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ZARA: And you still don’t know who the bank robber is?

JIM: No.

ZARA: Listen—if you don’t explain soon how on earth you suspect I might be involved in this, you’ll end up wishing I had called my lawyer.

JIM: No one suspects you of anything! My colleague would just like to know why you were there in the apartment, if you weren’t there to buy it?

ZARA: My psychologist told me I needed a hobby.

JIM: Viewing apartments is your hobby?

ZARA: People like you are more interesting than you might imagine.

JIM: People like me?

ZARA: People in your socio-economic bracket. It’s interesting seeing how you live. How you manage to bear it. I went to a few viewings, then a few more, it’s like heroin. Have you tried heroin? You feel disgusted with yourself, but it’s hard to stop.

JIM: You’re telling me you’ve become addicted to viewing apartments owned by people who earn far less than you?

ZARA: Yes. Like when kids catch baby birds in glass jars. The same slightly forbidden attraction.

JIM: You mean insects? People do that with insects.

ZARA: Sure. If that makes you feel better.

JIM: So you were at this apartment viewing because it’s your hobby?

ZARA: Is that a real tattoo on your arm?

JIM: Yes.

ZARA: Is it supposed to be an anchor?

JIM: Yes.

ZARA: Did you lose a bet or something?

JIM: What do you mean by that?

ZARA: Was someone threatening your family? Or did you do it voluntarily?

JIM: Voluntarily.

ZARA: Why do people like you hate money so much?

JIM: I’m not even going to comment on that. I’d just like you to tell me, so that we’ve got it on tape, why the other witnesses say you didn’t seem at all afraid when you saw the bank robber’s pistol. Did you think it wasn’t real?

ZARA: I understood perfectly well that it was real. That’s why I wasn’t frightened. I was surprised.

JIM: That’s an unusual reaction to a pistol.

ZARA: For you, maybe. But I’d been contemplating killing myself for quite a long time, so when I saw the pistol I was surprised.

JIM: I don’t know what to say to that. Sorry. You’d been contemplating killing yourself?

ZARA: Yes. So I was surprised when I realized that I didn’t want to die. It came as a bit of a shock.

JIM: Did you start seeing your psychologist because of those suicidal thoughts?

ZARA: No. I needed the psychologist because I was having trouble sleeping. Because I used to lie awake thinking that I could have killed myself if only I had enough sleeping pills.

JIM: And it was your psychologist who suggested that you needed a hobby?

ZARA: Yes. That was after I told her about my cancer.

JIM: Oh. I’m very sorry to hear that. How sad.

ZARA: Okay, look…

The next time the psychologist and Zara met, Zara said that she had actually found a hobby. She had started to go to “viewings of middle-class apartments. ” She said it was exciting because a lot of the apartments looked like the people who lived there did the cleaning themselves. The psychologist tried to explain that this wasn’t quite what she’d had in mind by “getting involved in a charity, ” but Zara retorted that at one of the viewings there had been “a man who was thinking of renovating it himself, with his own hands, the same hands he eats with, so don’t try to tell me I’m not doing all I can to fraternize with the most unfortunate members of society! ” The psychologist had no idea how to even begin to answer that, but Zara noted her arched eyebrows and hanging jaw and snorted: “Have I upset you now? Christ, it’s impossible not to upset people like you the moment you start to say anything at all. ”

The psychologist nodded patiently and immediately regretted the question she asked next: “Can you give me an example of when people like me have been upset by you without your meaning it? ”

Zara shrugged, then told the story of how she had been called “prejudiced” when she interviewed a young man for a job at the bank, just because she had looked at him when he entered the room and exclaimed: “Oh! I would have expected you to apply for a job in the IT department instead, your sort tend to be good with computers! ”

Zara spent a long time explaining to the psychologist that it was actually a compliment. Does giving someone a compliment mean you’re prejudiced these days, too?

