The Astrologer's Daughter (21 page)

Tears welling in my eyes, I brush them away viciously as the Indian guy at the cash
register looks on with suspicion because I’m not buying and I’m not talking. I’m
just dripping water onto the floor by the newspaper stand, shaking like a drug addict
over the screen of my phone.

Fumbling at the keypad, I type with bloodless fingers:
I WANT to be home. Scared.
Feel I’m being watched / followed.
My words crop up in a golden bubble at the side
of the game.

Simon’s answer comes back right away, slotting straight underneath in a bubble of
white:
Where are you? Come to you.

I think frantically, my eyes raking the windows facing out onto the Lonsdale and
Exhibition Street intersection.

‘Can I help you?’ the Indian guy queries over my shoulder, but I just wave a hand
in his direction, so that he takes himself back around the safety screen, pissed.

I know there is a narrow, dog-legged shortcut just around the corner that takes you
back past the front of
the Chinese Museum into Chinatown. I can wait there. In the
museum, no one will want me to buy anything or move on, and it’s public enough that
nothing can happen to me if I stand, dripping wet, by the pretty girl at the front
counter.

I type:
Chinese Museum, hurry.
Hitting
send
, then sending one more word:
Please.

Simon’s bubble comes back:
Cohen Place, got it. Coming.

Then he does the same thing as me, sending another message hot on the heels of his
last one:
And you’re not, you know. Ugly. You’re kind of unforgettable, actually.

There’s no time to savour the amazingness of that perfectly punctuated message right
now. Later, we can thrash out the exact context and parameters of his words, but
for now I shove my phone deep into my jacket pocket and head back out the sliding
doors.

Going left up Lonsdale, I see the half-hidden opening to the laneway just past a
deserted souvenir shop, its windows full of sheepskin scuffs and Aussie flags, clip-on
koalas. A man emerging from a pokies venue that opens onto the laneway actually pauses
in his stride to let me pass, alerted by something in my face, in the way I’m holding
myself.

I burst through the doors of the Chinese Museum and the girl behind the counter nods
in bewilderment as I gasp, ‘Is it okay if I just wait here?’

That feeling, the crawling feeling, hasn’t for a moment gone away. A chill moves
through my guts when I see through the museum’s long front windows: a dark shape
emerging from the laneway I’ve just come from, wet grey hair plastered to his gaunt,
familiar features.

As his head quests from side to side, turning towards the museum’s doors, I back
further into the building, hoping I haven’t been seen. The woman calls out, ‘Miss?
Miss!
’ as I start running up the stairs.

22

Every room I pass is lit up like a Christmas tree, the light stark against the unnatural
early afternoon darkness outside the windows. I hear heavy feet on the stairs below
and make for the female toilets signposted for the third floor, intending to lock
myself in until Kingdom Come, or at least until Simon does.

As I’m about to crest the landing outside the chamber of photographs, the lift between
me and the restrooms opens and Don Sturt steps out, his hands already extended, like
he’s reaching for me. I let out a scream, so high and terrified you can barely hear
it.

‘Don’t be afraid!’ he pleads, taking a tentative step forward. ‘Don’t run!’

On the turning below me, the Chinese woman from the front counter has come to a stop,
her eyes wide and frightened. A look passes between us: that I’m not dangerous,
that I’m not the problem; the tall white man, the man who stinks of booze, is the
one to watch. Don hasn’t seen her, but I catch her beginning to back up quietly and
head back down, her steps undetectable above the shudder and roar of the rain outside.

Help is coming, it is. I have to tell myself that.

I force myself to keep still, guts quivering as Don draws closer. I’m neither up
nor down. I’m at a disadvantage, frozen here on the flight, looking up into his pockmarked
face, the muscles of his seamed mouth, working.

‘She saw the darkness in me,’ Don pleads, his yellow-flecked eyes very wide, ‘and
she wasn’t afraid.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, voice shaking. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I need you to know that when I left her,’ he tells me, hands still out in a gesture
like supplication, ‘she was
alive
. We drove all day, and all of the next. I talked
and talked and she listened and she was alive when I left her. She was fine.’

I shake my head, uncomprehending. But horror dawns when he says, ‘She said you were
the smartest person she’d ever known. She said you’d figure she wasn’t dead, just
gone, and she couldn’t tell you, because then the magic wouldn’t work. That’s what
she called it:
magic
.’

I sink to the stair I was just standing on, unable to hold myself up.

They tell you the darndest things.

Even if I could speak, there are too many questions. So I fumble for my phone, right
there under his nose, and start recording him, every word. I mean, I’m just holding
my phone in my hand, but he doesn’t stop talking.

