The Upstairs Neighbour – Part 1: Water Through the Ceiling

The first drip landed on the back of Maya's hand while she was washing up. The second hit the sink. By the third she had stopped pretending it was rain.

She looked up. A brown stain was spreading across the ceiling above the cooker, like a map of a country nobody had ever visited.

"Oh, come on," she said to nobody.

The flat above belonged to someone called L. Okafor, according to the post. She had never seen L. Okafor. She had only heard them, at odd hours, walking heavily across the floor and once, memorably, singing very badly in the bath.

She went up the stairs in her socks and knocked hard.

The man who opened the door had dark hair, a grey jumper pushed up to the elbows, and a pencil behind one ear. He looked at the ceiling, then at her, then back at the ceiling.

"Oh no," he said. "Is that mine?"

"It's yours," Maya said. "Most of it's currently in my kitchen."

"I'm so sorry. I'm Leo. I'm an architect, which means I should know better than to leave a radiator valve half-open for three days." He ran a hand through his hair. "Please let me fix it. And pay for whatever's been ruined."

"You don't need to pay for everything."

"I'd like to," said Leo, and reached for his coat. "Give me ten minutes. I'll bring a plumber and a toolbox and a very large apology."

He came back with all three, though the plumber was a cheerful man named Dez who spent most of the next two hours under the sink, whistling. Leo sat at Maya's table with a notebook, drawing the flat's layout from memory and asking polite questions about the damp.

"You've got a beautiful kitchen," he said at one point, looking up. "The window's in the wrong place, though."

"Says the architect."

"Says the architect," Leo agreed, with a crooked smile. "I'd move it three feet to the left."

"It's a rented flat, I can't move the window."

"Then we'll just have to make the best of it." He tapped the notebook. "Would you like me to show you the drawing?"

She took the notebook from him. The sketch was careful, precise, and then, in one corner, a small loose doodle of a woman at a sink with her hair tied up in a tea towel. She stared at it for a long moment.

"That's me," Maya said.

"It's you," said Leo, not looking embarrassed in the slightest. "I've been listening to you through the floor for a year. You hum when you cook. Sometimes you sing very badly, and I think it's the best thing I've heard all week."

She laughed out loud, startled, and he laughed too, and the plumber said, from under the sink, "Right, that's the valve sorted, you two can stop being romantic now."

They both went red. Maya handed the notebook back. Leo took it, and their fingers met, and neither of them let go immediately.

"Dinner?" he asked quietly. "Tonight. Your kitchen, my takeaway, and I'll fix the window in my head."

"Yes," said Maya, before she could think too hard about it. "But I'm choosing the takeaway."