A man walked past, gazing upwards. He stopped and shielded his eyes with his hands. I saw his shoulders tense. Then he lowered his hands and backed away. He retreated slowly, his face still turned towards the ceiling. I don’t know why I didn’t follow his gaze. I think I was wondering what it would be like to embrace this man, and perhaps I might even have done it, but at that moment he suddenly turned and started running. Then I heard the sound, a hoarse screech swiftly rising to a crescendo. It was as if the air were vibrating, creating this all-­pervasive screech all by itself. I felt a tremor beneath my feet. Then I saw the ground move. I saw the man stumble and fall, an expression of furious astonishment on his face. He stumbled because the ground opened up in front of him, and he fell down and put his hands over his head, and I saw that his hands were covered in blood. I heard a woman scream. But her voice was swallowed up by the screeching air and the creaking of fake marble that burst like ice on the surface of water that has begun to flow. Out of the corner of my eye I saw someone run past, bent double, jacket pulled over their head for protection. Perhaps I would have made it if I’d run after them, but for some reason I was rooted to the spot. Now I saw the woman. She was lying by the wreckage of a stone slab that had fallen off the wall. She was hugging her knees to her chest and her face, too, was turned upwards. Her mouth was forming words I didn’t understand. I looked up. And I saw the glass dome burst apart with a single, muffled report. It was as if, in a brief moment of true beauty, the heavens split and opened themselves to the light.

But isn’t it strange that, at that very moment, as I gazed up at the fine, glittering rain of glass splinters that sliced into my face a second later, I had a vision? It was a clear picture of my husband Robert, who was sitting outside in the parked car with his hands in his lap, hands that would achieve nothing else ever again for the whole of the rest of his life.

Robert Avenieu

At night, when she crept downstairs again to pose in front of the mirror and enjoy feeling like some sort of French tart, I didn’t stay in bed: I sat at the open window where I could look out onto the road and breathe freely at last. It was quiet, the only sound the occasional swish of car tyres; the roofs projected their outline onto the night sky, and there was a smell of old, damp walls, especially in spring, after the first warm rain.

When I was a child, my mother often urged me never to regret anything. She said regret didn’t alter what had happened, it just weighed on the soul, and there was no sense or point to it, anyway. She was right, of course, but I wasn’t like her. I usually regretted things even as I was doing them, which didn’t exactly make life easier.