‘Have you heard about Marie? About the court case?’ the brunette was asking and Norah, who couldn’t concentrate on the newspaper anyway, pricked up her ears.

The two other women shook their heads.

‘She’s been sentenced.’

‘Go on with you. What for?’ the blonde asked in disbelief.

‘Grievous bodily harm. It was in the papers.’

‘I can’t believe it. Will she have to go to prison?’ the redhead asked, puckering her thickly drawn eyebrows.

‘No, but she’ll have to pay a fine.’

‘What with?’ asked the blonde.

Shrugs and clueless faces.

Norah finished her espresso, put two euros on the table and left. On the train, she looked at her phone. Two new texts, both from Max, worried because Norah wasn’t responding to his calls. Norah suddenly realised that she was no longer angry with him; so much had happened in the last few days that Max’s white lie hardly seemed to matter anymore. She decided to call him as soon as she had a spare moment. She missed him. But she had other things to deal with first; he’d have to wait. Instead of replying to his text, Norah sent a message to the unknown number.

Who are you?

When Norah reached the office, there was still no reply.

Sitting down at her desk, she recalled the conversation she’d overheard in the bistro. She played around with various search terms until she found what she was looking for on the online pages of a local newspaper.

Last summer Marie T. was in a beauty salon in the Fourth District. Shirin W., who testified in favour of her customer at the trial, had just finished giving her a manicure when three men in their early twenties noticed Marie T. and began to knock on the window and make insulting comments about her appearance, especially her weight.

Marie T. stormed out of the beauty salon to confront the young men.

‘I’ve put up with a lot in my life,’ Marie T. told the court, ‘but I’d had enough.’

‘Stupid slag’ and ‘fat bitch’ were among the more harmless insults spoken by the men.

It seems that one thing led to another until eventually Marie T. felt so threatened that she opened her handbag, took out a can of pepper spray which she carried for personal protection, and sprayed it at the young men.

The defence argued that Marie T. had acted in an urgent and stressful situation; she had, after all, been threatened by three men and had only defended herself. But the court rejected this argument, holding that the pepper spray had not been Marie T.’s only option; she could equally have taken refuge in the beauty salon. The court refrained from a prison sentence, but ordered the accused to pay a thousand-euro fine.

Marie burst into tears in the courtroom and had to be comforted by her defence lawyer. The victims of her attack appeared satisfied with the sentence.

Norah clicked the website away with a bitter taste in her mouth. A woman fought back and look where it got her. The old mantra popped into Norah’s head: life is so fucking unfair.