I pick up my mobile and gradually the rocking slows, then ceases. It is 4.44am. In five, maybe six hours I will have to give my final oral English presentation of the year; no, scratch that—of my entire life. It will be a shambles, because nothing short of a blow to the head will let me get some rest now. It’s like I have electricity running through my veins. I’ll be lucky if I can string three words together. And I won’t have any help, because Simon Thorn has earned the right not to speak; the right not to be pushed into doing anything, by anyone, ever again. If he wants to sleep with his boots on in my living room for the rest of his life, so be it.
There’s a mobile number in Hugh de Crespigny’s showoffy arsehole handwriting, on the last page of the printouts. Uncaring of the time, I type into my phone:
The progressed chart for the older man indicates he was badly hurt by a male sibling or family member (brother?) on the date in question.
The one for the younger man indicates mental breakdown and force/violence used against loved one (female) resulting in loved one’s death. I DO NOT want your money.
With a sharp pang, I add: Please do not come here again.
If I was older and more sophisticated, with a different face, and a whole different personality—arch, witty, fascinating—then maybe a guy like Hugh would come into my life and not ever want to leave it.
Yeah, I tell myself, dreaming.
After I send the message it’s like this weight comes off me. But then I remember the issue, the one I shoved in the ‘for later’ compartment. If everything is connected, and people really do wander into your life for a reason, all those things I never believed in before but maybe almost kind of do now: then I need to breach the compartments, let the waters in. Let them mix and mingle. I owe it to Fleur to do it. And to Mum; because she would try and set things right, it was her way.
I pull up the mobile number for Don Sturt and just stare at it for a while. He might be on a stakeout and get my message in real-time—in which case he will most likely call me up and subject me to all kinds of awkward questions that I can’t answer. But it’s more likely he’ll be asleep and this will be the last of it; for me, anyway.
Either way, once the message is delivered, it’s no longer my responsibility. If Boon is to be believed, it never was. It was already written, and all people like me amount to is Fate’s dumb conduit.
I copy the two sets of birthdates, birthtimes and birthplaces provided by Hugh de Crespigny into the message for Don and tell him:
Progressed stars and transits indicate the older man was injured by male sibling or family member (brother?) and that younger man killed a female ‘loved one’ with force or violence on the night of 9 July, 1984. I was not given names. The source does not know I am sending this. Do not ask me how I got this. Please do not involve me any further. Avicenna Crowe.
The message in no way breaches anyone’s confidentiality, I reason feverishly. No names are involved. It could just be a stupid hunch, an awful coincidence, in which case Don can shrug his narrow, ropy shoulders, hit delete and get on with his life knowing he tried his hardest.
Filled with misgivings I hit send.
I look down at Mum’s birth chart with unseeing eyes so that all the baby pinks and blues and greens go blurry and run together. Now that I have it I could make it speak. I could find out her state of mind on that Wednesday. I could find out from where the harm—if any—had come. Had a friend set off this chain of events? A co-worker? A…lover? All her secrets—and now I know, she had them, she had them in spades—I could find them all out and fill in all the shadowy spaces in my mother I never knew existed.
Hell, I could ask the chart whether she’s still alive.
And my own birth chart—it’s right here. I could torture it, too. Set my life on some narrow pathway I might never get off. Find out how long I’ll live, how I’ll die; whether I’ll ever be kissed, or have children, a breakdown, a lottery win, a house.
Or find someone to love me again, the way I have been loved my entire life.
For a second, before the tears stream down, a familiar cluster of stars in the first house seems to leap out at me. And I realise with a shock that my chart is the one from the front of all the journals, Mum’s journals.
House Aries. My house.
What had Wurbik said? She wouldn’t even start a case if the job wasn’t compatible with this chart. Mine.
Find the pattern and you find the person.
Suddenly, I’m howling, ripping at all the papers, all the printouts, until there’s a blizzard of torn paper, the pieces mixed up and scattered and impossible to put back together. The fate of all the Crowes, to be scattered and destroyed and made lesser, pulled to pieces: as a people, as a family. It’s like we’ve always been the one person anyway—destined to die young; dying then being reborn, only to die again. Leaving our daughters motherless.
In the midst of the storm I hear the door open, and Simon’s standing there, still in his clothes and boots, the left side of his face creased from sleep. He doesn’t ask me what I’m doing. He just pulls me to my feet and wipes at my eyes with the pads of his bruised thumbs and rocks me in his arms until I stop bashing at him, bashing at the world, and he says, ‘Cenna, Cenna, it’s going to be all right.’
