Max had replied: Don’t know yet. Got a lot on. If we go out, we’ll let you know. xx

Then Norah had rung Tanja, but Tanja had hung up on her again. Norah thought maybe it was a mistake and redialled. This time Tanja did pick up, but the conversation—if you could call it that—didn’t go at all well. Tanja briskly informed Norah that she’d rather spend what little time she had with people who really appreciated her, asked her not to call again and hung up.

What was going on? It was weird; Norah had never known her like that. She stifled the impulse to call back and heard a ring at the door. A few moments later, two delivery men were outside her flat with six enormous cardboard boxes on their backs.

Now, as well as a bed, a sofa and a desk, Norah had a wardrobe, a table and four chairs. It was a start. She slit open the ridiculously large boxes with the little Swiss Army knife on her key ring—a present from Werner—and pulled out vast quantities of corrugated cardboard, polystyrene and bubble wrap. She screwed legs onto seats and stacked the still-unpacked removal boxes against one of the living-room walls to make space for the table and chairs. Then she began to assemble the wardrobe. This turned out to be quite a challenge—at least for someone tackling the job alone—but it was something to do and kept her mind off Tanja’s atrocious behaviour. Eventually the last shelf was in place and the hundredth tack hammered into the back panel.

That evening, when everything was finished, Norah sat down on one of her new chairs. As soon as she’d unpacked them, she decided she didn’t like them anymore. She liked the chairs in Berlin, fuck it—in the flat that was no longer fucking hers.

And now the noise was back. An electric buzz—a painful, drawn-out sound, like a double bass being bowed agonisingly slowly; a dark, sonorous note that swelled into an ancient-sounding tune. If icebergs had voices, Norah thought, they’d sing like that when they calved and floated out to sea.

Her gaze fell on the tarot card from the Imperial that was lying on the table. Norah turned it over so that she didn’t have to look at the scythe-wielding skeleton beneath a Roman thirteen.

She would have liked to drop in on Max and Paul, but Max had sent an email to say that Paul had a filthy cold and a high temperature, so he was staying in to look after him. No escape—she was on her own.

Loneliness was creeping up on Norah like the incoming tide.

Premonition

My grandmother lived to be a hundred and two. She outlived two husbands, two of her four children and countless friends, and whenever anyone in her village died, she knew in advance. (Or so she said.) I thought of her the other day when I was reading about Soviet military research into paranormal events such as telekinesis and extrasensory perception. One experiment in particular stuck in my mind.