least, nothing but that infernal music. What was he? Seventeen?
She tried again, this time pounding with her fist. Still nothing. She waited again. Five minutes she stayed there, alternately knocking then folding her arms and staring at the door, her toes tapping in impatience. Once or twice she found she’d accidentally fallen in with the rhythm of the music and that just infuriated her further.
Eventually, she stormed off back upstairs and slammed her front door as hard as she could. So he wasn’t just an inconsiderate, lazy, pasty-faced technology geek, but a coward too. She should have known.
She went back to bed and rummaged through the drawer in her bedside table until she found the earplugs she always took on long plane journeys. She squished them into her ears and lay there, shoulders tense, armed folded across the top of the sheet and stared at the ceiling.
It was no good. She could still hear it.
At least she thought she could. It might just be the memory of all that noise echoing off the inside of her skull, like hearing an extra chime after the church bells had stopped ringing. She turned over and shoved her head underneath her pillow.
Please let him leave soon, she prayed fervently, as she waited for her blood pressure to drop back down to normal. She didn’t know when, but it had to be soon, didn’t it? And she’d be crossing the days off her calendar with a fat red squeaky marker until he did.
*
Dominic woke with a start. He was lying on his sofa in his living room and had no memory of how he’d got there. For some reason, he could hear the end of the last song on one of his favourite albums playing in his head, but all around him everything was completely silent.
He looked up and noticed his iPod, still lit up, sitting in its dock.
Ah. Now he remembered.
He’d been feeling particularly restless this evening. Probably because now he’d been back in the UK for more than a week, he was noticing that his days were kind of empty. He’d decided to listen to some good music to get this feeling of being trapped, grounded, out of his system. Somewhere in the middle of it, he must have fallen asleep.
Now, for most people that might have been impossible, but not for Dominic. He’d always been able to drop off anywhere, even when he’d been a teenager, and it had served him well on his travels most of the time. When he’d gone backpacking with uni buddies, they’d always complained about noise and hard beds and strange smells, but none of it had bothered him. He just closed his eyes and he was away.
Even staying in some of the really dodgy places his work took him to hadn’t been that bad. If he ever did have problems sleeping, he stuck his earphones in his ears and played music, sometimes quite loud, reasoning that it was often silence punctuated by unexpected noises that woke him up. If he could choose something with a consistent volume level it became white noise, lulling him to sleep. It was the sudden quiet at the end of an album that often roused him these days.
The iPod blinked off and he sat up, stretched and yawned. At least he was feeling sleepy now. And it was dark. Finally, his body clock was returning to some sort of normal pattern. About time too. He stumbled off into his bedroom where he ripped off his clothes and fell into bed. A few seconds after he hit the mattress, he was sleeping the sleep of the innocent.
*
He was still in a pretty good mood when he emerged from his flat to go for a run at eleven o’clock the next morning. He looked out for a little white rectangle on his doormat and wasn’t disappointed. Somewhere along the line, the war of notes between him and his upstairs neighbour had become a source of entertainment.
Hmm. A signal that he definitely needed to get out more. He had the research for a new documentary he wanted to do on free divers – the particular kind of mental discipline required, the tight-knit community of enthusiasts, the dangers – but it was desk work, his least favourite kind, and would hardly get him out the flat much. Pete had texted him a couple of times and he’d texted back, but they hadn’t seen each other since that incident at his house last week.
Which meant he needed an alternative social life. One involving female company would be good, no matter what Pete said.
Just thinking about how his best friend had summed him up still made his jaw clench. Just because Pete had a point, it didn’t mean he had to lay it on quite so thick. He’d exaggerated, as always.
Dominic frowned. No way was he a total romantic disaster! But Pete couldn’t see that. All Pete could see was his little nest of domestic bliss and he measured – and judged – everyone, including his best friend, against that. The only problem was that Dominic knew Pete was so stubborn he was never going to let go of the idea that his best friend was a romantic pariah unless he was faced with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.
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