‘You sure about that?’ Norah asked seriously.

The man said nothing.

Norah took a closer look at him—the faded acne scars on his pasty face, the gelled hair, the yellowish teeth. He withstood her gaze for a while, then looked away.

Norah nodded. ‘I thought as much.’

The woman clerk wasn’t serving anyone and Norah could feel her looking at them.

‘I’ll just have to try another bank,’ Norah said, her voice louder again. She turned to go. ‘Thanks all the same!’

Before leaving the foyer, she threw a last glance over her shoulder.

‘I expect the Seychelles are overrated anyway.’

7

‘You know what that’s called in court?’ Norah’s friend Sandra asked, when they spoke on the phone that evening.

‘I’m sure you’re about to tell me.’

‘Impulse control disorder.’

Norah rolled her eyes. ‘The guy was a bastard. You should have seen the way he treated the woman.’

‘I can imagine,’ Sandra said. ‘Still, you can’t do stuff like that all the time, Norah.’

‘What do you mean, all the time?’

Sandra sighed, and Norah wondered whether her clients ever got to hear her sigh like that, or whether it was something she reserved for recalcitrant friends. Sandra had been working in a solicitor’s office for five years, although she was currently on maternity leave.

‘One of these days you’ll get into real trouble,’ Sandra said.

‘Aren’t I already?’ Norah asked.

‘There are worse things in life than libel charges.’

Norah saw Coco’s cut-up face.

‘I know,’ she said softly.

‘How is Coco, by the way?’ asked Sandra, as if she’d read Norah’s thoughts.

‘I don’t really know,’ said Norah. ‘But not great.’

Sandra said nothing. Then she said, ‘Take care of yourself, won’t you?’

‘You know me,’ said Norah.

‘I know you all too well.’

Alone in her flat later that evening, Norah stood at the window, watching couples and small groups of people cross the square on their way to a restaurant or cinema or theatre. After talking to Sandra, she’d sent SOS messages to Max and Paul and Tanja, but got no reply. Her eye fell on the orchid she’d brought with her from Berlin—the only other living thing in the flat. She took up her phone again, then put it down in disappointment. No messages. She went into the kitchen, opened the fridge and stared helplessly at the food she’d bought that afternoon.

The trans woman’s face popped into her mind; their eyes had met for a moment and Norah hadn’t forgotten the look in them. Then her thoughts moved to the bank clerk—his grin, his conspiratorial wink, his nasal voice. Just as she was closing the fridge door, the news came on in the living room. She went and plumped herself down in front of the TV and let the announcements rain down on her; it was like being pelted by the stones of an angry mob. War, greed, drownings, rape.

Norah’s mind began its usual downwards spiral. She thought of all the dictators and arms dealers in the world, of a boy in her primary school whose father had hit him so hard in the face that he’d gone blind in one eye, of a girl she’d been friends with in her teens who’d woken up on a motorway car park one Sunday morning, bleeding and half naked, after someone had spiked her drink. She thought of the concept artist who mutilated unstable young women with a scalpel and called it art. She thought of the head of a weapons company she’d once seen playing the philanthropist at a charitable gala while, in other parts of the world, her weapons destroyed lives. She thought of the bankers in their glass towers, of hunger and thirst, bombs and fire and—