‘Who else could it be? There’s no-one else who could possibly hear us making love, apart from maybe Mary, and this from a we, not an I.’

‘But look at the way it’s addressed: to the Ground Floor Flat. Not even our names. It’s so cold and impersonal. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Well, we haven’t spoken to them since Chris offered to find us a window cleaner. Maybe they think we’re no longer on first name terms. Or even second name terms.’

‘It’s ridiculous.’

Jamie took the letter back from Kirsty and read it again. ‘The noises that emerge from your flat night after night.’ He laughed. ‘It’s quite flattering, really.’

‘It has to be a joke.’

‘If not, it’s very sad. It makes me feel sorry for the person who wrote it. They’re obviously not getting any.’

Kirsty rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t you feel angry, or insulted?’

‘A bit. But, to be honest, it’s so stupid I can’t really take it seriously. I mean, what’s the point of writing something like this? If it’s meant to be a joke, it’s not funny. And if not…well, it’s just stupid.’

‘It’s horrible, though, Jamie. It makes me feel like I’m being watched. Or listened to, at least.’

She climbed out of the bath, her skin warm and pink, and Jamie took a towel from the rack and wrapped it around her shoulders.

‘We’ll have to talk about this later,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be late for work.’

While she dried herself, he cleaned his teeth and washed himself at the basin. He thought about the letter: did Lucy and Chris really have cause for complaint? It wasn’t the most pleasant situation in the world, having to listen to someone else having noisy sex. When he was a student his room in the halls of residence was next to this guy called Terry, who had a girlfriend called…Jamie couldn’t remember her name. But he could certainly remember Terry’s name, because of the number of times he had heard it called out: Oh Terry, Ter-ry, Oh God Terriiiieeeee. Jamie hadn’t had a girlfriend at the time, and the nightly orgasm-fest going on next door had driven him half-mad. But that had been different. Lucy and Chris were married, they were in their thirties. The best way to drown out the sound of someone else having sex would be to do it yourselves. That’s if the letter really was from them. But then, like he’d said to Kirsty, who else could it be from? It had come through the inner door, so it had to be from either Lucy and Chris, Mary, or Brian and Linda.

It had to be the Newtons. And if they were trying to be funny, well, he wasn’t in the mood for jokes, especially not from them.