The psychologist tried to find a way to talk about it without actually talking about it, so she said: “You seem to get caught up in a lot of disagreements, Zara. One technique I’d recommend is to ask yourself three questions before you flare up. One: Are the actions of the person in question intended to harm you personally? Two: Do you possess all the information about the situation? Three: Do you have anything to gain from a conflict? ”

Zara tilted her head so far that her neck creaked. She understood all the words, but the way they were put together made as much sense as if they’d been pulled at random from a hat.

“Why would I need help to stop getting into conflicts? Conflicts are good. Only weak people believe in harmony, and as a reward they get to float through life with a feeling of moral superiority while the rest of us get on with other things. ”

“Like what? ” the psychologist wondered.

“Winning. ”

“And that’s important? ”

“You can’t achieve anything if you don’t win, sweetie. No one ends up at the head of a boardroom table by accident. ”

The psychologist tried to find her way back to her original question, whatever it had been.

“And… winners earn a lot of money, which is also important, I assume? What do you do with yours? ”

“I buy distance from other people. ”

The psychologist had never heard that response before.

“How do you mean? ”

“Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on airplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance. ”

The psychologist leaned back in her chair. It wasn’t hard to find textbook examples of Zara’s personality: she avoided eye contact, didn’t want to shake hands, was—to put it mildly—empathetically challenged, and had perhaps as a result chosen to work with numbers. And she couldn’t help compulsively straightening the photograph on the bookcase every time the psychologist moved it out of position on purpose before each session. It was hard to ask someone like Zara about that sort of thing directly, so the psychologist asked instead: “Why do you like your job? ”

“Because I’m an analyst. Most people who do the same job as me are economists, ” Zara replied immediately.

“What’s the difference? ”

“Economists only approach problems head-on. That’s why economists never predict stock market crashes. ”

“And you’re saying that analysts do? ”

“Analysts expect crashes. Economists only earn money when things go well for the bank’s customers, whereas analysts earn money all the time. ”

“Does that make you feel guilty? ” the psychologist asked, mostly to see if Zara thought that word was a feeling or something to do with gold plating.

“Is it the croupier’s fault if you lose your money at the casino? ” Zara asked.

“I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison. ”

“Why not? ”

“Because you use words like ‘stock market crash, ’ but it’s never the stock market or the banks that crash. Only people do that. ”

“There’s a very logical explanation for why you think that. ”

“Really? ”

“It’s because you think the world owes you something. It doesn’t. ”

“You still haven’t answered my question. I asked why you like your job. All you’ve done is tell me why you’re good at it. ”

“Only weak people like their jobs. ”

“I don’t think that’s true. ”

“That’s because you like your job. ”

“You say that as if there’s something wrong with that. ”

“Are you upset now? People like you really do seem to get upset an awful lot, and do you know why? ”

“No. ”

“Because you’re wrong. If you stopped being wrong the whole time you wouldn’t be so upset. ”

The psychologist looked at the clock on her desk. She still believed that Zara’s biggest problem was her loneliness, but perhaps there’s a difference between loneliness and friendlessness. But instead of saying that, the psychologist murmured in a tone of resignation: “Do you know what… I think this might be a good place for us to stop. ”

Unconcerned, Zara nodded and stood up. She tucked the chair back under the table very precisely. She was half facing away when she said, “Do you think there are bad people? ” It sounded as if she hadn’t really meant to let the words out.

The psychologist did her best not to look surprised. She managed to reply: “Are you asking me as a psychologist, or from a purely philosophical perspective? ”

Zara looked like she was talking to a toaster again.

“Did you have a dictionary shoved up your backside as a child, or did you end up like this of your own volition? Just answer the question: Do you think there are bad people? ”

The psychologist shuffled on her seat so much that she very nearly turned her pants inside out.

“I’d probably have to say… yes. I think there are bad people. ”

“Do you think they know it? ”

“What do you mean? ”

Zara’s gaze fell upon the picture of the woman on the bridge.

