The Astrologer's Daughter (7 page)

‘
Give me that
,’ I say fearfully, scrabbling in the air for my pack. ‘What are you
doing?’

He leads me like a blind person to the pedestrian crossing, punching the button with
one elbow. His voice is almost lost in the scattergun sound of the green man lighting
up. ‘I’m getting you there. Somebody has to, okay? Move it.’

Inside his car, later, I’m surprised by lots of things. By the way he patiently positioned
the journal while I was operating the copier. By the way he showed me the room where
you can access old newspaper articles on the microfiche machine because
it might
come in handy, later, you never know
. By the look and smell of his car.

I’m in Simon Thorn’s
car
, travelling across Princes Bridge down St Kilda Road, thin
sunlight kicking up sparkles on the surface of the murky river that bisects this
city. It’s a bomb, Simon’s car, the kind of car
I
might one day drive: an early model
Holden with peeling maroon paint and bubbly window tints, black plastic louvres across
the back window. It looks like a low-rent drug dealer’s ride on its second go round
the odometer. On the inside, the car is OCD bandbox-neat the way Simon dresses—not
a scrap of loose shit bouncing around anywhere. But it smells like stale hash browns.
Like years of fried breakfasts eaten behind the wheel, with a throbbing bass note
of male body odour.

I’d expected a late-model BMW with leather seats and chrome trims. And for Simon’s
ride to smell like he does: fresh, sandalwoody, expensive. But I find myself actually
trying to breathe through my mouth.

Simon gives me a quick sideways look then cranks down his window with the kind of
dinky manual handle you see in retro TV cop shows. ‘It’s kind of disgusting, isn’t
it?’

All I say, faintly, is, ‘I appreciate the lift. But you aren’t coming in with me.’

He shrugs and then says, ‘Pick one.’ He points at the poetry compendium, big as a
brick, at my feet.

‘
Are you dense or something
?’ I say in an angry rush. ‘I’m not
doing
it.’

‘Just look at them,’ he says patiently, slowing down and craning his neck up at the
numbers on the passing buildings, big and concrete and sprawling. ‘Looking does
not indicate commitment to any further course of action.’

I lever the compendium up off the floor by its bent cover, turning to the single
dog-eared page I myself inflicted on Simon’s once-pristine book.

John Donne (1572–1631)

Beside the chapter heading, Simon’s written in his anal, leaning script:
Military
service for the Crown, Dean of St Paul’s.
Secret marriage
(12 children!!) ended political
career. Wife died of childbirth.

‘Well, that would be right,’ I mutter, disgustedly, ‘dying of childbirth. That’s
something to look forward to, as a woman. Why couldn’t Dalgeish have given us Stevie
Smith, or maybe Yeats or Auden or Whitman like some of the others? Even that guy
who didn’t punctuate enough and loved himself sick some alliteration…’

‘Gerard Manley Hopkins?’ Simon interjects dryly.

‘Yeah, him. I could just about understand
him
. But she
always saves me the poems
and plays written in
400-year-old
English. Crap. Not doing it.’

‘She saves them for me, too, remember?’ Simon says, easing his car into a service
lane, still peering up at the buildings as we roll along slowly. ‘Just read one out.
That’ll be the one, then we will—’

‘
You will
.’

‘—build the talk around it,’ he finishes, sighing.

When I say nothing for an entire block, he tries again. ‘There will be themes…’

‘And shit.’

‘
Themes
we…’

‘
You.
’

‘…can pull out of it—
you’re very argumentative, did you know that?
—and maybe discuss
in more depth.’

Conscious that I’m pouting like a toddler but I can’t help myself, I stab my finger
blindly into one of the pages and mutter:

If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the’other doe.

‘Oh, the metaphysical poets,’ I snap. ‘If someone compared me to a
compass
, I’d fucking
drop them.’

Simon slows the car and turns to me. ‘I would have
picked that one, too,’ he replies
evenly, and I can tell how hard he’s trying to be patient because he’s not patient—I’ve
seen him in action reducing debating hard-arses like Catherine Dinh to tears. ‘It’s
the best of the bunch,
A Valediction forbidding mourning
.’

