‘Snake wine very good for you,’ she told me after I had emptied my glass and too late for me to wonder if it was such a good idea. ‘Good for all things inside. Good for manhood.’

I began to think how best to take my leave without giving too much offence, but she was already pointing me to a small card table which had two chairs and I don’t remember whether it was a relief or a new worry when she announced she was going to tell my fortune.

‘I do it for all Americans who come here. There is no charge,’ she said, and after she’d gestured me to sit, we looked at each other across the table. This was the closest I had ever been to her and I realised that she could have been sixty or eighty. Whichever, the age of her face was optimistically offset by a splash of rouge in the hollows of her cheek and her incredibly long nails were painted the brightest red. She wore a black, possibly silk trouser suit and her silver sandals revealed toenails of the same intense colour. Over her shoulder I saw another table that was decorated like a shrine, with some black and white silver-framed photographs, lit incense sticks, blossoms of jasmine in a glass bowl and a small golden Buddha.

I had to tell her my name, the day, month and year of my birth, and as she mulled over their significance I half-hoped that Corley would appear in the doorway and tell me that we needed to be somewhere, but all that broke the silence was the chirp of a yellow bird in a cage that stood near the window. When my birth details failed to elicit the necessary results, she began to study my face intensely and once stretched her hand across the table to test the outline of my chin. For a second I wondered if she might inspect my teeth but her hand dropped away and reached for a little canister containing thin bamboo sticks with writing on them. I had to shake them like dice but clumsily spilled nearly all and, getting a scolding, had to repeat it until one landed on the table. Lifting it, she deciphered my fortune from its hieroglyphics.

‘You will enjoy long life,’ she said. ‘Good long life and good fortune.’

‘That’s very good,’ I said, wondering if this was the sum total of my reading and thinking it might permit my departure.

‘But you will never go home,’ Madame Binh continued. ‘Always your heart stays here. And you must beware deep water. Beware deep water and those who want to take your wealth when you least expect it. And your children will be girls only.’

Then she brought her hands together and bowed her head, and replicating the gesture I thanked her and, with the scent of incense still clinging to me, took my leave. It was the only time I have ever had my fortune told, and as predictions go it seemed pretty innocuous, so the only thing that stayed with me was not the idea of thieves in the night but never going home. But if I was to enjoy long life it meant I wasn’t going home in a flag-draped box and I thought, despite my natural scepticism, that was something to hold on to, except when I later told Corley about having my fortune read he was able to predict that, like him and everyone else in the block, our future involved both never going home and long life.