I had an overwhelming sense of the lonliness of this city - a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows. I thought of what was underneath it all - I thought of the electricty cables, steam, water, fire, subway trains and lava in the city's guts, the subterranean rumbling of trains and earthquakes. I thought of the dead souls from the war, concreted over.

I'm a post-menopausal woman who's lived in a man's world for twenty years. A more cynical, cruel creature it's hard to find.

I'm not very good at knowing what other people are thinking, but I do know that you can see tragedy, real tragedy, sitting just inside a person's gaze. You can almost always see where a person has been if you look hard enough.

Wine?" said Zoe. "At two in the afternoon?""I've decided to become an alcoholic. Just for the duration of my middle years." She filled a glass and rested it on the edge of the washbasin. "That's yours.