‘They’re all about love,’ I snarl, ‘or God, or loving God. Not in the mood, quite
frankly.’

‘This one was probably about his wife,’ Simon replies absently, pulling up the handbrake
as the car shudders to a complete halt. ‘I’ll need to look into that. The whole secret
marriage angle.’

‘Angle?’ I parrot, glancing out the window, distracted by the official signage and
all the blank, black windows that allow only the looking out of, not the looking
in. We’re here. Then it suddenly strikes me; what I’m groping for, in my head.

‘
Compass
,’ I say.

Simon looks askance at me. ‘Sorry, I thought we’d moved on from the whole compass
thing.’

But I always play them, games of association:
This word leads to this word leads
to this word.
Words are the only currency I have too much of. Simon has reminded
me of my mother’s battered tin box of compasses. She’d left all her almanacs behind—that
chart the stars and planets in their manifold phases across the skies and years and
decades and hemispheres—tattered and taped-up from
daily use, cobbled from sources
everywhere, indexed by country, by date. But in my multiple ransackings of home I
never saw a single one of her compasses.

She’s had them since childhood and sometimes even carried one around in the front
pocket of her shirt; you’d see the silver tip poking through the weave, tiny but
lethal, as she did the vacuuming, or picked at her dinner. Years after she stopped
carrying me around, she still carried
them
.

She would only leave home with them if she was drawing a chart for someone
in situ
,
in their own environment. In those cases, she had all the coordinates already mapped
out in her head, memorised.

A parlour trick
, she would call it, modestly, as she sketched out someone’s celestially
ordained life map before their rapt eyes. Over cups of tea, someone would have their
own little universe rendered live on paper.

The compasses had to be
with
her. I wasn’t sure if it was important, but I needed
to tell Wurbik to maybe tell people, put it out on the wire, or whatever: that the
crazy shaman lady had been packing her weapons. She had been on her way to see someone.

‘I have to go,’ I say breathlessly, chucking the heavy poetry book in Simon’s lap
before turning and hooking my backpack up off the back seat.

‘Wait—’ Simon shouts, but I’m already half out the door.

‘That’s just it,’ I say, leaning in and actually looking him in the face, for once,
in all sincerity. ‘
Don’t
wait. Write your talk, win your prize, live your life, be
successful, ride roughshod over the dead bodies of your enemies to get there, Simon—only,
I’m not going to be one of them. None of it means anything to me without Mum. She
took care of me, and I was going to take care of her. She
is
the point, the way I
was hers. Now I’m without point; I am point-
less
.’ I laugh, but my laughter sounds
teary, edging hysteria. ‘That poem could have been about
us
. Mum and I never made
a move without each other. We were—are,
are!
—joined at the hip.’ Simon has the grace
to wince as I add gruffly, ‘Only a mother could love this face, remember? Now
get
,’
I tell him, slamming the door shut so hard the car rocks.

A group of police standing by the bushes near the front door stop speaking and move
aside for me instinctively as I hunch my shoulders and enter the complex.

8

There is a laptop set up on a table at the front of the meeting room, with a Victoria
Police logo etched into the desktop background. I’m bending over the keyboard when
Wurbik—with his sharp-featured young man’s face, old-guy hair—comes in with a black,
leather-bound notepad and a couple of Mum’s journals under one arm, my mangy laptop
bag slung over his shoulder. He’s followed by a lean Asian guy I’ve never seen before:
in a grey suit and salmon tie with a thin navy stripe through it, clean-shaven, short
back and sides. It’s hard to tell his age or function and instantly all my antennae
go up.

I blurt, ‘Just because I’m a
mutt
doesn’t mean I need an Asian liaison officer who
looks like an accountant!’

Wurbik’s eyes widen as he gives his colleague a sidelong glance. All my life, just
about everywhere we’ve lived, I’ve been the token
whatever
in the room and I’ve hated
it.

