The Astrologer's Daughter (8 page)

Something makes me look, I’m not sure why. I cross six lanes of traffic and Simon’s
car is still there, exactly where I left it over two hours ago. He is asleep behind
the wheel, his beanie jammed down over his eyebrows, head thrown back against the
driver’s side headrest. He is wrapped up in a blue-and-white checked blanket that
blends in so well with his plaid jacket that all I can see of him is his face. The
purple bruise under his right eye is starting to go yellow around the edges. All
the windows are rolled up tightly
again, to keep the heat in, I suppose. And I suddenly
get why his car smells like the inside of a fast-food outlet and a locker room, and
it does something to my heart.

I go around the back of his car and pop open the crusty-looking boot. It’s filled
with books, sealed cups of
Suimin
that you just add hot water to, tied-up plastic
bags, packs of wet wipes, loose towels, plastic bottles of water, a set of purple
dumbbells, a toddler-sized pillow. All the usual shit you’d need to get through a
day. If you, maybe, didn’t have a house to keep them in.

My eyes fill and I dash at them angrily. I hear his car door open and then he’s standing
beside me, still wrapped in the checked blanket. I don’t know what to say, and neither
does he, and we don’t look at each other. So we just stare down at his life for a
while, then he puts his hand on the raised lid and slams it closed.

He turns and sits on the boot of his car. I do the same and we’re facing down St
Kilda Road towards the city, looking through the trees at all the cars driven by
people whose lives are normal. He pulls his beanie off and twists it in his banged-up
hands, while his massive genius brain tries to come up with an excuse.

I don’t apologise for getting him so wrong, all this time, because if I don’t talk
about it then maybe the illusion that he’s
The Guy Most Likely
—the one who really
has his shiz together—will not crumble and fail him.

‘I think there’s lentil dhal on the menu at my place tonight,’ I say in a low voice.
‘You’re welcome to share it. At least, until you piss me off, which might be all
of five minutes; then you’re out on your arse.’

I imagine him trying to fold himself along the back seat of the car, with that child-sized
pillow jammed beneath the rough beginnings of dark stubble on his pale face, and
have trouble swallowing.

Simon exhales. ‘Deal,’ he says unevenly. ‘But only if we run through the talk. It’s
just a
talk
. Your mum wouldn’t…’ I tense up, but he doesn’t finish his thought, instead
saying softly, ‘She raised you to be
strong
. You can tell that. Within a second of
meeting you, I could…’

I scramble off the boot before he says anything he can’t unsay, and bundle all my
bags into the front seat, climbing in after them and closing the door.

9

Leaving Simon’s car parked on the edge of the city, we pool our loose change and
get a bamboo steamer’s worth of
xiao long bao
and a small container of chilli-spiked
soya sauce from the dumpling house two doors down.

Simon has a range of plastic bags from his car boot clutched in both fists. ‘Just
like a homeless guy,’ he mutters as we head up the stairwell to the accompanying
rustle. ‘Thanks for the offer.’

I shrug apologetically as I unlock the front door. ‘Smells like teen poverty. Don’t
thank me yet.’

Only hours ago, I would have killed to prevent him seeing this, but now it doesn’t
seem to matter. Snapping on the light in the front hall, I say casually, ‘Just incidentally,
if you reveal the location and condition of my crib, I will be forced to kill you.’

Simon’s laughter turns into a small sound of surprise as I light up the place in
increments. It’s the bombsite I left it last night: everything hanging open; papers,
books, cushions all over. As I pass through the living room, I turn on a lamp and
fire up the ancient wall-unit gas heater. It hiccups a couple of times before roaring
to life.

‘Were you…?’ Simon says hesitantly from behind me as I kick things aside on my way
past Mum’s room.

‘Robbed?’ I reply, not bothering to explain. ‘No, I just like living like this. Bathroom’s
that way.’

I shut the door to my bedroom before pointing him down the corridor, and he disappears
into the tropics with his bundles of bags, swiftly engaging the bolt.

While I’m wolfing down my half of the dumplings at the kitchen bench, I hear water
starting through the pipes and the mental picture of what he’s doing in there is
enough to drive me outside. I head downstairs.

I can see Boon’s profile through the glass. Usually he has at least one customer
with him, or a graceful-looking assistant in a flowing pantsuit with the kind of
straight black hair I would trade my wavy mud-brown mane for in a heartbeat. But
it’s late in the afternoon now, and he’s alone, so I open the door that leads into
his shop from our stairwell. A bell tinkles and the old man looks up in
surprise,
his face clearing when he sees it’s just me.

