The scientists took a mother rabbit and her litter. The mother had electrodes inserted in her brain to measure the brainwaves. The young rabbits, meanwhile, were placed in a submarine and put to sea, presumably to keep them as far from their mother as possible. Then the scientists killed the young, one by one, and each time a clear reaction could be observed in the doe’s brain.

A fascinating experiment, not only because the thought of those bunnies on a Soviet submarine is so bizarre, but also because it proves something that many people have been claiming for centuries—that some living beings can sense the presence of death. I find it a beautiful and poetic notion, and since I have started observing her, I wonder whether she too possesses this gift.

Can she sense the presence of death? Can she feel it growing closer? Does she know how close it already is?

19

Being alone in the cinema was nothing like what she’d expected.

Norah had decided to watch a French comedy, but sitting there, surrounded by couples and groups of friends, she realised that jokes were funnier if you had someone to laugh with, and when she heard that dull, menacing sound again, over the actors’ chatter and the film music, she understood that the noise hadn’t been coming from her empty, lonely flat, but from her.

Leaving the cinema between clusters of happy people, she looked about her. The men and women around her—holding hands, discussing their favourite scenes, imitating the lead actor’s accent—all seemed to glow with a warm light, as if their shared laughter had charged them with energy.

Norah felt like a black hole. She was glad to leave the cinema and the glowing people behind her and plunge into the darkness of a dismal, rain-scented night. On her way to catch a tram, she saw a beggar kneeling on the ground in a pose of humility, head lowered, hands raised. Like a statue, Norah thought, rifling through her bag for coins for him. The man mumbled something without looking up. A handful of people were waiting at the tram stop, dark and mute and cold. Across the road, a bright-pink poster was printed with large black letters.

DEATH SMILES AT US ALL.

ALL WE CAN DO IS SMILE BACK!

Norah didn’t smile; she put a cigarette in her mouth and glanced at her phone. There was a text from an unknown number.

The Goldfinch, now.

She shook her head in annoyance. Some idiot must have made a mistake—like the time she’d got all those texts for someone called Mesut.

Think you’ve got the wrong number, she replied, and slid the phone back into her bag. She felt surrounded by strangers.

Her tram came, the windows fogged from the passengers’ breath. The doors opened and the strangers who had been waiting with Norah got on. She looked about her. Weird—she had suddenly been hit by the same feeling that had overcome her the first time she’d noticed that sickly sweet smell—on her way home in the small hours the other day, up by that wall that she now knew to be the wall of Belvedere Park. But why?