The Astrologer's Daughter (3 page)

4

I don’t like to be alone and I’m afraid of the dark.

There it is. I’ve never told anyone that before. It’s at odds with the way I look,
the way I have learned to conduct myself in public—with hauteur, and a certain amount
of swagger, as if I am a pirate.

I work out that I’ve been awake for roughly two days. It might go some way towards
explaining the hammering in my ears, and the heat I seem to be generating, as if
I’m made out of pistons and cogs and steam.

In the end—even though I had nothing more pressing to do at home than stare at the
ancient soot stains on my bedroom walls—I didn’t go to school, didn’t even make it
down the hall to the toilet, or eat. After the police left,
I shut my door and climbed
back into bed, because I knew that night would eventually fall and no one would be
here to mark it with me. Or bear it with me. On their way out, I almost begged one
of them to stay, but it would have sounded pathetic.

I haven’t left home for more than a day, based on the irrational fear that I will
go out and somehow miss Mum popping back for something, then leaving again. If I’m
not here, I won’t catch her, and it’s important I catch her and tell her not to go
outside again, that it’s dangerous to leave home, to leave
me
.

I feel disgusting, and it’s only feelings of self-disgust and bladder-as-ticking-time-bomb
that finally propel me out from under my blankets. I crack open my door and am greeted
with the kind of darkness that could hide… anything.

Skin prickling, I run through our apartment towards the front entrance, palming on
every light along the way. The air smells stuffy and ancient and dead in here, like
how a tomb might smell, and panic makes me throw the front door wide open to catch
a draft, any sort of draft. Or just to catch my mother, walking back through it,
throwing her battered tan leather handbag down and saying, ‘Phew, Avi, that was the
longest train ride in recorded
history
.’

We live on the top floor of a three-storey Victorian-
era brick building in the heart
of Chinatown, listed as the registered place of business for the
Mei Hua Bean Sprout
Company
. A tarnished brass plaque right by the residents’ entrance at street level
says so. The bean sprout people are very quiet. I often imagine, as I pass by the
locked wooden door on the second floor, that they are practising a kind of Zen farming,
nurturing their seedlings in absolute silence.

When we came here—with our scratched meals table, mismatched chairs and boxes of
journals, books and bare essentials—I’d shrieked, ‘No, what,
seriously
?’

And Mum had replied fiercely, ‘We’re lucky to have this.
Lucky
. You don’t understand
how perfect it is for you.’

But it hadn’t seemed that way. And on days when the Chinese restaurant next door
is cooking up a stinky new batch of XO sauce? It still doesn’t. An old Chinese medicine
practitioner takes up the whole ground floor of our building; there’s a street entrance
to his shop, but also a separate doorway leading into his business from our stairwell.
Sometimes, when I look in on my way out of our building, I see him taking shrivelled-up
things out of Perspex canisters for the benefit of whoever’s just walked in. But
we live in our own little bubbles, the bean sprout people, the old guy, and us. And
bubbles can’t touch or they will burst, so I haven’t introduced myself, even though
he looks animated and kindly, with his wrinkly face and ring of crazy-scientist white
hair surrounding a freckly
bald spot. There’s really no point. We always leave.

I don’t know how Mum found the place, but it’s fifteen minutes door-to-door to my
school by tram, so she’s right, it
is
perfect, even though she’ll never get me to
admit it and I might now never get the chance.

I should have said something, yesterday. Like
hello
or
good morning
.

Or
goodbye
.

A squeal of pain escapes my throat, like the sound of a wild pig in fear for its
life. I have to lean against the doorframe for support, conscious my breathing sounds
ragged, as if I’m trying to outrun something.

But it’s inside me, and I can’t.

God, she could be anywhere—I can’t make myself think past that—while I’m
marooned
here, in a city I barely know.

The weak kitchen fluorescent barely penetrates the darkness beyond our door. I take
a tentative step forward and peer out and down into the stairwell. It could be an
actual
well
out there. Maybe if I set foot past the threshold, beyond the thin puddle
of light, I will fall straight through the earth.