‘Avicenna,’ he says kindly, before his expression goes complicated, anxious, and
he half turns to look at something in the shelving.

Behind him are a couple of wooden stepladders giving access to rows of wooden shelves—separated
into cubicles—that reach right up to the twelve-foot ceilings. Each cubicle is packed
with lidded jars and tins with peeling paper labels. Propped in the gaps are calendars
written in Chinese characters on paper thin as onion skin; incense holders; tiny
shrines to unknown gods; characters out of Chinese mythology with long, flowing beards
and wooden staves, cast out of shiny porcelain.

Boon runs one hand across the ends of his wild fringe of hair, before tugging the
sleeves of his patterned pullover down. His gaze is enquiring, but wary.

‘You knew them,’ I state baldly, ‘before I was born.’

Boon blinks. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘yes, I did. I remember the day Greyson first met your
mother.’ He smiles. ‘At some, ah, alternative lifestyle exhibition. They were very
big, you know, in the 90s; almost every weekend, something “spiritual”. They had
stalls next to each other. On their feet nine hours a day for three days straight.
Who wouldn’t fall in love in such circumstances?
Greyson told me.
It was meant to
be
.’ Boon’s smile fades. ‘Greyson was the eldest son. The only son. His mother…’

The old man clears a small space, pushing pens and paperwork aside and sitting down
on a battered metal stool behind the scratched, glass-fronted counter. He waves at
me to come closer and I pull out a matching stool at the front of the counter, sitting
on it gingerly. Up close, Boon’s eyes are eerie. There’s a distinct ring of blue
around the dark irises, like his gaze is channelling an eclipse of the moon.

‘She never talked about where she came from, your mother. She was a person without
history, without family…’ He gropes for the right words. ‘Greyson’s own mother suffered
a lot to come here, and when she came, she still suffered. The language, you know;
working in markets and restaurants all over town. Every day of the week, rising before
dawn. She struggled to have Greyson. She was already old when he was born—she wanted
him so much!—but her husband went to Sydney after, and he never… But by then, you
know, she couldn’t stop working; she didn’t know any other way. She could never understand
how her son would give it all up for someone so…’

His voice falters entirely to a stop.

‘White?’ I query finally.

Boon’s mouth turns down at the corners. ‘Different.
We fear what we are not.
That
is something we all share.’

He sighs and gets back off his stool, pretending to straighten a couple of glass
canisters on a shelf just behind
him. ‘Your grandma doesn’t want to meet you,’ he
mutters gruffly. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘She knows I’m here?’

He nods. ‘But she isn’t. I mean, she doesn’t live here anymore. She went back to
Hong Kong a few years ago and she won’t come back now. Not even for you. The pain…’

I look down at the countertop, which has grown blurry, understanding.

‘Greyson was my godson and I loved him,’ Boon says simply, his back still to me,
‘the same way I loved your mother. When you were born, I knew. When Greyson…’ His
voice wobbles. ‘I also knew. We were always in contact; your mum was good like that,
always writing. When she said she was coming back to Melbourne after all these years,
well, of course, you had to come back here and Ping—your grandma—she understood that.
Your mother and father were happy here. It was already set up: just one new bed needed,
a cleaner, not much work to do.’ Boon turns and looks at me beseechingly. ‘But Joanne
insisted on taking the top floor this time.
No changes
, she said; I wasn’t to do
anything. I couldn’t stop her.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, confused. ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’

Boon turns back and reaches into a wooden cubicle at head height, taking down a silver
key on a short length
of red string that had been hanging on a hook I hadn’t even
noticed was there. ‘She borrows this sometimes. Just to sit.
For thinking
, she said.
Your mother said you didn’t need to know—I wasn’t to show you, it wouldn’t help,
you wouldn’t remember—but you should see it. It’s part of
your
history.’

He takes his own set of keys out of his khaki trouser pockets and comes around the
counter.

First flicking off a bank of lights, he locks the shop’s main door from the inside
and leads me into the stairwell that smells of decaying boxes, before locking up
the shop from the outside. Pocketing his keys, he begins mounting the stairs. ‘The
Mei Hua Bean Sprout Company
,’ I say in sudden realisation. ‘That was my
dad
?’

