The Astrologer's Daughter (18 page)

Hell, I could ask the chart whether she’s still
alive
.

And my own birth chart—it’s right here. I could torture it, too. Set my life on some
narrow pathway I might never get off. Find out how long I’ll live, how I’ll die;
whether I’ll ever be kissed, or have children, a breakdown, a lottery win, a house.

Or find someone to love me again, the way I have been loved my entire life.

For a second, before the tears stream down, a familiar cluster of stars in the first
house seems to leap out at me. And I realise with a shock that
my
chart is the one
from the front of all the journals, Mum’s journals.

House Aries. My house.

What had Wurbik said? She wouldn’t even start a case if the job wasn’t compatible
with
this
chart. Mine.

Find the pattern and you find the person.

Suddenly, I’m howling, ripping at all the papers, all the printouts, until there’s
a blizzard of torn paper, the pieces mixed up and scattered and impossible to put
back together. The fate of all the Crowes, to be scattered and destroyed and made
lesser, pulled to pieces: as a people, as a family. It’s like we’ve always been the
one person anyway—destined to die young; dying then being reborn,
only to die again.
Leaving our daughters motherless.

In the midst of the storm I hear the door open, and Simon’s standing there, still
in his clothes and boots, the left side of his face creased from sleep. He doesn’t
ask me what I’m doing. He just pulls me to my feet and wipes at my eyes with the
pads of his bruised thumbs and rocks me in his arms until I stop bashing at him,
bashing at the world, and he says, ‘Cenna,
Cenna
, it’s going to be all right.’

19

Suddenly, I am a pillar of stone in his arms. Nobody calls me
Cenna
but me. Mum and
Vicki know it as my gamer tag, but they’ve always, always called me
Avi
. And
Changeling_
29
never called me anything because it was his policy to never write back. Not even
when I gloated and deliberately twisted the knife, for laughs.

‘So is it true, then,’ I mumble, ‘what they said about you dropping Miranda Cornish
because she couldn’t
spell
?’ But what I’m really asking him is:
Is this okay, what
we’re doing here?

Simon is standing very still; I can feel the tension and uncertainty in the way he
holds himself so upright, he might snap from the strain. He doesn’t often get caught
out, or let things slip, but he knows it, and I know it, and I can’t help the small,
secret smile that curves up the corners of my mouth where it’s hidden in the front
of his scratchy jacket. ‘You never even won a single
game
,’ I say quietly into his
shoulder.

‘It was driving me crazy,’ he replies, and he could be talking about Miranda and
her loose grasp of the English language, or about all the games in which I handed
him back his arse on a plate. I feel him slowly relaxing when he realises I’m not
going to go berserk and scratch his eyes out.

‘I saw you and Vicki playing once, in The Caf,’ he says sheepishly into my part,
his jaw all scratchy with dark stubble. ‘You were sitting side-by-side, laughing
your heads off. It was easy enough to invite you to a game after that. It was meant
to be a test. But then I couldn’t win, so I couldn’t stop.’

He says it like it’s my fault.

I raise my head then to his mauled face, my own all red and scaly, runny and unlovely,
the two of us a pair. ‘But if you win, will you?’ I say uncertainly. ‘Stop?’

And I mean
stop playing
, but I also mean:
stop wanting to know me or be with me,
leave me behind once you achieve the shiny new life you’ve always longed for?

It’s palpable, how badly he wants that life. But I understand now why he deserves
it and is the way he is. ‘I’m never going to win,’ Simon says simply, ‘because you’ll
always be smarter than I am, and you’re going to take out the Tichborne. I’m always
just going to be standing in your shadow.’

It’s not an answer, not really. But it was a stupid question. People who want guarantees
are the kind of people who consult astrologers and I’m done with all of that.

I’d like him to kiss me, but I wouldn’t know where to begin. So instead I say gruffly,
‘What happens now?’ Hoping he’ll take it as an invitation.

He steps back and says firmly, ‘We do the talk.’

Of course we do.

I’m so disappointed I actually sway on the spot, but I see the rightness of what
he’s saying. When you keep busy, you forget to remember, or to dwell. You take it
one step at a time and then you find that you’re…living.

We have the soup for breakfast because we are motherless now, and there are no longer
rules to abide by. We can do what we like—but we’d give it all away in a moment to
have them back, the way they were, at their best, when they loved us and were not
overwhelmed by the things that caused them, in the end, to leave.

Simon drives us to school in his rusting, stinky bomb, pulling into his usual spot
in the Year 12 car park, by the skips. It could be any other day. But plenty of people
see us get out together, and the class is already talking about it when we take our
seats, side-by-side, in the front row.

The mess his face is, this morning, makes looney June de Costi gasp out loud. Dalgeish
practically smacks her ruby-red lips when she sees that we’re both here, technicolour
bruises, scars and all. ‘When you’re ready?’ she trills from the side of the room,
activating the
record
function on the tablet she’s holding up with a purple fingernail.
I can imagine all of them in the staff room later, having a gay old chortle, and
my face goes so hot and red that Adam Carney, sitting in the second row right under
my nose, actually laughs. ‘Come on, Frankencrowe, balls of steel, man, balls of steel.’

Simon and I had agreed in the car that I’d go first because I had nothing prepared.
I was going to wing it, pull something out of my arse, and it would be up to Simon
to try and draw the whole thing together, get us back on point, whatever that was.

In summary
, he’d say smoothly,
in conclusion
. And that would be the impression Dalgeish—all
of them—would be left with: that we’d actually
worked well together
,
top marks for
trying
. When of course, we hadn’t; because we’re both house
Aries
—I worked out that
much from the way Simon had seemed to recognise himself in my chart—and we’re both
always going to want to dominate the proceedings.

