‘Mum told me that as far as she knew, she’d never been wrong. Maybe they wouldn’t tell her themselves, but word got back if she was right and it seemed like she always was. People talk. Good fortune, misfortune, we all love hearing about it. People always tried to follow her. No matter how many times we moved, or where we went, clients from years back would look for her. She was spooky-accurate. Is, is.’ I could punch myself in the mouth.
Docherty mutters, ‘I still don’t see it.’
‘You wouldn’t,’ Detective Wurbik replies, coming back into the room, ‘because that thing is missing quite a bit of…detail.’
He throws a stapled document onto the coffee table and I register with a jolt that he’s got rubber gloves on, the disposable kind. The top sheet is dated roughly a month before today and headed: Carson Watters, age 59. Horary reading: move interstate? There are the same three wheels on it, and a dense forest of numbers and astrological symbols, or glyphs, laid over the top, that to the uninitiated might look like code.
‘I remember him,’ I murmur, scanning the top page before flicking through the typed-up notes Mum stapled behind, without really seeing any of the words. ‘Big guy, booming laugh, smelled like cigarettes. Said to call him Cars: “Cars by name, Cars by trade.” He wanted to sell his business, move to Cairns. Asked Mum whether she thought the stars were beneficial for the day he had in mind.’
‘And were they?’ Docherty interjects, sceptical.
‘Yeah,’ I say, running my eyes again over the glyphs Mum annotated freehand onto the top page. ‘Surprisingly good. He was lucky. A couple of afflictions, nothing major. She said: “Do it.” And I think he took her advice.’
‘Come with me,’ Wurbik says abruptly to Docherty.
I hear them opening the filing cabinet again, their voices pitched so low I can’t catch the words. When they return, Wurbik picks up right where Docherty left off. ‘Bank account details? Place of work?’
I stand up and head towards the overflowing filing tray on the kitchen bench, handing him an old bank statement of Mum’s and a pay slip with the bank branch she works at, printed across the top. ‘Her work called me, yesterday, asking where she was. But we’re doing a musical, at school, and I was painting the backdrop. Didn’t check my messages all day, not until after five. I mean, who calls someone asking whether they’ve seen their mum? I wasn’t expecting it. I’m still angry at myself.’
I should have said something, back when she was at my bedroom door. Regret is sharp in me. I pivot, suddenly reminded of the accident-message Mum left. ‘Listen to this.’
Turning on the speakerphone, I let them all listen to the date and time stamp, the static-filled call from Mum’s phone to mine.
Detective Wurbik hands me his card. ‘Can you forward that message? To the number here?’
While he watches, I do it, then Wurbik goes back into Mum’s room and comes out with an armful of charts, asking if he can take them. I shrug. ‘I guess,’ I say, feeling like I’ve said the wrong thing because they’re not really mine to give.
‘They all look…finished,’ the detective says, holding them out to me in a fan, like an oversized deck of cards he’s just pulled out of his sleeve, ta da. ‘Am I right?’
I flip through them and have to agree. ‘Mum’s works-in-progress aren’t typed up like this. When she was done with someone, she used my laptop for word processing, but she always kept a handwritten journal for “open” cases.’
Wurbik’s eyes sharpen on me instantly. ‘There’s no journal in her room. You see one?’ he asks the others, and they shake their heads. ‘Where are the old ones? If you still have any.’
‘In the hallway closet by the front door, stacked up,’ I reply. ‘I’ll show you. Half our problem is Mum never throwing stuff away. Especially not info that might come in handy down the track; if the client came back. And lots did.’
There are dozens of journals in the narrow broom closet in the hall, all different shapes and sizes, going back years. After scanning the pile, Wurbik follows me back into the living area and I finally remember to tell them about Mum’s hand.
‘Father’s name?’ Docherty interjects gruffly, still shaking his head at the fact I could leave something so important out of Mum’s description. Only just about half her hand missing, wouldn’t you say?
‘Greyson,’ I say quietly. ‘Kooky, right? Greyson Zhou. But he wanted me to have Mum’s name, I don’t know why, so that’s what she had put on my birth certificate. Avicenna Zhou would have sounded all right. Crowe and Zhou rhyme, which is weird, even though they’re spelled completely differently.’
It’s turned into a stifling hot autumn day. Forensics people start trickling in, with their gloves and brushes and flash-lit devices, asking me things I can’t remember answering a second after the words have left my mouth.
Before all of them finally leave, spiriting away my laptop and armloads of journals and paper, Detective Wurbik asks for a photo and her toothbrush. And that’s when it hits me like a solid punch. It’s official: she’s really missing.
Numbly, I retrieve the toothbrush, also handing them the photo of Mum and me from the fridge. It’s the most recent thing I have of her. Someone at school took it, just after they told me I’d made it through the bastard-hard Collegiate High entrance exam with flying colours, full marks—didn’t happen too often, I should be real proud. In it, Mum’s beautiful, the way she’s always beautiful, wings of hair like white-gold, and we’re both grinning manically. I’ve got my arm around her neck like I’m putting her in a headlock.
