From Rosengift (The Poison of Roses)
by Mirjam Pressler

Things like this just happen: every so often people do things which cannot be explained, or behave differently to how you would expect. And that's fine - in my guise as a crime writer I depend on these inexplicable and unexpected twists and turns as I depend on chance: how else would I create an interesting plot? Ultimately a novel thrives on its combination of the predictable and the accidental, the known and the unknown. It is this that draws in and grips the reader, and my success is I guess partly due to the fact that I have mastered this blend. Only in my writing, mind you, for in real life I prefer the known, the predictable and the planned: it protects one from uncertainty. After all, life itself is chaotic enough, chaotic and threatening, something which is plain to see if you ever open a newspaper or turn on the television.

I remained sitting there on the pavement, in thin stockings and high-heeled shoes, and although I was wearing a woollen coat over my pigeon-coloured silk dress I could feel a damp coldness creeping gradually up my spine, turning me numb on the inside...

Apart from the two of us, the girl and me, the street was deserted, and I was astonished to realise that in the whole time I'd been sitting there, not a single car had driven past. I stayed where I was and waited until she took her arm away from her face and said 'you're still there'. I remarked once again how indifferent her voice sounded, missing the note of surprise that you would expect with such a comment. I handed her a tissue, she wiped her nose, lips and chin with it and, still lying down, ripped two pieces from the blood-soaked paper, scrunched them up into little balls and stuffed them into her nostrils, just like my brother used to do when he had fallen over. It looked just as disgusting when she did it as when he used to. I watched her as she finally stumbled to her feet, and once standing shook firstly her arms and then her legs, as if she wanted to check that her limbs were still in full working order. Now I too stood up, stiff and half-frozen, and asked if I could drive her anywhere. I specifically remember saying 'anywhere' rather than 'home', as if I already knew that she didn't have a home, as if it was only natural that this girl would be homeless as a stray cat.

Without answering she picked up her rucksack, the same dark blue as her fat, shapeless coat which lay on the floor under the shop window and which I hadn't noticed up to that point. She walked alongside me to my car, and only once she was already sitting in the passenger seat, and I had started the engine and was looking at her expectantly, did she say 'Can I sleep at your house tonight?'