The Astrologer's Daughter (9 page)

I meet Wurbik on the ground floor. Boon’s back inside his shop, talking to a customer,
but I see his eyes slide sideways, taking in
the fuzz
gathering outside. ‘Ask him,’
I say urgently, ‘what she took. Get him to tell you. Then tell me. Please? It’s important
I know what it was.’

Wurbik nods as we mount the stairs, a police photographer and a forensics guy following
closely behind us.

When we stop on the first landing, Wurbik reminds me again: ‘She’ll be on the evening
news; it’s already on the net, just went live.’ Then he opens the door to the apartment
and the three of them fan out, making very little noise for such big men.

Upstairs, Simon—now freshly shaven, in a clean but dingy white T-shirt and grey trackpants
with frayed
cuffs—turns the TV up loud as I sweat the lentils with a spoonful of
tinned curry powder and chopped onion, then drop two cans of tomatoes right over
the top and leave it on a low flame to turn into sludge. Dinner sorted.

I get out of the kitchen in time for the lead story, which is Mum.

There is that cropped photo of her beaming, long hair hanging down across her shoulders,
big blue eyes crinkled up at the corners, my tanned and disembodied arm slung around
the base of her neck.

‘Wow, she looks young,’ Simon exclaims softly. ‘You wouldn’t—’

‘Know we were related?’ I say absently and he falls silent, listening.

I don’t really take in the words that the pretty reporter lady is using, although
some part of my brain must be ticking away, mulling them over, because later, a long
while after we’ve turned off the TV, I remember she mentioned they found Mum’s bank-issue
name tag. It was in the gutter near one of the exits to the Flagstaff Gardens, the
pin badly bent, like it had been hastily ripped off. Wurbik hadn’t mentioned that
bit, the same way Malcolm had omitted to mention that he was Homicide.

Simon’s writing
our
talk—the one about John Donne and the secret wife—sitting on
the floor at the coffee table, while I stare into space between running to answer
the
phone. It’s been ringing off the hook, with especial surges after each newsbreak
and late edition. Like every person who ever met Mum somehow caught the news and
wants to share it with me. Old clients, mostly; sobbing about how extraordinary she
was and wanting to know whether she’d be back, like I could answer that. The ones
who are digging for information, I hang up on straightaway.

‘It must be a terrible thing,’ I say aloud to the water stains on the living-room
ceiling, ‘to be so
needed
.’

Simon ignores me, his lips moving silently as he reads parts of the talk to himself.
It occurs to me that the two of us must be the two least-needed people in all the
world.

After a while, I just hang up as soon as I hear crying down the line. It’s easier
for everyone concerned, seeing as I never got around to having that standard response
ready.

‘I’m going to leave the phone on message bank,’ I say roughly, as Simon peers into
his banged-up laptop screen with a pinched expression—the one I always call his
resting
bitch face
—still ignoring me. I scoop up our dhal-encrusted dinner bowls bad-temperedly,
along with all the partially drunk cups of instant coffee that have gone cold. Still
his expression doesn’t change. ‘Going to bed?’ I bark as he continues typing and
deleting and ignoring. ‘Hey, I
said
…’

‘Yeah,’ he replies, not looking up and not missing a beat, ‘eventually. But not with
you
so stop asking and go, already. You make too much damned noise for someone
who
claims they aren’t doing anything. It’s distracting.’

Huffing away across the room, I drop all the crockery on the counter with a loud
clatter that makes him sigh, before turning back to the phone and engaging the
recorded
message
button. Mum never had it on record because she didn’t like messages building
up. She always said:
If it’s important, they’ll call back
.

But mediation is necessary tonight. And I know I’ve done the right thing when I’m
soaking our dinner things in the sink and a couple of criers get through to the recorded
machine voice and hang up abruptly, cut off mid-sob. I turn the volume on the ringer
down, conscious that Simon will be out here later, sleeping on a couch two sizes
too small for anyone. Except maybe Mum. But as I’m turning off the kitchen light,
the phone goes again, and this time there’s the
beep
and then it’s just silence being
recorded.

One cat and dog
, I count automatically.
Two cat and dog
.

I get up to ten cats, ten
dogs, and still there is only breathing. The constancy, the peculiar quality of the
waiting, the watchfulness, seem familiar, and I remember all the hang-ups. I snatch
up the handset, conscious that all this is being recorded.

Simon’s humming to himself in the other room as I say sharply, ‘Avicenna speaking.’

