The Astrologer's Daughter

  ‘Uh, come in,’ I add, belatedly releasing my messy topknot and finger-combing all the wavy dark hair down off the top of my head and over my ruined ear.

  I look like hell today. Like Hollywood-grade demon spawn in my fiery tartan pyjamas with matching craniofacial scarring that grew and stretched as I grew and stretched. A teen serial killer in faux-sheepskin slippers.

  We all sit down, the male officer across from me in the orange tweed armchair, the female officer beside me on the matching couch because it’s the appropriate thing to do: I’m eighteen years and thirteen days old today, the least fully formed ‘adult’ you’d be likely to encounter. The front desk coppers who took my call at Melbourne East station—passing me around like a hot potato—got that right away. When Constable Lara Brand now tries to take my hand, it makes a panicky, crablike gesture of escape, and she doesn’t try again. I’m striving so hard not to stare at the real live gun she’s carrying in a thigh holster on her right leg that I’m practically sitting with my back to her.

  ‘Sergeant Sam Docherty,’ the man says, rushing to fill the silence that follows. And I’m glad he does, because I’m unable to frame in words the awful realisation that I’ve somehow lost myself two parents. I only seem to have misplaced the most important person in my life not once, but twice. A feat for anyone, surely.

  Docherty summarises the specifics of my call-in, refraining from mentioning that it was both hysterically brief and largely non-sequential. I nod and nod and nod as he speaks, like a nodding doll.

  They make me describe Mum in detail. How tall she is, dress size, skin tone, hair and eye colour, and I’m racking my brains again over the vital question.

  What had she been wearing yesterday morning? Had I even lifted my head to grunt as she lingered by my bedroom door? I’m not what you would call a morning person. I have not yet discovered the time of day at which I am optimally functional. But you can’t find a person you can’t describe, so I say, ‘Dark blue?’ with so much uncertainty I sound like an uncaring flake.

  Docherty frowns. ‘Can you go one better than that?’

  ‘Some kind of pants-suit thing,’ I add hastily. ‘White blouse, with a foofy collar or scarf?’ I fluff around at the base of my neck as if I have wattles, like a chicken. ‘Flat shoes because she was walking to work,’ I resume threadily, lowering my hand, ‘at the bank. She always walked. Though she may have been packing heels for a meeting. Hair down.’

  I only know that part because I have a vague memory of squinting through my open bedroom door and seeing the early morning sun flaring in the ends of her hair, turning them a pale red. That was after the bit where I’d pretended I was still asleep when she’d said quietly, ‘Love you, my girl,’ and got no answer.

  While I’ve been talking, I’ve caught the officers flicking surreptitious glances at each other. I don’t blame them—I’m tall and broad-shouldered, dark and busty and solid. The exact opposite of the woman I’m describing. You wouldn’t even know you’re related! the TattsLotto lady in the shopping arcade across the road from our place had exclaimed, the first time we’d met her. No, you wouldn’t, Mum had replied cheerily, rubbing the back of her wounded hand against my face with affection. The unconscious gesture had caused the TattsLotto lady’s eyes to flick away.

  The sergeant underlines something in his small police-issue notebook. ‘Your mum have any identifying marks?’ he asks. ‘Like tattoos? Evidence of childhood illnesses, accidents? Scars, is what I mean. Someone may see them on her, jog something.’

  I pause, diverted by Constable Brand’s light-hazel gaze skimming across all the surfaces in our apartment. Her eyes fly up the smoke and grease-stained walls, taking in the knick-knacks, the dust, the general air of poverty and neglect. I’m sitting so close that I catch her nose wrinkle minutely at the smell of old food and vicious rising damp masked by an ambient layer of lavender oil. She takes in the books on astral projection and fate versus free will, the tomes on reincarnation, Chinese astrology and foretelling the future Occidental versus Oriental style, and I see more thought bubbles quickly forming that say: New Age fruitcake?

  And: Bad mother?

  ‘She wasn’t,’ I interrupt sharply, unable to stop myself. ‘She was the best mother you could ever, ever have. She’s been through so much. You have to find her. Please.’

  There it is again, the past tense, slipping out. Sudden panic squeezes my throat closed.

  Constable Brand averts her eyes and asks if she can see the rest of the apartment but is gone before I can reply. I hear lights going on in Mum’s bedroom, mine, then the combined toilet/shower/laundry room at the far end that almost always feels like you’re stepping into the tropics regardless of what the weather’s doing outside. Only one window opens in our flat—it overlooks the street—and I’ve broken more nails than you can count trying to jimmy it open.

  The sergeant clears his throat gruffly and repeats the question about identifying marks. ‘Not that we hope it will come to that, mind, but anything you can give us is always useful.’

  The room goes airless as I tell him about the small broken heart, inked onto her right shoulderblade. ‘No colours,’ I whisper. ‘Just black. A heart with, like, a white lightning bolt through it.’

  Loved him, she did. Was cut through, just like that heart, when he died. None of that’s on the public record. They were both heroic that night. I shouldn’t have survived. But I can’t make the extra words come out, to explain: the depth of her love, the depth of his.

