54

Norah looked at the gun that lay loaded on the kitchen table. Soon she would put it in her handbag and set off for the Prater to put an end to things.

She had to. But she wasn’t ready yet.

She felt a sudden surge of longing for Alex, a fierce ache between her throat and her breastbone, as if something had been torn from its ligaments and flung against the inside of her ribs. Lying in front of her on the table, her phone suddenly seemed no less dangerous than the loaded revolver beside it. For three years, she had talked to Alex about everything. Everything. How could it all be over from one day to the next? How was it possible that what was happening to her was happening—that she was planning what she was planning—and hadn’t told Alex? Alex would have listened to her; Alex would have believed her, right from the start. Why hadn’t she talked to him?

Because you screwed up, Norah.

Suddenly she had the phone in her hand and was calling Alex’s number. It rang. And rang.

She jumped when she heard his voice—closed her eyes for a second.

‘Hi, this is Alex.’

Then she realised: it was only his voicemail.

‘I can’t take your call right now, but I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’

A beep.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘It’s me.’

Her mouth was dry.

‘Norah,’ she added, realising that a little more was needed, now that they’d split up.

‘Hey, I just wanted to say…’

She hesitated.

‘I just wanted to say I’m sorry.’

She stopped and would have liked to say something else, but couldn’t find the right words and hung up. She pushed the phone away from her and buried her face in her hands, suddenly realising that she had just said goodbye to Alex. ‘Fuck it,’ she muttered, reaching for her phone again.

I love you, she typed.

It was only as she wrote the words that she knew how much she meant them. Her finger hovered over the screen. Then she pressed Send. Even before she could put the phone down, the icon under the message switched from Sent to Read and her heart leapt to her throat. She stared at her phone for seconds—minutes, even—waiting for a reply. But there was no reply. What had she expected? Norah pushed the phone away again, took a deep breath and waited for the surge of adrenaline to subside.

She looked about her in the cold, empty flat. Cardboard boxes, dust, loneliness. But after sitting quietly for a while, Norah began to hear the music her flat was playing to her. It started softly, almost tentatively, but as she listened more closely, it seemed to surge and swell. The soft creak of the floorboards, the hum of the fridge, the steady trickle of dust, as slow as a glacier, the muffled sounds of the street coming in at the windows. Life.

It had been dark for hours. Norah got up, put the gun in her bag and pulled on her shoes and parka. Her phone buzzed. Her hands trembled as she reached for it, but it wasn’t Alex. It was the unknown number.