The Astrologer's Daughter (4 page)

Hugh, Charlie and a third one, whose confident sneer had made my skin crawl. What
if they try to force their way in?

I hug myself, rocking, as the water runs and runs noisily down the plughole. For
the second time today, I am outnumbered by strangers in my own home. It’s as if time
and sound are magnified, made elastic, by my fear.

The doorknob rattles again and I almost tip over into the mirror, in horror.
Leave
me alone.
My throat works at the words, but they do not come.

‘Now you bastards have got me here,’ the one called Hugh snarls imperiously, ‘what’s
supposed to happen
next
? Jo-aaa-anne?’ he adds sharply, singsong. ‘Is everything
o-kaaaay?’

Everything is not okay,
it is not okay
, but I pitch my voice higher than usual, like
I’m doing a comedy version of my mother’s voice, and quaver, ‘Now’s not a good time,
young man. Come back another day.’

Then I turn the water off, listening hard, fingers tangled in the spokes of the taps,
which feel like the only things keeping me up.

‘She can’t be decent,’ sniggers the nameless one. ‘Maybe the hot, naked, psychic
lady needs a hand?’ He doesn’t bother lowering his voice.

The male equivalent of giggles erupts outside—
hor hor hor
—and I feel my face flush
right up to the hairline.

The door jumps as a fist is rammed into it. ‘I
told
you this was a waste of time,
Rosso. She hasn’t even done it. I let her take my money, Jesus.
Get my birth chart
done to find out how my life’s going to “turn out”!
It’s going to be a
sterling
life,
and I don’t need a bullshit psychic to tell me that. Only morons believe in this
stuff.’

Hugh, Charlie, Rosso.

Mum took this guy’s
money
?

He sounds like a born-to-rule arsehole. Mum usually gives shitheads like this a miss.
She has a meter. She can just tell. How did she let this one through?

I can’t explain what happens next. The words just tumble out of me.

‘I’m a busy person,
Hee-yoooooo
,’ I roar, dizzy with fury and distress. ‘Leave your
natal details on a piece of paper on the table on your way out and call in this time
Monday.
Alone
. Leave the Greek chorus of wise guys at home.
If you’re game
.’

I’m so angry I’m not even rocking now, though the room seems to tilt in and out of
focus at the edges.

‘Oh, I’m
game
,’ Hugh replies immediately through the door, ‘because, like I said,
only
morons
believe in this stuff and nothing you can do has the power to change
a single thing about
me
or my
life
. Later.’

He punches the door again, and I recoil into the pink enamel sink rim like the punch
actually reached through the wood and landed on me. More shuffling and laughter,
followed by the sound of something being shoved aside, or someone being shoved into
someone else.

The heavy
tock
,
tock
of the bathroom clock tells me only minutes have passed, but
it feels like hours that I stand there, waiting: for the creaking and snickering
and shuffling outside to stop; for the sound of my own heartbeat to die out of my
ears.

Why did I offer to do the guy’s
chart
? Mum’s never been able to get me to do one
from start to finish, not even for a bit of pocket money, not even when I know how,
like, backwards; because I refuse to be influenced, or to influence others, using
some ‘science’ I don’t even truly believe in. And here I am promising to do the guy’s
radix out of, what,
anger
?

But then I work out that some small, vicious part of me wants there to be bad news
in Hugh’s stars, and for me to be the person who delivers it. I want it so much to
be true,
it is a feeling as fierce as pain. I will find something. I will twist him,
and he will never be the same.

Feeling stupid, I pull open the medicine cabinet and grab the black-handled hair
scissors off the first shelf. Cranking the door open an inch or two, I survey the
narrow slice of hallway with the blades raised, letting out the breath I hadn’t realised
I was holding.

I push the door open more fully, and the
creak
it makes on the outward swing is like
a chill breeze across my skin. It’s quiet now, and so very bright. The dim of the
pendant light in the bathroom hasn’t prepared me to re-accept the light blazing down
the length of the corridor, out of my room, Mum’s, everywhere. So much light. It’s
like I released the sun in here. But all I can think is that I need to lock the front
door; that I have to make it there first.

