(file image) Photo: Unsplash
First person - Didier is wearing a brightly coloured purple shirt, unbuttoned a bit closer to his navel than is comfortable for me as we stand talking. A large, dangly necklace nestles in the slash of chest hair. While French, he now lives in England - where "the women are much nicer".
We are standing in a small conference room in a hotel apartment complex in the sweltering Paris suburb of Bry-Sur-Marne. It's late summer, mid-August, and we (my wife and I) are taking a break from an eight-month road-trip around Europe to raise some much-needed funds by working for a newswire service at the 2007 Rugby World Cup.
It's meet and greet night. We are both journalists by trade, but Didier is a numerologist. Weirdly, he won a competition to join the reporting team. He tells me to look into his eyes.
"You have expressive eyes," he says. "You have been sent to teach people. You're quite charismatic."
I'm warming to Didier. He's a quick study. He turns to Lucy, my wife. She is also charismatic; we're two charismatic peas in a pod.
He asks for our birth dates to confirm his initial thoughts. Satisfied, he then turns to Lucy and starts rubbing her stomach. I'm too surprised to intervene; while Lucy is either holding her breath from shock or because she's getting ready to punch him.
"I used to have a flat stomach like that," he says wistfully.
Then the showstopper.
"You will have a baby in the next year."
We both gulp down our drinks, looking for someone else to talk to while Didier starts doing a number on someone else.
Over Didier's shoulder, our young Australian housemate for the first few days is talking loudly about his sex life. He's full of wild stories, yet so unworldly he's fascinated by the holes in Swiss cheese.
Two days earlier, I'd walked into the apartment, where the bedrooms all have doors opening into the hallway, to get a full view of him having sex. I suggested he close the door and then retreated upstairs.
A little while later (after they had also flooded the bathroom), his guest leaves and he joins me in the kitchen.
"Was she embarrassed about earlier?" I asked.
"No way," he says, his mind ticking over, "but she didn't want to come and say hello."
Back at the party, we start talking to a real numbers man. Warwick is a polite, reserved sports statistician and seems like a safer bet until he reveals that he is a wanted man - in Bavaria. Twenty years earlier, he was on a downhill ski run when another skier collected him from the side. Warwick was unharmed but his new German friend had a broken leg.
He helped him get medical attention and thought nothing more of it until several months later, back in Sydney, he received a letter from the state of Bavaria seeking his return on criminal charges. The man with the broken leg was a justice official - Warwick hasn't been back.
He's a good listener, Warwick. Not the prediction type, he likes verifiable things. He used to run his own business tracking down missing freight containers for major airlines - a niche market which he cornered. He would spend 72 hours at a time flying around the world tracking down his prey. Apparently, they were easy to find - you just had to know where to look.
Speaking of which, Didier is looking at us again and moving in our direction. I nudge Lucy, suggesting we might want to grab some fresh air on the balcony.
Later that week, Didier tells another colleague that his numbers for the day aren't good, and he should be very careful. Five minutes later, Jean Charles, while riding his motorcycle, is hit by a truck and rushed to hospital.
Miraculously, he has a sore back but is okay. We, on the other hand, are little worried.
*Postscript - we do not have a baby the next year, but Lucy is pregnant nearly a year to the day following Didier's prediction.
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