T
he voice cuts through her sleep and hovers on the surface. The woman is stroking some playing cards which are face down on the table. She repeats several times with conviction: ‘On the twentieth of May your life will change.’ Mathilde doesn’t know if she’s still dreaming or has already begun the new day. She glances at the radioalarm. It’s four in the morning. She was dreaming. The dream was about the woman she saw a few weeks ago. She was a clairvoyant – there, she’s admitted it – she didn’t have a shawl or crystal ball, but she was a clairvoyant none the less. Mathilde took the metro all the way across Paris, sat behind the thick curtains of a ground-floor flat in the sixteenth arrondissement and handed over € to have her palm and her numbers read. She went there because she had nothing else left: no glimmer of light to reach towards, no future tense, no prospect of anything after. She went because you need something to hang on to. 1
709g.indd 1
02/02/2011 09:16:59