The music began around half-past six. Anna had just dragged herself in from work and slumped down on the couch - looking forward to a quiet Friday night with a glass of wine and a book - when the thumping bass started coming through the wall.

She sighed. This wasn't the first time those particular neighbours had made a nuisance of themselves and she was getting pretty sick of it. But, on the other hand, they usually quietened down before it got too late and could she really be bothered putting her shoes back on and going out and banging on their door and asking them to be quiet and risking an argument and god knows what else?

No, she decided. Not now. Not today. She would put up with it again and deal with them sometime when she wasn't exhausted. She hauled herself up from the couch and went hunting for her headphones before starting on dinner.

Anna gave up on the headphones by seven o'clock. They weren't noise cancelling or anything fancy, the plastic band made the top of her head sore, and she refused to wear them while eating anyway. Even her neighbours' music was preferable to the echoes of her own chewing.

Sitting there eating dinner and staring at the wall, she tried to place what exactly the music was. Something club-ish or techno or whatever, definitely well outside her classical wheelhouse. And yet it felt familiar. Perhaps they'd played some of the same tracks the last time they threw a party, whenever that had been. A couple of weeks ago, she reckoned. Busy people.

As she stood at the sink doing the washing up, she tried to picture what must be going on through there, on the other side of the wall. Were they all dancing? It was dance music, certainly. The kind of music that was supposed to have bodies writhing to it. Without thinking, she began to tap her foot and then to sway her hips, imagining herself there, with them, dancing and writhing and-

A fork slid out of her hand and clattered against a plate, snapping her out of her reverie. She swore and checked nothing was broken. It was fine. Of course it was. Even a cracked plate would've been too exciting for her life.

She finished the dishes and left the pan to soak and wondered what to do next. She didn't want to sit here alone. She didn't want to read. She wanted to let the music wash over her and slip back into that fantasy.

At quarter to eight, she was standing in her bedroom, looking at herself in the mirror. The dress was a late-night, four-glasses-of-wine purchase from a couple of years ago, something she'd never been able to bring herself to either wear or get rid of. It was sleek and revealing and everything her usual clothes weren't.

It was the kind of dress worn by the kind of woman who danced to that kind of music and didn't care about anything else.

The music. The music was still playing. It should be quieter through here, even with the intervening doors left wide open, but it felt louder in her mind. Louder and clearer. It filled her head. It drowned out her thoughts.

She moved effortlessly on her heels, spinning and swaying, feeling her hair on her shoulders as she flicked it around, feeling alive as she performed for the audience in the mirror.

She knocked on her neighbours' door at half past eight. The music in her own home wasn't loud enough. Her own eyes weren't enough attention on her body. All evening, the beat had been pulling her out into the stairwell and inexorably towards this moment.

The door opened. The music grew louder. A woman in a sleek silver dress grinned and took her hand, wordlessly pulling her inside.

There were other women there, dancing, writhing, grinding, all in perfect sync. There was a man on the couch, earplugs in his ears, smiling. There was a sound system hooked up to a computer, speakers circling the room, all except for the two that were pushed right up against the adjoining wall of her flat.

But Anna didn't care about any of that. All she cared about was the music. It was so clear, so loud, loud enough now that she felt like she was truly hearing it for the first time.

Her body moved to join the others on the makeshift dance floor.

At three o'clock the next morning, Anna stumbled back through her unlocked front door, limbs aching and mind blank. She stripped off what was left of her dress and collapsed into bed.

She woke at her usual six-thirty, cursing the sunlight-filled gap in her curtains and her neighbours too, in roughly equal measure. She had barely slept a wink with their obnoxious music going all night.

She really would need to have a word with them about it, sometime soon when she wasn't so tired.