The Same Man in Every City

Chapter Originals

Frankie Osei has been travelling by a dead man's rules since she was fifteen, when her grandmother gave her a paperback called The Cheapest Ticket. It has eleven rules in it. Take the cheapest flight leaving in the next four days. Stay at least nine nights. Never book anything in advance except the first bed. Learn four hundred words. And the eleventh, which is the one nobody follows: when you have run out of reasons to stay, go to the highest place in the city and decide there. She has done thirty-one cities in six years and written about all of them and it has become a job, which is the worst thing that can happen to a rule. And in Tbilisi, in the March she turns twenty-eight, she comes up the funicular at eight in the morning to decide where to go next, and there is a man at the rail she has already seen in Naples, in Chisinau and in Almaty. He is thirty-two. He is Danish and he is extremely polite and he has an identical paperback in his bag with a different handwriting in the front of it. And it takes them four days and a very bad ferry to work out that neither of them has been choosing anything at all.