Swaying slightly, he says, ‘Not like them others. We gave it to them; every man took
his turn. And when they wouldn’t, when they played up, tried to run away into the
bush, we laid into them with sticks and bottles—after a while I had to drink myself
stupid to block out the screaming. But not your mother. Didn’t touch her. She was
good when I left her. She was fine.’

Fine
, that stupid word that’s supposed to convey, what,
fineness
?

‘Who are you talking about?’ I whisper, this sick taste of iron in my mouth. ‘What
“others”?’

‘Them girls from Armidale. Hitchhikers. Coming on for forty years. We showed ’em
a good time then carried on the party. At Mount Warning.’

Something monumental has shifted in the man. It’s like he’s spewed forth some irritant
that’s been buried deep, like a bullet, or a fishhook, for years. He’s actually hunched
over, clutching at his stomach, purging his guts out. ‘We left ‘em tied up,’ he whimpers,
‘facedown choking, like, on
their own blood. When they was found, they was bones.
And all this time, I’ve kept it quiet, carried it in me, tried my best to make amends,
do some good, make my peace, but your mum…’

Something, even in his speech, has broken down. The country boy he used to be is
coming up through his pores, rising like a ghost.

‘So she wanted to go somewhere she could feel the presence of death, that’s what
she said and did I know anywhere? Just asked me one day, out of the blue, on the
way back from El’s place and, and…’ His eyes fill with tears as I watch. ‘And I said
I knew; I knew a place all right.’

My mouth fills with an onrush of saliva, like I’m about to throw up. Don took Mum
to
that place
, where some atrocity was committed. She must have been so scared. To
think she got into a van with this well-dressed, unassuming man, this trusted acquaintance
of an acquaintance. And that underneath his expensive clothes and well-kept shoes
is this monster inside.

‘Never told, swore a pact, blood oath; no one ever caught, ever charged, everyone
dead but me. Night sweats for years. Eleanor doesn’t know—if she did, she never would’ve
took me on, leant on me the way she does. But I told
her
.’ His head swings back up,
red-rimmed eyes focused on me. ‘And now I’ve told you.’

What is it about us
, I think, shrinking back, sliding down a stair,
that makes people
hand us their darkness?

Don takes a step forward, his hands still out, grasping, and I fall down the stairs
in earnest then, phone still clutched in my hand.

I break out into the front foyer and the Chinese woman is on the phone, still giving
frantic instructions, calling out, ‘Wait! Wait,
Miss!
’ when she sees me. But I don’t
wait, because Mum told me you don’t wait, you never wait when things go bad, you
get. I burst out, into the obliterating rain.

In the tiny square outside the museum, I send the audio file to Wurbik’s phone. Rain
runs down my screen, into my mouth, the hollow in my neck. No time to explain. How
to explain? That bad things bring other bad things out into the light.

I spin, unsure and directionless upon the slick cobblestones, the rain raining down;
knowing absolutely where I am, but feeling lost.

Simon hasn’t come. I wonder why I even expected him to—don’t I always save myself,
in the end? I shove my phone into the front of my pack, cutting across the small
ornamental square, hurrying under the celestial arch and
past the stone lion on the
right, towards home: when I see him.

It’s like he’s stepped out of the future.

A tall, strikingly handsome man in a long camel overcoat and dark pinstripe suit,
narrow-toed business shoes, a Melbourne Football Club scarf draped elegantly around
his neck. He’s coming up the hill towards me, unhurried in the rain beneath a black
umbrella.

I see the same longish, dark-blond hair and one-in-a-million physique. He looks good,
and he knows it, and he’ll always look good. He’s talking on the phone. I don’t think
he’s even seen me yet.

But then he looks up, with his unreadably dark eyes under wicked brows, and I’m looking
at the man of my dreams—Hugh de Crespigny—
in thirty years’ time
.

As he gets closer, I see there are streaks of grey in his hair, the beginnings of
crepey chicken neck happening, but it could be the same man. I actually back up in
horror, thinking:
This can’t be happening
.
I just left you, and you were young.

It’s like magic.

Heart thumping like a driving bassline, I turn quickly on my heel, walking back uphill,
up Little Bourke. I give pretty good poker face. But I’m certain the man recognised
that I recognised him, because the hard heels of his fine shoes are ringing out behind
me, steady and unhurried
on the slick flagstones. And when I pick up my pace, he
does too.

What had that snake Rosso said?
If he finds out you’ve been airing very private dirty
laundry with a cheap palm reader, he will kill you himself.

When I get to the theatre restaurant the front door is locked tight. I pull on the
handle, sobbing low in my throat, but it doesn’t give. Future Hugh is standing on
the corner now, a block away, still talking on the phone. He’s looking into the window
of the noodle shop by the pedestrian crossing, checking out his own reflection in
the electric streetlights, the beams of passing cars. Just his presence, menacing.

