Sunrise By the Sea by Jenny Colgan

Chapter Sixteen

However bad Nonna’s advice had been, Marisa was still glad that she’d spoken to her and was sorry to hang up. It had been a while, she realised. She seemed to have more or less stopped speaking altogether. And her phone had stopped ringing too.

Enough, she thought. She was going to get through this. She was feeling better already. She had a therapist, and she’d managed to get in touch with her nonna. Two things had gone well already and she’d only been here a few weeks. She’d be down playing on the beach in no time.

She went to bed oddly pleased with herself for the first time in months. She’d achieved something.

Just as she was turning out the light, it started up. A low crumping of chords, all deep low keys, loud enough to make the light shades shake.

She sat up, incredulous.

‘Shut up shut up shut up!’ she said, teeth clenched. She was dying to shout it, loudly, bang on the walls – but oh my God. What if he answered? What if he was angry; what if he came round . . . She didn’t know him at all. What if he was dangerous? He was so big those kids had thought he was a bear.

She felt her heart race, fell back on the bed, cursed herself for her weakness. She knew she could say goodbye to sleeping tonight.

This couldn’t go on. It couldn’t.

Marisa agonised over writing the note – it felt so passive-aggressive, probably because it was.

On the other hand, she didn’t know what else she could do.

But what to say? Could you set your piano on fire and never play again? Could you give up what is patently your job and livelihood just because I don’t want to go into the office?

So much of this, she knew, was about her own issues.

No. During the day she’d have to deal with it. It was the nighttime music – the awful modern stuff that wasn’t really music. That was the stuff that really had to go. He must see that was reasonable, surely. Just the night stuff.

Then next door they started a halting, punishingly slow version of ‘My Heart Will Go On’ – this must be one of his new collection of older lady pianists, who had suddenly started turning up out of nowhere – and this stiffened her resolve.

She took out her pen and pad. It always felt nice to be writing by hand again. She had always taken a lot of pride in her handwriting, looping it carefully. She started:

Dear Neighbour

Tentative, but friendly. The last thing she wanted was him coming over to make friends. And she couldn’t remember his name. It was Russian so it seemed she was unlikely to guess it correctly. But then his English wasn’t very good. Maybe he wouldn’t know what that meant? She frowned to herself. She was overthinking this. Maybe she should leave it for another time.

The terrible key change in the song was coming up and Marisa found all her nerves tightening in anticipation. There was an agonisingly long pause . . . and then a crash of harshly dissonant notes. She could make out the bass rumble of the man’s voice: it was soothing and encouraging. Perhaps he was deaf, she thought. That would make sense of the noise.

The student went at it again, and Marisa found herself completely wound up, like an overstrung instrument.

Dear Sir,

As your neighbour . . .

Okay, so that didn’t get round the neighbour problem.

Dear Sir,

As I am living next door to you and have to work from home I wonder if I could ask you to keep the music down? It is very loud at all hours of the day and particularly at night and it appears the walls are very thin. Thank you.

She was going to write her name and then at the last minute decided against it. He wouldn’t . . . I mean, he hadn’t seemed an aggressive person, but who knew? She was up here all alone; nobody had a clue where she was.

She chided herself. The piano teacher living next door was very unlikely to kill her. Surely.

Although from what she remembered, he was a very large person. And, as she’d already seen, absolutely thoughtless.

No, that was madness.

And wasn’t Russia quite a violent place?

She was being ridiculous.

She heard his voice again, murmuring. The walls in here were terrible, she thought. If she got close enough she could almost . . .

I mean, she wouldn’t.

She shifted herself over towards the wall. After all, what if he was saying, ‘If you don’t play this properly I will kill you’?

As she got close to the wall, his low rumbling voice came through incredibly clearly.

‘. . . is just notes,’ he was saying. ‘You can learn to play notes. Notes can be wrong. Does not matter. But you must learn to trust heart. Celine, she say, heart go on. Do not hesitate. Go on.’

‘But I keep getting it wrong,’ came the querulous tones of the student. It was Mrs Baines, as it happened, one of Polly’s best clients, who had fallen in love with Mr Batbayar because she liked his dark flowing hair and was hoping that he would understand that when she played ‘My Heart Will Go On’ she was actually playing it to him.

Mr Batbayar did not understand this and thought that someone had sent this woman playing a terrible version of the worst song ever written in order to torture him for a sin he had committed in a past life and was wondering what it might be, and was regretting accidentally killing a spider the day before, which he had meant to pick up and free. His huge fingers on a keyboard were elegant and full of precision. When it came to being around the rest of the world, they were oversized and he had been unusually clumsy. This was spider karma, he had decided, and he was simply dealing with it as well as he could.

I love you, thought Mrs Baines next to him, who had mistaken his narrow brown eyes remembering a spider for fascination.

‘So?’ he said, returning to Mrs Baines, who was pink with effort. ‘Gettink wrong is our road to gettink right. Do not stop. But do be slower, yes? Fingers cannot run before head is ready. Try it slow slow slow, and put your heart in every note. It will find you.’

‘All right,’ said Mrs Baines timidly. ‘Could you show me again how to shape my hands?’

‘No! You know now! You can do it.’

Marisa frowned crossly. He didn’t sound remotely dangerous. And as Mrs Baines started, very slowly and not quite so falteringly, she irritatingly thought he was probably quite a good teacher. She googled ‘piano teacher murderer’ but it appeared to be a vanishingly rare set of circumstances.

She sighed and returned to the note. Still. She couldn’t live like this, she really couldn’t.