Theo's new apartment had everything he had asked for: good light, a quiet street, and a kitchen just big enough for two chairs, although he knew nobody to put on the second one. It also had a voice, which the landlord had somehow failed to mention. Every evening at eight, precisely, as though a very dedicated ship were sinking on a timetable, a deep, theatrical voice rolled through the wall. "The ship is sinking!" it boomed. "Save the captain's cat!" The first time, Theo froze with a spoon halfway to his mouth. By the third evening he was pressing a glass to the wall like a detective in an old film, and by the fourth he had phoned his sister. "I think my apartment is haunted," he whispered. "By whom?" "A sea captain. He is very worried about a cat." "Theo," she said, "if it is a ghost, it has terrible timing. Go and knock."
He did not knock on the wall; he knocked on the neighbor's door, which seemed braver, somehow. It was opened by Mrs. Okafor, a retired actress with a purple scarf and a script in her hand, who listened to his explanation with perfect composure until the word "haunted," at which point she had to sit down. She was recording an adventure audiobook for the children's ward at the hospital, she told him, and she had not realized that the walls were so thin. "Come in," she said. "A voice like mine needs a sound-effects man." By the end of the evening Theo had learned to make a creaking door with a rusty hinge, thunder with a baking tray, and rain with a handful of rice, and when he went back to his own apartment, it no longer felt quite so quiet. Mrs. Okafor, who had once played queens, now had an audience of one, and Theo, who had arrived in the city knowing no one, had joined a company.