Instagram seemed to be the only social media she had here, and she only seemed to post pictures of poems on it.

She took a moment to read one:

FIRE

Every part of her

That changed

That got scraped off

Because of schoolyard laughter

Or the advice of grown-ups

Long gone –

And the pain of friends

Already dead.

She collected those bits off the floor.

Like wood shavings.

And she made them into fuel.

Into fire.

And burned.

Bright enough to see for ever.

This was troubling, but it was – after all – just a poem. Scrolling through some emails, she found one to Charlotte – a ceilidh band flautist with earthy humour who’d been Nora’s only friend at String Theory before she had moved back up to Scotland.

Hi Charl!

Hope all is fine and dandy.

Pleased the birthday do went well. Sorry I couldn’t be there. All is well in sunny Sydney. Have finally moved into the new place. It’s right near Bronte Beach (beautiful). Lots of neighbourhood cafes and charm. I also have a new job.

I go swimming in a saltwater pool every morning and every evening I drink a glass of Australian wine in the sunshine. Life is good!

Address:

2/29 Darling Street

Bronte

NSW 2024

AUSTRALIA

Nora

X

Something was rotten. The tone of vague, distant perkiness, as if writing to a long-lost aunt. The Lots of neighbourhood cafes and charm, as though it was a TripAdvisor review. She didn’t speak to Charlotte – or indeed anyone – like that.

There was also no mention of Izzy. Have finally moved into the new place. Was that we have or I have? Charlotte knew of Izzy. Why not mention her?

She would soon find out. Indeed, twenty minutes later she was standing in the hallway of her apartment, staring at four bags of rubbish that needed taking out. The living room looked small and depressing. The sofa tatty and old. The place smelt slightly mouldy.

There was a poster on the wall for the video game Angel and a vape pen on a coffee table, with a marijuana leaf sticker on it. A woman was staring at a screen, shooting zombies in the head.

The woman had short blue hair and for a moment Nora thought it might be Izzy.

‘Hi,’ Nora said.

The woman turned. She was not Izzy. She had sleepy eyes and a vacant expression, as if the zombies she was shooting had slightly infected her. She was probably a perfectly decent person but she was not anyone Nora had ever seen in her life. She smiled.

‘Hey. How’s that new poem coming along?’

‘Oh. Yeah. It’s coming along really well. Thanks.’

Nora walked around the flat in a bit of a daze. She opened a door at random and realised it was the bathroom. She didn’t need the toilet, but she needed a second to think. So she shut the door and washed her hands and stared at the water spiral down the plughole the wrong way.

She glanced at the shower. The dull yellow curtain was dirty in a vague student-house kind of way. That’s what this place reminded her of. A student house. She was thirty-five and, in this life, living like a student. She saw some anti-depressants – fluoxetine – beside the basin, and picked up the box. She read Prescription for N. Seed at the top of the label. She looked down at her arm and saw the scars again. It was weird, to have your own body offer clues to a mystery.

There was a magazine on the floor next to the bin, National Geographic. The one with the black hole on its cover that she had been reading in another life, on the other side of the world, only yesterday. She sensed it was her magazine, given she had always liked reading it, and had been known – even in recent times – to buy it on the occasional spontaneous whim as no online version ever did the photos justice.

She remembered being eleven years old and looking at the photos of Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic, in her dad’s copy. It had looked so vast and desolate and powerful and she had wondered what it would have been like to be among it, like the scientist-explorers in the article, spending their summer doing some kind of geological research. She cut out the pictures and they ended up on the pinboard in her bedroom. And for many years, at school, she had tried hard at science and geography just so she could be like the scientists in the article and spend her summers among frozen mountains and fjords, as puffins flew overhead.

But after her dad died, and after reading Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, she decided that a) Philosophy seemed to be the only subject that matched her sudden inward intensity and b) she wanted to be a rock star more than a scientist anyway.

After leaving the bathroom, she returned to her mysterious flatmate.

She sat on the sofa and waited for a few moments, watching.

The woman’s avatar got shot in the head.

‘Piss off, you zombie fuckface,’ the woman snarled happily at the screen.

She picked up the vape pen. Nora wondered how she knew this woman. She was assuming they were flatmates.

‘I’ve been thinking about what you said.’

‘What did I say?’ Nora asked.

‘About doing some cat-sitting. You know, you wanted to look after that cat?’

‘Oh yeah. Sure. I remember.’

‘Bad fucking idea, man.’