The Astrologer's Daughter (22 page)

I register all of this—that there’s no cover, anywhere—as I’m pulling myself awkwardly
up into a sitting position.

Rising with a cry of pain I can’t quite muffle, I’m just standing there at the bottom
of the stairs, favouring my right foot, when a man appears at the top of them.

It feels like a dream as he slowly walks down, his dark eyes never leaving mine.
I back up, limping and sucking in shallow, painful breaths. One heel hits the edge
of the peeling yellow-and-black tape and I’m backing straight through the centre
of the boxy wooden structure, because it’s the only clear path in the entire space,
my sneakers snagging on the warped edge of a metal plate as I fall out the far side.

He keeps coming on: withered-beautiful, up close, and deadly; wearing every single
one of his years and cruelties on his face and in his eyes.

Behind me is the vast, damaged bulk of the bright-blue elephant; on either side,
broken chairs and heaped-up boxes. The room is a giant box—no, a box inside a box—with
no way out except those stairs behind him.

The man who wears Hugh’s face keeps crossing the room, passing through the standing
wooden beams himself, before coming to a stop in front of me. He places his hands
on my shoulders, running long, leather-gloved fingers through the ends of my hair
while I look up into his face like cornered prey.

If I closed my eyes, right now, and placed my head against this man’s rain-drenched
lapel, it would feel like Hugh and smell like Hugh: expensive, well maintained, reeking
of sex and power.

The resemblance is uncanny as he purrs, ‘How could anyone prefer him to
me
?’

Disorientated, I realise belatedly that the man must be speaking of Fleur Bawden
and the mistake she made: of loving his brother better.

Above us, I hear Newlands roar: ‘
What the devil is going on?
’ and through the floorboards
overhead there’s a metal
clang
, then light streams down through the cracks, refracted
into strange lines and patterns.

The man before me puts a hand over my mouth and pulls me, hard, into the iron line
of his body, breathing, ‘
Hush now
,’ into my hair.

I can hear someone above, walking in circles. Footsteps close, then dying away, roaming
all over the stage.

Then the footsteps grow distant and the man with his hand over my mouth relaxes his
grip only slightly and says, ‘You’re coming with me now, quietly, like a good girl.
I’m glad I waited.’ He clutches at me with his free hand and I actually gasp into
his palm as he twists hard at my soft, female flesh and says lazily, ‘You were worth
waiting for.’

The lines overhead are dizzying, resolving and dissolving. I start fighting him
then, really kicking out and biting, stamping and bucking, going wild because I know,
I know
there are some things you can’t come back from, as he’s pulling me around,
smashing me in the side of the head, getting huge handfuls of my hair and wrenching
until I’m seeing purple and stars and explosions.

‘Come with me, you little bitch, or I will kill you here,’ he hisses in this voice
that’s all the more terrible for being so controlled, so quiet.

He has me facing down and he’s forcing me, really trying to push me to my knees,
but I’m forcing my way back up, the two of us almost centrifugal, when I glimpse
feet on the stairs: battered workboots, the brown leather so worn it’s got this sheen
of grey all over the surface of it.

Then his fist connects with my face and I can’t see the boots anymore, I can’t see
anything. When I sag to my knees the judge turns me like a baby, hugging me to his
broad chest and dragging me backwards between the first pair of heavy wooden beams,
my heels again snagging against the edge of a warped metal plate, set into the floor.

Then we’re under the archway and he’s got an arm under my jaw, right across my windpipe,
pressing down on it so that I’ve got no air left, there’s nothing, I’m going to pass
out. But as the edges of my sight start going black, I see the weight above us. It’s
enormous: as wide across as the gap between the beams themselves; three pulleys it
takes to lift it, heavy enough to crush a man.

And I understand, at last: about the lines overhead, how they all go one way, in
parallel, except for this one star shape, right in the centre.

‘Simon,’ I gag, rasping, kicking out, my heels beating against metal as the man struggles
to contain me. ‘The lever, push it!’ I’m barely audible. ‘
Push it!
’

It is a Death’s head rattle. As my eyes roll back, I actually look for him, the
silver-haired giant with the eyes like sunlight on the sea. I can feel him in the
room, walking amongst the boxes, watching over me.

Then I pull down on the man’s little finger, the way Mum taught me, until I feel
it snap in my hands. Wrenching myself sideways, I dive and scramble to get clear
of the box with no sides, uncaring that I’ve left my hair and my blood everywhere.

It takes forever and it takes no time at all.

There is a sound like a heavy bolt shooting home, an iron arrow leaving a crossbow,
and then there’s a star-shaped hole in the sky, white light, the metal plate returning,
sinking back down into the floor, empty. And screaming.

Nothing can block out the screaming. It goes on and on, the star shape remaining,
jammed open by a man’s arcing, writhing body. As I turn over onto my back, whooping
and heaving to get air into my lungs, I see the rain coming down, together with the
light. The light and the rain are the colour of blood. A rain of blood, falling all
over me. I close my eyes.

AFTER

So you want to know how it turns out, right? Well, so do I. But I’m resisting the
urge to look.

I still believe in happy endings. They just happen to other people, that’s all. For
people like me it is a little more complicated.

It could have gone either way
, I remind Simon gravely, when I want to see him squirm.
I do it a lot because it’s fun.

If he hadn’t run back and found Boon after making it to Cohen Place too late to catch
me? Well, I’d be all kinds of dead. To needle him, I say that it was really Boon
who saved me—for introducing me to Newlands in the first place, and restoring to
me pieces of myself I hadn’t even known were missing.

