An hour or so later, Norah was sitting at her desk in the office, translating her interview with the Hollywood star. When the letters began to blur on the screen, she headed for the kitchen.

Luisa and Eva were standing by the coffee machine, chatting over steaming mugs. Norah said hello, opened the window and lit a cigarette.

‘Are you doing the Abramović?’ Luisa asked, and Norah pricked her ears. She was a big fan of Abramović and would have loved to talk to her.

‘I wish,’ Eva said. ‘The boss bagged that one.’

Norah knew that she would have to wait her turn to be offered that kind of work. She’d only got the interview with Michael because she knew someone from the studio that had produced his latest film. Even so, she felt a small pang of envy. She consoled herself by planning to go and see a museum sometime—the Kunsthistorisches Museum or the Albertina.

‘What’s the boss bagged?’ asked David, who had come into the kitchen soon after Norah.

‘The interview with Marina Abramović.’

‘Who’s that?’

Blowing smoke rings out of the window with her back to the others, Norah pulled a face. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t best friends with her new colleagues, but she had a feeling she was going to run into real trouble with David at some point.

‘Er, let’s see,’ Eva said sarcastically, ‘maybe the most famous performance artist on the planet?’

‘Never heard of her.’

‘God, you really are a philistine.’

‘I prefer to think of myself as an outdoorsman,’ said David, and Norah didn’t have to look at him to know that he was grinning complacently.

‘Action art?’ Eva said. ‘Marina Abramović? Hermann Nitsch? Wolfgang Balder? Ring any bells?’

David shrugged.

‘I’ve heard of Balder. Isn’t that the guy with the gutted animals?’

Norah’s stomach turned over.

‘No, that’s Hermann Nitsch. Balder’s the one with the electric shocks.’

Norah dragged on her cigarette, closed her eyes and tried to think nice thoughts. She’d been to the Kunsthistorisches Museum twice, but she’d never visited the Albertina.

‘The what?’ David asked.

Yes, Norah thought, she’d go to the Albertina as soon as she had a moment to herself; she could see Dürer’s Young Hare and Degas’ Two Dancers.

‘He did this performance once where he had three women sitting in a room, a blond, a brunette and a redhead. The public could look at them through glass and give them electric shocks.’

Any second now, he’ll ask which woman was given the most shocks, Norah thought. As if that were the point. She looked out at the milling pedestrians.

‘And another time he poured pig’s blood all over a man waiting at a station.’

‘God!’ David said. ‘What gives him the right to do that?’

‘It’s art, you uncultivated morons,’ said Eva. ‘The guy’s a genius!’

‘You’re not serious,’ Luisa cried. ‘That’s perverse!’

‘No, it’s not. The electric-shock thing was a fascinating combination of action art and social experiment.’ Eva sounded teacherly.