The Astrologer's Daughter by Rebecca Lim

Joanne
insisted on taking the top floor this time. No changes , she said; I wasn’t to do
anything. I couldn’t stop her.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, confused. ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
    Boon turns back and reaches into a wooden cubicle at head height, taking down a silver
key on a short length of red string that had been hanging on a hook I hadn’t even
noticed was there. ‘She borrows this sometimes. Just to sit. For thinking , she said.
Your mother said you didn’t need to know—I wasn’t to show you, it wouldn’t help,
you wouldn’t remember—but you should see it. It’s part of your history.’
    He takes his own set of keys out of his khaki trouser pockets and comes around the
counter.
    First flicking off a bank of lights, he locks the shop’s main door from the inside
and leads me into the stairwell that smells of decaying boxes, before locking up
the shop from the outside. Pocketing his keys, he begins mounting the stairs. ‘The Mei Hua Bean Sprout Company ,’ I say in sudden realisation. ‘That was my dad ?’
    Boon’s soft laughter precedes us both. ‘It is your grandma . It should have been your
dad’s. Ping sold the business, years after he died, to someone who came out from
the same village, on the same boat, in the late 1950s. She’s very traditional. She
only kept the business name. And this building.’
    I go rigid in shock, but Boon doesn’t see because he’s already opening the mysterious
door on the second floor that leads to the apartment only ever filled with silent
voices. He swings the door wide and says apologetically, ‘It’s very dusty. It’s been
left exactly the way it was when they lived here, when you were born…’

    Boon doesn’t come past the threshold. He just presses the key on a string into my
hand and tells me that I will know where to find him.
    The light is fading, but I don’t touch the switches, or any of the surfaces, which
are covered in a furry pelt of dust. I stand in the doorway. The apartment is a carbon
copy of ours upstairs, only nicer. It’s dusty, sure, with a closed-up, musty smell.
But it still looks like someone could be living here. Every magazine on the coffee
table is stacked in a neat tower; the furniture is heavy, minimalist, matching,
all in hues of black and grey and coffee. A man-cave, bach-pad; frozen in time for
years.
    But then I start seeing feminine touches. A couple of small framed Japanese woodcuts
on the walls: of blossoms and geisha, 19th century-style; a couple of handcrafted
throw pillows on the brown leather Chesterfield that have Mum written all over them.
I recognise the quilting blocks she must have used, because years later she was still
making the same ones out of the fabric from T-shirts I’d grown out of. There are
pillows just like them, upstairs in our apartment.
    She’d called the pattern The Mariner’s Compass : a large, foregrounded, four-pointed
star with a series of four rays set on the cross coming out from behind it, with
a smaller, eight-pointed star sitting behind, for backgrounding. Mum taught it to
me , she’d said once, piecing fabric together in front of the TV. One day, darl, I’ll
teach it to you . And I think I drawled something along the lines of: I don’t do craft
and you can’t bloody make me, so quit asking.
    The cushions have a Mariner’s Compass set into the middle in an alternating pattern
of blues and reds. I almost cross the rug and pick one of them up to hug it to me,
to see if it smells of her—all warm vanilla and rose oil—but I force myself to stand
still and just look .
    This must have been where she came to commune with her dead. I can almost feel him,
in here with me, the air heavy with presence.
    There are two pairs of slippers by the side entry to the galley kitchen, in his-and-hers
colours and sizes, and my eyes sting at how well suited they seem to each other,
how they’ve been placed together with such care. It’s clear from the way the