‘Most people think I look Greek,’ I add lamely. ‘And I thought
you
were my liaison,
Detective Wurbik.’ I don’t look at the other man. ‘I appreciate the gesture, but
if you speak slowly and loudly enough, we’ll manage. It’s all right;
he
doesn’t have
to stay.’

The Asian dude is smooth, because he doesn’t even blink, or back up. He just says,
‘Malcolm Cheung. I used to
be
an accountant, but I found there weren’t enough stakeouts
in Audit for my liking. I’m only here because Drayton got called to a job. Just treat
me like wallpaper.’

He waves at me to sit down in one of the three chairs ranged loosely around the police-issue
laptop then takes the one closest to the door. Crimson, I take the chair furthest
from him, which leaves the seat in the middle to Wurbik, who sighs and inserts my
computer bag into the space between our chairs. Stacking the notepad and journals
behind the laptop, he looks at the other man and says, ‘I guess I drive then,’ folding
himself into the narrow space we’ve left him. He squints at the icons, clicks open
a folder.

My intake of breath is audible once the video gets going. Filmed from a fixed point
somewhere above head height, Mum is looming into the shot holding that impossibly
large
cup of milky coffee Paolo mentioned. The fluorescent light shining down on
her crown makes her long, loose hair look white and her eyes huge in her heart-shaped
face. She seems nervous, unhappy? I recognise the place almost immediately, with
its overtones of corporate, frosty blue. It’s the bank. Mum’s bank.

‘It’s her work!’ I exclaim. ‘The foyer outside her work. I’ve waited out there for
her, like, a million times. She made it to
work
?’

Wurbik nods and points to a small string of numbers at the edge of the picture. ‘That’s
the date and time stamp, Wednesday. Allowing that she stopped for a coffee on the
way’—he gestures at the takeaway cup—‘she walked straight to her place of work from
home. But
look
.’

The piece of footage is in real-time, and I work out that less than a minute elapses
before Mum looks both ways, hesitating, and then steps out of the foyer and back
into the street. In a second she is gone, and the footage ends.

‘That’s it?’ I exclaim. ‘That’s all you’ve found?’

It’s the third day.
I know, because I’ve been counting the hours. I feel a scream
rising inside.

‘Wait,’ Malcolm says quietly. ‘There’s another one.’

While Wurbik trawls through the next folder, I tell them everything I learnt from
Paolo: about the apricot jam biscuits she never ate and the milky coffee she never
drank. ‘And she took her box of compasses!’

The men look at each other.

‘I went through the house so many times,’ I babble, ‘but they weren’t there. Not
a single one. The tin, you know, it’s silver, flat, but rusty. Has a picture of a
castle on it. No, no, a house, a big, grand, like, English house. And there’s a dark-blue
label thing, across the front of it, with white writing in capital letters that say:
THE OXFORD SET OF MATHEMATICAL INSTRUMENTS. It has to mean something, right? That
she took them.’

‘Compasses?’ Malcolm queries, brow furrowed.

Wurbik pulls one of Mum’s old journals around the side of the laptop. ‘She used them
to make these, yeah?’

He flips the cover open and I see it straight away, taped to the inside front cover:
a badly photocopied astrological chart for someone whose natal house is
Aries
. I
drag my pack onto my lap and rummage around inside with shaking hands, drawing out
the dark-red journal I found wedged inside my gym bag. I push the police laptop back
a little and line the two books up, side-by-side. The charts are an exact match.

Wurbik pulls the journal towards himself and exclaims in a low voice, ‘This the current
one? The one she was working on when she…’

I nod.

‘Where did you find it?’

I tell them as the two men flick through the contents,
glancing at each other again
when they get to the old articles on Fleur Bawden.

Wurbik mutters, ‘Mal, that the compasses are missing would tend to increase the chance
of it being client-related, wouldn’t you say?’