19
Suddenly, I am a pillar of stone in his arms. Nobody calls me Cenna but me. Mum and Vicki know it as my gamer tag, but they’ve always, always called me Avi. And Changeling_ 29 never called me anything because it was his policy to never write back. Not even when I gloated and deliberately twisted the knife, for laughs.
‘So is it true, then,’ I mumble, ‘what they said about you dropping Miranda Cornish because she couldn’t spell?’ But what I’m really asking him is: Is this okay, what we’re doing here?
Simon is standing very still; I can feel the tension and uncertainty in the way he holds himself so upright, he might snap from the strain. He doesn’t often get caught out, or let things slip, but he knows it, and I know it, and I can’t help the small, secret smile that curves up the corners of my mouth where it’s hidden in the front of his scratchy jacket. ‘You never even won a single game,’ I say quietly into his shoulder.
‘It was driving me crazy,’ he replies, and he could be talking about Miranda and her loose grasp of the English language, or about all the games in which I handed him back his arse on a plate. I feel him slowly relaxing when he realises I’m not going to go berserk and scratch his eyes out.
‘I saw you and Vicki playing once, in The Caf,’ he says sheepishly into my part, his jaw all scratchy with dark stubble. ‘You were sitting side-by-side, laughing your heads off. It was easy enough to invite you to a game after that. It was meant to be a test. But then I couldn’t win, so I couldn’t stop.’
He says it like it’s my fault.
I raise my head then to his mauled face, my own all red and scaly, runny and unlovely, the two of us a pair. ‘But if you win, will you?’ I say uncertainly. ‘Stop?’
And I mean stop playing, but I also mean: stop wanting to know me or be with me, leave me behind once you achieve the shiny new life you’ve always longed for?
It’s palpable, how badly he wants that
life. But I understand now why he deserves it and is the way he is. ‘I’m never going to win,’ Simon says simply, ‘because you’ll always be smarter than I am, and you’re going to take out the Tichborne. I’m always just going to be standing in your shadow.’
It’s not an answer, not really. But it was a stupid question. People who want guarantees are the kind of people who consult astrologers and I’m done with all of that.
I’d like him to kiss me, but I wouldn’t know where to begin. So instead I say gruffly, ‘What happens now?’ Hoping he’ll take it as an invitation.
He steps back and says firmly, ‘We do the talk.’
Of course we do.
I’m so disappointed I actually sway on the spot, but I see the rightness of what he’s saying. When you keep busy, you forget to remember, or to dwell. You take it one step at a time and then you find that you’re…living.
We have the soup for breakfast because we are motherless now, and there are no longer rules to abide by. We can do what we like—but we’d give it all away in a moment to have them back, the way they were, at their best, when they loved us and were not overwhelmed by the things that caused them, in the end, to leave.
Simon drives us to school in his rusting, stinky bomb, pulling into his usual spot in the Year 12 car park, by the skips. It could be any other day. But plenty of people see us get out together, and the class is already talking about it when we take our seats, side-by-side, in the front row.
The mess his face is, this morning, makes looney June de Costi gasp out loud. Dalgeish practically smacks her ruby-red lips when she sees that we’re both here, technicolour bruises, scars and all. ‘When you’re ready?’ she trills from the side of the room, activating the record function on the tablet she’s holding up with a purple fingernail. I can imagine all of them in the staff room later, having a gay old chortle, and my face goes so hot and red that Adam Carney, sitting in the second row right under my nose, actually laughs. ‘Come on, Frankencrowe, balls of steel, man, balls of steel.’
Simon and I had agreed in the car that I’d go first because I had nothing prepared. I was going to wing it, pull something out of my arse, and it would be up to Simon to try and draw the whole thing together, get us back on point, whatever that was.
In summary, he’d say smoothly, in conclusion. And that would be the impression Dalgeish—all of them—would be left with: that we’d actually worked well together, top marks for trying. When of course, we hadn’t; because we’re both house Aries—I worked out that much from the way Simon had seemed to recognise himself in my chart—and we’re both always going to want to dominate the proceedings.
‘We’re completely not compatible in any way,’ I’d said fretfully, in the car, unable to look at him. ‘It will be a disaster.’
Ostensibly, I’d been talking about the talk. And Simon, who’d been distracted by a taxi rear-ending someone in the lane beside us, had completely missed the point the way I’d wanted him to, and said, ‘We’re going to do great, if you just keep it brief and punchy. Leave the textual analysis to me.’
The lights are very bright in the classroom. I look down at the skin of my hands, which seems both yellow and red at once, stippled and blotchy. I close my eyes briefly and think to myself: Words. Words are my currency.
