The Witch of Portobello Page 0,49

reality around us.

'When you start creating rituals for your student to carry out, you'll be receiving guidance. That's where the apprenticeship begins, or so my protector told me. If you want to heed my words, fine, but if you don't and you carry on with your life as it is at the moment, you'll end up bumping up against a wall called dissatisfaction.'

I rang for a taxi, and we talked a little about fashion and men, and then Athena left. I was sure she would listen to me, mainly because she was the kind of person who never refuses a challenge.

'Teach people to be different. That's all!' I shouted after her, as the taxi moved off.

That is joy. Happiness would be feeling satisfied with everything she already had a lover, a son, a job. And Athena, like me, wasn't born for that kind of life.

Heron Ryan, journalist

I couldn't admit I was in love, of course; I already had a girlfriend who loved me and shared with me both my troubles and my joys.

The various encounters and events that had taken place in Sibiu were part of a journey, and it wasn't the first time this kind of thing had happened while I was away from home. When we step out of our normal world and leave behind us all the usual barriers and prejudices, we tend to become more adventurous.

When I returned to England, the first thing I did was to tell the producers that making a documentary about the historical figure of Dracula was a nonsense, and that one book by a mad Irishman had created a truly terrible image of Transylvania, which was, in fact, one of the loveliest places on the planet. Obviously the producers were none too pleased, but at that point, I didn't care what they thought. I left television and went to work for one of the world's most prestigious newspapers.

That was when I began to realise that I wanted to meet Athena again.

I phoned her and we arranged to go for a walk together before she went back to Dubai. She suggested guiding me around London.

We got on the first bus that stopped, without asking where it was going, then we chose a female passenger at random and decided that we would get off wherever she did. She got off at Temple and so did we. We passed a beggar who asked us for money, but we didn't give him any and walked on, listening to the insults he hurled after us, accepting that this was merely his way of communicating with us.

We saw someone vandalising a telephone box, and I wanted to call the police, but Athena stopped me; perhaps that person had just broken up with the love of his life and needed to vent his feelings. Or, who knows, perhaps he had no one to talk to and couldn't stand to see others humiliating him by using that phone to discuss business deals or love.

She told me to close my eyes and to describe exactly the clothes we were both wearing; to my surprise, I got nearly every detail wrong.

She asked me what was on my desk at work and said that some of the papers were only there because I was too lazy to deal with them.

'Have you ever considered that those bits of paper have a life and feelings, have requests to make and stories to tell? I don't think you're giving life the attention it deserves.'

I promised that I'd go through them one by one when I returned to work the following day.

A foreign couple with a map asked Athena how to get to a particular tourist spot. She gave them very precise, but totally inaccurate directions.

'Everything you told them was completely wrong!'

'It doesn't matter. They'll get lost, and that's the best way to discover interesting places. Try to fill your life again with a little fantasy; above our heads is a sky about which the whole of humanity after thousands of years spent observing it has given various apparently reasonable explanations. Forget everything you've ever learned about the stars and they'll once more be transformed into angels, or into children, or into whatever you want to believe at that moment. It won't make you more stupid after all, it's only a game but it could enrich your life.'

The following day, when I went back to work, I treated each sheet of paper as if it were a message addressed to me personally and not to the