‘It was more thanone, Oliver.’
‘Still, it’s no reason—’
‘I lost my nerve up there,’ Ava said, her voice coming out a little louder than she’d intended. ‘I froze. And there was an entire audience of people there to see it.’
Oliver wrinkled his nose as though that were a trifling worry – and not a career-ending mistake. ‘All the same, people still talk of you, you know. The act? “The Memory Binder”.’
Ava gave her brother a flat look. ‘I’m sure they do.’
‘I imagine Lillian would have you back. Even after—’
‘I don’t want to work for that woman again,’ Ava said sharply – and her mind stamped the thought down with:and I never shall. The Mersey would have to up and leave Liverpool before she agreed tothat. ‘In fact,’ she continued. ‘I’ve made the decision to put the whole thing quite behind me.’
Oliver raised one, questioning eyebrow. ‘The whole thing?’
‘Mesmerism,’ Ava said. ‘Memory work. All of it.’
Oliver’s expression slackened. ‘What—?Why?’
‘I just believe it’s time to turn my attention to something new.’
She ignored the bewildered look upon her brother’s face, and gripped the bicycle’s other handlebar, to help steady it. Oliver had broken his dominant hand, and so they would both be forced to try and walk the thing home with their off-hand, which no doubt would make it zig and zag all the way.
‘But it’s your gift,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s your passion. And you’re good at it! And … and …’ His eyebrows furrowed. ‘And what about Pa?’
Ava felt the old tick of something in the pit of her stomach, a clockwork spoke long quiet that had begun to coil again. She turned her focus to the sky instead, and the heavy clouds pulling inland.
‘HowisPa?’
Oliver tilted his head up and frowned. ‘Bad.’
‘How bad?’ she asked, curling her cold fingers more firmly against the handlebar.
‘You’ll see soon enough,’ said her brother quietly. ‘Now come on. The rain looks like it has eased.’
Chapter Two
Their home was the last in a row of sagging brick houses east of the docks, serenaded night and day by the circling caw of seagulls.
The minuscule herb garden her mother had kept between the garden gate and the front door was now a thorny tangle of weeds, and the lamp that hung by the front bore no candle, only a sad pool of wax.
Oliver stopped at the black iron gate, blocking Ava’s path with his bicycle. ‘Go easy on him,’ he said, pushing sodden strands of hair from his forehead. ‘Please.’
‘And will he go easy on me?’ She looked at the house, at the dark windows, and wondered whether her father had already gone to bed. That wouldn’t be surprising, seeing as he hated homecomings almost as much as he hated goodbyes, although the fizzle in her stomach told her that itwasdisappointing.
It had been months since they’d seen one another.
Oliver shrugged, and Ava huffed a half-breath through her lips as she followed him up the three stone steps to their front door, wondering what level of ‘bad’ she would find behind it.
At its best, ‘bad’ meant her father sat in his armchair, and nursed the same bottle of amber liquid for nigh on a week. At its worst, ‘bad’ meant he would forget to eat, forget to wash, forget to pay rent.
But as she stepped through the door she realized that this … this was something else.
The windows had been boarded up.
Here, in the hallway, and then again in the sitting room, though the cardboard wasn’t thick enough to block out the light entirely, and little threads of golden lamplight crept in from the edges. It was, however, enough to swathe everything in a pallid gloom, turning the cheerful yellow settee her mother had loved into a gloomy grey, the matching yellow curtains almost brown.
‘It’s the noise again,’ said Oliver, coming to stand in the doorway. ‘He says it’s waking him up.’
