‘Fucking hell,’ said Sally, when Bob finally showed her the messages. ‘Also why can’t he spell his name with a “k” like a normal person?’ They were in Bob’s new kitchen. Water was all over them in every way except the way that would have made them wet: the kettle boiling, the cold tap running in an attempt to stop Bob’s eyes stinging from the onions he’d just chopped, and a further, more captivating liquid story being told just outside the window. He lived by the river now, just under an hour’s walk from Sally’s, and he normally did walk, not drive there, arriving in mud-splashed trousers after cutting through woodland where fallen trees often blocked the path and the ground sucked thirstily at his legs. The front door to Sally’s cottage led directly to the living room and if you had a bit of a belly, as Bob did, it was a squeeze to get yourself through the gap between the Kentia palm and the piano. The piano, a Bechstein which had once been her granddad’s, wouldn’t fit through the door so when she’d moved in it had meant getting permission to go through the Dawsons’ garden, four doors down, then using the ginnel that led behind all seven gardens on the cottage row. The removal men had not been pleased and she gave them a £50 tip, which had left her £371.23 overdrawn, rather than just £321.23 overdrawn. Sally rarely played the piano any more as tuning other ones all day could drive her what she called ‘a bit doolally’ and she had come to appreciate the opportunities for silence that home offered. Even though her business name, Sally the Piano Tuner, made matters fairly explicit, people still often expected her to be a man when she arrived at their house to tinker with their instruments, or much older than she was, or blind, or all three. ‘So what do you do as well as this, for your actual job?’ some of them asked. They found it strange, almost impossible, to believe that this is what she’d been doing for a full-time form of income since she left college. The job was not the quaint and refined Victorian existence she had imagined when she was younger. It could be territorial and shady. When she’d first moved to the area and tried to build up her clientele, rivals in the trade had badmouthed her temperament and stability as a tuner. One especially vindictive veteran had sent her a warning message by calling her out to a fake job at a fake address. As she attempted to solve the musical jigsaws in front of her at the houses of lonely men, she saw their desperate staring reflections in the polyester finish of the pianos. But there were still moments that made the job worthwhile. Old people, hearing her play dusty instruments that had not been touched for decades, burst into tears as they were sucked down tunnels into parts of their past that had been inaccessible to them for many years. The terminology of the trade never fully ceased to provide some level of amusement for her, although most of that was now her amusement at witnessing the reactions of others when they heard it. ‘If you are lucky, I will show you my papps wedge,’ she told Bob the first time she invited him over.