Below, the bean sprout people are silent. The air outside my apartment is heavy with
the scent of dust and the mouldering cardboard boxes that are stacked on every landing
in the building. But I breathe it all in gratefully
because it does not smell like
inside
, everything stinking of nerves and fruitlessness and
waiting
.

Which is what Mum’s clients have been doing. She only ever has two or three on the
go at a time, but no more. I know that, because she told me once that it was exhausting—the
constant expectation. ‘If I don’t keep it down to manageable numbers, love,’ she
said, ‘I make mistakes. And precision is everything.’

She had a waitlist
that
long to see her. Lately, she’d been turning people away;
I know because I heard her on the telephone being apologetic, but firm. And we’ve
had so many hang-ups I knew people were pissed. Some would just call to see if she
was answering. I’d say my name, get a second of breathing, then dial tone.

The waitlist, the live cases, will all be in Mum’s missing journal. I described it
to the police: dark red, bound in fake leather with gold scrollwork on the front
cover and the spine. Mum couldn’t believe she’d gotten it for a dollar from the five-dollar
shop across the road that doesn’t live up to its name; everything’s so expensive.
‘Donny must have missed this one when he was repricing everything,’ I remember her
laughing as she held it up for me to see, flicking through the unlined, white pages
with the thin edge of gilt around each one.

I think I’d mumbled something sarcastic back, like: ‘Well, doesn’t that look
special
.’

But I would do just about anything right now to get hold of that book. Next to talking
to Mum? It would tell me what was going on inside her head before she…

I cut that thought right off at the knees and go back through our apartment, turning
on all the table lamps for extra company. I paw through the kitchen cupboards first,
then Mum’s reading room. Ransack her bedroom and the hall cupboards next, before
digging through the bathroom cabinets, which are full of shed hair and half-finished
bottles of Bio-Oil, for the scarring. She never would have hidden anything in here,
where the air smells constantly of mould. But still I look.

Then I look at everything again, everything she might have touched, even under the
couch, running my hands through the dust balls and staples and crumbs; peering inside
all the seat cushions for things that might be secreted there. As if Mum was some
kind of spy who had to hide all the information she was putting together on people,
or risk having it fall into enemy hands.

Nothing.

The only pieces of paper with Mum’s brittle-looking handwriting on them are in her
filing cabinet, which is filled to capacity with superseded notes, finished charts,
all past history. The police took all her old journals away and skimmed off the most
recent forecasts for further study.

And because the police have taken my laptop for
analysis, I can’t access the half-arsed
English presentation on John Donne I’m supposed to have finished, like, yesterday,
with Simon Thorn who is, literally, a thorn.

I think it’s safe to say we felt an immediate visceral, mutual dislike; just one
of those chemical things you can’t explain.
I
think Simon’s a know-it-all with a
God complex because he will not leave me alone in class—the moment I open my mouth
he will chase and badger, bait and harass, trying to make me look stupid, it’s almost
reflexive—and
he
thinks I’m visual pollution because he stuck me with
Frankencrowe
the moment I walked into our form room for the first time. And now everyone at school
calls me that, even the people who claim to be friendly. So I’ve got nothing better
to do right now but freak out about where my mother might be.

The only place I haven’t searched is my bedroom, because I was in it, pretending
to be asleep, the morning she walked into thin air. Suddenly, I hear screaming and
realise—after one disorientating, out-of-body moment—that it’s coming from
me
. I’m
just standing there, on the narrow bit of hallway connecting our two bedrooms, my
fingers curled into claws, and I’m screaming like I’m that wild pig, but with a spear
lodged deep in its guts. I have to force myself to stop. I actually put my hands
around my throat in order to choke the sound off, and the tears overtake me again,
from nowhere. I feel them falling straight
out of my eyes onto the speckly brown
carpet worn so thin I can make out the yellow underlay in places.

