The Astrologer's Daughter (5 page)

I know I will have to give up Mum’s book, but not yet. Not when I’m the only one
in the whole world who spoke the same language she did, and can maybe read this thing
to work out what happened to her. It’s almost as if I was created to do it, and I
will not fail.

I look up into the clear, cloudless black of the night sky, the muted stars, and
say fiercely, ‘I do not
submit
.’ Then I turn and enter the glaring white tunnel of
the arcade teeming with late-night shoppers heading home, uncaring of whether Simon
is with me or not.

6

Simon looms at my shoulder as I queue at the sweaty display window of fried foods
and ask for the special of the day: a Turkish pide stuffed with shanklish, pickled
pineapple and pulled-pork. My mouth is watering so badly I can barely get my order
out. It sounds like all kinds of wrong: salty, sour, sweet, meaty, and loaded with
carbs and melted cheese. But it’s the only meal I’m going to manage today, and it
covers every one of the food groups, so, hey.

For a moment grief overwhelms me. I close my eyes and lean my chest and belly against
the hot glass on the pretence that I’m feeling cold. There’s the sound of a vacuum
seal separating, and a rush of warm air against my face, as the mournful-looking
man behind the counter
takes the pide out of an oven nearby. The background clatter
of falling cutlery could almost be Mum, fumbling haphazardly around our kitchen for
something to boil water in because she burnt through the bottom of another kettle.
She could literally burn water, my mum. Didn’t I say she was magic?

I smile, but it’s a smile that pulls down at the corners, like I’m going to cry.
In my head, I can hear her tutting:
You’ve got to take better care of yourself, love.
I make a small noise, like a hiccup, before I get my throat under control.

‘Drink?’ the man barks and I open my eyes, pointing to a fluoro-coloured jumbo bottle
of sports drink in the fridge behind him, which covers all the food groups, too.

The front door’s just about rusted open at this place, and tonight the draft is fierce,
so I settle for an inside table against the far wall, near the swing door to the
toilets. Taking a seat where I can see the flat-screen TV screwed into the wall,
I uncap my bottle, distracted by grainy CCTV footage on the news, of a tall man in
a cap and tracksuit robbing a servo. Behind me, Simon’s voice is diffident, jokey.
‘I think I might be related to that guy.’

I turn, skewering him with a look of disbelief. ‘Mr Clean? No way.’

I don’t remember telling Simon he was welcome to join me, but he does anyway, sitting
across the table over
his own mound of oozing meat and pastry. He slides the compendium
out of the space between us—its bent cover sticking up at a weird angle like an accusing
finger—and I centre Mum’s journal in the space it has vacated. The journal doesn’t
quite lie flat because there are things interleaved through the middle.

Scrapbooking with the stars
, Mum would mutter as she pasted in the backstory to some
stranger’s life. It was crazy the stuff they thought was important to show her. I
remember one woman bringing in a cake-baking trophy, another one a Grade 5 piano
certificate. Like it had any bearing on the outcome of her life.

I stare at the cheap leatherette cover, wolfing down the pide so quickly that I’m
missing my mouth and hitting my chin, wanting to get the eating out of the way so
that I won’t leave stains on the pages. Simon raises his eyebrows, fascinated, as
I chug half the bottle of electric-blue drink in one hit before wiping my hands clean.
But then I hesitate over the journal like it’s a live grenade.

‘You won’t know if you don’t open it,’ Simon observes mildly through a mouthful of
chewed food.

Stung, I flip the journal open so forcefully there’s a hollow
clap
as the cover hits
the Formica tabletop. There are marbled endpapers pasted on the insides of the book
in a vomity pattern of pale blues and reds, like an oil slick on water. On the facing
page, over the general impression
of vomit, I see that Mum has taped a small diagram.
It’s an astrological chart without any identifying attributions: no name, date, natal
longitude, latitude.

Just a bleached-looking photocopy, so pale it could be a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy.
But the drawing is in Mum’s hand, and the chart must have been important to
her because
it’s the very first thing in the journal. I can’t stop myself from reaching out and
touching it as though it might speak to me and tell me where she has gone.

But, of course, it doesn’t.

‘It could be for anyone, from any time,’ I say aloud, my eyes running across the
signs and annotations.

Simon swallows loudly, leaning forward with interest, and I swear I almost hear his
fearsome, gigantic brain kicking up a gear, ready to suck down and master something
new. ‘
What
—
?
’ he begins.

I make a duck beak with my hand to shut him up, the same way Mum and I used to silence
each other, and he actually laughs. Flushing, I run my finger over the photocopied
glyphs, one after the other, and I’m talking before I realise I’m talking. ‘Sun in
Aries and the fourth house indicates ambition, obstinacy, restlessness, brilliance,
sensitivity, quickness to anger, a desire for greater security, a strong maternal
influence.’

Simon has stopped eating now. The usual faint expression of scorn he wears around
me is curiously absent. What did he declare once, during Physics? Oh, yeah:
He who
dies with the most skills, wins
. I feel a savage satisfaction that he will never,
ever get
this
the way I do.

‘Moon in Capricorn,’ I continue, ‘and Capricorn ascendant indicates a reserved person
with few friends.’ The words tumble out of me as if I am channelling
her
voice.
‘Pisces and Saturn in the fourth house says the person may be marked for life by
a tumultuous upbringing, and this area here?’ I jab at the sign:

‘It’s roughly moon square Saturn indicating a disturbed relationship with the maternal;
family problems, abandonment,
lack
.’ I run my finger over the chart, seeing this
pattern repeated in Saturn square the ascendant. ‘Life will be difficult for this
person, and solitude will be forced upon them, rather than looked for, or wanted.’

