It’s making
its way back by police chopper right now,’ he tells me.

My mother, without her stupid, foofy blouse, on a two-degree night.

I don’t really take in what Malcolm says next about the operation of tollway gantries
and the mechanics of SIM card analysis, how police technicians have been working
around the clock to try and narrow down the vehicle she must have travelled in to
get to Mount Warning. Someone swears they saw her crying at a petrol station on the
New South Wales–Victorian border. It was her long, pale hair that caught the woman’s
attention, her obvious distress. Even when the Caucasian driver of the dark-coloured
van—Black? Grey? Navy?—ducked out to do something the servo cameras didn’t catch,
Mum never got out of the front passenger seat of the van. She didn’t appear to be
restrained, but you never know.

‘The Queensland bomb squad’s actually looking at
whether someone planted explosives
on board Kircher’s yacht,’ I hear Malcolm add from a long way away. ‘I’m only telling
you this because I’ve got a recording of your voice here that says you saw it coming.
You caught the news? How they recovered three bodies? Kircher, the wife
and
her lover.
That was unexpected. Like a bad movie. If it was supposed to look like an accident,
someone cocked that up badly.’

I can’t make my throat work. After a humane pause, Malcolm clears his own and says
kindly, ‘It’s a lot to process, Avicenna. Call me back if you can think of any questions,
okay? I’m right here.’

Then he hangs up and I look down at Simon’s battered hand, which has somehow made
its way back into mine. I can see individual hairs and freckles; make out the snaking
blue of his veins in the parts that aren’t too messed-up.

My voice, when it finally comes, sounds faded. ‘Part of me has been hoping—even though
it’s the worst kind of thing to hope, you know?—that she just went crazy, couldn’t
take it anymore, and walked out. I could almost stand that—that maybe the pressure
of our life got to her, and she just left.’

I cradle Simon’s hand in mine for a moment longer before depositing it gently back
on the table. He looks down at it for a second, as if he’s unsure whether it belongs
to him.

‘They’re looking for the van, running the criminal records of the owners of vehicles
that went through the tollway that night. There’s a contender registered to a builder
in Glenroy and another to a rural property in Macedon; a meat transport vehicle with
dirty plates belonging to an abattoir in Footscray. But they’re still working on
it.’

I’m proud of how calm I’m sounding. Later, maybe, when I am home, and in my pyjamas,
I will break into pieces; but not yet.

‘You need to get upstairs.’ I phrase it like a question, in case Simon needs the
hand-holding returned. But he shakes his head, already rising from the table, his
thoughts already moving outward—the way they always do when he decides to do something—as
he strides out of the room.

I wish I had that ability of his: to inject iron into my soul; temporarily slough
off my troubled life, as if it were a dirty coat.

Where do I go from here?
I think.
Where do I go?

Boon’s shop is in darkness as I let myself into the gloomy stairwell to my apartment.
A single voice floats down from above; there is desultory laughter, the rumble of
a
one-way conversation. Some weirdo talking to himself on the landing outside my
door.

For a moment, frozen below stairs, I consider leaving again. But I’m exhausted, and
I have a direct line to the Victoria Police, so I force myself to keep moving upward,
my tread deliberately heavy. I transfer my mobile into the pocket of my hoodie just
in case, and take my slender silver Maglite torch out of my pack. I close my right
hand around the base of it, so that the thing is protruding out of my clenched fist.
If I have to, I will drive it into the soft tissues of the neck or the face, the
way Mum taught me, when we lived near Rainbow.

A voice floats down. ‘
Avicenna
? It’s Hugh.’

And I hesitate again, mid-step, my skin going hot, remembering how he was so beautiful
to look at that I couldn’t do it properly, I lost all nerve. Being in the guy’s presence
was like a kind of suffering. I’d wanted to grab him and… I don’t know. It’s all
technical stuff I’ve read about in books from there. The mind digresses.

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.