She scooped her stew efficiently onto a plate. “The day I saw the ad in the papers, a psychic told me Ilford was in my stars.” She licked the spoon, then shrugged. “Who am I to fight destiny?”

Usually I came into the office earlier than Sabine and left before she did. But one afternoon, I hung around. I’d thought of asking her for a drink; if we left together, the conversation might head that way.

As she packed her Tupperware into her lime manga rucksack, I said, “Your food always smells intriguing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Smells good. What was it today?”

“Moroccan tagine.” She pulled the drawstring closed.

Tossing my small denim handbag over my shoulder, I followed her to the lift. “I’d love to go to Morocco,” I said.

“I went with my lover once,” she said.

“Lucky you.” I wondered if it was a woman or a man.

The lift arrived, empty.

“And lucky him,” I tested.

“Lucky her,” she said, giving me a look as she stepped inside. She pressed the button. “We went to Fez. It is like in the fourteenth century. We stayed in a palace with an old pool.”

“I’m jealous.”

The lift descended.

“Fez is a sensuous place,” she said. “You walk in the medina. You go through the dark alleys. You get lost. Around one corner there are perfumes, these perfumed stones the women rub on themselves. Around another corner, you see a tannery, you smell the piss they soak the skins in. And around another corner, you go through a side door into a marble palace.”

I stared at her in wonder.

The lift doors opened.

“I’ll send you the recipe for the tagine,” she said.

3

If Sabine’s talk was elusive, it seemed to me free; if it was fanciful, it fed my image of her as a brave heroine in a dark fairy tale. I was awed by her ability to be herself—unconventional, uninhibited—where I’d never had the courage to do the same.

Negative space is the lifeblood of obsession. In the late nineties, I felt as if I was mostly negative space. Although I wasn’t the daughter my mother wanted, I’d never had the guts to rebel. She said I was like my father: passive, meek, defined more by what I bumped up against than what I chose.

An English lecturer, romantic, and dreamer, my father was killed in a car accident when I was two months old. Before his death, my mother was a professional ballroom dancer. The way she told it, she’d had tremendous potential. But finding herself a widow with an extremely demanding baby, she gave it up. Taking out a loan, she opened Renata’s Roses & Blooms. She hired a trained florist, Thandi, who did most of the work.