96.

Somewhere below or beside her the sound of an alarm clock’s hootenanny chorus. Sound hard to locate exactly, rising in this warren.

Afternoon. A neighbour’s computer kicks into life with noisy beeps and trills. Leaning on the buzzer outside, the same woman who’s accosted her before, at the same door. Another day, same sodden set to her clothes, and still visibly drugged, flesh having given up the job. The moral problem of admittance. The woman’s plaint: I can’t get in. She gives the woman the same lecture at which the young woman returns the same acquiescent monosyllables. Yep. Okay. Sure. So many hectoring words the young woman has to pretend to absorb, for the sake of whatever it is she wants.

At night the sound of people rises outside her windows. They are talking loudly as if in their own homes. Perhaps they are in their own homes six metres from hers in the next building or upstairs, big sash windows thrown open to the cold.

A young woman’s laugh, a young man’s excited lengthy explanation. Song rises in dissonant chorus from a group of people swaying down the street. Gradually dies away. She sleeps through the small hours, perfectly content. There was a time when she would wake in the night and hear the gasp of women above, their keening and urgency. Now nothing.

Each hour gradually comes to life in a rising wall of sound. At five a.m. there is perfect stillness, broken only by the occasional car passing on the street outside. By six the sound of engines rushing by has become intermittent. The cars always have somewhere to go and never want to stop.

By seven the traffic has begun to coalesce into a steady stream: droplets of water joining together to form a spotty rain, then a torrent.