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shifts back.’ ‘Fantastic,’ I say. ‘What happened to Whatshername?’
    A few months ago some talented kid came along and took some of Wolfgang’s shifts. From her point of view, the narrative must have been exciting: teenage girl gets life-changing opportunity playing piano in public. But it meant that Wolfgang couldn’t pay his rent and his bills, so he stopped paying his bills.
    ‘Pony accident.’
    I smile while he fills in the details. I’m not really listening; I’m thinking about the book.
    ‘Oh … Wolf?’ I say, once we’ve finished eating.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Do you believe in curses?’
    He looks at me with his head slightly tilted to one side. ‘Curses? Of what sort?’ ‘Like a cursed object. Can something be cursed?’
    ‘Now that’s interesting,’ he says. ‘You could argue that everything is cursed.’ I had a feeling he’d approach the question from this angle. ‘Yes, but …’
    He pours more slivovitz. I get up to sort out some coffee.
    ‘Or you might ask why curses even exist. What is their purpose? I’ve been wondering this myself for a long time, ever since I first saw Wagner with Catherine.’
    Wolf has a girlfriend who is aiming to ‘improve’ him by taking him to the opera.
    ‘I suppose maybe we have to start by defining “curse”,’ I say. ‘Is it a word or a thing?’
    Wolfgang groans. He’s had enough conversations with me before that have started in this way. We usually get into an argument about Derrida and différance.
    ‘Stop. Please. Don’t start hurting me with your French deconstruction. Just pretend for a minute that there is something called a curse and it exists and it is a thing. Where does it come from? That’s what we need to ask.’
    ‘Do we?’
    ‘Yes. Is it something magical, or is it a prophecy that comes true because you make it come true? Or is it even just nothing at all, just a way of explaining bad things that happen to us that are actually random. I may ask: why do I have an infestation of mice? Did someone curse me? Or did I just leave too much food out one day to tempt them? Or is life just as simple as there are mice ?’
    I light a cigarette. ‘I found three today.’ ‘Three what? Curses?’
    I laugh. ‘No. That would be very unlucky. No. Three mice.’ ‘And you put them where? Not in the corridor again?’
    ‘No. Outside. In Luigi’s backyard.’
    Wolf starts talking again about getting a cat. After a few minutes the coffee pot hisses and I pour the coffee.
    ‘Anyway,’ he says, exhaling slowly as I put the cup in front of him. ‘This is what I am wondering about curses: can they exist if we don’t believe in them?’
    I laugh. ‘How is that different from what I was saying?’ ‘It’s simpler.’
    ‘Not if you think it through.’
    As Wolf starts talking about voodoo curses, and how they only work on people who believe in voodoo, I imagine something like a Möbius strip, the shape you get if you glue together a long strip of paper with one twist in it. You could be walking along one side of this strip quite happily for ever, without ever realising that, in a strange kind of way, you kept changing ‘sides’. Just as this world once seemed flat, so your world would seem flat. You could walk for ever and not realise that you kept going back to the beginning and starting again. Even with the twist, you wouldn’t know. Your reality would change, but as far as you were concerned, you’d just be walking on a flat path. If this Möbius strip was a spatial dimension, your whole body would flip when you travelled past the twist and your heart would be on the right side of your body for a while until you looped back. I learned this from one of the physics lectures I downloaded onto my iPod. At Christmas I made myself some paper chains that were all Möbius strips. I prepared to stay in on my own all day reading and drinking wine; then Wolf came round with a huge, misshaped plum pudding and we spent the rest of the day