I’m moving down the hall before my feet know they’ve started. It is somehow like
the light’s inside me, hot and unsettling, crowding out all conscious thought save
the need to protect myself. How could I have been so dumb to leave the place wide
open like that? I find myself standing in the connecting doorway to the living room,
just across from Mum’s room, and I can’t immediately process what I’m seeing as I
look towards the kitchen. It’s all coming to me in pieces, stark and backlit.

A fallen reading lamp. On the floor.

A fan of papers, kicked out, like leaves, leading from
the sofa towards the reading
room, the kitchen bench beyond it.

Cushions every which way. Did I leave the place looking like this? Or did that pack
of malicious pricks kick them around for good measure on their way out?

A man
, bent so low over the meals table that the tip of his nose is almost touching
it. A voice in my head says quite clearly and calmly:
Leave him for now, he won’t
hurt you, you know that
.

My gaze slides right on past him—and he’s standing there plain as life, I mean I
can see him, I can’t explain what I’m doing—and comes to rest on the long white envelope
in the centre of the table with big, bold words and figures slashed across it.

What kind of wanker
, I hear myself thinking,
writes with a permanent marker?

And the conversation I’m having with myself goes exactly like this, as if circumstances
have caused me, somehow, to split down the middle:
Date of birth, time of birth,
birthplace. It’d better all be there, just like I asked, the stupid shit.

But there’s a man!

Even his handwriting looks like an arsehole was responsible.

But there’s a man! The old man from downstairs.

He looks up suddenly and sees me, his face going as shocked and rigid as mine must
be. He steps back, squinting, one hand rising up before him as if I am an apparition,
and the light is a halo in his ring of fluffy, colourless hair.

I can’t really make out his face for the light when he says, ‘I warned her! I warned
her this would happen!’

The words rain down on me like little pebbles, having no innate sense to them, only
an irritant quality. Time and distance, all sensation, are magnified once more by
my fear. Perhaps my heart stops; I don’t know.

I remember sliding to the ground, having enough sense not to fall on the scissors
I am still loosely holding. But that’s all I remember.

There’s a telephone in my thoughts, ringing loudly. I follow the sound of it, like
it’s a rope, until it brings me to the sharp realisation that I’m sprawled along
my side across the floor, the greasy feel of the brown shag pile against my face.

But then I’m no longer on the floor, I’m in the air; lifted effortlessly by someone
with hands that are slight, but hard with muscle. I’m laid across the couch and everything
pings
inwards, and I remember.

She’s gone. I’m alone.

No, I’m not. There’s a man.
The old medicine man, from downstairs.

‘Avi-
cen-
na?’ he says, shaking me slightly. He sounds like he’s stepped out of a
Chow Yun Fat movie.

He knows my name. That surprises me—because I’ve never introduced myself, never even
talked to him—but I play dead for a bit longer, fighting the impulse to curl up in
a ball and rock until the old man walks out in disgust, or dismay, unable to fathom
what I could possibly be doing. Once, when I was nine and sleeping over at a friend’s
house, someone caught me doing it and that was pretty much the end of sleeping over.
People think you’re mad, you see, and they think that madness is catching.

The telephone stops then starts up again, loud and jarring, and the old man snaps,
‘I know you are awake. Aren’t you going to answer it?’

I ignore that, too, eyes jammed resolutely shut to indicate:
I do not want your
help; I do not need you here
;
I will ‘come to’ when you have gone.
The man makes
a
hunh
kind of noise and walks away, and I feel myself start to relax as he crosses
the room.

Then he actually
answers my phone
. My eyelids spring open as he says calmly, ‘Avicenna’s
phone, Boon speaking.’

‘What are you doing?’ I say, appalled, scrambling upright, as Boon adds, ‘Okay, okay,
uh huh, she’s home, no problem.’

He gently replaces the receiver, looking at me across the length of the apartment,
his head slightly tilted.

‘You’ve got no right!’ I snarl.

He shrugs. ‘It could have been your mother.’

That stops me like a bullet.

