Only the receptionist, Kas, was in place when Pete arrived at Studio V, ready for the job, a fresh marathon of shifting and plugging, winding leads, adjusting stands. Pete and Kas were steady old hands, familiar, perennial seniors to the musicians that passed through, at peace with the process, the people, but still occasional fans of the outcome. She buzzed him through the door into the guts of Studio V, a single long corridor that each lounge, studio, storeroom and bathroom branched from, that ended at the red fire door at the rear of the building. He found the complementary breakfast spread in one of the lounges and snuck four fruit bagels into the booth of the studio booked for this job, two on a paper plate, two wrapped in napkins for later, maybe for home. He ate on the sofa, away from the desk, flipping through industry magazines, waiting patiently for everyone else to arrive, glad to be paid to relax, feeding on someone else’s dime.

The producer appeared at eleven. Richaud startled Pete from sleep on the sofa. Pete shook his head clear and waved his hand at the empty studio behind the glass. They were familiar with the habits of production - any day that did not start after breakfast would not start until after lunch, any day started after lunch would finish after midnight, any sleep that can be had should be taken. They shook hands warmly. Richaud has kept Pete as his assistant through twenty two albums (a dozen top tens and three number ones in them) despite the constant tugging on his sleeves by hungry young men and women, and the occasional lean by aggressive music executives trying to further the aspirations of distant family members, place a spy in the process. Pete was a necessity, a key man, and would so remain while Richaud’s own chart continued to rise, and, in the event of a decline in fortune, Pete would remain to the end, one of the last items of ballast to be ejected.

Caught in a fog that was refusing to lift, Shelley made her way home on foot to her rented flat tucked under the roof of a grand house whose rooms, wood panelled acres, had been sub-divided like an orchard that lingered too close to the city. The attic was divided by a white plaster wall that ran along the centre line apportioning the east, the morning, to Shelley, and the west to a snuffling stranger. There was a basin, a multi-purpose stand-in for the bathroom two flights down, and a large window that had been cut into the steep roof and filled with a pair of french doors cannibalised from the house’s original library, now two small rooms without a garden. The gaping margins of the aging doors let in the draughts, and when rain fell the angle of the roof ensured they trickled much of it over her floor, like incontinent aunts taking a water cure. There was no cover for the window doors, but the rooftops of the nearby buildings were lower and their windows almost always empty, so she had a kind of public privacy, and there were the low corners either side and out of sight of the window for changing, sleeping and bathing.

She undressed in the corner away from the door, ran hot water into the basin, soaked a wad of tissues to make a plug and stood over a towel to catch the run-off. Under the sweep of a soaped cloth she found bruises and tender flesh that she could not faithfully claim to own. A rinse of the cloth and a refill of the sink, she wiped herself free of lather, carrying away with the milky froth some of the stains of the night. Too weary to towel, she put on a heavy bathrobe. Inside, in the fog, something dark was moving. She wheeled her bed, metal, high and narrow - apparently taken from a hospital, into the squares of sunlight that fell through the doors. She climbed in still damp and robed and plumped pillows enough to prop up her head, and, without any real thought, stared out over the tops of the other houses and the boughs of trees between them that marked the streets. Something was off. Bob was a dog. She fell asleep in the sun.