Each night when his work was done he and Mariam would sit on the sofa and he would ask like what could she hear now? and she would say oh oh it sounds like someone is fucking in the flat next door or it is just like a waltz of footsteps in the flat upstairs or it sounds like furniture movement or it sounds like kids playing in high voices or like the sombre tunes on a piano in a late afternoon, autumnal, in the 18th Century, that has seeped out from behind a door, and down the corridors of time.

She loved him (Wirral/Special Measures) then and when he died of probably an overdose a few yrs later she took up his tool kit and work ethic, mourned as was appropriate in Endland (sic) at that time, dropped his body in the lift shaft with all tender ceremony, then went back to the job – building new neighbour machines to her own wild designs, modifying or extending the existing ones, slowly but surely populating the hole of the building with a flicker of life, light and sound that they provided.

The time she used to spend with Special Measures she later, in this later period of her life, spent solo on the sofa at nite listening in the half-dark to his sounds and her own sounds set in motion by machine. No matter how dark her mood grew of loneliness and Fear ©, no matter when the strange changes came to the city or the divided country beyond, it was comforting in that time to hear from some distance the laughing child he had created. And the simulated rumble of the tumble dryer next door. And the soft ambiguous imitation voices that seemed to pass and echo on the stairs. Even the blazing row from the neighbours that played on continuous loop down below could always make her smile – the blurred dialogue he had simulated cleverly with its pantomime of yells – it gave comfort, if not to be surrounded by persons, then at least to be cradled by such echoes and subterfuges.