“In my experience there are plenty of people who are real pigs. Emotionally cold, thoughtless people. But even we don’t want to believe that we’re bad. ”

The psychologist considered her response for a long time before she replied: “Yes. If I’m being honest, I think that almost all of us have a need to tell ourselves that we’re helping to make the world better. Or at least that we’re not making it worse. That we’re on the right side. That even if… I don’t know… that maybe even our very worst actions serve some sort of higher purpose. Because practically everyone distinguishes between good and bad, so if we breach our own moral code, we have to come up with an excuse for ourselves. I think that’s known as neutralizing techniques in criminology. It could be religious or political conviction, or the belief that we had no choice, but we need something to justify our bad deeds. Because I honestly believe that there are very few people who could live with knowing that they are… bad. ”

Zara said nothing, just clutched her far too large handbag a little too tightly and, for just a fraction of a second, looked like she was about to admit something. Her hand was halfway to the letter. She even allowed herself, very fleetingly, to entertain the possibility of confessing that she had lied about her hobby. She hadn’t only just started going to apartment viewings, she’d been going to them for ten years. It wasn’t a hobby, it was an obsession.

But none of the words slipped out. She closed her bag, the door slid shut behind her, and the room fell silent. The psychologist remained seated at her desk, bemused at how bemused she felt. She tried to make some notes for their next encounter, but found herself instead opening her laptop and looking at the details of apartments for sale. She tried to figure out which of them Zara was thinking of looking at next. Which was obviously impossible, but it could have been simple if only Zara had explained that all the apartments she looked at had to have balconies, and that all the balconies had to have a view that stretched all the way to the bridge.

In the meantime Zara was standing in the elevator. Halfway down she pressed the emergency stop button so she could cry in peace. The letter in her handbag was still unopened, Zara had never dared read it, because she knew the psychologist was right. Zara was one of the people who deep down wouldn’t be able to live with knowing that about herself.

This is a story about a bank robbery, an apartment viewing, and a hostage drama. But even more it’s a story about idiots. But perhaps not only that.

Ten years ago a man wrote a letter. He mailed it to a woman at a bank. Then he dropped his kids off at school, whispered in their ears that he loved them, drove off on his own, and parked his car by the water. He climbed onto the railing of a bridge and jumped. The following week, a teenage girl was standing on the same bridge railing.

Obviously it doesn’t really make any difference to you who the girl was. She was just one person out of several billion, and most people never become individuals to us. They’re just people. We’re just strangers passing each other, your anxieties briefly brushing against mine as the fibers of our coats touch momentarily on a crowded sidewalk somewhere. We never really know what we do to each other, with each other, for each other. But the teenage girl on the bridge was called Nadia. It was the week after the man had jumped to his death from the railing where she was standing. She knew next to nothing about who he was, but she went to the same school as his children, and everyone was talking about it. That was how she got the idea. No one can really explain, either before or after, what makes a teenager stop wanting to be alive. It just hurts so much at times, being human. Not understanding yourself, not liking the body you’re stuck in. Seeing your eyes in the mirror and wondering whose they are, always with the same question: “What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel like this? ”

She isn’t traumatized, she isn’t weighed down by any obvious grief. She’s just sad, all the time. An evil little creature that wouldn’t have shown up on any X-rays was living in her chest, rushing through her blood and filling her head with whispers, saying she wasn’t good enough, that she was weak and ugly and would never be anything but broken. You can get it into your head to do some unbelievably stupid things when you run out of tears, when you can’t silence the voices no one else can hear, when you’ve never been in a room where you felt normal. In the end you get exhausted from always tensing the skin around your ribs, never letting your shoulders sink, brushing along walls all your life with white knuckles, always afraid that someone will notice you, because no one’s supposed to do that.

All Nadia knew was that she had never felt like someone who had anything in common with anyone else. She had always been entirely alone in every emotion. She sat in a classroom full of her contemporaries, looking like everything was the same as usual, but inside she was standing in a forest screaming until her heart burst. The trees grew until one day the sunlight could no longer break through the foliage, and the darkness in there became impenetrable.

