Lou is something between a conjoined twin and a haunting. He’s the reason we got the job at Maisie Millions’ Fairground Amazements when I–when we–quit school. Lou didn’t want to quit; our teacher, Miss Bell, even offered to find the school fees somehow, but I was impatient to make my own way in the world, and it’s not like I could leave Lou behind.
Not then, anyway.
Lou loathes being an Amazement. He hunches on my shoulder, a boy-shaped shadow, a piece of night sky with the stars clouded over, hiding his face in my collar when the stares get too hard. When visitor numbers surge in summer, he ends the day like a washed-out rag.
That’s why I didn’t expect him to make such a fuss about the severance. It’s his chance to escape the fairground. He’s the one that visitors scoff at, not me. The one they’re scared of, whether or not they try to hide it; the one they accuse of being a hoax. Some kids even flick pennies at his head, to see if they pass through him or bounce off.
He doesn’t know what freedom is. He doesn’t know enough to want it.
But I do. I’ve been saving our pay. Five shillings a month. “I need to be alone,” I tell him. Speaking deliberately, watching him flinch out of the corner of my eye. “I never asked for you.”
I’m sixteen this week. Everyone my age is leaving Saint Hemlock. Marce and Jordie visit me at Maisie’s before they go; they’re the only ones from school who kept in touch. “We’re out of here.” Jordie shoves his train ticket under my nose. “But I guess you already have a job.” He gestures at the fairground, and Marce sniggers.
I shrug. “I won’t be here much longer.” I know what they think about Maisie’s: that it’s a freak’s corner, a distraction to pass time on the way to somewhere bigger and better and more important. They’re right. Maisie’s was only ever a step along the way. If not for Lou, I’d already be gone. But he frightens people, and the whole world frightens him. “Going to see the world,” I say. “On my own.”
Their eyes flick to Lou and back to me. “On your own?” Marce sounds doubtful.
I nod. “Time I went my own way.”
They’re silent, exchange glances. Jordie shrugs. Then they carry on talking as if I hadn’t said anything, about the jobs they’ll get in the city, the lives they’ll lead. They think I’m buffing. They think we belong here, me and Lou. But Lou hears me. Which was my intention. He fades, until he’s barely more than the sheen of rain on glass. He stays faded long after Marcel and Jordie have left.
Stallholders always turn a profit at Maisie’s. The crowds suspend their disbelief before they even walk through the gate, when they buy their tickets to see the Amazements; they’re credulous enough to be pay for any painted geegaw. Merchants bring their wares all the way from Plainsedge, and artisans come down from Hagfall for midwinter. There are tarot-readers and lace-makers and truffle-hunters.
The stallholders don’t introduce themselves to Lou and me, not even the ones that come back every year. They think the Amazements are frauds or freaks. I know them only by their crafts: the knife man, the blood-song woman, the ribbon maker.
Sometimes Lou says things I don’t like.
I came to help you, but I made it worse.
The hair rises on the nape of my neck, and Lou squirms because my discomfort tickles him.
I make my voice gruff. “Why are you here, then?”
You know why, he says.
Those pennies the kids throw, they fall away into Lou. They accelerate until they’re just specks among his stars. Soon, they’re too small to see. Lou’s only the size of a six-year-old child, but his depths are fathomless.
Most people don’t notice those depths. Don’t want to, maybe. “See the lights?” The kids point at Lou’s twinkling surface, the way the lights glimmer and shift. “Like fireflies.”
“It’s called phosphorescence,” their know-it-all fathers say. “Probably just some circus trick.”
The fathers wander off to ogle the Inked Princess’ tattoos, or lose all their money arm-wrestling Strong Lucy. The kids spend the rest of their pocket money on cinder toffee, or writhing knots of elvers to feed to the brine-maids in their tank. Most of them don’t give us a second thought.
But some of them stare into the inky folds of Lou’s being, the contained galaxies of his eyes. Those are the ones that don’t want to leave, weighed down by something I can’t see. The ones that want to take Lou with them.
Sometimes, he says his name’s not Lou.
The knife man can cut away anything: spirit or flesh or wood. For five shillings he’ll snip the threads that braid us close. Sever the connection that makes Lou flinch when I bruise my shin, that channels the same dreams through our separate sleep.
Lou begs me not to go through with it. Says we need each other, that he’ll miss me. He has nowhere and nobody else.
Nor do I. But I face the mirror and meet his eyes. “I have to do this,” I say. “For me.”
Lou shrinks into himself a little, then nods.
I wonder if Lou will survive the severance, but it doesn’t give me pause. The way he won’t meet my eyes, I suspect he knows that. That I’m weighing it all up in my head, deciding who’s worth what.
I was never meant to end up in Saint Hemlock. My family came from another town, though I forget its name. The year I turned six, the town we came from flooded. We lost everything, or what we thought was everything back then, before we realised how much more there was to lose. I remember rain, sandbags, the smell of bad water. The word estuary. My clothes and toys and school-books sodden and ruined. I cried about it. Hard to believe it mattered, now, things as small as that. We took the train north, my brother and parents and I, across the plains to the big cities over the salt-flats, so my parents could find work and my brother and I could carry on with school.
