18

Now that I am home, and in my pyjamas, the tears won’t come.

The rock I am hauling seems heavier than ever, but I lift it effortlessly as I unplug my home phone before taking cans of creamed corn and stock out of the kitchen cupboards, dumping their contents into a saucepan. Then I microwave a hunk of frozen chicken until it’s hot on the outside, but still frozen in the middle, chopping it up haphazardly and throwing it in until I have something resembling soup going. I season the whole mess and stir an egg through it so that the white flares out into streamers resembling drowned blossoms, before turning the flame down and washing up. The whole time I tell myself I must be a bad daughter because I do not cry.

The tears still do not come as I lay out blankets and pillows on the couch avoiding the squat, blank shape of the TV in the corner. The worst has already happened; there’s no need for the relevant footage, or an accompanying voice over; blow-by-blow coverage:

SES volunteers found her bloodied shirt, hanging in the lower branches of a tree–
Disturbed undergrowth–
Strange circular impressions in the topsoil–
Police sources say the blood trail went for almost six hundred metres up the mountainside before abruptly ceasing.

While I’m cleaning my teeth and trying to brush out the worst knots in my hair, my mobile goes off on the vanity unit beside me. It’s Simon, with a two-word text that says only: I’m outside.

Ignoring the reams of missed calls and messages—Wurbik and Vicki amongst them—I let Simon in. Neither of us speaks. We are both bad children, for our eyes are dry. I know that nothing could ever surprise us again. We will be impervious.

He sways a little on the spot and I put my arm around his waist gingerly—conscious of all his wounds, both visible and invisible—and lead him to the made-up couch in the living room. He lets me hold him lightly for a second, then his plastic bags slide out of his fingers and he lays down with his back to me, fully clothed. I douse all the lights except for the lamp that turns everything in its vicinity a soft orange. Even from the darkened kitchen I can see his outline, shaking. There’s the soup, of course, but nobody wants it. So I turn off the gas and put the covered pot in the fridge.

As quietly as I can, I slide Hugh’s packet of papers off the kitchen bench and take it and my phone into my bedroom, closing the door behind me. I’m not doing these readings for Hugh, I tell myself fiercely, who is nothing, and can never be anything to me. I am doing it for the person who was murdered—it wasn’t an accident, Hugh made that clear enough—on 9 July more than a decade before I was born.

Already the problem has arisen of what I should do if the answer, in the case of either man, is: Yes. But I park that for later because I’m good at compartmentalising. Grief has taught me that: how to batten down the hatches; seal off the affected areas.

Setting aside the two sets of handwritten details, I fan the rest of the papers out across my nubbly bedspread. There’s a URL crawling along the bottom of each page from an obscure astrology website I’ve never heard of; research from the internet that Hugh thought was important for me to read, as background.

What had Mum said once? They show you the darndest things, Avi.

And they do. I’ve had more windows into my mother’s life than I could ever wish for, and yet she remains mysterious, out-of-reach, unknowable. When I think of her now, she comes bathed in that soft, red-gold light of my dream, as remote as the stars.

There are computer-generated astrological charts interspersed amongst the pages Hugh provided, the symbols coloured in baby pinks and blues and greens. Curious, I backtrack until I find the last relevant subheading, helpfully outlined in green highlighter:

CASE STUDY 3
The Descendants of Beverley Eunice Crowe,
Astrologer (Australia)

Every hair on my body standing on end, I read:

Beverley Eunice Crowe was the first in a recorded matrilineal line of soothsayers with whom Death was reputed to ‘walk’. She was said to have told one querent that Death had blue eyes and a calm and cultured demeanour, who ‘is a great personal comfort’. When her body was discovered in bizarre circumstances in a client’s apartment in Manly, New South Wales, Australia, in 1962, there were allegations of occult practices that were never substantiated and no culprit was ever charged. But when her only daughter, Joyce, hung up her own shingle, many practitioners in this branch of horoscopic astrology—

My eyes fly down the page and two passages leap out at me as if outlined in flames:

Joyce was known to have credited seeing Death at several critical junctures in her life. Like her mother, Joyce also died before she reached the age of forty-five and it is well known that she foretold the exact date and circumstances of her premature and tragic death based on the Pleiades rising in opposition to her ascendant in conjunction with the sun in baleful opposition to Mars.