So she stood on a bridge looking over the railing to the water far below, and knew it would be like hitting concrete when she landed, she wouldn’t drown, just die on impact. That thought consoled her, because ever since she was very little she’d been scared of drowning. Not death itself, but the moments before it. The panic and powerlessness. A thoughtless adult had told her that a person who’s drowning doesn’t look like they’re drowning. “When you’re drowning you can’t call for help, you can’t wave your arms, you just sink. Your family can be standing on the beach waving cheerfully to you, completely unaware that you’re dying. ”

Nadia had felt like that all her life. She had lived among them. Had sat at the dinner table with her parents, thinking: Can’t you see? But they didn’t see, and she didn’t say anything. One day she simply didn’t go to school. She tidied her room and made her bed and left home without a coat because she wouldn’t be needing one. She spent all day in town, freezing, wandering around as if she wanted the town to see her one last time, and understand what it had done by failing to hear her silent screams. She didn’t have any real plan, just a consequence. When sunset came she found herself standing on the railing of the bridge. It was so easy. All she had to do was move one foot, then the other.

It was that teenage boy called Jack who saw her. He couldn’t explain why he’d gone back to the bridge, evening after evening, for a week. His parents had forbidden it, of course, but he never listened. He snuck out and ran there as if he were hoping to see the man standing there again, so he could turn back the clock and make everything right this time. When he saw the teenage girl on the railing instead, he didn’t know what to shout at her. So he didn’t shout anything. He just rushed over and pulled her down with such force that she hit the back of her head on the tarmac and was knocked unconscious.

She woke up in the hospital. Everything had happened so quickly that she had only caught a glimpse of the boy rushing toward her out of the corner of her eye. When the nurses asked what had happened she wasn’t even sure of that herself, but the back of her head was bleeding, so she said she’d climbed up onto the railing to take a photograph of the sunset, then fell backward and hit her head. She was so used to saying what she knew other people wanted to hear, so they wouldn’t worry, that she did it without thinking. The nurses still looked worried, suspicious, but she was a good liar. She’d spent her whole life practicing. So in the end they said: “Climbing up on that railing, what a silly thing to do! It’s sheer luck you didn’t slip off the other side instead! ” She nodded, dry-lipped, and said yes. Luck.

She could have gone straight back to the bridge from the hospital, but she didn’t. It was impossible to explain why, even to herself, because she would never know for sure what she would have done if that boy hadn’t pulled her down. Would she have taken a step forward or back? So every day after that she tried to understand the difference between herself and the man who had jumped. That drove her to choose a profession, a career, a whole life. She became a psychologist. The people who came to her were the ones who were in so much pain that it felt like they were standing on a railing with one foot over the edge, and she sat in her chair opposite them with eyes that said: I’ve been here before. I know a better way down.

Of course sometimes she couldn’t help thinking about the reasons why she had wanted to jump, all the things she thought were missing from her reflection. Her loneliness at the dinner table. But she found ways to cope, to tunnel her way out of herself, to climb down. Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. She tried to be one of them. She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is. Over time she realized that deep down almost everyone asks themselves the same sort of questions: Am I good? Do I make anyone proud? Am I useful to society? Am I good at my job? Generous and considerate? A decent shag? Does anyone want me to be their friend? Have I been a good parent? Am I a good person?

People want to be good. Deep down. Kind. The problem of course is that it isn’t always possible to be kind to idiots, because they’re idiots. That’s become a lifelong project for Nadia to grapple with, as it is for all of us.

She never met the boy from the bridge again. Sometimes she honestly believes that she made him up. An angel, maybe. Jack never saw Nadia again, either. He never went back to the bridge. But that was the day his plan to become a police officer became unshakable, when he realized that he could be the difference.

