Whereas the corridors, after visiting hours, were empty, silent, cold and grey. They were rain after drought, a cool place of stillness only occasionally punctuated by someone rushing by with a gurney, the rattle of the wheels rising and falling like a motorbike on an empty country lane. So Harmony drifted, body weak and weary, stopping on benches in Oncology and Dermatology whenever she needed to rest, pausing to catch her breath at Imaging 3 and Gynaecology, the doors shut up for the day, the patients packed off to bed.

She heard the piano while crossing a walkway over one of the hospital’s big, internal atriums, a courtyard of red brick, blue metal, potted plants in cat litter and dirty green glass. She got turned around at Sarah Ward as she tried to work her way down to it, but picked up her route again by the all-faith chapel and shuffled the walk of the gown-clad penitent towards the music.

In the middle of the atrium, framed by bamboo and hardy stiff-limbed grasses that no one need care about too much, was a grand piano. On Wednesday and Thursday lunchtimes, a sign said, there were concerts. Everyone was welcome. Donations were appreciated.

The woman who played was not holding a concert. She was pear-shaped, her breasts beginning to droop with age, and disguised this horrendous truth with a long black cardigan and baggy trousers, creating from her sinking shape no shape at all. She had hair fading to grey, which seemed to be passing through purple and blue on its journey, her body unsure how it wished to age, and damned if it would do so gracefully. She wore four rings, three on her left hand, one on her right, and hunched like a crow over the keys, producing runs of sound and falls of music that couldn’t be called a tune, but still managed to hold Harmony in her place.

The woman played for one other: a creature even more ancient and decrepit than herself. This older lady was strapped into a giant blue chair, closer to a sunbather on wheels than a wheelchair, padded and blue. Beneath the straps that held her were layers of woolly pink blanket, none quite big enough to cover all of her, and so a patchwork of interlaced squares spread out instead to form a fluffy cocoon. Her hair looked like a fistful of bubble bath dolloped on her scalp; her skin was grey-white, threaded with blue-black veins. Her green eyes were open, and stared at nothing much. Yellow-tinted spit rolled off her great, protruding lower lips, and if she breathed, the motion was so tiny that Harmony couldn’t see it at first.

Yet it was clear that this was the lady for whom the music was made, and she was perhaps the mother of the woman dressed in black, caught in a moment of vacancy.

The music finished.

The woman looked up.

Saw Harmony, and smiled.

Stood up; went to her mother, daubed spit away from her mouth casually, a habitual act, then looked up again quickly, as if only just remembering how a stranger might feel about this, unused to such things; smiled, an apology, a shrug with the lips – you know how it is.