When the man’s back is half turned, I duck down the driveway of the commercial car
park a couple of shopfronts away, praying that he hasn’t seen me and it’s all a terrible
coincidence.

I’m standing in the stinking alley, the rain falling from the early evening sky through
a narrow gap between all the buildings. The back door’s ajar, which means Newlands
must be in.

Almost crying with relief, I pull the wire security door open and run through the
deserted kitchen into the darkness of the backstage area, looking for a place to
hide. Somewhere in here are stairs that take you to the upper floor. And there was
that glow, coming from down below;
some kind of basement or cellar, I remember. Across
the stage, on the far side from the kitchen passageway.

My eyes adjust slowly today. There is no light left in the day and no gap in the
curtains facing onto the dining area. Backstage is absolute blackness, except for
that below-stairs glow that begins, tremulously, to coalesce in the corner of my
eye.

I almost call out to Newlands, who must be around. But I’m glad I don’t when the
unlocked screen door slams, then slams again seconds later.
Two
of them: their heels
striking the distressed concrete of the kitchen floor as they poke around between
the island benches, searching for me. And two options: straight out through the curtains
at the front of the stage, screaming for
Newlands! Help! Police!
And hope that the
front door will open from the inside. Or make for that faint glow.

I feel about with my hands out, like a blind person. A line of painted balsa wood
cut-out trees runs either side of me. I abandon my pack and begin creeping towards
the faint source of light, the glow abruptly vanishing as a new bit of backdrop crops
up, set on a different plane from the first. I’m suddenly panicked, lost in the dark.
But as I inch forward, the light returns. I must be midway across the stage by now.

My sneakered footfalls are absolutely soundless and I’m maybe ten feet from the opening,
crouching low
against a 3D polystyrene prop, when the sound of male voices emerges
from the passageway. Then their footsteps are echoing on the same floorboards I’m
standing on, and I know I’ve missed my chance to make it downstairs without being
spotted. I’ll be silhouetted against the light if I move now.

‘You shouldn’t be seen here,’ says a hard voice I recognise as Stainer’s.

I wonder if they can smell my fear, or maybe feel it, rolling off me in hot waves.

‘You know how much I enjoy the thrill of the chase,’ replies a deep, cultured voice,
laughter in it. It’s a beautiful voice; less a voice than an instrument. Authoritative,
resonant. ‘It’s part of the
fun
,’ the man continues. ‘And I’m going to have fun with
this one.’

‘I have to insist,’ Stainer says, his own words blunt with concern. ‘Whatever you
intend to do later, right now? You should wait in the car,
sir
.’

I’m craning my neck, trying to work out where they are, but their voices are floating,
disembodied, echoing in the high-ceilinged space. There’s a long pause, as if Future
Hugh is weighing his risks. And then he says, briskly, not best pleased, ‘Perhaps
you’re right, Stainer. My son, Ross, won’t breathe a word, of course, but my nephew
is in… an unpredictable frame of mind. Take the front-of-house area. I’ll wait by
the back door. Just in case.’

There’s another long pause and then Stainer says, voice colourless and unemotional,
‘Yes, sir. Just stay out of sight of the cars coming up and down the entryway, okay?
She won’t be far. The geriatric’s probably out. And even if he isn’t…’

I hear one set of hard soles moving away, striking concrete. Then the other man steps
lightly across floorboards until there is the sound of curtains being batted aside,
an instance of weak, grey light, then the sound of heavy fabric falling back into
place. I hadn’t realised I was holding my breath until it comes out of me in a quiet
whoosh
. I need to move. I’ve got one foot on the top of the basement stairs when
my phone, my bloody phone, utters that loud, sparkly
bling
sound—to tell me someone
has just played me a word.

I don’t wait to see what happens, throwing myself down the hard concrete steps, tripping
badly off the last one and twisting my ankle. I land on my side, on the cold, dusty
floor, with a dull
thud.

As I breathe out hard in pain, overhead it sounds like wild animals stampeding in
all directions. The basement is lit by a single dim pendant bulb and littered with
junk: a bright-blue papier-mâché elephant with a hole punched in its side, giant
fans, broken chairs, boxes and barrels and crates, a glittery game-show spinning
wheel.

Right in the centre of the room, though, is a
weird-looking rectangular wooden structure
fixed into the concrete of the floor, yellow-and-black warning tape stuck all around
its perimeter. It has three weighted pulleys set into the top, but like everything
else it affords me no place to hide. It reaches from the floor to the underside of
the stage above, like a rudimentary archway made out of four heavy wooden beams,
each one wider and more solid than a person. Like a rectangular box, only standing
upright, all the sides open, facing onto mounds of old theatre rubbish.