  Docherty holds out his notepad, asking me to sketch the tattoo. I was there when she had it done, my eyes wide, near fainting when the beads of blood welled up on her white, white skin. I’m no good with blood.

  ‘Not that I’m likely to forget,’ was the only thing Mum said as the needle had bit in.

  ‘That’s marvellous,’ Docherty mutters, studying what I’ve drawn, adding, ‘She was a part-time, ah, fortune-teller, you say?’

  He sounds disturbed, as if I’ve just declared my mother a nudist and notorious con woman, rolled into one.

  ‘She was—is, is!—an astrologer,’ I cry, teary-angry, as he makes a Whoa there, lassie hand gesture at me. ‘An astrologer. Not a “psychic”, or some cheap tarot-reading faker you call on a 1900 number. There’s a difference.’ I’m almost spitting, though I can tell from his face he can’t see it, the difference.

  ‘And she accepted monetary payment for these, these… services?’ he ventures delicately. ‘Routinely doled out bad news, did she? People not liking what they were hearing? Enemies?’

  ‘She worked as a bank teller for money,’ I say, voice rising, ‘because we needed to eat. Everything else she did from the heart. Ask everyone, they’ll tell you. PEOPLE LOVED HER.’

  I fling one arm out at all the stupid, ugly trinkets positioned lovingly around the sitting room. ‘This! This! This!’ I shout, jabbing at two leaping crystal dolphins forming a heart shape with their bodies; the porcelain ballet dancer with rose-filled flower basket; the sad-eyed, clay bloodhound with the ginormous head, ‘is how she got paid.’

  Docherty glances down dubiously at a family of pink elephants marooned in the centre of the cheap white cube we use as a coffee table, and I know I’m making no sense at this point, everything’s disjointed, just l
ike the call I made that brought him to me. And I cry then, loud and gushing; I can’t help it, it’s like I’ve finally been given permission.

  At the raw, animal sound, Constable Brand shoots back out of whatever dismal corner she’s been nosing around in and looks sharply into her partner’s face, before drawing him into our cramped galley kitchen.

  I hear everything, of course, there’s nowhere to hide in here. I used to sit in my bedroom with the door shut, willing all the strangers with their desperate eyes to go the hell away. But I still heard it all: infidelities and breakdowns; miscarriages and hasty marriages; accidents, crossroads. Death. All delivered in Mum’s calm, authoritative voice, peppered by frantic outbursts across the table.

  It’s always the women who overreact and imagine the worst. A man gets bad news? He’s already trying to slide out from under it. But, by and large, a woman only hears what she wants to hear, and then she’s never the same again. She twists it, it twists her. The end.

  ‘Please let that not be me,’ I wail through hot, salty tears, my fingers interlaced over my mouth.

  They are kind, and let me cry. And through the sound of it—which goes on and on and seems somehow quite separate from my body—I hear Docherty rumble: I didn’t say anything I don’t say to all the others. But she’s only a kid. She’s got every right to be taking it hard.

  Brand replies, low, but harsh: She’s an ‘adult’. And it might not be a coincidence, the timing. I mean, look at this place! Anyone would do a runner, honestly. There’s something in this. They should see this while it’s fresh.

  While Docherty excuses himself from the room to make calls, Brand takes my hand firmly and will not let me pull away. Writing with her free hand in the notepad she’s balanced on one knee, the constable shoots question after question at me.

  Jewellery?

  Don’t know. Never wore much. Didn’t have much.

  Aliases?

  What? God, no idea.

  Car?

  No, no, not for years.

  Medical conditions?

  She had, like, a cold last year, but that’s it. She was good, fit. Happy.

  (I howl out that last word, Happy, so that it’s got extra vowels in it, extra syllables.)

  D.O.B.? P.O.B.?

  Don’t know, don’t know, she would never tell me, though we celebrated in November, different days, always.

  Why? Why on earth would you do that?

  Didn’t want me to do her chart and find out, I suppose.

  The constable’s eyes fly to mine. ‘Find out what?’

  I swipe at my nose with the back of my hand. ‘What was coming for her. Yesterday.’

  Brand stares at me, astonished. ‘Sorry?’

  I say, in a mad rush, ‘I didn’t know it was supposed to be yesterday, she never said there was anything different about yesterday, but I suppose yesterday must have been the day. The day the eventuality was supposed to happen. It was the goddamned day and she never said anything. She just woke up and went out and met it—in a suit and foofy blouse. Head on. God.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Constable Brand insists, shaking me by the arm. ‘What was coming for her? What day?’

  I’m deep into an explanation of the Joanne Nielsen Crowe school of predictive astrology when Docherty comes back through the front door with a hard-faced, kind-eyed man in a dark suit and stripy tie. ‘Detective Senior Sergeant Stan Wurbik,’ he says. ‘Missing Persons Intelligence.’

  3

  Constable Brand, who hasn’t let go of my hand this whole time, says urgently, ‘Tell Detective Wurbik—about the work your mother did.’

