Redux (The Water Tower Book 4) - Chris Vobe

Redux (The Water Tower Book 4) by Chris Vobe

Book excerpt

Endings. They’re such ignoble things.

Like the lights on all our harbours – distant, almost imperceptible at first, growing brighter as we edge closer. They’re the voice at the end of the phone; there, but not quite there. Until the moment comes when they drown out every other sound and the world speaks in one unified note of sadness.

Endings. They’re the dreams unfulfilled, the promises undelivered, the fates unreconciled.

Seldom, when they come, are they anything other than abrupt. So often, they carry with them the wish that there could have been something more; more time, more opportunity, more chances. More tomorrows. Endings rarely arrive gift-wrapped, bow-tied or neatly arranged, with all of their histories settled and their questions answered. They are the blunt instruments of finality; cold, unforgiving and sudden.

Endings. They leave so much unresolved.

If only there had been one more day, before the end. A day to ask the question that had never been asked. A day to impart the words that had never been imparted. A day to hear the person who most needed you to hear them. A day to seize the moment that had, for so long, rested untouched or relinquished. A day that would have made the perfect tomorrow.

Only the lucky few will meet their ending with no mountains left to climb. With the final page of their story bequeathing them a satisfying completeness; a denouement to their life leaving no stone unturned; no problem unresolved; no difficult, knotty, or untied thoughts to linger. In most cases, there will be at least one loose thread that haunts those left behind; one which yearns not to be left hanging, which thirsts to be wound with orderly precision into the tapestry of life from which it came.

We will, all of us, face an ending. Not our own; ours will be the ending someone else must face. Instead, we will each face another. Perhaps this ending will meet us in the dead of night, on a cold winter morning, or amidst the sweet surrender of a lazy afternoon. One way or another, it will come; a shapeless shape without fixed form.

A grandfather’s last breath in a room overlooking the river; a room that someone filled with all the memories of home.

A mother clasping the hand of her child as one of them fades away forever.

A candle lit in a cathedral of memory; the end of a rosary and a final benediction.

A slow tear falling for someone left behind.

A lover resting on a bench in Ashfield Park, where the grass is dying and a woman is walking away.

A note placed on a dressing table, as her makeup runs and he lies sleeping in the bed beside her.

A text message sent just as the moon starts climbing, signed with a symphony of words that masked what she really wanted to say.

“I just can’t do this anymore…”

A couple who were friends once – before they fell in love, then casually slipped into a cradle of silence from which they would never recover.

A train leaving a station, bound for the City, carrying the one who was never supposed to go.

The last day at the office.

A friend watching from a window.

A door closing on all the bitter, remorseless words two people exchanged.

A final kiss – long and deep and moist with meaning.

A pair of tired eyes closing to the sound of a goodnight serenade.

A full life lived; its final breath a carriage for the softly-spoken forget-me-not of some departing soul.

The last time a look of love, reserved just for him, passed fleetingly over the girl with the emerald eyes.

Endings. However they find you, however you come to meet them, their arrival will take you on a journey; along a road that will be travelled by everyone you’ve ever known. The man next door. The woman across the street. The couple on the Clapham bus.

You will search for the same rationalisation that they sought. You’ll try to reconcile yourself to the new normal, using the memory of all that came before as your purchase on reality. But the house you lived in won’t feel quite the same by then. That song on the radio won’t ever sound the way it used to; its once-perfect chords will be warped somehow, corrupted. And the path across the meadow – the one you used to walk together – won’t seem quite as inviting anymore.

You might resist the ending, when it comes. But eventually, you’ll learn to embrace it. You’ll hold it closer; let it mould you, sculpt you, renew you. Allow it to open the door to something else. Something unexpected. Something that wasn’t there before. Something new.

A beginning.

***

(ii)

There is a clock on a mantelpiece, shining bronze and polished silver. It chimes on the hour, every hour, as it has since the day it was put there. It is cleaned diligently each week; its mechanisms, rotating chrome balls and ornate spokes are dusted until the same gleaming light reflects off its surface as it did when the clock’s owner first brought it home.

To the best of the owner’s knowledge, it has never stopped. It has been a consistent, dependable timepiece; a reliable companion that has ticked away the years – never deviating, never pausing. It has been wound regularly; typically on a Friday, as part of the owner’s morning routine. It is a memento; a reminder of a day that was unlike any other. The clock is a keepsake; its presence a recognition of the fact that, no matter how far we travel, there are some memories that will always stay with us.

Sometime – a long time after our time – the owner of the clock dies. It is twenty past two in the morning when she passes. There is a rain shower just after midnight. The sky is tinged with a rich infusion of colour that carries the owner of the clock away; a deep blue that bleeds into the black.

The morning after their death, the owner’s next of kin steps into a house that they too had often thought of as home. They run their fingers along the crystal glass dome of the clock and realise that, for the first time in its lifetime, it is motionless.

It has stopped.

At twenty past two in the morning.

As if the clock too had somehow sensed an ending.

The clock’s new owner hesitates, unsure of what comes next. In the end, he does what he knows the dearly departed would have wanted him to do.

He winds the clock and sets it running again.

It chimes on the hour, every hour, for its new owner now.

Ticking away the hours until sunset.