You have to understand, I’m not a crier. It’s something I’ve trained myself not to
do, but what has taken me years to perfect has all been undone in one day.

I’m falling apart. I’m a mess. I need to pee. A door banging somewhere far below
causes me to sprint for the bathroom and lock myself in. The Chinese medicine man
closes up late on Fridays. Mum and I have gone out for late suppers before and seen
him moving calmly amongst his shelves and medicine chests, putting things away, the
lights in his shop half-dimmed to deter persistent traffic. Mum said he was good,
too; that his appointment books were always full weeks ahead. He could cure anything,
any hurt, she said. Physical, spiritual, you name it. He had magic hands.

Like, yeah, that’s possible
, I’d snorted, pointing at the webby skin on the side
of my face.
Magic hands can’t fix
that
.

But she’d just started belting out the chorus from that Whitney Houston song about
miracles, and I’d been forced to hit her with a cushion, right in the mouth. Only
when we’d stopped laughing had she said:
That’s your trouble. You’re a sceptic. You’re
a straight line, my darling, in a very circular world. Things will not go easy on
you in this life if you do not
unbend
.

And I’d said tightly:
It’s not that I’m a sceptic, per se, Mother. I just don’t want
to know any more than I have to.

And then she’d said,
Fair enough
,
but you’ll have to agree it’s a necessary evil
,
in a funny little voice, before disappearing somewhere for a while. Never for long,
which is exactly what I told the police. Just long enough for her to
commune with
my dead
, as she liked to put it. I never knew where she went, and I never asked,
and now I think I should have.

Ignoring the hard ache in my bladder, I throw myself onto the closed plastic toilet
seat and wrap my arms around myself, knees tucked in hard under my chin. The blue-green
tiles beneath my toenails swim indistinctly in the ebb and flow of my salt tears,
straight lines reforming into curves and back again.
Please, please, let the nice
old man not have heard me losing my head up here.

Perched there, I rock back and forth while the tears continue falling straight out
of my eyes. It’s something habitual and comforting, the rocking. Mum told me I’ve
always done it, since the fire. The rocking helped me get to sleep in the beginning,
and I still do it after I climb into bed each night, or else the sleep won’t come.
Just another thing that isn’t common knowledge about me. It’s what I do when I’m
at home, and I can let it all hang out, and there’s no one to judge, because she
never did. She accepted me and loved me and called me:
the most precious thing
in
the whole world
. Another sob escapes me then, harsh and monstrous.

I’m still crying noisily, steadily, when a deep voice, male, calls through the bathroom
door, ‘Hello? Joanne?’

It’s like magic, the man’s voice. Instantly the tears, the rocking, the noise winding
out of me, it all stops.

I am a single pent-up breath.

The guy tries the bathroom doorknob but I shot the bolt out of reflex, and the steam-warped
door rocks in its frame, but doesn’t budge. I almost fall face-first off the top
of the toilet, scrambling for the taps above the sink. I turn them both on, full
force, to disguise the sound of my desperate breathing. But he is undeterred by the
loud sound of running water.
Rattle
,
rattle
goes the door.

‘It’s Hugh,’ the voice calls out—male, posh,
drunk
, because it comes out:

Ish Hee-yoooooo
.

‘You said I was supposed to come back and see you.’

Statement, not question; all the words slurring together. It takes me a beat extra
than it should to work out what he’s saying. Was she expecting him today?

Trapped like an animal, I half-turn from the basin towards the ancient washing machine
in the corner, as if I might somehow take shelter inside it, and hear someone else
outside laugh, ‘Maybe she’s in the shower?’

The way my skin is prickling now actually
hurts
.

A third voice butts in. ‘Bet you’d like to see that, Charlie, you dog.’

Charlie, the dog, laughs and says, ‘We can wait. We can wait all night, right Hughey?
Because you’re worth it. Don’t you wanna know how
much
?’

My eyes fly to their own bulging reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror, scar
flaming in the water-stained glass.

Men. Three. In my house.