Joanne is said to have surpassed both her mother and her grandmother in intuitive ability, but her life has been marred by more than its fair share of grief and tragedy due to a prolonged period of that well-known condition ‘Saturn hunting the moon’. It is also well known in the horary community that Joanne found, then swiftly lost, her soul mate—a man whose natal Venus, it may be added, was conjunct that most fated of indicators, her natal vertex. After his death, she is said to have been ‘destroyed’, but as Pluto is her planetary ruler, together with the calming influence of Neptune—marrying transformation and arcane power with wisdom, sensitivity, vision, empathy and compassion—Joanne did recover and continues to do great work in the field of—

There’s one natal chart for Bev, one for Joyce.

One for Mum and one for…me.

Refusing to look at the charts— our charts!—I fire up my laptop and type in the URL for one of the pages I’m holding and it’s really there, all out there, for people to see. We Crowes are a case history accessible to every wacko spiritualist nut-job on the planet with WiFi. There aren’t any direct hyperlinks to our names, thank God, so we’re unlikely to ever trend on Google, but some astrology tragic in Chicago, Illinois, has compiled a Ridley’s on the best-known horary practitioners in recent history, and as I scroll through paragraph after paragraph of lunacy, I see that I get a mention, too:

It remains to be seen whether Joanne’s daughter Avicenna (named auspiciously after the great Persian polymath) manifests any—

Mum wouldn’t even tell me her birthdate, but her chart, her chart, is right here. On the screen and in my hand. Wurbik would have seen this already, and Mal; anyone else who’d cared to look. Suddenly, all the weird little questions, the glances between the two men that day at the police complex, they all make sense.

I shut my laptop down and push everything aside for later, only keeping the piece of paper with Hugh’s handwriting on it in front of me. I tell myself that after today, I will never do this again. Because no one in Chicago, Illinois, or anywhere else in the world, has the right to know whether I manifest a common cold, let alone ‘the knowledge’. After these two readings are done, I will never again frame a question for the heavens to answer.

Some things may have no answer, see. I accept that. But some questions should never be asked. Boon was right: this thing we Crowes can do is dangerous.

I hesitate for a while over whether to assign the quesited thing—the issue of another’s murder—to the seventh house governing other people and open enemies, or to the fifth house governing sex and pleasure.

Something—the murder date, or maybe the weird frisson of discord between Hugh and Rosso, or just the way Hugh had looked: kind of wild and sick and desperate—makes me plump for the fifth house. The house and its ruler will largely determine the quesited thing, the answer, and I hope this gut feeling is right.

It takes me a few hours to progress the men’s natal charts to the night in question. After I finish annotating the transits into the outer wheel for each man, it becomes clear that the two are implicated in some personal grief or misfortune for the same day and time period. The older one was physically injured—that much is obvious from the afflictions to Mars and Uranus and his progressed sun, with trouble coming through siblings, or family connections. But the younger man…

I lay my pen down and rock for a long time, my knees drawn up under my chin, hoping that none of what I’m looking at is true. At birth, the younger man’s natal stars show multiple afflictions affecting his natal sun and moon. There are harsh aspects between Mars and the sun conjunct Venus, between Mars and the ascendant, between the moon and Jupiter, between both the luminaries and Mars. The ‘potential’ outlined in the man’s radix is for abuse coming through the male parent, with deep hostility or neglect on the female side. Couple those stars with multiple afflictions to natal Mercury—governing the mind—and what you have is the ‘potential’ for a walking time bomb: an individual who is at once argumentative, secretive, destructive, deceitful and hypersensitive, but also exceptionally well spoken, intelligent, ambitious and decisive. Cunning, but resourceful. A survivor.

Okay.

Now progress the natal conditions forward to the evening of 9 July, 1984, throw several unusual conjunctions between Pluto and other fateful nodes into the mix—stimulated by transits of malefic Mars and Saturn—and this much is obvious: the younger man had some kind of meltdown that night, reaching a dangerous turning point. Violence and force were involved. While the man’s own death is not indicated in his eighth house stars, death is indicated in that house via afflictions to Venus and the moon from a number of sources—Jupiter, for one, and the transiting lunar nodes. The man lost someone he considered a loved one (female); and the indications are that the loved one’s destruction came by his own hand in a singular instance resembling madness.

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.’