Boon’s soft laughter precedes us both. ‘It is your
grandma
. It should have been your
dad’s. Ping sold the business, years after he died, to someone who came out from
the same village, on the same boat, in the late 1950s. She’s very traditional. She
only kept the business name. And this building.’

I go rigid in shock, but Boon doesn’t see because he’s already opening the mysterious
door on the second floor that leads to the apartment only ever filled with silent
voices. He swings the door wide and says apologetically, ‘It’s very dusty. It’s been
left exactly the way it was when they lived here, when you were born…’

Boon doesn’t come past the threshold. He just presses the key on a string into my
hand and tells me that I will know where to find him.

The light is fading, but I don’t touch the switches, or any of the surfaces, which
are covered in a furry pelt of dust. I stand in the doorway. The apartment is a carbon
copy of ours upstairs, only nicer. It’s dusty, sure, with a closed-up, musty smell.
But it still looks like someone could be living here. Every magazine on the coffee
table is stacked in a neat tower; the furniture is heavy, minimalist, matching,
all in hues of black and grey and coffee. A man-cave, bach-pad; frozen in time for
years.

But then I start seeing feminine touches. A couple of small framed Japanese woodcuts
on the walls: of blossoms and geisha, 19th century-style; a couple of handcrafted
throw pillows on the brown leather Chesterfield that have Mum written all over them.
I recognise the quilting blocks she must have used, because years later she was still
making the same ones out of the fabric from T-shirts I’d grown out of. There are
pillows just like them, upstairs in our apartment.

She’d called the pattern
The Mariner’s Compass
: a large, foregrounded, four-pointed
star with a series of four rays set on the cross coming out from behind it, with
a smaller,
eight-pointed star sitting behind, for backgrounding.
Mum taught it to
me
, she’d said once, piecing fabric together in front of the TV.
One day, darl, I’ll
teach it to you
. And I think I drawled something along the lines of:
I don’t do craft
and you can’t bloody make me, so quit asking.

The cushions have a Mariner’s Compass set into the middle in an alternating pattern
of blues and reds. I almost cross the rug and pick one of them up to hug it to me,
to see if it smells of her—all warm vanilla and rose oil—but I force myself to stand
still and just
look
.

This must have been where she came to commune with her dead. I can almost feel him,
in here with me, the air heavy with presence.

There are two pairs of slippers by the side entry to the galley kitchen, in his-and-hers
colours and sizes, and my eyes sting at how well suited they seem to each other,
how they’ve been placed together with such care. It’s clear from the way the dust
has been disturbed that Mum only ever came here to think in one place, and I gingerly
follow her tracks now, as if walking more heavily might somehow raise the dead.

I’m led to the windowless bedroom they must have shared. There is a neatly made up
double bed with a navy-patterned duvet cover and matching pillowslips, the feather
pillows gone lopsided from gravity. My gaze takes in the Moses basket on a stand
in the corner of the room, made
of some woven kind of off-white plastic, a hospital-issue
blanket draped over the end of it.

But the footprints I’m following don’t extend past a vintage armchair, set up at
the foot of the bed that faces a retro-looking, empty wardrobe with two mirrored
doors that swing outward from the centre. There are still hangers inside the wardrobe,
pointing every which way, and both doors are wide open as if the thing has only just
been hurriedly emptied.

Cautiously, I enter the dim bedroom and sit down in the chair, this tight and constant
ache in my throat. I imagine Mum sitting here: then and now. I imagine her, then
and now, listening for the front door to open; for the confident footsteps that will
take him through the living room, down the hallway, to her. I imagine him placing
a hand on her shoulder and the two of them looking at each other, reflected in the
doors.

Only it’s Simon Thorn with one hand on my shoulder and my mobile phone in the other,
and my eyes are wide, my scar dark with fearful blood. ‘What are you doing?’ he asks
me hoarsely, his face shadowy in the mirror.

My throat is still clamped tight from the shock of seeing him here. But seeing him
has also made me notice something behind him on the wall, to the left of the door.
And I point to it now. Simon turns to look, then turns back, puzzled.

The walls are a faded olive-green colour, save for a darker, rectangular patch just
beside the light switch. On the wooden bureau below is an empty, glass-fronted photo
frame, the warped cardboard backing lying abandoned beside it. I take my phone from
Simon’s outstretched hand and see Wurbik’s number repeated in the screen of missed
calls.

‘Please turn around and go back outside,’ I say quietly as I rise from the armchair
and hit
call back
.