Tower

15 Minute write

Cav had always been fascinated with towers. From the early stacking of alphabet blocks to balancing things on each other and on into Lego, it was always built upwards. He visited the monument to the Great Fire of London at seven and from that point forward would pester his parents to take him to any towers in the places they visited: Paris, Pisa, Berlin, Barcelona, and Madrid. There was, to his thinking, safety high up, something he badly craved. He liked that he could see what was around, and whether any trouble was coming. He wanted to get a feeling of the place he was visiting by surveying from above, allowing him to sense its people on the streets, and in other buildings. You can tell a lot about a place by the way its residents interact with their environments.

Along with the feeling of safety, there was also a calmness. He had been a late child, his mother being 42 when she gave birth, she died of an aneurysm at 54 by which time his dad had succumbed to Alzheimer's. He blamed his dad for his mother’s death, the stress and constant need for attention, he felt, had brought on her illness, even though he was assured it had not. It had always been there, just waiting for its moment to rip through their lives.

It was little surprise that he would end up living in a tower for himself. And when the opportunity came to take up a lease in a flat in one of his favourite tower blocks in London, he jumped at it - even though he knew it would be an enormous struggle to keep up with the rent. He worked three jobs. He interacted with people in ways he didn’t think he was capable of. He forced himself ‘out of his comfort zone’ to maintain this solace of a home. However hard it was outside, here, in his space in the sky, there was a supreme stillness, it was a balm to the irritations of a world he found hard to get along with.

He spent his free time writing and taking photographs. The photographs were almost exclusively taken from his balcony. Every single photo was different, in some subtle way, be it the weather, the season, building works that regularly started or ended, or the movement of the population through the city. Watching and noting everything he saw, allowed him to feel himself a part of the community, a part of this city he had made his home. If only he could feel this way when he set foot outside or at least find someone else whom he could share these feelings with. For all of his contentment in his place, this was the one remaining niggle. The itch that he couldn’t help but scratch and inflame. He was, he had to admit, lonely. He had been on dates with people before and had a couple of girlfriends but none of them shared any of his interests, they were keen and fun to begin with but when they realised that he would rather be sitting on his balcony in his flat, the interest soon waned. Every single one of them felt that where he lived was ‘scary’ and ‘dangerous’ - this one place where he felt at his most ‘himself’

In the end, he realised he had given up on the idea of a partner. Accepting that he would never raise the children he had once dreamt about. He would have to resign himself to mere contentment rather than to any form of fulfilment. He could never imagine leaving this place. Many of the people who lived in his block did so because they loved it. The guy next door had been here 45 years, almost from when it was first built. Cav had talked to him only a few times, and about the place, he would say how he’d “Never be able to live anywhere else”. He died a month ago. It had seemed he’d got his wish. Barely had his next-door neighbour passed before the place had been emptied, revamped and rented out again - how easy it is to wipe away a whole life. Would his be so easy?

It was in this reflective mood that he heard the knock on the door. He was taken aback as this was the first time anyone had knocked on his door the whole time he’d lived here. He was tempted to ignore it when a second knock caught him off guard and by some latent genetic reflex, he found himself opening the door before he had a chance to think about it. There, before him, a woman, much the same age as himself, with a beaming smile, luminous blue eyes and her hand thrust out ‘Hi! I’m Mads, your new neighbour!’

Great Arthur House, Golden Lane Estate, London.
Chamberlin, Powell & Bon 1957

2019. Nikon d750