Gus fell asleep at half past five with his shark slippers on and his arm across the avocado, saying "I'm fine, I'm fine, it's totally fine" into a cushion until the words ran out.

She took the hall. It was a narrow strip between the front door and the bedroom, floored with grey vinyl and decorated with a poster of a rocket that was, as far as she could tell, also an advertisement for a cryptocurrency. She set a kitchen chair against the door, one against the bedroom door and sat on the floor between them with her back to the wall, as she had sat in hotel corridors across three continents with a principal asleep on the other side. It was a position she understood. Doors in front of her, doors behind. Exits counted. The only difference was that the principal snored with the confidence of someone with a trust fund.

Day came and went through the curtains.

She did not go back to the desk. Seun had put a notice on it: CONCIERGE ON SICK LEAVE (ARM). He had covered the shifts himself, bravely, in a fleece. By evening she had eaten a pot noodle and half a croissant and given up on sleep. At eleven the knock came, soft, two and then one, and she opened the door on the corridor and found Rui there with a tray.

"I didn't know what you eat," he said. "So I brought everything I could cook."

It was a toastie press, an extension lead, and four slices of bread. Next to them stood a chunk of the cheese. Out of its dome, out in the open of the third-floor corridor, it was a pale glistening cube the colour of old piano keys, rind patterned like a map.

"No," said Zee.

"Give me three minutes." He stepped past her. "You haven't eaten properly in two days. Cheese is a mood food. And anyone who has put up with the building's opinions of it for four months deserves a chance to defend it."

They ate on the vinyl, sitting against the wall opposite each other with the tray between them, in the unnatural quiet of a house whose residents were holding their breath. The toasties were extremely good. The cheese had no right to be. It ran out of the bread in long amber strings and tasted of hay and nuts and the inside of a warm barn, and she ate the first one with her eyes shut and the second with her eyes open and said, "Fine. Fine, it's good."

"I told you."

"You did not tell me. You said it was a character."

"It's a character that's also good."

She laughed. It surprised them both. It was a short plain laugh, rusty from disuse, and he looked at her mouth while she did it and then looked quickly at the toastie press.

"May I ask something?" said Rui. "You don't have to answer."

"You say that a lot."

"It's a defence. I'm usually asking things people don't want to be asked." He turned the plate on his knee. "You wear a glove on your left hand. You didn't yesterday."

She looked at the hand. It lay in her lap in its thin black leather, one of the pair she wore to drive. Under the leather it was the wrong colour. She had checked twice that evening in the bathroom mirror, and each time the bleach had spread another knuckle, up toward the wrist, a clean pale wash, like a photograph left in a window.

"It's cold," she said.

"It's twenty-two degrees."

"I feel the cold."

He nodded slowly. He did not argue. He waited, and she knew the waiting was a kind of mercy, and she hated it for being one. And in the end, because there was no one else to be tired in front of, she said, "Dona Graça saw. I haven't told anyone else. I don't want a meeting."

"I won't call a meeting."

"Seun will make a chart."

"He'll make a chart in four colours." He hesitated. "Zee. This is the thing I said about fixing. I fix. I can't help it. If you tell me it hurts, I'll try to repair it. I know I can't. But I'll try. I'd rather you knew that than found out."

"Thank you for the warning."

"Would you like the same from me?"

"What?"

He took his glasses off. It was a gesture he made when he was about to say something plain. "I'm deaf in this ear." He touched the left one. "Since I was nineteen. I was a trainee in a radio studio, in Osaka, and someone plugged a mic into a speaker that was on, and the feedback went through my left ear like a nail. I was holding the headphones. I'm told it was the loudest sound anyone in the building had ever heard. I didn't hear it." The ghost of a smile. "I've spent sixteen years since then trying to put the sound right. I restore old recordings. I clean out the pops and the hiss and the people coughing, and I give the voice back to whoever it was. I think I'm trying to hear that one sound the right way."

"You can't."

"I know. I'm very good at not being able to."

She sat there looking at his tired, lovely, stupid face, and an extremely inconvenient warmth went through her from the neck down. It was not the sort of thing that happened in her working life. It was a warmth that came with a clause attached: you'll lose it. She had learned that clause early. She did not like how quickly she had put her glove on the floor between them, palm up.

