I really can talk to shells, you know . . .

He could remember his mother doing exactly that, ever since he was a kid. He’d loved the way that he could whisper into a shell, give it to her, and she’d tell him what the shell said in response. It was like believing in Santa Claus – he’d clung to the belief his mother was magic for a long time. Even when she was deep in the drug-induced psychosis of ice addiction, paranoid and then euphoric in dizzying cycles.

When she’d first landed in hospital, they found it so hard to identify her, it was a long time before they were even able to reach out to let him know she was there. They claimed she had a grandson who came to visit her, but then the police had come asking questions and they realised she wasn’t who she said she was . . .

From what he’d pieced together after that, in the later years of her life she’d been living in Hobart, moving from drug house to drug house . . . Ahab had always tried to stay in touch, but he’d lost contact with her well before that. Her disappearance had been the final straw – that was when he resolved to drag himself out of the Business.

And then, just as she was dying, she was back in his life.

Hooked up to those machines, she was in withdrawal, and her mind was gone. She was dosed up and asleep most of the day. But there on her deathbed, an infection in her blood caused by a dirty needle, in one of her rare moments of lucidity, she’d told him the truth about the shells.

‘I need to tell you, my boy . . . the shell-speaking was a trick.’

Ahab was a grown man by then, and he had known for some time that there must have been a trick to it, but part of him had still clung to the idea that his mother did have a spark of magic. That maybe she was part-siren.

‘It’s just lip-reading, Ahab. That’s all it is.’

She must have seen the disappointment in his face, because she’d reached for his cheek and then entered a coughing fit. He’d had to leave the room while the nurses came to assist. But when he’d come back, that was when she’d made him promise never to turn on his family. To always be there for them.

After Miriam had died, Ahab did a lot of research into shell-speaking – the folklore behind it. It wasn’t long until he stumbled upon a book about mentalist tricks, which explained the lip-reading ‘Jar of Secrets’ trick in detail.

So if Forest claimed he could talk to shells . . .

Either he really could, in which case his mother’s magic might have been real – unlikely – or he was just lip-reading, in which case he was trying to trick Ahab.