2

When Norah woke up in her new flat in Vienna the next morning and walked barefoot to the window, the grand facades of the houses opposite were already bathed in the milky light of the winter sun. She opened the window and stood there, enjoying the crisp chill on her face as the city stirred to life below. A group of children was crossing the road, their shouts almost drowned by the noise of the traffic. Norah took a deep breath, then closed the window and looked about her.

How little there was to her life. Her bed was only a roll of slats and a few pieces of wood, strewn over the parquet of her bedroom like a disjointed skeleton—she’d spent the night on a camping mat, feeling the hard floor beneath her whenever she’d moved. Then there were the removal boxes, forty-eight of them. That was as much of her old life as she’d brought with her into the new.

She opened one of the boxes at random. It was labelled Clothes and contained summer things—flip-flops and the white bikini she’d bought for the previous year’s holiday in Sardinia, where they’d celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday.

She’d packed too hastily, desperate to leave the flat in Berlin. Alex had looked on in bewilderment, knocked sideways by what was happening. He didn’t know what to say and she wouldn’t have listened if he had.

Norah shut the box again, then opened another and another and another: bedclothes, diving gear, blankets, shirts, T-shirts—but no warm jumper anywhere. She shivered. It was cold in the flat; the radiators barely gave off any heat. Sighing, she threw down a black blouse, then stretched and looked about her again. The removal men had stacked the boxes at random all over the flat. Piled up against the backdrop of bare white walls and high ceilings, they looked like installations in a museum of modern art.

Only a few things were already in place: her desk in the study, her sofa in front of the TV in a corner of the living room—she could leave the TV on, if the silence got too loud for her—and the coffee machine in the kitchen. The rest was a desert. No, she thought, not a desert—a blank sheet of paper, waiting for the first brushstroke.

Norah found herself smiling.

When she went out a little later, locking the door behind her, the communal stairs smelt of damp carpet and filter coffee. She was about to head down when she heard a low noise and, glancing up, she saw a small black cat eyeing her shyly from the stairs above.

‘Hello,’ said Norah. ‘Where have you come from?’

She crouched down and reached out a hand. The kitten stared. Then, timid at first, but gradually bolder, it started towards her. Norah stroked the little head gently. She’d always wanted a cat as a child, but her mother hadn’t wanted a pet in the flat, and by the time Norah was old enough to make her own decisions she was working twelve hours a day in an office and didn’t have the time.