It might be my imagination, but the breathing seems to grow erratic, anticipatory.
Usually at this point, whoever it
is just puts the phone down. But tonight the silence
stretches out further; the faintest electronic buzz in the background. And I want
to leap into that buzzing void with questions and threats and fury, but the rational
part of me is saying in Mum’s voice:
Do not engage
. It was a lesson we learnt the
hard way from Graham of Rainbow. But the void is still open between us, beckoning,
and unable to stop myself I grate, ‘Who
is
this? What do you
want
?’

The breathing stops altogether and it’s unbearable: whether to hang up or hang on.
Then across the line I hear a voice—hoarse and male—say: ‘Slut got what was coming.
And you’ll get yours, too.’

I scream, dropping the handset like it’s made of maggots, and hear Simon overturning
the coffee table behind me as he surges to his feet.

PART 2

Be prepared to journey to a place where there’s the likelihood of pain.

10

Even though I don’t know the faintest thing about him, Wurbik is the closest thing
to a father I have at this point. His dry, no-nonsense voice is the first thing I
hear in the mornings and the last one I hear before bed. And he hadn’t lied. He’d
been there when I’d rung him yesterday, near midnight—all my words sticking together
in a writhing, ugly, fearful mass—and he’d told me calmly what to do next.

But he also passed on a surprise request, and I’d surprised myself by saying
yes
because it’s what Mum would have done.

So Simon and I rock up to the St Kilda Road police complex at 7.30 on Sunday morning.
Wurbik, in his
trademark dark suit, meets us: me clutching my home telephone that’s
trailing wires all over the carpet in the empty reception area; Simon politely shaking
Wurbik’s hand after introducing himself.

I offer Wurbik the machine and he ducks away briefly to hand it to someone. ‘You’ll
get to take that back as soon as this is over,’ he says, and then he leads us back
out of the building, taking us across the deserted six-lane road to a café just setting
up for the day. It’s a symphony of curved concrete with subdued interior lighting,
white tablecloths, shiny silverware and bone-china plate: you can see that right
away through the spotless floor-to-ceiling windows. Simon—in his Bluey jacket and
beanie—hesitates at the threshold as he takes in the incomprehensible stone sculpture
dominating the middle of the room that more than anything else says:
fancy people
eat here
.

The look of uncertainty on Simon’s face makes me reach out and give his elbow a tentative
squeeze. As we languish by the door, feeling hot and stupid and out of place, Wurbik
crosses the room and greets the head waiter, who seems to be expecting us. He’s a
young buzz-cut guy in black-framed nerd glasses and a three-piece suit. He shows
the three of us to a table for four set up behind one part of a high concrete wave.
It’s utterly private back here, and quiet; a pendant shade casting moody light all
over our table.

Wurbik dismisses the hovering waiter but none of us sits. To my look of enquiry,
Wurbik replies, ‘He demanded that we approach you to finish the job; chewed Mal’s
bosses’ ears off till they said for Mal to make it just go away and he handballed
it to me. The police force, you see, believes in astrology like it believes in the
tooth fairy.’ He sighs. ‘I’m sure he’ll be here in a minute.’

‘I’ll get out of your hair as soon as he does,’ Simon offers. He’d insisted on coming
with me, but being here has done something to the way he carries himself. He is hunched
over, wary.

Wurbik, shooting the two of us a shrewd glance, sits himself down at the far end
of the table with his notebook out like he’s about to conduct a job interview. I
slide into the seat beside him, my back against the concrete curve, regretting my
sartorial choices—another polar fleece hoodie over a pair of denim-look leggings—as
soon as a fit-looking old man in a navy blazer, pink jumper and pressed chinos, with
thinning white hair and a pencil moustache, comes through the gap.

The waiter holds out a chair deferentially, but the older man comes straight around
the table, towards me, and I am engulfed by a cloud of sharp, expensive-smelling
cologne. To my right, Wurbik stands, and Simon starts backing towards the door. But
I remain frozen in my chair, head tilted up at an awkward angle as the stranger holds
his hand out and says smoothly, ‘Avicenna? I’m
so sorry
to ask at a time like this,
but it’s very
important
to me. And I wanted it “on the record”, so to speak.’

‘Because evil never sleeps?’ Wurbik enquires dryly from the other side of the table,
and the stranger says, ‘No, it doesn’t,’ without a pause, shaking my hand with a
cool, firm grip.