The judge—who’ll never be pretty again—and Don Sturt are both Wurbik’s problems now.
Things eat at you long enough? They’ll either kill you, or you’ll kill to keep them
secret. I’ve seen it for myself, firsthand. I know.

Elias Kircher knew it, too. He saw death coming and made sure the people who most
wanted it made it to the party. The explosives were his own special touch, rigged
by a special effects guy on the Gold Coast who thought he was doing it for a telemovie.
The only way to get the job done properly, Kircher always believed, was to do it
yourself; see it to the bitter finish. He must have recognised that quality in my
mother.

And the word? The word that came through at the worst possible time and almost got
me killed?

Was:
Luv
.

I like to think that, wherever she is, Mum was trying to reach me with the only letters
she had left.

It’s slang, sure. But it’s clear enough. Well, as clear as her last message was before
she left on her great journey, astrolabe in hand, kindled by some kind of weird blood
magic:
always
. That’s the way I imagine it, anyway: her setting off on a journey
like some misguided, modern-day Orpheus going after her lost love. Because to imagine
anything else is unbearable.

Words can have more than one meaning, I know that. But
always
on its own has a terrible
certitude, an irrefutable
finality. However, when you couple it with the idea of
love
, it goes beyond even borders, even death: it’s transcendent, this idea that
there will always be love, enough love, more than you could ever want; something
constant. And, in those two words, she’s somehow managed to reference the entire
back catalogue of Whitney Houston, too—I can see her now, belting out the very tune
at the top of her lungs, me hitting her with a pillow to make her shut it—so I’ll
take it all as a sign that she’s okay.

I don’t think she ever worked out that Fleur and Hugh were connected, even though
they were a generation away from ever meeting each other. But she just had a way
with people, with bringing things out into the light. So maybe it really is true
what Boon said—that we’re all just links in a gigantic chain; or a web, because life
is circular, things come around again and again. Bad things beget bad things; but
good things, too. Those dead girls from the 1970s? They’re saying now the families
will at least get some answers, and if it took Mum leaving to get that, well, she
would have said it was a fair trade.

She never looked it, but Mum was strong and wise. And now I have to be all that,
too, because I am the last Crowe left behind in this world.

Simon’s taught me how to turn that sound off, that sparkly
bling
thing. He’s taught
me lots of things, in the days and hours since I looked for Death in the basement
of the oldest theatre restaurant in Melbourne. When you’re as damaged and spiky and
House Aries
as the two of us are, it is never exactly boring. More like a game of
combat where we make up the rules as we go along and the play never, ever stops.

But he’s refusing to cut a deal regarding the prize money. We’re going to hear any
day now, which one of us is officially more
alpha
than the other. But I’m holding
to my side of my one-sided bargain. If I win it, he gets a car. On condition that
he’ll take me driving up the coast so that I can see it for myself, see Mount Warning.

They haven’t found a body, and I’m holding on to that.

If there’s magic up there, Crowe magic, I like to think that I’ll feel it and figure
out what really happened.

So. I could confine it all to paper, run my divinations, pierce the veil between
now
and
what comes after
. But this way, my way; there’s no messenger, no message.

The future’s just wide open, the way I like it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With loving thanks to my husband, Michael, and to our beautiful children, Oscar,
Leni and Yve; who every day put up with me and love me exactly the way I am.

With thanks also to my parents, Yean Kai and Susan, and my sisters, Ruth and Eugenia,
and new brother-in-law Quino Holland, for distracting the little people with games
of Candyland and Connect Four and Uno. Thanks also to Barry and Judy Liu, Ben and
Michelle Lee, and Sally and Marcus Price for their unflagging support.

To Michael Heyward, International Man of Mystery and Publisher Extraordinaire, and
my editor, the fabulous and enormously dedicated Rebecca Starford, manifold thanks
for letting me retreat to my cave and just write
without expectations of suitability
or marketability—how intensely liberating.

A huge thanks also to rights ninja Anne Beilby, marketing genius Kirsty Wilson, super
publicist Stephanie Speight, design sorceress Imogen Stubbs, and to all at Text Publishing
who have championed my work and given it wings.

Grateful thanks also to Mark Battye, Suzy Roberts, Sharne Bryan and Caitlin Bryan
for reading my manuscript and gently pointing out the many glaring errors, inaccuracies
and pacing issues. It would not be the book it is without your help.

Thanks also go to Alicia McLeay, Cassie Pittman, Kara Bobbera, Ainsley Hallman, Ben
Doughty, Kirby Spicer, Regan O’Cleary, Daniel Mills, Sarah Beassley and Katie Kletzmayer
for feeding and watering me during the writing year and keeping that corner table
free.

Also, in memory of Ray Factor, master astrologer. I’m only sorry that this didn’t
make it into your hands before you left on your great journey.

And last, but not least, to Alison Arnold—who took a punt on a complete stranger—with
thanks and best wishes always.

This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, horoscopes, readings and
events in this book are entirely fictional, and all opinions expressed by the characters
are
expressed by the characters, whose preferences and attitudes are also entirely
their own. Any errors are entirely mine.

The extract from John Donne’s sonnet ‘A Fever’ that appears in the epigraph, is taken
from the 1635 compilation (made after his death) of some of his songs and sonnets.
The extract from ‘A Valediction forbidding mourning’ that appears on page 92 and
the extract from ‘The good-morrow’ that appears on page 270 are both taken from
Seven
Centuries of Poetry in English
, edited by John Leonard, Oxford University Press,
1988.

Certain authorial liberties may have been taken with those buildings and places that
do actually exist in the real world and, for those, the author apologises and begs
your leave.