2

Since I’m in no immediate danger, two officers come out first thing in the morning. A tall, heavy-set man with sandy hair and a compact woman who looks only a year or two out of the academy, still fresh-faced and curious. Both are bristling with holsters, gadgets, ripstop nylon.

They recoil when I answer the door, and my hand rises to my ear. But, of course, it’s too late. The young woman’s eyes narrow thoughtfully on the melted, stumpy thing that is all that remains of my left ear, then on the waxy-looking pattern burnt into my left cheek that pulls my eye down a little at the outer corner. I see her thinking, as clearly as if a thought bubble has formed over her neat, blonde head: Abuse?

Then: Motive?

Before two lots of official ID are even folded away, I find myself babbling, ‘Ipswich house fire, late 90s; it’s on the public record.’

What’s also on record is that my father died trying to save both of us, but I don’t tell them that part. They can look that up themselves.

‘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 like 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.’