Wurbik assures me I’ll be cropped out of it, and I say inanely: ‘I don’t mind, really, it’s up to you,’ but of course I need to be out of the picture or it will be like it’s me that’s missing too.
He gives me all the numbers I need if I can think of anything, promising to have the laptop back to me ASAP. And all I can say is: ‘Thanks, you’ve been really… thorough’.
No one was talking homicide—Not yet, early days—but I could see them entertaining the idea because I’m observant. They took so long tearing our place apart that I knew, as if they’d straight out said it to my face, that they held grave fears for Mum’s safety.
4
I don’t like to be alone and I’m afraid of the dark.
There it is. I’ve never told anyone that before. It’s at odds with the way I look, the way I have learned to conduct myself in public—with hauteur, and a certain amount of swagger, as if I am a pirate.
I work out that I’ve been awake for roughly two days. It might go some way towards explaining the hammering in my ears, and the heat I seem to be generating, as if I’m made out of pistons and cogs and steam.
In the end—even though I had nothing more pressing to do at home than stare at the ancient soot stains on my bedroom walls—I didn’t go to school, didn’t even make it down the hall to the toilet, or eat. After the police left, I shut my door and climbed back into bed, because I knew that night would eventually fall and no one would be here to mark it with me. Or bear it with me. On their way out, I almost begged one of them to stay, but it would have sounded pathetic.
I haven’t left home for more than a day, based on the irrational fear that I will go out and somehow miss Mum popping back for some
thing, then leaving again. If I’m not here, I won’t catch her, and it’s important I catch her and tell her not to go outside again, that it’s dangerous to leave home, to leave me.
I feel disgusting, and it’s only feelings of self-disgust and bladder-as-ticking-time-bomb that finally propel me out from under my blankets. I crack open my door and am greeted with the kind of darkness that could hide… anything.
Skin prickling, I run through our apartment towards the front entrance, palming on every light along the way. The air smells stuffy and ancient and dead in here, like how a tomb might smell, and panic makes me throw the front door wide open to catch a draft, any sort of draft. Or just to catch my mother, walking back through it, throwing her battered tan leather handbag down and saying, ‘Phew, Avi, that was the longest train ride in recorded history.’
We live on the top floor of a three-storey Victorian-era brick building in the heart of Chinatown, listed as the registered place of business for the Mei Hua Bean Sprout Company. A tarnished brass plaque right by the residents’ entrance at street level says so. The bean sprout people are very quiet. I often imagine, as I pass by the locked wooden door on the second floor, that they are practising a kind of Zen farming, nurturing their seedlings in absolute silence.
When we came here—with our scratched meals table, mismatched chairs and boxes of journals, books and bare essentials—I’d shrieked, ‘No, what, seriously?’
And Mum had replied fiercely, ‘We’re lucky to have this. Lucky. You don’t understand how perfect it is for you.’
But it hadn’t seemed that way. And on days when the Chinese restaurant next door is cooking up a stinky new batch of XO sauce? It still doesn’t. An old Chinese medicine practitioner takes up the whole ground floor of our building; there’s a street entrance to his shop, but also a separate doorway leading into his business from our stairwell. Sometimes, when I look in on my way out of our building, I see him taking shrivelled-up things out of Perspex canisters for the benefit of whoever’s just walked in. But we live in our own little bubbles, the bean sprout people, the old guy, and us. And bubbles can’t touch or they will burst, so I haven’t introduced myself, even though he looks animated and kindly, with his wrinkly face and ring of crazy-scientist white hair surrounding a freckly bald spot. There’s really no point. We always leave.
I don’t know how Mum found the place, but it’s fifteen minutes door-to-door to my school by tram, so she’s right, it is perfect, even though she’ll never get me to admit it and I might now never get the chance.
I should have said something, yesterday. Like hello or good morning.
Or goodbye.
A squeal of pain escapes my throat, like the sound of a wild pig in fear for its life. I have to lean against the doorframe for support, conscious my breathing sounds ragged, as if I’m trying to outrun something.
But it’s inside me, and I can’t.
God, she could be anywhere—I can’t make myself think past that—while I’m marooned here, in a city I barely know.
The weak kitchen fluorescent barely penetrates the darkness beyond our door. I take a tentative step forward and peer out and down into the stairwell. It could be an actual well out there. Maybe if I set foot past the threshold, beyond the thin puddle of light, I will fall straight through the earth.
Below, the bean sprout people are silent. The air outside my apartment is heavy with the scent of dust and the mouldering cardboard boxes that are stacked on every landing in the building. But I breathe it all in gratefully because it does not smell like inside, everything stinking of nerves and fruitlessness and waiting.