We fell ill on the train. Some kind of sickness we’d carried with us from the floodwater. Saint Hemlock was the only one of those whistle-stop towns on the plains that had both a graveyard and a hospital, and nobody was sure which one we’d need.
I recovered. My parents didn’t. None of us left Saint Hemlock.
My brother recovered too, but they didn’t let us stay together. I was lucky; the boy’s home took me in. I got schooling and food and clothes. Kindness, even, though I couldn’t see that until later. But my brother was old enough to work, so they sent him north alone. The salt-factories always need young workers, boys whose eyes haven’t yet burnt out on the crystalline glare off the flats. If I concentrate, I can still see his tear-blurred face, pressed against the train window. And two new holes in the graveyard.
My whole family, gone.
I guess I cared at the time. I remember the shape of caring, emptiness and loss. Fathomless depths. But I remember it only like the chill of winter when you’re inside by the fire. Not like a wound that still aches. It happened, I can describe it, but I’m not cold anymore.
I remember. I don’t feel.
When Lou arrived I was sitting on the flagstone step of Saint Hemlock Church after the funeral, turning a silver penny over and over in my hands. The pastor’s wife gave it to me. She’d seen me crying and told me to buy some toffee to cheer myself up. I guess it was sinking in for the first time, that everyone was gone.
Catch a penny, make a wish, my mother used to say. I tossed that coin up and it didn’t come down. Instead, there was a slight pressure on my shoulder. Something like the aura of a migraine, dark and glittering, snagged the corner of my eye. Lou was there.
He whispered to me–you’re not alone, something like that–and I wasn’t.
Without Lou, nobody else in the whole world would dream the same dreams as me. It would be like speaking a mother-tongue nobody else understands. So many things are untranslatable.
But I don’t need him. I’m not lonely anymore.
I should miss my family. It would sure make more sense if I did. But I was six then, and I guess there’s a whole world between six and sixteen.
Miss Bell visits after Jordie and Marce have gone. She’s the only one who remembers my birthday. She brings pumpkin cake and asks about my family. Nobody else does that, either.
“It’s a lot to carry,” she says. “You should talk about it.”
“Lou, you mean?” He flinches on my shoulder.
“Not Lou.” She smiles. “Holding on. Grief and love and loneliness. Floods and stars and endless night. All those necessary things.”
She has that misty-eyed look she got when she quoted poetry in class, but I don’t remember this one. Maybe it’s something she taught after me and Lou dropped out.
Or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. The words seem to mean something to Lou. He goes completely still. I can feel him listening intently for whatever I say next. But I only nod again, as if I have any clue what Miss Bell is talking about. I don’t know what she means by floods and stars. And I never learned how to hold on in the first place. Apart from Lou, I never carried anything.
The knife man comes in midwinter. Lou’s sad all day, curled around my neck, silvery and faint like mist among poplars. The knife is silver too. Brighter than stars or pennies. It pares Lou away. It cuts and cuts until I don’t know who’s screaming.
Then it’s over. The world spins on its edge, a coin that could fall on either side. I know Lou’s absence will change me irrevocably, but I don’t yet know how. I hold my breath; wait for his absence to crash over me, to find out whether I’ll drown.
Maybe I’ve already changed.
The first thing I ask is whether Lou’s okay.
Lou’s taller without me. Brighter. He stretches above me. His depths blaze with stars I’ve never seen. For a moment I wonder whether I’ve made a terrible mistake. Whether we can bring us back together. Whether we should. I don’t know whether to laugh in relief that we’re finally apart, or ask him to stay, or run for my sorry life. To beg his forgiveness or thank him.
(Later I’ll realise. What I should have said is goodbye.)
Here, he says, before I can speak. This is yours. He flicks something towards me. At first I can’t see anything, then a speck appears, glinting in Lou’s starlight. A silver penny, spinning end over end, accelerating closer. My hands clasp empty air. A flash of silver; a jolt that grounds itself deep inside my ribcage. Then a thudding starts up in my chest. It’s spasmodic at first, then rhythmic. Agonising.
I reel. “Lou, what . . . ?”
But he’s gone.
The grief hits then, all of it at once. Not for Lou. This is all mine: the loss he’s been carrying for me since I was six years old. It’s cold and heavy, knocks me over and over until I don’t know where up is. Sweeps me out beyond reach. It feels like how I used to imagine floodwater felt, before Lou, before the nightmares stopped. My lungs squeeze; I taste salt. And below, there’s the dark pull of it. Like Lou’s fathomless depths.
I’d forgotten, or never admitted it to myself. All these years, Lou carried my grief for me. He also carried my heart.
Late winter. When the thaw comes, I’m going north. I take snowdrops to my parents’ graves. I dream of trains hurtling out of sight, and wake up shouting for my brother.
You can guess his name.
Mostly I’m grateful; there are things a six-year-old should never have to carry. Other times, I’m not so sure. Maybe by now the loss would have become a familiar ache; time-softened. Not this stabbing agony that catches at my breath. I still twist my neck to accommodate Lou’s absence, my skeleton still cradles his bonelessness. I still look for him in the mirror. And the nightmares are back.
They’re not about knives or graveyard holes. Not even about dark water. In the bad dreams Lou and I are never cut away from each other. He’s always something between a conjoined twin and a haunting, and I never learn to carry those necessary things.
In the bad dreams, both of us go wrong.
