In the middle of October, Axelle and I sat outside together at a small cafe not far from La Samaritaine. Axelle, careful not to look me in the eye in public, read to me some gossip out of La Presse – a cuckolded man had been accused of pushing his wife down a flight of stairs – while I sipped my coffee and picked at an apple tart with the tines of a silly little dessert fork.

‘I’ve been worrying,’ she said, folding the newspaper on our pedestal table, ‘that I’ve made a dreadful mistake.’ She spoke with her eyes on the street and my heart kicked at my ribs.

‘Oh?’

‘Do you think,’ she said, leaning towards me, ‘that because I’ve seen those dead people, do you think I could have brought a curse upon myself? Do you think it was mocking of me to visit that place?’

‘Mocking towards whom?’ I asked, relieved that my heart, for now, was safe.

‘The dead. I feel like I’ve seen something that can’t be unseen.’

‘That’s true of everything you see.’

She nodded, pleating the edge of the newspaper like a fan. ‘Do you think though,’ Axelle went on, ‘that I might have drawn the wrong sort of attention to myself, you know, from Death?’

‘You do spend a lot of your time at its fringes,’ I said.

She frowned. ‘I’m being serious and you’re making fun of me.’

I grabbed her hand, only to assure her that I had been joking, and she quickly pulled it away, shifted her eyes to the tables around us.

Because when we were out there, outside Madame’s cosy, shabby salon, Axelle was not the same person as she was when we were alone; one ear, each of us, alert to the sleep of an old woman down the hall, when Axelle pressed her fingers to the sides of my face or when she unlocked me with a kiss, or when she peeled away my corset shell and lifted my chemise over my head and took my small breast, my beating heart, into her mouth. When her tongue was at my ear and her breath how I imagined the ocean would sound, when her fingers like a pestle stone found me.

When we lay naked together (very quickly we grew bold and naked and entitled) we compared our bodies. Axelle was curved and plump and warm, with shiny white tracks traversing the terrain of her thighs where the skin had stretched in growth. The hair at her pubic bone was tawny and rose freely from her body, whereas mine was black, wiry and slick. She had a beautiful potted belly, and if a hundred cakes would have given me a belly like that I would have eaten every one of them, but my body never held on to fat.

Outside the cafe where we sat that day and spoke of death, a chill wind blew up the boulevard, carrying bits of paper and leaves and the smell of leaves. On the road in front of us, a team of men unloaded large sacks of flour from the back of a sagging cart, a cart pulled by two muscular, black and shaggy horses. A pall of flour hung in the cold air about them, whisked into swirls by the horses’ stamping hooves, and the sight of it, the flour dissipating in the air, made me feel mocked – reminded me how loose my hold was on this love I so badly wanted. I was partially, but not wholly, aware of my own stupidity.