Simon’s almost made it out of our private area but the old man—still clasping my
hand—looks at Simon with his alert blue eyes and says, ‘Stay,
stay
, young man. I
insist
.’

The old man’s speech is full of sharp emphases, like he’s used to giving
orders to idiots and having them instantly obey. Simon backtracks towards me, sliding
his beanie off his head and into a pocket, while the old man takes the seat beside
mine, opposite Wurbik. Simon takes the last one, across from me. I have to remind
myself, as I look around the table at all the serious faces, that it’s a Sunday morning,
and this is the new normal.

Pulling my wad of photocopied notes from my backpack, I place them on the table
even though I won’t need to refer to them. After I hung up from Wurbik last night,
I spent hours analysing Mum’s handwritten notes, the finished chart, doing a progressed
one of my own, just to check. And I wonder again, just like Simon did, why on earth
anyone would want to
know
the date and way they were going to die.

Elias Kircher—the first client in Mum’s current journal—takes out a slim silver voice
recorder and places it on the table, pressing the
record
button. Then he folds his
hands together and rests them in his lap. Wurbik looks at the tiny machine then surprises
me by sliding out one of his own and placing it beside Kircher’s. It starts with
a tiny
whirr
when Wurbik states his name and rank, the date, place and time.

‘We’re here today for a number of reasons,’ Wurbik continues smoothly, like he’s
rehearsed it. ‘We called you, sir, because your details cropped up as part of a current
investigation. Independently of that call, you rang the hotline, yesterday, after
seeing an online news article regarding Joanne Nielsen Crowe.’

Mr Kircher inclines his head once and says, ‘I called straight away. I was shocked.
I’d been expecting her to call
me
for days, you see, so she was very much
top-of-mind
.’

He looks at me then, and it feels like I’m in a play where I don’t know my lines.
There’s this sensation, like I’m about to step out into the abyss and there’s no
safety net, and I will freefall.

‘For the record,’ Wurbik adds, ‘you have been ruled out as a suspect in Joanne Nielsen
Crowe’s disappearance and this meeting with her daughter, Avicenna Crowe, also attended
by Simon Thorn’—Simon widens his grey-green eyes at me across the table—‘has been
instigated
at your insistence, Mr Kircher, and doesn’t form part of the official
investigation.’

Kircher’s blue eyes bore into mine as he states, simply, ‘Nevertheless, there are
answers, and I want them.’ Then everyone looks at me expectantly.

I clear my throat, a surge of acid in my stomach. ‘I’ve never done this before,’
I say gruffly.

‘But you
can
, Avicenna,’ Kircher replies, placing his hands on the table in front
of him, ‘and that’s the
vital
thing. The detectives assured me that you possessed
your mother’s…talents. Please begin.’

I push the fancy table settings in front of me to one side so that I am facing him
down an expanse of snowy-white cloth. ‘You asked for a horary reading.’ My voice
is slow and hesitant. ‘Elias Herman Kircher. You wanted to know the date you are
ordained to die.’ I pause to swallow. ‘And you want to know
how
.’

Elias Kircher leans forward in his chair, replying softly, but clearly, for the benefit
of the voice recorder, ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ His face is eager, alight with interest,
and his eyes are fixed on me like there is no one else around.

‘Uh, okay,’ I continue, discomfited. ‘So your natal chart indicates that you’re a,
ah, Capricorn, and your progressed aspects between Jupiter and Neptune—the uh, what
did Mum call it? “Millionaire Aspect”—and between Jupiter and Saturn are really very
exceptional and bear out your
luxurious, um, lifestyle, and ability to get and maintain
enormous wealth. But there’s a repeated pattern of afflictions in your fifth and
seventh houses—to do with love and marriage, the moon and Venus, you know—which indicates
a strong attraction to the, ah, female sex, but a general lack of harmony and support
in your relationships. So I’m seeing multiple marriages, lots of divorces. You also
have extraordinarily powerful aspects for accumulating property, but as Uranus rules
your ninth house, and you see how Jupiter sits right
here…
?’

I point to the photocopied chart. Wurbik half stands and pushes the page across the
pristine tablecloth to Kircher, who receives it without even glancing at it.

‘This indicates constant travel in connection with the maintenance of your wealth
and a level of upheaval and risk-taking that—’

‘Yes,
yes
,’ Kircher’s voice is impatient now. ‘That’s all very well, but it’s really
very
simple
. All I want to know are
two
things. I don’t want the helicopter-level,
tourist’s version of my life. I am
living
it. I just want to know
when
and
how
.’