It’s like I’m reading it all aloud from a book. Except that
I
am the book and the
words are somehow written in my blood. All these years I have denied
the knowledge
,
as Mum rather grandly called her skill, but it soaked in anyway, because I’m a freak.

Things come back to me, all the time. I’ll be asleep, and then I won’t be; and there
will be these words in my head: from an advert or a song, or a book about time travel
that I haven’t held for years. I might look them up, hours later, and see them repeated
on the internet, or on the page, word-for-word, and feel a wave of absolute coldness.

Like the time I passed a woman asking her friend if a movie she’d seen was any good,
and the friend had replied,
‘Shit yeah! It’s really deep, and it’s got all these underlying themes and shit.’

That happened years ago, before I’d even grown boobs, on a train platform in Nowra.
All I’d done was walk past these two women and now those words are stuck in my head,
for always. Whenever I see a deep film—one with themes and shit—I’ll think about
those two women and wonder what they’re doing, whether they’re still engaging in
filmic discourse, on a distant train platform, in the sun.

Snippets eavesdropped from strangers: all that’s in me, along with the jingles and
the songs, the poems and the passages. I can’t run away from the words. I carry them
with me, like a carapace: my curse, and my armour, growing heavier and heavier.

With a groan, I plunge my hands into my heavy fall of loose, wavy hair and shove
it back again over my shoulders, making sure my left ear is covered. Simon pushes
his plate away, even though he’s only eaten half his meal. He wipes his mouth carefully,
steepling his fingers together on the table in front of him. ‘You know,’ he says,
‘that could be
me
you’re talking about. No shit.’ My eyes fly to his over the top
of the photocopied chart. His mouth quirks up at the corners when he sees he has
my attention. ‘Brilliant, ambitious, friendless, marked by tragedy.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I say sharply. ‘This can’t be
yours
. She didn’t know you.
She never even met you. You have
plenty of friends. You’re the school freaking
captain
.’

To forestall him saying anything more, I turn over to the first of the internal pages
of
the
journal. It’s headed by an underlined name:
Elias Herman Kircher
. Under it,
Mum
has
written:
Horary reading. Date he is ordained to die? And how
.

‘Why would you even want to
know
?’ Simon breathes, coming around to my side of the
table and forcing me to shove over.

What follows are pages and pages of notes. How many pets the man had, the stupid
things he’d called them. The names of his estranged adult children, the houses and
places he’d lived in, the money he’d made and assets he owned. Names of companies,
names of old girlfriends, ex-wives, people he thought had swindled him, people he
thought he’d swindled. Mum had a way of loosening people up so that they talked
and talked and talked. People told her everything: their deepest, darkest secrets,
things they’d been carrying around for years. None of it might have anything to do
with their actual horoscope, but whatever they told her gave her an idea of the kind
of person she was dealing with, and how to frame the message she was about to give
them: short and sharp, like a slap, because that’s the way they liked to take their
bad news, straight up; or vague and sweet, because anything harsher than that would
completely undo them.

Based on Kircher’s birthdate, he was seventy-one years old and had never been hospitalised,
never taken a day off work. He lived to work. He’d ruined just about a million marriages
to prove the point. Every woman he’d ever come into contact with hated his guts.
The guy had enemies from every walk of life, stretching back decades.

Mum had drawn a little cartoon in one margin; a small stick-figure dog with a balloon
coming out of its mouth that said:
He seems proud of this?!

I can’t resist needling Simon. ‘Play your cards right,’ I say snidely, ‘and one day
this could be
you
.’

Simon shoots me a dark look and keeps reading.

At the end of Mum’s running notes on Kircher, we come across a rough sketch of the
astrological wheels she’d worked out for him. There is no indication that she’d ever
scheduled in the guy for the final face-to-face to give him the news, whatever that
had been. Maybe she was working from the drawing I was looking at straight into my
laptop. When she…

I feel a pang. The police can correlate all that. They have my computer.

‘Can you read this thing?’ Simon asks, glancing from Kircher’s roughed-out astro
chart to me. ‘Those questions he asked, could you answer them, do you think?’

I nod, but quickly turn the page, to stop myself doing it. It’s none of my business
if someone’s got a death wish, or
whatever. People are mental. The next two pages
are filled with taped-in photocopies of old newspaper clippings. My scalp prickles.

Simon helps me hold one of the pages flat as I smooth out a large article folded
into an upper corner. There’s a date handwritten along the margin in blue biro:
9
July, 1984
. It isn’t Mum’s writing.

‘Somebody must have given her this,’ I murmur. ‘As background.’

We start reading the article and I feel myself shrinking in my seat, my face and
body going hot and needly with distress.
Fifteen-year-old girl found naked, brutalised.
Clubbed to death on neighbour’s property.

Fleur Lucille Bawden would have been around my Mum’s age now, if some sick bastard
hadn’t used her like a wet wipe and thrown her away. He’d used a golf club, apparently,
in all sorts of inventive ways.

I fold the newspaper clipping up hurriedly as soon as I’m done, not checking to see
whether Simon’s finished because I’m feeling panicky and breathless. I flip backwards
and forwards, briefly scanning every article, and he lets me do it, without complaining.
All date from a six-month period from mid-1984 to early 1985; there’s nothing later
than that.