‘Arthur Grimm,’ she heard Anita say. ‘But as far as I know, nobody’s really aware of it.’

Norah stopped in her tracks. Had she heard right? Slowly she turned around. She saw Anita fish a teabag out of a mug and drop it in the bin.

Norah must have made a mistake. It would be too much of a coincidence.

‘Do you need any help?’ Mario asked, and Norah realised that she had frozen mid-movement next to the coffee machine.

She cleared her throat, flicked down the On button and the machine sprang to life, gurgling and hissing like a mythical beast stirring from sleep.

A thought flashed into her mind. Was this whole fortune-telling thing an elaborate joke on the part of her colleagues? Rubbish, she told herself. Who’d do a thing like that?

‘No, thanks,’ she said. ‘I can manage.’

The Woman

My happiest childhood memory isn’t celebrating Christmas or going camping in the summer, but watching a boxing match. I went with my father, although in those days it was unusual for children to be taken along. We sat right at the front, by the ring, and I could hear the sound of flesh slapping against flesh. The place smelt of blood and adrenaline, and whenever a boxing glove smashed against bone, I saw a spray of sweat and saliva dancing in the air like dust motes in a beam of light. It wasn’t a championship or anything, and I couldn’t even say for sure what weight class the boxers were. They were both giants to me, and they went at each other like wild beasts.

There was no knock-out, though I’d hoped for one, if only to see a man that size crash to the floor like a felled tree. The fight went the distance and ended in a draw, which disappointed me, not that I knew which of the men I wanted to win; I suppose it just seemed unsatisfactory to me that something as dramatic as a boxing match could end in something as banal as a draw. When my father told me some days later that one of the boxers had died after the fight, I was fascinated. I suppose, in a way, that was my first encounter with death.

For some reason I was reminded of that evening the first time I saw her. God knows why. I’ll never understand how my brain jumps from one thing to another. It fires salvos of associations at me and I just take them as they come.

I saw her in a bar the other day. I didn’t follow her in, but I watched her for some time. She was sitting alone, drinking a colourless drink from a thick-bottomed glass and smoking a cigarette, and when the barman alerted her to the smoking ban, she rolled her eyes and stubbed out the fag in a corner of silver paper torn from the packet. Soon afterwards, a man came to her table—tall, with short dark hair, dressed in jeans and a white shirt. I saw him only in profile and couldn’t hear what he said or what she replied, but I saw that the exchange lasted only a few seconds and that the man, who had been smiling as he walked to her table, was no longer smiling when he left it. Perhaps one should admire the arrogance with which such women go through life. But for some reason I can’t.