‘I saw some men leaving your apartment,’ the old man says, expression softening.
‘Naturally, I was worried. You should really be locking your door. I told your mother,
when she insisted on moving back here, that the city is a lot crazier than when she
lived here with your father.’

I feel the muscles of my face sliding into shock. He knew both of them?

‘You have his eyes,’ the man adds, as if he can read my mind. ‘Oh, and your school
friend, Simon Thorn—that was him on the phone. He wants his book back. He says he’s
coming over now to collect it.’

Then the old man’s gone, and it’s all I can do to make it to the toilet in time.

5

Basic Premise #1:
Simon Thorn knows where I live
.

If Vicki Mouglalis was the one who told him my address, I will kill her myself using
some fiendishly diabolical and highly complex methodology involving pulleys, notwithstanding
that she is my closest friend (and that’s not saying much).

Basic Premise #2:
Simon Thorn cannot come up here and see how I live
.

I can imagine his lips twisting hatefully as he says to his second-in-commands Buddy
Sadiq and Glenn Tippett on his way over:
Getting a glimpse of the Frankencrowe in
her native habitat? Priceless.

The things you see, you can never unsee. He’s not
allowed that much power over me.
I’ve got to catch him on the street, before he even sets foot on the stairs.

Bolting out of the bathroom and into my bedroom, I look for my backpack and that
stupid
Compendium of Classic English Poetry
that I was forced to borrow off him to
write my half of the talk because I was too cheap to source myself a copy. I remember
the collective gasp that had gone up when Mrs Dalgeish allocated talk partners midway
through first term. I’d only been there a few weeks, but already I knew who was safe,
who wasn’t.

‘But it’s worth ten per cent of our final mark!’ Simon had protested, skin pale with
fury, refusing to look me in the eye.

‘Maybe you got lucky,’ Adam Carney had snorted from behind, ‘because she’s going
to carry your sorry arse over the line, Thorny. She’s got the Tichborne covered;
ask anyone.
I’ll
take her if you don’t want her.’

Lots of people had joined in the haggling, while I burned and burned at my desk,
until Dalgeish had rolled her eyes under her unnaturally black Jazz-Age bob and matching
eyebrows and put a stop to it. Cornered, Simon’s gaze had snapped to mine with an
All right, bring it
kind of look which had made me so mad I had asked him for his
stupid book in front of everyone, and he’d had to hand it over.

I tip everything in my daypack onto the carpet and I’m
looking at a coin purse, a
plastic zip-lock bag full of panty liners and a squashed banana that’s ninety-nine
per cent black. None of which remotely compute when taken in combination. Where
is
everything?

While I’m staring down at the banana, whose off-white insides have started leaking
out through the broken skin like pus, I’m frantically jiggling on the spot. Tearing
off flannelette every-which-way and pulling on jeans, a yellow turtleneck and a shapeless
fleecy navy hoodie with kangaroo pockets I’m hoping will convey just the right amount
of disdain for Simon Thorn, eternal champion of the free-market system and school
captain of the biggest boatload of dysfunctional so-called high-school geniuses in
Melbourne.

Every girl nerd and polysexual at Collegiate High—a name that says it all, because
every day at Collegiate
High
is exactly that!—has a metaphorical hard-on for Simon
Thorn, who like some mystical Indian shaman goes by many names: The Thornster; Greased
Lightning; Simo; Lucky-as-fuck.

He’s the man most likely to steal your girlfriend and charge you for the privilege,
via some complex betting/ Ponzi scheme he’s come up with. I can imagine the swinging,
cashed-up household he hails from: half an acre on The Avenue in Parkville, with
a louche barrister father who doesn’t believe in having to pay a cent for education,
and
a fruitarian artist mother who used to be a neurosurgeon.

Can Simon Thorn
argue
. He has a mouth like a sub-artillery machine gun and looks
like one of those ugly-beautiful French boys: the kind with interesting bony faces
and long, off-kilter noses who model kilts and combat boots on the runway. All grey-green
eyes, nuclear-winter pale skin, straight dark brows and slicked-down, side-parted
short hair that’s long on top. Whatever the weather—maybe because he’s trying to
prove he’s really one of us, one of the proles—he wears worn-looking jeans with beaten-up
leather workboots and a rotating handful of faded, button-front Henleys that show
off his boxer’s shoulders and broad-spectrum pectorals to perfection.

