Page 40 of The Key to My Heart

‘Gosh. I’m sorry too. Your brother – that must be really hard.’

Joe nods, and silence stretches between us, awkward and thick, like an insivible band but, already, there’s something that’s lifted. Just in that tiny exchange with Joe. Pressure, released. And a sort of irony. All those times I’ve been at the station, a rain cloud of grief and emptiness following me around, like a dutiful pet, feeling like everyone else had it together, just a few tables over, there was Joe, beneath an invisible cloud of his own.

I clear my throat. ‘So, I might go and take a look at the piano. In there did he say?’

‘Yup. The famoussmelly room.’ Joe smiles, just a tiny one – a graze of teeth on his lip. ‘They’ve tried to find the culprit. I even tried. Found an old mouldy apple, felt like king of the world—’

I laugh.

‘But it didn’t work. It wasn’t the apple.’

‘What a plot twist,’ I say. ‘And you’re welcome to join. If you’re learning piano, maybe it might help? Or not, of course. Whatever the …music therapy etiquetteis …’

‘Ah, there’s no etiquette in places like this, really. I’ve been to enough of them.’ He laughs, bashfully. ‘Me. The therapy overachiever. But yeah, it’s cool with me if it’s cool with you. Plus – you haven’t lived until you’ve heard meunleashingon a French horn.’

‘Oh? Any good?’

He laughs. ‘We’re both about to find out.’

‘I am – very bad at French horn.’

‘If it softens the blow, Joe, I think the screech you got out of it encapsulates grief perfectly,’ I say, and Joe laughs.

We’re in the smelly room, which is a small, windowless square with black, tatty soundproof foam on the walls, and a weak, warm light that casts our faces in shadows. Joe and I have been in here for twenty minutes, chatting, in between bursts of my playing. We’ve swapped the basics, the way you do when you meet someone new in a confined space. He’s twenty-seven, works atan ‘insufferably trendy’ speakeasy bar in Soho, and lives in a houseshare in Kentish Town with two antisocial, work-obsessed nerds which Joe loves because it means he gets to ‘wander around the house alone in peace without feeling pressurised to establish some sort of Chandler, Joey and Ross dynamic’. Joe also asks the nicest questions about Russ – ‘What did he like doing?’ ‘Was Russ into his music?’ – and it feels so lovely just to talk about him, without anyone worrying, or thinking,‘Oh, shit, she’s still grieving. I never know what to say when she talks about him, do you?’

Joe weighs the brass tangle of tubes in his hand. ‘I always look at these things and think, how hard can it be? Surely you just pick up a French horn and blow, and voila, you just played Brahms.’

‘I remember thinking that about piano,’ I laugh. ‘Surely you just press a few keys in the right order and out it comes. Easy.’

‘Well, you play like that is definitely the case,’ he says. ‘You make it look easy. Like it’s being played from a record playing somewhere.’

‘Ah. Thank you,’ I say. ‘Once you can play, you can play.’

Joe gives a small shrug in the dim light. ‘I dunno. I think you’re doing yourself a disservice there.’

‘Am I?’

‘Yeah.God, yeah.’ Joe leans to put the French horn back in its case, the little round stool, creaking under him. The faintest sound of music floats from the main room, seeping through the sealed crack in the door. ‘I just think sometimes people can’t play like others,’ hesays, straightening. ‘Even if they’re following the same music, it just doesn’t sound the same. It’s the same way you know an Oasis song from the first note. You can tell who’s playing. And you can’t even put your finger on what’s different, and what’sthemabout it. But it just is. You know.’ Joe stretches then, pushing his chest out, widening his toned arms, like someone who’s just woken up, and laughs. ‘God, look at that, I’ve gone and got all philosophical in the smelly room.’

I laugh. ‘Well, I think what you just said was profound,’ I say. ‘AFas the internet would say.’

Joe grins over at me. ‘The power of the French horn, I reckon,’ he adds. ‘It’s what it does to you.’

Chapter Fourteen

‘I can’t believe you actually got asked out!’

‘Priya, I did not getasked out.’

‘Sure,’ grins Priya. ‘Of course you didn’t. Why else would a sexy dude like Notebook Guy give you his number?’

‘Because he wants a friend?’ I offer. ‘Because his brother died?’

‘And because he fancies you,’ Priya says musically, with a shrug. ‘The end, my friend. The end.’

Priya, Jodie and I sit out the back of Tina on the concrete, in the bright summer sunshine. We don’t often get to do this, have lunch, us three all together. One of us always has to mind the shop floor, but Mum is visiting again, and she just can’t help herself. The second she can, she gets back behind the counter, a (totally pointless, of course) tape measure around her neck, and chews the ear off any customer that dares utter a single admiring word about her shop. Someone complimented the new range of anklets twenty minutes ago. That’s all Mum needed before she launched into a guided history of how she and Dad – ‘my Colin’ – started the business back in a ‘better time’, when the internet didn’t exist and people didn’t care for organic meat.

‘I think it could be perfection,’ says Jodie, a squashy triangular half of an egg and cress sandwich in her hand. ‘Joe and Natalie, under each other’s noses all along at the coffee shop, grief bringing them together …’

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