View

Annie lives on the seventh floor and hates with hardening passion the trudge up when the lift fails. Coming home to a flat at height is a committed action, you wouldn't feel like popping out again shortly after, for anything.

To the window now. It's early evening, a thin light is being peeled from the old earth. Bits of city are seething away somewhere completely out of reach. The patch below unpeopled, but it hardly looks as if they'd belong there anyway. Her tea cup rattles on its prim saucer as she slops to a chair, relishing the wobbly silence.

Then I see what it is, the cost and benefit of detachment. Living in a house separates you, living in a tower separates you more, until you begin to like it. Of course Annie works at that with the tenants committee but it was the sound of the door catch closing behind her that refreshed her most.

And looking out I have the most profound sense of unbelonging. Not to this place or person, not to the tangent of this view, or the conversations before with those around who might move or speak or dream as I do.

Before my eyes a bird unhurried sets off to separate the sky.

Comments

[Julian Dobson]

Great post - really captures what it's like. In Wigan there's a neighbourhood called Scholes with a group of tower blocks, all done up and quite nicely refurbished and mainly occupied by older people. And council officers wonder why the residents don't get more involved in their community.