Ten years later Nadia will move back to the town, after training to become a psychologist. She will acquire a patient named Zara. Zara will go to an apartment viewing and get caught up in a hostage drama. Jack and his dad, Jim, will interview all the witnesses. The apartment where it happened has a balcony, from which you can see all the way to the bridge. That’s why Zara is there. Ten years ago she found a letter on her doormat, written by a man who jumped. His name was written neatly on the back of the envelope, she remembered their meeting, and even though the newspapers never published the name of the person the police found in the water, the town was too small for her not to know.

Zara still carries the letter around with her in her handbag, every day. She’s only been down to the bridge once, the week after he climbed onto the railing, she saw a girl climb up onto the same railing, and a boy who rescued her. Zara didn’t even move, she just stood hidden in the darkness, shaking. She was still standing there when the ambulance arrived and took the girl to the hospital. The boy vanished. Zara walked out onto the bridge and found the girl’s wallet and ID card with her name on it. Nadia.

Zara has spent ten years following Nadia’s life and education and the start of her career in secret, from a distance, because she’s never dared approach her. She has spent ten years looking at the bridge, also from a distance, from the balconies of apartments that are for sale. For the same reason. Because she’s afraid that if she goes down to the bridge again, maybe someone else will jump, and if she seeks out Nadia and discovers the truth about herself, perhaps it will be Zara who does it. Because Zara is human enough to want to hear what the difference is between that man and Nadia, even though she realizes that she doesn’t really want to know. That she bears the guilt. That she’s the bad person. Maybe everyone says they’d like to know that about themselves, but no one does really. So Zara still hasn’t opened the envelope.

The whole thing is a complicated, unlikely story. Perhaps that’s because what we think stories are about often isn’t what they’re about at all. This, for instance, might not actually be the story of a bank robbery, or an apartment viewing, or a hostage drama. Perhaps it isn’t even a story about idiots.

Perhaps this is a story about a bridge.

The truth? The truth is that that damn real estate agent was a damn poor real estate agent, and the apartment viewing was a disaster right from the start. If the prospective buyers couldn’t agree about anything else, they could at least agree on that, because nothing unites a group of strangers more effectively than the opportunity to come together and sigh at a hopeless case.

The advertisement, or whatever you want to call it, was a poorly spelled disaster, with pictures so blurred that the photographer seemed to believe that a “panoramic shot” was something you achieved by throwing your camera across the room. “The HOUSE TRICKS Estate Agency! HOW’S TRICKS? ” it said above the date, and who on earth would get it into their head to hold an apartment viewing the day before New Year’s Eve? There were scented candles in the bathroom, and a bowl of limes on the coffee table, a brave effort by someone who seemed to have heard about apartment viewings but had never actually been to one, but the closet was stuffed with clothes, and there was a pair of slippers in the bathroom that looked like they belonged to someone who had spent the past fifty years shuffling around without ever lifting their feet. The bookcase was packed, and not even color-coordinated, and there were even more books piled up on the windowsills and the kitchen table. The fridge was covered with yellowing drawings produced by the owner’s grandchildren. Zara had been to enough viewings by this point to be able to spot an amateur: a viewing should make it look as if no one lives in the apartment, because otherwise only a serial killer would want to move in. A viewing should make it look as if anyone could potentially live there. People don’t want to buy a picture, they want to buy a frame. They can handle books in a bookcase, but not on the kitchen table. Perhaps Zara could have gone up to the real estate agent and pointed that out, if only the real estate agent hadn’t been a human being, and if only Zara hadn’t hated human beings. Especially when they spoke.

Instead Zara did a circuit of the apartment, trying to look interested, the way she had seen people who actually wanted to buy apartments look. That was quite a challenge for her, seeing as only someone on drugs who collected fingernail clippings could possibly be interested in living in this particular apartment. So when no one was looking in her direction, Zara went out onto the balcony, stood by the railing, and stared off toward the bridge until she started to shake uncontrollably. The same reaction as always, time after time for the past ten years. The letter she had never opened lay in her handbag. She had learned to cry almost without tears now, for practical reasons.