Malcolm Cheung nods before standing swiftly and, without warning, takes the journal
out of the room. I made photocopies because I knew this would happen, but I still
feel a pang that, just like that, Mum’s book is out of my hands and is no longer
mine.

As the door clicks shut, Wurbik says, ‘That diagram was in all of the journals we
recovered from your place. It’s like some kind of key. There are cases where if a
client’s, ah, stars weren’t compatible with that thing? She would scratch them. She
wouldn’t even start. We worked it out from the notes she left in the margins. There
weren’t many, but there were a handful.’

Malcolm returns, empty-handed. ‘Is it hers, do you think? That chart?’ he says, sitting
back down and crossing his arms over his chest.

‘She was a Scorpio,’ I say dully. ‘Well, at least that’s what she always told me.’
They can hear the hurt incomprehension in my voice. ‘You know: intensely magnetic
to others, passionate, painstaking. Scorpios are considered the detectives of the
astrological world who feel everything deeply. They’re supposed to be great at keeping
secrets…’
My voice falters as I realise what I’ve just said. I push myself to continue.
‘It’s traditionally a house of great power and darkness. It speaks of profound transformation,
death, the underworld. Pluto, you know, key planet.’ I see that they don’t understand;
they have no idea what I’m talking about. I could be pulling all this out of my arse
for my own amusement.

‘But Pluto isn’t even a planet these days,’ Malcolm interjects. ‘So how does
that
work?’

‘Asked Mum the same question,’ I say, shrugging. ‘Just telling you what she told
me.’ I trace the outline of the photocopied chart. ‘It could have been hers,’ I mutter.
‘I couldn’t really—’

‘Getting a birth certificate will sort that out,’ Wurbik interrupts. ‘Got some questions.’
He writes Mum’s star sign down in his notepad, putting a large question mark beside
it.

‘Shoot,’ I say warily as Malcolm Cheung shifts in his chair.

I confirm Mum’s full name, her birth month and mobile number; that she wasn’t in
any relationship I was aware of and hadn’t been for centuries. I also confirm that,
to my knowledge, we maintained the single joint bank account, details of which have
already been provided.

‘It hardly ever has much money in it,’ I say, realising with a flash of horror that
I haven’t thought about money.
I wonder how much food is in the house and whether
I’m going to make it through winter without a job.
Shit
.

‘Maternal grandmother’s name?’ Wurbik says, breaking into my thoughts.

‘Joyce Geraldine Crowe,’ I answer, puzzled. ‘She died before I was born. Sometime
in the 1980s, I think.’

‘Great-grandmother?’ he presses. ‘Just maternal. In order to establish…’ There’s
a clear moment of hesitation and I wonder at it. ‘…identity.’

‘Beverley something Crowe,’ I reply, frowning as Wurbik asks, ‘Also deceased?’

I nod. ‘In the 60s, before Mum was born.’ I look down, blinking. ‘After Dad died,
it was just me and Mum. Though she talked about them a lot, said she got “the knowledge”’—I
do talking marks in the air—‘from her mum and my gran learnt from hers. It came down
through the girls. Beverley and Joyce actively made their living from it: private
readings, funfairs, school fetes, whatever they could get. Mum was the first female
Crowe in generations to hold down a “real” job as well, apparently. Said I was on
track to be the first one
not
to earn a living from doing this stuff, that I was
a “ground-breaker”.’

I snort-sob into the back of one hand.

Malcolm leans forward now and looks around Wurbik, straight at me and my damp lashes.
‘But you can do it, right? You’ve got it, too? This “knowledge”?’

I’m surprised when Wurbik and I both nod at the same time.

‘But I don’t, uh, practice,’ I say, cautiously. ‘I’ve always refused to. Mum never
pushed it. It was
her
thing, not mine. But I can read them, her charts.’

‘Draw one up?’ Malcolm asks casually.

‘If I had to.’ They can hear the sudden, pathetic eagerness. ‘I want to be part,
of the, you know, investigation. I want to help in any way I can.’

Malcolm inclines his head, which isn’t really any kind of answer. ‘And your mum and
dad,’ he asks, ‘they never married?’

