Chapter 14: The Gram of Memory Mara Regrets

The map did not want to go back to Bermondsey.

Mara noticed this the way she noticed most things — obliquely first, then with increasing precision. She had unfolded it on the kitchen table at half past seven Saturday morning with the lamp burning beside it and a mug of tea going cold at her elbow, and the map had given her streets, had given her the usual drift of red threads northeast toward Shoreditch, had shown her the temple district in miniature and the river's bend and all the patient topography of a city going about its ancient business. But when she held the Bermondsey arches in her mind — that specific Victorian dark, the smell of damp brick and bottled sweetness — the map had offered nothing. The thread she needed stayed stubbornly undrawn.

She had waited. She was good at waiting; her grandmother had made her practise it the way other children practised scales.