We’re all scholarship kids, see, every single one of us. Get past the fiendish entrance
exam and show proof you live within two kilometres of the place—established for the
offspring of the inner-city working class by some 19th century sadist—and you’re
in. There’s no uniform, few rules. You don’t have to possess basic levels of personal
hygiene or even a loose idea of how the social contract is supposed to work. Based
on the way people eat at The Caf, the entire student body has never been taught how
to hold a fork properly and can’t afford three square meals a day.

But Simon’s not sloppy like the rest of us. He’s not content just to coast. He lives
by his own set of internal guidelines, and occasionally you get glimpses of the iron
that rules him. But only glimpses. He cuts through the rest of us like an icebreaker
on its way to leaving the known world behind.

He looks too hard and too clean. He wants to know everything from every angle and
he wants to know it
now
. And he never stops trying to crush me in public. It’s like
a blood sport with him.

He’ll be here, any moment and
he can’t see how I live
.

Where is his damned book?

The last time I felt normal levels of anxiety it was Wednesday afternoon and I was
in the Leppitt Gymnasium, painting a crowd scene. Lots of pink, tan and brown faces.
Fuckin’ fifty shades!
Ozzie Palomares had grunted, down on his massive knees—each
one thick as a Christmas ham—beside me, amongst the paint pots.

I had made one of the spectators red-faced, and frizzy-haired, just for him, and
Ozzie had given the woman he was painting enormous tits, as a gesture of affection
for me and my D-sized rack. We’d grinned at each other like lunatics then, and proceeded
to paint moustaches on all the women.

Slow down, rewind. Gym. Start there.

I was already in the gym before the working bee started. I’d helped move the balance
beam out of the way to get the backdrop down.

Everything has to be in my sports bag. The one
prominently marked with the word
Champion
on both sides, which must operate as some kind of visual joke once I’ve got the thing
slung over my shoulder.

I pull the duffle out from under my bed and squat beside it, before undoing the long
zipper that runs the length of the bag. I toss out my wallet, shin guards and the
plastic box-on-a-rope that holds my bright yellow mouth guard, digging down through
tracksuit, socks and dirty runners until I hit the smooth cover of a textbook.

There are others beneath it, and I tip everything out onto the floor. The weight
and motion of upending the bag puts me on my arse on the carpet and two things leap
out at me: Simon Thorn’s bloody poetry
Compendium
and a dark red, A4-sized journal,
bound in fake leather with gold scrollwork.

I feel like I’m on fire as I grab hold of both, and my wallet, and my house keys.
Slamming the door behind me, I run, shaking, down the stairs to head Simon off at
the pass.

It’s chilly now, in a way I’ve only just started to recognise as the way night falls
in Melbourne in autumn—bitter and immediate, from sun to shade in a heartbeat—and
my feet are soon frozen lumps inside my Explorer socks.
But it isn’t long before Simon materialises out of a crowd of start-of-weekend, out-for-thrills
street traffic in his usual worker-chic garb—six foot plus of wiry, rock-solid muscle,
a fresh bruise under one eye—and I don’t bat an eyelash or even say,
Hi.

I just ram the compendium into his sternum so hard he gives an audible
ouf
, then
step off the front stoop of my building, job done, crib protected, crisis averted,
and turn on my heel to cross the street. The arcade over the road is only open until
midnight, but beyond it, one block over, is a 24-hour grease-pit where I can sit
and feel like I’m part of the living, but still be left alone with Mum’s journal,
a lamb gyro and something to drink with sugar in it.

I’m so hungry, so grainy-eyed and tired, I’m lightheaded. Or maybe it’s the feel
of the journal, burning like acid into my palms. I have to resist opening it right
now and devouring it while I walk.

