There’d been a man, a customer, some bloody weirdo, who wouldn’t leave her alone, kept wanting his piano tuned over and over again when the thing was totally fine, could not have sounded better, then when she told him she couldn’t work for him any more, he contacted her via a fake identity on social media, tried to book her services again. It wasn’t quite frightening enough to go to the police about but it had scared her. But it wasn’t even that. It was a prevalent feeling at that particular time: a feeling that it was all in your face, everyone, everything, all the time, on your screens. They both had dreams about total strangers filing into their house, telling them what was wrong with the way they lived. It wasn’t his fault and it wasn’t hers; it wasn’t most people’s fault. People’s brains – everyone’s – were still pre-industrial village brains, brains built for the nineteenth century, and the eighteenth century, and a lot of the centuries prior to that, and could not be expected to cope with this overflowing rush of world, this full spate river of statement and opinion. But then after that they had felt like they had finally run away, for eight years, and maybe even for the two different years that came after. She, he knew, had felt more like she was in a place. And that made him more confident that sprinkling her remains over the thing – he forgot what it was called now, but it was green, and directly across the river from the house – was the right course of action. It had been a good time, that period. But he could not say if it was her best time. He could not even say if it was his best time, even though he told himself it was. A lot of it was guesswork, how you remembered your own life. He could not feel his body and mind as it had been on a day on a Tuesday afternoon in 1998 or a Thursday morning in 1982 or a Saturday evening in 2006. But sometimes when he went away from the present and swam about in snapshots of memory, he got close to it. Music helped. She told him about that once: how melodies worked, stimulating neuro-pathways that other things couldn’t. In the orchestra she was in, they played old songs for people who had the illness. The big disease with the little name. No, that was a line from a song about something different. The little disease with the big name. No, not a little disease. A horrible thing, anyway, and music somehow penetrated it, took them back to something, revived something.