‘I tell you what Iwouldpay coin for,’ he said, padding towards the kitchen. ‘Forgetting.’
‘Is that what you would rather?’ Ava fired at his retreating back. ‘You would rather forget Mother, than remember her? Would rather pretend that she never existed?’
Her father paused then, one hand resting on the doorjamb. Then he walked into the kitchen, letting the door swing shut between them.
‘Ava,’ her brother said, his voice quiet. ‘I said don’t be too hard on him.’
‘Yes, well,’ Ava huffed, blinking rapidly. ‘It’s harder to remember that in the moment.’
The kitchen door opened again, and her father padded through the sitting room without looking at either of them, a plate of eggs clutched in one hand and a fork in the other.
‘Shall I let the first one in?’ Oliver asked.
Ava blew a sharp breath through her teeth, but she nodded. ‘Although I don’t know how one slips “crumpet” into conversation naturally.’
Two and a quarter hours later, Ava had not uttered the word ‘crumpet’ once, though she felt as though she had stepped onto a merry-go-round, and it was spinning ever faster.
People never came to her because they wished to call up unhappy memories. No one wished to line up the small, scratching moments of their life and feel them sink their claws in again.
It was usually only one thing people wished to remember.
Love.
The feeling of being loved. The feeling of loving someone else. A child. A spouse. A mother. A grandfather. It was those golden moments of life that people wanted to not only remember, but clutch close. To keep forever.
And that was why she was still sitting here, long after the last woman had left, with a tear-streaked face, and but one sentence written in stark black ink in her notebook.
I cannot do it.
‘So?’ Oliver asked, coming to sit beside her. She hadn’t even noticed the kitchen door creak open; hadn’t noticed him walk in. ‘How many wanted to become clients?’
He was baking something, for now the smell of it was wafting into the sitting room: sugary sweet, and for a moment she was six again, and her mother was going to come walking through the door, her blonde-brown hair scraped into a tight bun.
‘All of them,’ Ava said, sinking into the cushions, one hand reaching to try and rub some of the tension from behind her eyebrows. ‘But it doesn’t matter.’
‘All of them! But that’s wonderful, isn’t it?’
She turned to look at her brother. ‘Oliver, I can’t do it anymore.’
He huffed a breath between his lips. ‘Notthisagain—’
‘No,’ she said – her voice low. Urgent. ‘You don’t understand. I can’tdo it, anymore. I can’t … it doesn’twork. No matter how hard I push. No matter how much I try it just … it doesn’t work.’
He blinked at her a little. ‘But … I’veseenyou do it. On stage.’
She shook her head, her chest squeezing. ‘When I began performing under Ma’s name, we used stooges. Lillian had them planted in the crowd to make it seem as though they were audience members, but it was all scripted. All planned.’
Because after everything that’d happened with Jem, she’d found that something had changed. She couldn’t keep all her worries, all her fears, in the darkness anymore. Instead they’d begun to follow her on stage – and the more they followed, the worse it’d become. But Lillian wouldn’t remove her name from the marquee – and so the only other option left was to lie. And so, when the critic had called her act eye-wash, when he’d called her ‘naught but a storyteller –a peddler of false tales’, he’d been right. There’d been no truth in it anymore, no heart in it.
There’d been nothing real about it.
Oliver’s brow furrowed, and he sat a little straighter on the settee. ‘I’ve seen you do it properly though, Ava. And not just on stage, either. Remember? In the storeroom, with Jem?’
She pressed a fingernail into the palm of her hand, pinching away the memory. ‘But that wasbefore. After everything happened with Jem … I don’t know. It felt as though it broke something within me – whatever tether I’d had to it had been snapped. And I just … I couldn’t do it anymore.’
Oliver’s mouth opened, and then closed. ‘You didn’t breathe a word of this to me,’ he said, his voice low.
‘Because telling you would’ve made it real,’ she said. ‘And I didn’t want to make it real.’