The balcony door was ajar and she could hear voices, not just in her head but from inside the apartment. Two married couples were wandering about, trying to ignore all the rather ugly furniture and instead visualize their own really ugly furniture in its place. The older couple had been married for a long time, but the younger couple seemed to have only gotten married recently. You can always tell by the way people who love each other argue: the longer they’ve been together, the fewer words they need to start a fight.

The older couple were called Anna-Lena and Roger. They’d been retired for a few years now, but clearly not long enough for them to have gotten used to it. They were always stressing about something, but without having anything they truly needed to hurry for. Anna-Lena was a woman with strong feelings, and Roger a man with strong opinions, and if you’ve ever wondered who writes all those too detailed, one-out-of-five-star reviews of household gadgets (or theater plays, or tape dispensers, or small glass ornaments) on the Internet, it’s Anna-Lena and Roger. Sometimes, of course, they hadn’t even tried out the gadgets in question, but they weren’t the sort of people to let that stop them from writing a scathing review. If you had to try things out and read things and find out the truth about things, then you’d never have time to have an opinion about anything. Anna-Lena was wearing a top in a color usually only seen on parquet floors, Roger was in jeans and a checkered shirt that had received a sulfurous one-out-of-five-stars review online because it “had shrunk several inches! ” not long after Roger’s bathroom scale had received the damning judgment that it was “calibrated wrong! ” Anna-Lena tugged at one of the curtains and said: “Green curtains? Who on earth has green curtains? Honestly, the things people do these days. But maybe they’re color-blind. Or Irish. ” She didn’t say this to anyone in particular, she had just fallen into the habit of thinking out loud, seeing as that seemed appropriate for a woman who had gotten used to the fact that no one listened to her anyway.

Roger was kicking the baseboards and muttering: “This one’s loose, ” and didn’t hear a word of what Anna-Lena said. The baseboard may possibly have been loose because Roger had spent ten minutes kicking it, but for a man like Roger a truth is a truth, regardless of its cause. From time to time Anna-Lena whispered to him about what she thought of the other prospective buyers in the apartment. Sadly Anna-Lena was about as good at whispering as she was at thinking quietly, so it was pretty much the sort of shouted whisper that’s the equivalent of a fart in an airplane that you think won’t be noticed if you let it out a little bit at a time. You never manage to be as discreet as you imagine.

“That woman on the balcony, Roger, what does she want with this apartment? She’s obviously too rich to want it, so what’s she doing here? And she’s still got her shoes on. Everyone knows you take your shoes off at an apartment viewing! ” Roger didn’t answer. Anna-Lena glared at Zara through the balcony window as if Zara were the one who’d farted. Then Anna-Lena leaned even closer to Roger and whispered: “And those women in the hall, they really don’t look like they could afford to live here! Do they? ”

At this Roger stopped kicking the baseboard, turned toward his wife, and looked her deep in the eye. Then he said four little words that he never said to any other woman on the planet. He said: “For God’s sake, darling. ”

They never argue anymore, unless perhaps they argue all the time. When you’ve been stuck with each other long enough it can seem like there’s no difference between no longer arguing and no longer caring.

“For God’s sake, darling, remember to tell everyone you talk to that this place needs serious renovation! That way they won’t want to put in an offer, ” Roger went on.

Anna-Lena looked confused: “But that’s good, isn’t it? ”

Roger sighed. “For God’s sake, darling. Good for us, yes. Because we can do the renovations. But the others—you can tell from miles off that none of them knows a thing about renovation. ”

Anna-Lena nodded, wrinkled her nose, and sniffed the air demonstratively. “There’s a definite smell of damp, isn’t there? Possibly even mold? ” Because Roger had taught her always to ask the real estate agent that question, loudly, so that the other prospective buyers would hear and be worried.

Roger closed his eyes in frustration.

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