Chapter 4: Nights
Althea's shift began at seven in the evening, when the office workers were leaving and the building on Market Street was emptying out floor by floor. She collected her cart from the supply room, checked that she had enough cloths and spray and bin bags, and took the lift to the top floor to work her way down. The offices were quiet after hours, the desks neat or untidy according to their owners, the computer screens dark, the windows showing the city lighting up street by street. She emptied bins, wiped desks, vacuumed carpets, cleaned glass doors until they shone, and mopped the long corridors in smooth, even strokes. It was honest work, and she did it well, but no one ever saw her do it, which suited her fine.
She sang while she worked, not aloud, but in her head, where the music was always waiting. A hymn from Sunday would turn itself over as she pushed the vacuum cleaner down a corridor, and by the third pass she would have changed a harmony or added a low note underneath, testing how it sounded in the quiet of her mind. Sometimes she stopped in an empty office, her cloth in her hand, and tapped a rhythm on the edge of a desk with her fingertips, working out a passage that had troubled her at the keyboard the night before. The building never minded. The empty chairs and dark screens kept her secrets, and the hum of the air conditioning covered the soft sound of her fingers.
Her supervisor, a tired man named Mr. Doyle, rarely spoke to her beyond a nod and a roster. That was fine too. Althea preferred the nights to the days, in a way, because at night nobody asked her what she planned to do with her life, and nobody looked at her cleaning uniform and decided what she was capable of. At night she was simply a pair of hands doing a job well, and her mind was free to be elsewhere: at the church piano, at her keyboard, inside the music that had been growing in her since childhood.
She finished at midnight, or a little after, and took the bus home through streets that were mostly empty, watching shopfronts go dark one by one as the bus rattled east. The apartment was quiet when she let herself in. Jerome was asleep in his room, his schoolbooks spread across his desk. Esther was asleep too, her bedroom door ajar, a glass of water on her nightstand. Althea moved softly, heating a small plate of leftovers, eating standing at the kitchen counter, and then she went to her own room and sat at the battered keyboard by the window.
The keyboard was old, a gift from the church years ago, with two keys that stuck in humid weather and a volume control that crackled if she turned it too far. She played with headphones on, so as not to wake anyone, and the music went straight into her ears, private and close. She practised scales first, slowly, the way Esther had taught her, keeping her fingers curved and her wrists loose, even when she was tired. Then she worked on the pieces she was preparing, playing them through, stopping to fix a passage, playing it again, slower, then faster, until her hands knew it without her having to think.
Some nights the exhaustion won. Her eyes would close while she played, and she would wake with her forehead nearly touching the keys, the headphones slipping off. On those nights she went to bed without finishing, and she dreamed in music, fragments of melody running through her sleep like water. Other nights, something in her woke up instead of winding down, and she played past one in the morning, past two, working on the hymn about the river, letting it grow the way it had grown that night after the audition notice arrived: a simple melody first, then a rolling gospel rhythm underneath, then a harmony that lifted it and carried it somewhere new. Those were the nights she treasured most, when the apartment was dark and the city was quiet and she was alone with the music and it felt like the truest thing in her life.
She never told anyone at work about the piano. It was not a secret exactly, more a private room she kept for herself. But the nights taught her something she would need later, in rooms far grander than empty offices: discipline. She learned to practise when she was tired, to keep going when no one was watching, to do the work because the work itself mattered. When she finally switched the keyboard off and climbed into bed, the last thing she heard, before sleep took her, was not the traffic outside or the hum of the refrigerator, but a melody, still turning over in her head, patiently waiting for morning.