1

She sat in front of the glass in her dressing-room brushing her long dark hair, pinning it up and peering at her face, her head throbbing. She took two tablets from a small jar and swallowed them, drinking water from a tall glass. Then she shut her eyes and dabbed the lids with cologne before she began to use her eye-liner, thinking of the Gypsy’s eyes and the medallion twisting and glinting in the lamplight. She painted her lips bright crimson the better to set them off against the chocolate colour of her skin. Then she rubbed rouge on to her nipples, grimacing at herself in the glass. She stood to fix her G-string as she had six times a week, two shows a night, ever since she was fifteen.

She looked at herself in the tall glass at the end of the small room, naked save for the fake-jewelled triangle glittering between the dark skin of her thighs. She stretched up, planting and securing the plume in her hair. Fastening the bra, she slipped into the dress covered in spangles with the long zip easy to unfasten and stepped into the high-heeled shoes. After a last look she went out into the corridor which ran behind the stage and stood in the wings, waiting for her entrance. The brightness of the lights and the blare of the music pierced her head like a knife.

On stage she went through her routine like an automaton. Afterwards in her dressing-room during the interval between shows, she sipped tea and took more tablets and lay on the padded couch, thinking of the afternoon and the Gypsy with the different-coloured eyes who had put her to sleep.

All her life she’d had an obsession to pierce the curtain between the present and the future. It was an addiction as compelling for her as were drugs for some of her friends in the other dressing-rooms. At one time or another in every city from Paris to Istanbul, she would make her way to some back street into some cheap and shoddy room with the windows curtained to keep out the light, where some elderly woman stared into a luminous bowl or at the cards spread on the table before them, and prophesied. Only once had it been different. In Berlin, when it had been a great room like a tent with painted silver stars on the roof and three figures in black and gold robes wearing the white, beaked masks of Venetian revellers. Only one of the three had spoken and from the pitch of the voice she could not tell if it was a man or a woman.

It had begun when she was a child, squatting at the feet of Minerva, vast and much blacker than herself, as Minerva rattled the bones and read the grubby Tarot cards. One night, very late, Minerva had appeared by her bed. ‘I need you, little one,’ she had said. With an oil-lamp in one hand and a finger to her lips, Minerva had led her in the moonlight through the front garden, closing the gate carefully, making sure it did not creak. In her bare feet, with her small hand in Minerva’s great paw, they had gone up the dirt road to the graveyard at the edge of the village. There on the earth of a newly dug grave Minerva had told her to take off her night-shirt and stand on the grave and stay very still and very quiet. Then the old woman had scooped up dirt from the grave which she put into a small paper bag and tucked into the pocket of her apron, while she shuffled round the grave, three times one way, three times the other, all the while mumbling and crooning to herself or to the spirits she was invoking. And all the while in the centre of the circle stood the small naked figure of the child, facing the moon, with her hands rigid by her sides.

When Minerva had finished, she had taken her in her arms and made her promise that tonight would be their secret; that she had needed the little one to help her help someone who needed help very badly. And the child swore that what had passed would stay a secret between them for ever.

When five years later Minerva died, she had slipped out of the house and stood in the moonlight naked on Minerva’s grave. Then she circled it as she had seen Minerva do and took dirt from the grave. But she did not know what to do with the dirt and she didn’t know what words to say, except to wish good to the spirits into whose company Minerva had now passed.

Two years later she’d run away from home.

*   *   *

But why this evening was she feeling so troubled? The visit to the Gypsy that afternoon had been no different from so many visits in so many cities. The woman, too, had been no different, her face covered in white powder beneath a pile of dyed red hair, the skin of her forehead pitted under the mask of powder, two hoops of bronze wire swinging in her ears. The only difference had been the woman’s eyes – one grey-green, the other black.

‘Why have you come?’ the woman had asked.

‘To see what you can show me.’

‘The future, or the past?’

‘The future. I know the past.’

‘Are you so sure? How far back into the past do you know?’

‘Far enough.’

‘Before you were born?’

‘Maybe.’

She had lain on a divan covered by an embroidered scarf, the dark skin of her face framed by her black hair spread around her head resting on an orange cushion. She closed her eyes and felt the air from the window above her and imagined the curtains billowing gently as she became more and more drowsy while the Gypsy played with the gold medallion hanging on her breast and spoke of her childhood, of journeys through India across the rim of the world to Tibet and China. Soon she had fallen asleep.

She was climbing the steps of a great house to a door with an arch high above it. It was dark, but there was a lantern above the door and a bell with a long handle at the end of a chain. She heard the bell pealing in the distance. When the door opened, the inside was in shadow. She walked across what appeared to be a hall with black and white chequered tiles. Faint lights lit pictures in gold frames on the walls and she heard the cry of a child. At the foot of a wide staircase she began to climb, and as she climbed she became aware of a figure in the darkness above her with one hand holding a lighted candle, the other outstretched, the fingers pointing down at her. She continued mounting the stairs. Suddenly, when she was a little below where the figure was standing, the outstretched hand bent into a claw – and struck at her. She put her hands to her face and saw the blood on her fingers and cried out. Then, losing her balance, she began to fall, down the staircase, down the steps outside the house until she lay on her face spreadeagled on the gravel of the drive.

She had woken to the sweet scent of the cigarette the Gypsy was smoking, sitting in a chair watching her.

‘You put me to sleep.’

‘What did you see? The past or the future?’

‘I had a dream. Just a dream, that’s all.’

‘That’s all,’ repeated the woman. ‘Just a dream.’

*   *   *

She suffered from migraines. They came on suddenly, usually without warning or reason. But was there a reason for the migraine she was suffering this evening? Was it brought on by the dream? Or was it the heat? The city was throbbing with the heat. But with the pain, she also felt foreboding, fear. Why had this afternoon so troubled her? It was just a dream.

At the finale at the end of the second show when she stood surrounded by the chorus on the slowly revolving stage, naked save for the fake jewelled triangle between her thighs, her arms heavy with fake jewelled bracelets uplifted above her glittering head-dress, as always she was almost blinded by the fierce glare of the spotlight. Then, framed in the light, she saw again the image of the figure on the staircase. But now she could make it out more clearly. It was the figure of a woman, with hatred blazing from her eyes.

She jerked her head away from the light and looked towards the corner table where he always sat, the glass and the brandy bottle before him, the cigarette burning in the ashtray. He was reading a newspaper and didn’t look up. Why should he? He had seen her so often before. But the sight of him, the familiar, shabby bulk seated at his usual table, reading, drinking, smoking, doing what he always did, comforted her.

A little later he joined her in the dressing-room, lowering his bulk on to a chair while she sat before the glass removing her make-up. He had the newspaper in his hand.

‘It was a good house,’ she said in French.

‘It was. It has been a good week. Thanks to you.’

‘You didn’t look up at the finale, Paul,’ she said, smiling into the looking-glass.

‘Did I not, chérie? Then it was because I was so interested in what I was reading.’ He held up the newspaper. ‘My English is not so good, but there is something here of much interest.’

‘What is that?’

‘It is an advertisement and it invites someone to go and see a lawyer who will tell them something to their advantage. The someone they seek is a woman. She is called Sarah Wilson.’

She looked up from the dressing-table to the glass above it and their eyes met. Then she turned in her chair and faced him.