When I open them, and begin to speak, it’s like the fear, the edges of the room, the eyes, all fade away. I speak of my mother and my grandmother and my great-grandmother before them. Of their secret marriages: with the stars and planets and luminaries, with the men who were not their husbands, with blue-eyed Death himself. I tell them of how my mother loved my dead father so much that I think she bought an old astrolabe and went out looking for him in a fit of madness. But something terrible and cruel and ultimately human intervened, so that she found Death again, anyway. On the summit of Mount Warning.
As I say it, I believe it to be the truth, the true story of what happened. Then the words rush forth, out of nowhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let Maps to others, worlds on worlds have showne,
Let us possesse one world, each hath one, and is one.
Beside me, Simon rustles his papers, horrified that I have skied straight off the mountain into uncharted textual waters. (Not ‘The good-morrow’, I can hear him thinking, we didn’t agree to do that one!)
But the rest of the room is absolutely silent as I add, ‘This was them. Mum could read the stars, she could foresee all futures; it was her gift, both terrible and divine, wielded for such a mundane purpose: “Will he marry me? Will he leave me?” But all she wanted, I think, in the end, was him. “One world”; but not this one. Donne understood that. He understood death and love and God at some new and fundamental level, some eternal level. How two people can be so close, so conjoined, that they are like a compass, one arm anchoring the other, but still allowing it the freedom to move. The two moving always together. “Thy firmness makes my circle just”,’ I whisper. ‘ “And makes me end, where I begunne.” ’
There, Simon, I found my way back to the point, I think. I am the point. There is no other.
I bow my head when the grief cannot be held at bay. ‘In our own small way,’ I murmur, staring at the stained and rucked-up carpet beneath my runners, ‘Mum and I were like the two arms of a compass, always moving towns, moving schools, always together. But I wasn’t enough to keep her here. And now the compass is broken and I don’t know the way forward…’
I falter to an awkward stop, watching, horrified, as two fat tears fall out of my eyes onto my shoes. The front row kids see, and a murmur of restless noise spreads back down through the rows like wind rustling through fields of grass.
Simon smoothly steps into the gaping chasm I have created, talking confidently about a love so elevated above the profane that it is a love which transcends the physical, ‘Moving into the realm of inter-communion of two minds,’ he says breezily, like he didn’t just turn off the life-support for his own mother.
He’s so good at pretending.
Panic—that he’s talking about us, that maybe this is all I have to look forward to in this life, two minds meeting on an electronic gameboard in cyberspace—makes me feel like throwing up, makes me run out of the room with my hand over my mouth in a flurry of oooo-oohs that sets everyone talking.
It’s all been caught in high definition on Dalgeish’s Samsung.
Unable to face anyone, I grab my pack and walk out through the school gates. No one tries to stop me as my forcefield sizzles and sizzles away. Even the guys with lanyards and clipboards hustling for wildlife donations on the corner of La Trobe and Swanston leave me alone, actually peeling off to the sides when they see me coming.
As I draw closer to home, I delete my messages, one after another.
Wurbik’s worried: Call me.
Delete.
Vicki’s worried: Call me.
Delete.
Don Sturt next, saying Eleanor desperately wants to talk.
Delete.
Hugh de Crespigny, voice like molten honey, urgent: I need to show you something. You need to see it.
‘Unless it’s your huge, hard body, not interested,’ I say out
loud with a harsh, teary laugh, hitting delete.
Then there’s a couple of consecutives from a heavy breather who hangs up after the requisite amount of hostile panting.
Delete, I go; my finger savage. Delete.
Though I do wonder, for a moment, how it is that the mouth-breathers have gotten hold of my mobile number, too, spreading like mould across my life.
I wave at Boon through the front window as I go by, but I don’t think he sees me through the reflected glare. And I realise, then, that maybe all you ever see is surfaces, and that even then, sometimes you don’t even get that. One day soon I will have to sit down with Boon and ask: What was she like? When she was truly happy? But not now, not today.
Today, the question would be: How could she leave me, when I still need her?
But that’s not a question it would be fair to ask him.
Mounting the stairs, fatigue is heavy in every line of my body. I am slumped inside my jeans and flannel shirt, like a creature made of dough, incapable of speech or thought. It’s only because the stairwell lights are still blown on both the upper landings that I don’t see it. I don’t see the thing until my foot connects with it.
There’s a hard metallic thok as I kick something on my front doormat into the base of the door. I bend down low, squinting to make it out in the faint light from downstairs, and my backpack swings around and hits me, hard, in the side of the head. In a fit of all-consuming rage, I twist and dropkick the bag, punting it all the way down the steps to the landing below.