I shake my head. ‘She always wished they’d gotten around to it. But she said it didn’t
matter, anyway, because she felt married.’

‘Where were they living?’ Malcolm pushes gently. ‘When you were born?’

I tell them Mum’s Dimboola story and Malcolm gives a crooked smile and says, ‘Got
called
slant-eyes
once, walking up to uni, with accompanying visuals.’ He lifts the
outer corners of his eyes with his index fingers, lets them drop. ‘I was born in
Caulfield East,’ he says in his broad accent, ‘about twenty-five minutes from here.
It’s the only time I ever felt…’

He doesn’t finish the sentence as Wurbik mutters, ‘Try getting around a school full
of skips with a name
like Stanislaw Wurbik. Shall we show her the second one, Mal?’

There’s even less footage this time. You get a bird’s-eye view of a short stretch
of concrete footpath, then a flash of bowed head going past, the plastic top of a
takeaway coffee cup. Then there’s maybe ten seconds of Mum’s back, her shoulders
hunched forward, slender legs outlined by slim-fitting trousers, the rounded edge
of her tan handbag, receding out of the frame. At the very end, when she’s a thin
blob only slightly less pale than her surroundings, you see a dark compact van come
in from right of screen. Then, after a moment, it’s gone, and she’s gone too.

All the time, people are passing her, oblivious that Mum is in the process of vanishing.

I find I am shivering and hugging myself tightly. ‘You think she got into that van?’
I say in a tiny voice. ‘Do you know whose it is?’

‘We’re working on it,’ Malcolm says quietly, ‘because we want to find your mum as
much as you do. But we need your consent to get that footage out. Someone might recognise
her, or the vehicle.’

‘We’re not talking press conference,’ Wurbik rumbles. ‘Not yet. We just want to run
the video through the usual media outlets. It’s the only CCTV we’ve got at this stage,
but it’s good; clear. The second one was taken near the Flagstaff Gardens, on the
edge of town. We think she
entered at William Street, exited somewhere on King approaching
Dudley Street. She was a long way off her usual route, and she’s very…’

‘…beautiful,’ I finish for him, because it was always the first thing anyone ever
noticed about her, even before the damage to her hand. ‘So someone may remember.’

‘Yes,’ Malcolm replies.

‘Consent granted.’ My voice sounds weak, trembly, like it’s not coming from me. ‘Go
for it, get it out.’

‘Just be prepared,’ Malcolm says, a touch of concern in his smooth voice. ‘You’ll
get lots of questions, interest, from people who know you. Or her. Have some kind
of standard response ready.’

‘If you need to talk,’ Wurbik adds, ‘you just ring me. All hours.’ He taps the front
of his jacket and I hear a dull retort from the phone in his inner pocket. ‘I mean
it. I’m your liaison, remember? You insisted. So call.’

‘Same goes.’ Malcolm extends his hand and a card. Both men stand, and I realise that’s
all I’m going to get. I sling my laptop bag over one shoulder, my pack over the other,
feeling awkward and bumbly and superfluous. Malcolm opens the door and says over
his shoulder, ‘We’ll keep you informed, Avicenna, every step of the way. And thank
you.’ He goes right, disappears round a corner.

‘I’ll call the minute there’s anything,’ Wurbik adds. ‘You’ll be sick of me before
the day’s out.’ Then he gives my
arm a kind of squeezy-pinch thing meant to be comforting
before disappearing up a different corridor.

I work out at that exact instant that Malcolm Cheung isn’t Missing Persons Intelligence,
he’s
Homicide
. I don’t even have to look at the business card in my hand to know,
I just do.

But then I do. And seeing the word printed neatly under his name almost causes me
to sit down on the floor right there, but a trim-looking policewoman in navy wool
pants and a matching jumper with epaulets suddenly appears in the hallway, summoned
as if by magic. She holds out a hand to me, palm up. Like an elderly woman, I take
it, and soon find myself back outside, bereft under a sealed grey sky.