How can something hurt that isn’t there? A stupid question. I’ve read my Freud. What’s missing hurts more than anything else, especially when you are alone at night. Sometimes I find myself lying awake and wondering if the arm is still alive somewhere and missing me. I wonder where the arm is now, and if it is lonely. Those are thoughts that can keep a man awake for a long time.

No, I make enough money for my needs. Real work is for something else. Real work has to be for more than a full belly or a paid-up woman. Real work has its own reasons for being done; reasons that are part of the work itself. That, too, was a fact that Jo-Jo Olsen was going to have to think about before we were finished with each other.

‘Are you writing a column,’ Marty said, ‘or telling about Jo-Jo Olsen?’

Marty likes to read over my shoulder when I write about my work instead of working at it. She has the right.

‘Is this about Jo-Jo or about you, Daniel?’ Marty said.

‘Everything is about me,’ I said.

Everything we say or do is really about ourselves. I’m telling my story of Jo-Jo Olsen. The real story. The way it happened to Jo-Jo, and to me. It’s not the facts, the simple events, that tell a story. It’s the background, the people and what they have inside, the scenery a man lives with, the shadows all around him he never knew were there. The truth does not come in a nutshell.

Give the facts, Marty would say, but what are the facts that made the story of Jo-Jo Olsen? A fact is everything that makes someone act in such a way as to change events. It does not have to be true or logical or something you can point to and put your finger on. There were already two important facts in Jo-Jo’s story that had no relation to Jo-Jo at all, but without them there would have been no story, or at least a different story.