  So I start in again, still sniffing into my cuff, about the astrological clock and progressions and transits, the significance of solar and lunar returns, eclipses, nodes and the significance of the Pleiades when directed towards the ascendant—and he’s lost, she’s lost. Docherty’s got his mouth hanging slightly open.

  After I falter to a stop, the detective says into the silence, ‘Could you maybe sketch out what you’re talking about? It will give us a…better idea of what your mum does.’

  I’m about to go in search of a pen and notepad when my mobile phone goes off in the kitchen. The sound of it makes me go cold, reminding me that time has not, in fact, come to a standstill. I am due at school to do a witness cross-examination role-play with my creepy Legal Studies teacher and two other sacrificial victims. On top of this? I’m already the late-entry new kid with a tragic backstory no one can make me go into. I stick out enough without sticking out more.

  I have to shake Constable Brand’s hand off in order to get up from the couch. Conscious of three sets of eyes on me, I turn my back on them and pick up.

  ‘Frankencrowe?’ Vicki hisses down the line. ‘Mrs Clarke’s ropable. You’ve been late five days in a row. She’s gunna get the office to call your mum again. She’s talking detentions, plural.’

  ‘Can’t talk, Vick,’ I say softly, hunching over to make my broad, tartan-clad back less visible. ‘But you tell Clarkey and anyone else who asks that Mum’s gone missing…’ I make a weird mewling noise in my throat, swallowing to hold the tears down. ‘And I’m not sure when I’ll be back.’

  ‘That’s rich, even coming from you!’ Vicki says incredulously. ‘They’ll never buy that.’

  ‘Will if they log on to the Victoria Police media website in the next…?’ I glance towards Wurbik.

  ‘Twenty-four hours,’ he replies, voice loud enough to carry. ‘Probably faster. Time’s everything with cases like this.’

  I hunch over the phone again. ‘You get that?’ I say into the sound of Vicki’s rapid, open-mouthed breathing. ‘That’s the Police. Got a room full of them right here. With guns. Remind Clarkey that I’m fast, the fastest she’ll ever have the privilege to work with—she’ll still be talking about me when she’s in a nursing home—and that I’ll catch up.’

  I hang up before Vicki’s breathing can turn into questions, because with Vicki Mouglalis it always turns into questions. Sinking back down into the couch with a black felt tip and a bit of paper, I pull the coffee table closer, upsetting the elephants walking across it, and begin drawing the very first thing I think I learnt to draw:

  Then around that I add two more wheels, making a mess of all the lines, leaving them both blank.

  I stare down at the thing my mother blithely called her canvas. She could draw this blindfolded, every ring almost perfect, without even using a single one of her compasses. On this diagram she could hang an entire life.

  Brand, Docherty and Wurbik cluster around the series of shaky, concentric circles I’ve sketched out. The detective pushes the felled elephants to one side as he crouches beside me, tapping the centre of my drawing. ‘This some kind of clock?’ he asks.

  ‘Kind of,’ I say, voice back under control. ‘The centre wheel—the one with the numbers around it—represents the natal chart, or radix. That’s where a person’s story begins. Twelve houses, two-hour intervals, like a clock face with midnight at the cusp of the fourth house, noon at the cusp of the tenth. It’s calculated based on the birth information the client gives you: you fill the interior with a m
ap of the heavens as it was at the exact time, date, place of birth. It’s all about themes and influences, Mum says, not specifics. They have to be teased out, or the chart will tell you very little about how a person’s life will really unfold. Just writing up the radix tells you nothing really concrete: probably unlucky, overly chatty, a bit of a stress head, might have a career in finance. Why bother, right?’

  I quickly trace the next wheel out from the centre. ‘It’s in the progressed chart that the themes and influences come into their own,’ I continue. ‘Will you have the male children your mother-in-law desires? Does your porkable secretary think you’re hot stuff, or a bit of a bastard? Will your husband leave you for a man? Will you lose your teeth, your lustrous hair, your fortune, win one? Mum’s been asked all those things.’

  Docherty shakes his head, flicking a finger at my sketch. ‘You can tell that from this?’

  I look up into his faded blue eyes and realise he’s only seeing the blanks on the page, not the possibilities, because no one’s ever trained him to see them. The detective crouched beside me taps my diagram again. ‘And the very outer ring? The thin one without lines? What’s that for?’

  ‘Fine-tuning,’ I reply. ‘It’s like a kind of lens, or magnifying glass. It brings what’s in the central wheels into sharper focus. It can help to foretell actual events. To the extent you could have a specific question answered, to the date. They’re called horary readings.’

  Beside me, Constable Brand inhales. Wurbik leaves the room and I hear the sound of the filing cabinet in Mum’s bedroom opening.

  ‘Some people don’t move without them,’ I add quietly. ‘They’re the neediest. If they could come live here with Mum and me, they would. Just to have her on tap.’

  ‘That so?’ says Docherty, leaning in, and I’m instantly defensive.