‘We’re completely not compatible in
any
way,’ I’d said fretfully, in the car, unable
to look at him. ‘It will be a disaster.’

Ostensibly, I’d been talking about the talk. And Simon, who’d been distracted by
a taxi rear-ending someone in the lane beside us, had completely missed the point
the way I’d wanted him to, and said, ‘We’re going to do great, if you just keep it
brief and punchy. Leave the textual analysis to
me
.’

The lights are very bright in the classroom. I look down at the skin of my hands,
which seems both yellow and red at once, stippled and blotchy. I close my eyes briefly
and think to myself:
Words. Words are my currency.

When I open them, and begin to speak, it’s like the fear, the edges of the room,
the eyes, all fade away. I speak of my mother and my grandmother and my great-grandmother
before them. Of their secret marriages: with the stars and planets and luminaries,
with the men who were not their husbands, with blue-eyed Death himself. I tell them
of how my mother loved my dead father so much that I think she bought an old astrolabe
and went out looking for him in a fit of madness. But something terrible and cruel
and ultimately human intervened, so that she found Death again, anyway. On the summit
of Mount Warning.

As I say it, I believe it to be the truth, the true story of what happened. Then
the words rush forth, out of nowhere.

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let Maps to others, worlds on worlds have showne,
Let us possesse one world, each hath one, and
is one.

Beside me, Simon rustles his papers, horrified that I have skied straight off the
mountain into uncharted textual waters. (
Not
‘The good-morrow’, I can hear him thinking,
we didn’t agree to do that one!
)

But the rest of the room is absolutely silent as I add, ‘This was them. Mum could
read the stars, she could foresee all futures; it was her gift, both terrible and
divine, wielded for such a mundane purpose: “
Will he marry me? Will he leave me?
”
But all she wanted, I think, in the end, was him. “
One world
”; but not this one.
Donne understood that. He understood death and love and God at some new and fundamental
level, some eternal level. How two people can be so close, so
conjoined
, that they
are like a compass, one arm anchoring the other, but still allowing it the freedom
to move. The two moving always together. “
Thy firmness makes my circle just
”,’ I
whisper. ‘ “
And makes me end, where I begunne.
” ’

There, Simon, I found my way back to the point
, I think.
I am the point. There is
no other.

I bow my head when the grief cannot be held at bay. ‘In our own small way,’ I murmur,
staring at the stained and rucked-up carpet beneath my runners, ‘Mum and I were like
the two arms of a compass, always moving
towns, moving schools, always together.
But I wasn’t enough to keep her here. And now the compass is broken and I don’t know
the way forward…’

I falter to an awkward stop, watching, horrified, as two fat tears fall out of my
eyes onto my shoes. The front row kids see, and a murmur of restless noise spreads
back down through the rows like wind rustling through fields of grass.

Simon smoothly steps into the gaping chasm I have created, talking confidently about
a love so elevated above the profane that it is a love which transcends the physical,
‘Moving into the realm of inter-communion of two minds,’ he says breezily, like he
didn’t just turn off the life-support for his own mother.

He’s so good at
pretending
.

Panic—that he’s talking about
us
, that maybe this is all I have to look forward to
in this life, two minds meeting on an electronic gameboard in cyberspace—makes me
feel like throwing up, makes me run out of the room with my hand over my mouth in
a flurry of
oooo-oohs
that sets everyone talking.

It’s all been caught in high definition on Dalgeish’s Samsung.

Unable to face anyone, I grab my pack and walk out
through the school gates. No one
tries to stop me as my forcefield sizzles and sizzles away. Even the guys with lanyards
and clipboards hustling for wildlife donations on the corner of La Trobe and Swanston
leave me alone, actually peeling off to the sides when they see me coming.

As I draw closer to home, I delete my messages, one after another.

Wurbik’s worried:
Call me
.

Delete.

Vicki’s worried:
Call me
.

Delete.

Don Sturt next, saying Eleanor desperately wants to talk.

Delete
.

Hugh de Crespigny, voice like molten honey, urgent:
I need to show you something
.
You need to
see
it.

‘Unless it’s your huge, hard body, not interested,’ I say out loud with a harsh,
teary laugh, hitting
delete
.

Then there’s a couple of consecutives from a heavy breather who hangs up after the
requisite amount of hostile panting.

Delete
, I go; my finger savage.
Delete
.

Though I do wonder, for a moment, how it is that the mouth-breathers have gotten
hold of my mobile number, too, spreading like mould across my life.

I wave at Boon through the front window as I go by, but
I don’t think he sees me
through the reflected glare. And I realise, then, that maybe all you ever see is
surfaces, and that even then, sometimes you don’t even get that. One day soon I will
have to sit down with Boon and ask:
What was she like? When she was truly happy?
But not now, not today.

Today, the question would be:
How could she leave me, when I still need her?

But that’s not a question it would be fair to ask him.

Mounting the stairs, fatigue is heavy in every line of my body. I am slumped inside
my jeans and flannel shirt, like a creature made of dough, incapable of speech or
thought. It’s only because the stairwell lights are still blown on both the upper
landings that I don’t see it. I don’t see the thing until my foot connects with it.

There’s a hard metallic
thok
as I kick something on my front doormat into the base
of the door. I bend down low, squinting to make it out in the faint light from downstairs,
and my backpack swings around and hits me, hard, in the side of the head. In a fit
of all-consuming rage, I twist and dropkick the bag, punting it all the way down
the steps to the landing below.

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!
’