‘Hey, wait,
wait
,’ Simon growls, grabbing my arm just as I’m about to step onto the
road. His hand is red-raw, so damaged from doing time on the bags at whatever designer
gym he frequents that the knuckles are practically smeared together into a single
puffy line. Simon’s hands are the ugliest part about him, and I don’t want them near
me.

‘How dare you come here!’ My voice sounds thick and strange with rage. ‘How dare
you
touch
me. And how,’ I add, elbowing him in the ribs to make him let go but
getting
only a small, ragged intake of breath in return, ‘do you even know where I
live
,
you creep?’

Simon’s fingers bear down harder around my arm as he snaps, ‘I can’t believe you
bent
the front cover of my book right back!’

I’m not a short person, but he makes me feel short, and so angry I see stars. Running
on instinct, I reach below my left armpit with my right hand and pull out sharply
on his battered little finger. It’s a trick Mum taught me. Simon gives a wounded
bellow and lets go.

‘Now it’s two for two,’ I snarl, and a taxi blares in passing as we tussle for a
moment on the edge of the bluestone kerb.

‘
I’m not going to carry you!
’ he shouts, and an Asian girl coming our way, in fluffy
Mukluks, skinny jeans and a black hooded puffer, opens her eyes wide and swerves
around us.

‘And I’m not asking to be carried,’ I splutter, ‘and especially not by
you
. I’m
out
,
you’ve
won
. There’s nothing now standing between you and the R. M. Tichborne Prize!
Field’s clear, best of luck with your life.’

It’s true: I don’t care anymore; he can have it, that thing we both wanted so badly.
Suddenly, I feel lighter:
One less thing to consume me.
Simon is so shocked that
he drops my arm and I’m across the road before he can work out a reply.

‘That’s it?’ he calls, frowning over the rooftops of the cars passing between us.
‘One bad thing happens and you give it all up? You don’t come back? Where’s your
fight
? You’re supposed to be a fighter.’

I turn and look back at him, hugging Mum’s journal to me. Beneath it all—the big
hair, the swagger, the sarcasm-as-full-body-armour—I’m no better than any of them,
the people inside her book. I am the sum of my vanities and my faults, my cravings
and my weaknesses, just like they are.

All I want is my mother. I need her to come
back
.

One moment Simon is standing there, glaring at me, and then the sea, the sea that
is in my eyes, washes him away, and there are only colours. I don’t hear him cross
the road, but then he’s right in front of me, stepping up under the bright white
of the arcade signage, and I can’t understand why he isn’t
glad
. The Tichborne Prize
is worth $10,000 to the top student in their final year. It’s a no-strings, no-questions-asked
windfall. You can use it to fund your tertiary studies or your raging coke habit.
For the lowlifes of Collegiate High, it’s a big,
big
deal; no one’s ever seen that
kind of money in their lives. But I am prepared to walk away.

That’s what I tell Simon, mumbling the words in the vicinity of his chin. He stares
down at my scar tissue with fascination and I feel it burn. Up close, it’s like crocodile
or ostrich hide, quite alien.

‘It’s bad, really bad what happened with your mum,’ he says in a low voice. ‘But
we have until Wednesday, and it’s important. Dalgeish got me your details and gave
us an extension because of the circumstances. It’s a
joint
thing, remember?
Marks
given for ability to work with others
. Which indicates more than one person must
participate. We’re the last two. That’s what I came to tell you: there’s still time.’

I tap the back of the journal. ‘Maybe for you,’ I tell him jerkily, ‘but time’s everything
in cases like this. This was Mum’s. We’ve been looking everywhere for it. It was
in my gym bag!’

He can hear the confusion and bitterness in my voice, and frowns.

‘I must have scooped it up with everything else on the kitchen bench before I left
the house that morning,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘It could tell me everything, or
nothing, but this is where I turn and swim out, partner.’

I don’t care that I’m not making any sense, flinching as he moves forward until he’s
so close I can smell the sandalwood and citrus and sweat on his skin. I don’t really
want to know anything more about him. We two are ships. I hold his gaze as I back
away.

Eventually
, Mum liked to say, hands on hips, surveying the mess of our possessions
as we geared up for yet another move,
you have to give things up, even if it hurts
.