‘Who?’

Petra ignored her. The grime artist had become so popular that white middle-aged, middle-class shirefolk were dropping his name and lyrics. There was no doubt Suki knew of him; she was being deliberately obtuse. ‘Admittedly it was just a course or something. Wasn’t compelling enough to make him want to give up the bright lights of London for good. I also read Nathaniel Hawthorne lived here for a while.’

‘Scarlet Letter Hawthorne? Is that so?’ This piqued Suki’s interest, as Petra thought it might. But she was surprised Suki didn’t know this already; she wasn’t one to pass up any new bit of local witchery-related arcanum.

‘Our town didn’t seem to impress Hawthorne all that much.’

‘Well, he’s an insensate plodder then,’ Suki said. She liked to put on the heiress-in-forced-exile-in-the-salt-mines-of-the-provinces act, but she’d snap to Leamington’s defence if it was criticised. In her less guarded moments she’d pronounce that Leamington was an island of creativity and liberal sensibility in a wasteland of petty conservatism. ‘But I must add that factoid to my list. It’s up there with Crowley.’

‘What about Crowley?’

‘Don’t tell me you don’t know that? Aleister Crowley was born here. Right on Clarendon Square.’

‘Huh, that’s something.’ Despite herself, Petra was impressed. Crowley – whack-job spiritualist, Satanist honcho, proto-hippie free spirit, call him what you will – was someone people would have heard of. She hadn’t heard that name for ages, but she’d had some high-school friends who’d fancied themselves occultists. It was what kids did back then, before flaying yourself in public under the bright lights of social media became the enforced global teen pastime. She used to go up to the Melville Koppies with her friends and play at Wicca. The kids pretended it was just a joke when they went up there, but they performed the rituals with dead seriousness, both thrilled to access their personal power and terrified of letting it out. Tania, Lyon, Kath – what had happened to them?

She hadn’t thought of those days for ages – it seemed so long ago; another life, a world away. She’d really allowed herself to become mundane, secular. Even though she’d never been religious, she’d had a sense of the spiritual back then. Later, as an older teen, she’d recoiled from her own embarrassing credulity and left all that behind. It was stupid, and Crowley was just a psychotic egoist. But right now, that vast distance between here and that thirteen-year-old girl in the candlelit hills on the other end of the world collapsed, and a connection between those two lives clicked into place. They were the same life after all; Petra was still the same girl.

‘His parents were brewers,’ Suki said.

‘Ah, that explains it,’ Petra said, quickly stuffing the ghosts back into their box. ‘He was a bit of a dick, though, wasn’t he? A poser, a fake. Like a two-bit cult leader.’ She was being deliberately provocative, wanting to gauge Suki’s reaction. Suki may style herself as a goth, but if she seriously was a follower of Crowley, Petra might have to reassess their friendship. ‘I picture him like an Edwardian Charlie Manson.’