Which is what Mum’s clients have been doing. She only ever has two or three on the go at a time, but no more. I know that, because she told me once that it was exhausting—the constant expectation. ‘If I don’t keep it down to manageable numbers, love,’ she said, ‘I make mistakes. And precision is everything.’
She had a waitlist that long to see her. Lately, she’d been turning people away; I know because I heard her on the telephone being apologetic, but firm. And we’ve had so many hang-ups I knew people were pissed. Some would just call to see if she was answering. I’d say my name, get a second of breathing, then dial tone.
The waitlist, the live cases, will all be in Mum’s missing journal. I described it to the police: dark red, bound in fake leather with gold scrollwork on the front cover and the spine. Mum couldn’t believe she’d gotten it for a dollar from the five-dollar shop across the road that doesn’t live up to its name; everything’s so expensive. ‘Donny must have missed this one when he was repricing everything,’ I remember her laughing as she held it up for me to see, flicking through the unlined, white pages with the thin edge of gilt around each one.
I think I’d mumbled something sarcastic back, like: ‘Well, doesn’t that look special.’
But I would do just about anything right now to get hold of that book. Next to talking to Mum? It would tell me what was going on inside her head before she…
I cut that thought right off at the knees and go back through our apartment, turning on all the table lamps for extra company. I paw through the kitchen cupboards first, then Mum’s reading room. Ransack her bedroom and the hall cupboards next, before digging through the bathroom cabinets, which are full of shed hair and half-finished bottles of Bio-Oil, for the scarring. She never would have hidden anything in here, where the air smells constantly of mould. But still I look.
Then I look at everything again, everything she might have touched, even under the couch, running my hands through the dust balls and staples and crumbs; peering inside all the seat cushions for things that might be secreted there. As if Mum was some kind of spy who had to hide all the information she was putting together on people, or risk having it fall into enemy hands.
Nothing.
The only pieces of paper with Mum’s brittle-looking handwriting on them are in her filing cabinet, which is filled to capacity with superseded notes, finished charts, all past history. The police took all her old journals away and skimmed off the most recent forecasts for further study.
And because the police have taken my laptop for analysis, I can’t access the half-arsed English presentation on John Donne I’m supposed to have finished, like, yesterday, with Simon Thorn who is, literally, a thorn.
I think it’s safe to say we felt an immediate visceral, mutual dislike; just one of those chemical things you can’t explain. I think Simon’s a know-it-all with a God complex because he will not leave me alone in class—the moment I open my mouth he will chase and badger, bait and harass, trying to make me look stupid, it’s almost reflexive—and he thinks I’m visual pollution because he stuck me with Frankencrowe the moment I walked into our form room for the first time. And now everyone at school calls me that, even the people who claim to be friendly. So I’ve got nothing better to do right now but freak out about where my mother might be.
The only place I haven’t searched is my bedroom, because I was in it, pretending to be asleep, the morning she walked into thin air. Suddenly, I hear screaming and realise—after one disorientating, out-of-body moment—that it’s coming from me. I’m just standing there, on the narrow bit of hallway connecting our two bedrooms, my fingers curled into claws, and I’m screaming like I’m that wild pig, but with a spear lodg
ed deep in its guts. I have to force myself to stop. I actually put my hands around my throat in order to choke the sound off, and the tears overtake me again, from nowhere. I feel them falling straight out of my eyes onto the speckly brown carpet worn so thin I can make out the yellow underlay in places.
You have to understand, I’m not a crier. It’s something I’ve trained myself not to do, but what has taken me years to perfect has all been undone in one day.
I’m falling apart. I’m a mess. I need to pee. A door banging somewhere far below causes me to sprint for the bathroom and lock myself in. The Chinese medicine man closes up late on Fridays. Mum and I have gone out for late suppers before and seen him moving calmly amongst his shelves and medicine chests, putting things away, the lights in his shop half-dimmed to deter persistent traffic. Mum said he was good, too; that his appointment books were always full weeks ahead. He could cure anything, any hurt, she said. Physical, spiritual, you name it. He had magic hands.
Like, yeah, that’s possible, I’d snorted, pointing at the webby skin on the side of my face. Magic hands can’t fix that.
But she’d just started belting out the chorus from that Whitney Houston song about miracles, and I’d been forced to hit her with a cushion, right in the mouth. Only when we’d stopped laughing had she said: That’s your trouble. You’re a sceptic. You’re a straight line, my darling, in a very circular world. Things will not go easy on you in this life if you do not unbend.
And I’d said tightly: It’s not that I’m a sceptic, per se, Mother. I just don’t want to know any more than I have to.
And then she’d said, Fair enough, but you’ll have to agree it’s a necessary evil, in a funny little voice, before disappearing somewhere for a while. Never for long, which is exactly what I told the police. Just long enough for her to commune with my dead, as she liked to put it. I never knew where she went, and I never asked, and now I think I should have.