He didn't take it. He looked at it and then he put his own hand a half-inch from hers, on the vinyl, with the knuckles brushing, and left it there.

Down the hall, a clock in someone's flat struck the three-quarter. Zee glanced at her phone. 2:46.

"Rui."

"Mm?"

"What happens in the lobby at 2:47?"

He was quiet. "Nothing. Hearthwell's cleaning contractors come at five."

"It's what Dona Graça said. The Office keeps its hours. That's what she meant. The lobby, the desk. The queue." She was on her feet. She did not remember rising. "I've worked nights here for a year and two months. Every single night I've sat at that desk. What do I do at 2:47?"

"You, I don't know, you do your rounds?"

"I walk to the door and I check it. I walk to the fire exit and I check it. I walk to the lift and I stand in front of it for eleven minutes." She stared at him. "Every night. I never knew why. I thought it was nerves."

The lift hummed down the shaft.

Both of them heard it. It was the sound of the car going by without stopping. Down. Then a pause, then the bright small chime of arrival on the ground floor, from a long way off, like a bell in another house.

"Stay with Gus," she said.

"Zee —"

"Please. Lock the door behind me. If it knocks, don't answer. If it speaks to you, say cut."

"I can't, it's an hour. I used it. It's only been —"

"Then sing a goat song."

She left him at the door, speechless and standing, and ran.

The stairwell light came on in her path, flight after flight, and she did not curse it. She took the last landing in a bound and came out on the ground floor with her heart going, and stopped on the edge of the tiles.

The lobby was empty. The trestle table. The dead fern. The great brass hook in the ceiling where the sunburst had been. The black glass of the front door, and the street beyond it, wet, still.

It was 2:47 exactly, and the room was full.

She couldn't see them. She could not have said how she knew. It was the way you know a lift is crowded when the doors open and everyone has stopped talking. The air was thick with them. There was a smell, wet wool, tar, cheap tobacco, the sweet dank breath of a ship's hold, and a sound too, a wide soft murmur like the hush in a church before the priest comes in, forty voices, sixty, in Portuguese and Yoruba and Creole and four tongues she did not know. The sound of a line.

The tiles had begun to change.

Blue and cream, the waves her eye had walked over every night for a year. Now a dark wet footprint appeared on the cream beside the door. Then another, bare, a broad foot, an old man's, with the toes splayed. Then a smaller one beside it, a child's, and then a woman's heel in a boot. They came in along the floor from the street door in a slow single column, leaving their damp marks, and bent away across the lobby toward the trestle table and the place where the old desk had been. As she watched, the line shuffled forward by a step. The marks moved with it.

"Is this the right line?"

The voice was an old man's, deep and mild, with a sing-song under the English. It came from the empty air at about the height of her shoulder, so near she could have touched him. "Excuse me. I was told they had a section for carpenters. I have been standing since morning. I have my tools in the cart."

She could not breathe.

The voice went on, courteous, bemused, a man waiting for a clerk. "I would not trouble you. But my name is Oyelaran. Segun Oyelaran. They will have it on a list."

"Yes," said Zee. It came out of her like a cracked plate. "They'll have it."

"Thank you, miss. You are very kind."

The wet marks shuffled on. The line was more than a line. It was patient and decent and appalling, and she understood now why she had stood at the desk every night of her working life, with her hands folded, saying nothing, keeping her place. She had been the one thing in the lobby they had to walk around.

She looked to the end of the line.

The footprints stopped short of the door. Beyond the last of them, at the very back, where the queue would have begun if it had begun, something was standing on the doormat. She saw its edges first. They were not quite right. Then she saw a woman in a dark suit, with a bandaged left arm and a thin black glove, a woman of her height and weight and stance, standing in the line with her hands folded and her head slightly bowed.

She was almost white. The flesh of the face was bleached, flat, glowing from inside like a lit screen. Only the eyes were dark.

The woman at the back of the queue lifted her head, slowly, and smiled at Zee with a patience that was almost love, and took a step forward into the line.