I feel the blood
whoosh
up into my face. ‘I suck at this, I’m sorry,’ I mumble. Mum
would have known that this guy took his bad news straight up, no preamble. ‘But Mum’s
not here,’ I remind him, ‘and I’m not
her
. She would know how to tell you. She just
had this way with people.
I’ve spent my entire life
avoiding
these kinds of moments.’

I find myself emphasising my words just like Kircher does, so that the idiot might
somehow understand how much he is asking of me.

‘And you shouldn’t ask these kinds of questions,’ I add beseechingly. ‘You’re probably
really
rich and
really
important and
really
smart, so you will understand me when
I say that these things are
self-fulfilling
. I’ve seen it, like, a million times
before—Mum tells someone what’s going to happen and then it happens. No matter how
many times she told them: “These are just planetary conditions, you have the power
to influence the outcome, free will, blah, blah, blah.” Whatever she warned them
of
would just happen
. People behave like sitting ducks. Knowing what’s around the
corner has the power to make you freeze in place and then it just
gets
you; the future
you’re so scared of. I don’t want to tell you, Mr Kircher. I’m
afraid
for you.’

The whole café seems very quiet after I finish talking, as if even the waitstaff,
the short-order cooks in their exposed, gleaming, million-dollar kitchen are all
listening with bated breath. I’m sweating so furiously that I swipe my forehead,
inelegantly, with the back of one hand and it comes away glistening.

It’s true, I’m afraid for him. I’ve
never
seen stars like his.

‘Nevertheless,’ Kircher says, quiet but adamant. ‘I want
to know.’ The only sign
of nervous anticipation? A single fingerstroke across his neat moustache.

We stare at each other for a long time before I gesture at Kircher to return the
sheet of paper. He looks down, before jabbing his forefinger into the page, and pushing
it back across the table. There are smudged notes in lead pencil on the back, scribble
only I can read, though I spent hours on it, working long after Simon turned the
lights off in the living room. I’d gathered all of Mum’s almanacs around me, with
the internet locked and loaded for backup. All in all, I managed maybe a couple of
hours’ sleep, tops, before my alarm went off, but I know—like I know my own name—that
I’m right.
We’re
right, me and Mum.

I’d written:

Unnatural death signified at the hand of
open enemies
. Sun, moon, ascendant and ruling
sign,
fourth,
fifth, seventh and eighth houses, all afflicted with no mitigating
benefic
aspects.
Multiple eclipses. Multiple malefic angles and planets (both Mars
and
Saturn).
Confirmed by natal vertex rising, conjoined with Neptune.

I’d only managed to sketch out a shaky-looking chart, because Mum really did take
every compass in the house with her and I’d been forced to use my school-issue plastic
protractor. But the glyphs are in the right places, progressed by several degrees
from Mum’s own, like a dial has been
turned, or a focus magnified, because everything
moves inexorably forward, time cannot be stopped. And what they say, those glyphs—when
read alongside the chart in Mum’s journal—are undeniable. Reading the two charts
together is like a slow-motion death-scene tracking shot in a horror movie. The first
chart foreshadows the badness to come. But the second?

I swallow. Taking a deep breath, I hold up Mum’s chart to Kircher’s gaze. ‘An astrologer
creates one of these on the basis of the time the question the subject of the horary
reading is
received
and
understood
. This is the answer Mum came up with based on
the meeting she had with you.’ I flip the piece of paper around to show my workings
on the back. ‘This is mine. I received and understood “the questions” last night,
at 11.13pm, based on my discussions with Detective Wurbik here.’

Wurbik chimes in with, ‘We actually agreed the time over the phone, both of us looking
at our watches. For the, ah, record.’ His voice is faintly sceptical.

Kircher inclines his head again, in acknowledgment.

I clear my throat. ‘I have to tell you that the two charts are entirely consistent.
I also have to tell you that it is usually very hard to predict a person’s exact
date of death with certainty. Astrologers can do it for themselves, obviously, because
of their ability to understand the themes present at their own birth, and then read
the flowering
of that potential in subsequent progressions of their own natal chart.’

‘So?’ Kircher says eagerly. ‘Spit it out, child! I’m more than ready to
receive
the
answers. As you might gather, conventional methods have so far
failed
me.’

I know every word of what I’ve written off by heart, but I find that I can’t raise
my eyes from the page. I’m a terrible coward, because I read aloud the second part
first, the
how
versus the
when
.