Reunion (The Water Tower Book 1) - Chris Vobe

Reunion (The Water Tower Book 1) by Chris Vobe

Book excerpt

It was on the day she died that they finally pulled down the Water Tower.

The final demise of the Tower, which had stood for so long as a mainstay of Little Bassington’s post-industrial heritage, came not with a tumultuous roar that signified its collapse in a moment of heart-stopping suddenness, nor in a breath-taking spectacle of intensifying destruction; instead it happened gradually, minute by minute, hour by hour, almost in slow motion. When it ended, finally – the scaffolding, wrecking balls and cranes all having been weaponised as tools in its unravelling – it did so with an eerie stillness that signified the moment’s conclusiveness; a moment punctuated only by the grit that salted the air and the final rush of dust that was carried on the wind. Tiny particles of history settled unobtrusively over the Village Green, on the rooftops of the nearby cottages, and scattered along the surrounding cobbled streets. As the footnotes of the past came to rest, and the watching eyes readjusted, the landscape that greeted those observing appeared suddenly different – altered – as if it had been warped somehow by unseeing, uncaring hands; remoulded into an image not of their choosing.

And the Tower was gone.

The winter that year had been endless, the days filled with bitter winds and rain clouds that had dominated the sky wherever they’d turned. The chill had been broken only by the onset of heavy, relentless downpours which had drowned Little Bassington’s customary colour in perpetual dreariness from sunrise until sunset. When the showers had lifted, and the temperature had crawled above the intolerable lows they had been forced to endure, the trees which lined the pedestrianised thoroughfare leading to the Water Tower cast no shadows. Their branches had seemed brittle, bent by the unyielding force of the winter weather that had pummelled them over the preceding months. Few buds had unfurled; none of the lush green leaves that stood out so remarkably in familiar paintings of the scenery around the Tower were in evidence now. It was like a barren landscape, one which retained just enough remnants of its past to remind onlookers of what had come before, yet coyly avoided any hint of what was still to come.

When he was younger, he and his friends would meet in the grounds of the Water Tower. In those days, when the summers had seemed endless, and the hours had stretched out before them with an inviting earnestness, he would climb over the walls which shielded the Water Tower from the Parade and Market Square, grazing his knuckles occasionally as he clamoured for purchase, and hoist himself over the dusty, uneven brickwork before allowing himself to drop easily onto the safety of the other side. The ground had invariably been wet beneath his feet; the leaves that had fallen from the canopy of decades-old trees around the perimeter wasting into a sodden mulch which had coated the concrete below. The turrets of the Water Tower cast long shadows across its boundary, the arch of the trees meeting them at the midpoint and diminishing the impact of the sun’s heat. The damp lime scale on the bricks only added to the sense of antiquity; although, as teenagers, they’d had had little to no appreciation of the Tower’s place in Little Bassington’s history. To them, it was the same as it always had been. They would sit there, within the walls their own private fortress; the place in which each of them had laughed with innocence, planned with simplicity, loved with inexperience, and dreamt with naivety.

We never imagined our days would be any different…

The future had arrived with alarming speed. There had been nothing more profoundly sobering to him than the day he’d realised that the years he’d once thought never-ending had passed him by unaware. There had been so much time – and then there had been no time at all. It was in the intensity of that realisation, when he had looked back over the span of moments unspooled behind him, that he had come to realise nothing was eternal. The young man felt that same sensation again, as he watched the Water Tower fall; as it was lost to that irretrievable pocket of place called the past. Months of debate about its future, arguments and counter-arguments, indictments and accusations, placards, and metaphorical lines in the sand had all come down to that afternoon, as the dust settled and the wind tore through the open space that had once been denied to it by the inflexible walls of Little Bassington’s defining structure. A Water Tower which existed only in paintings now, in photographs and memories; its architecture consigned to a wistful recollection of what had once been.

Eventually, as the years determined, there would be no one left alive who remembered it standing. The man wondered how the defining days of his life would be looked back upon in years to come. Would future generations understand why there had been such furore over the Tower? Would they feel a morsel of sympathy for the way in which dividing lines had been drawn on both sides of the debate by people who’d believed themselves equally right? Perhaps, occasionally, a solitary figure turning the pages of a photograph album, or admiring the work of a long-dead artist, would casually remark that there used to be a Water Tower overlooking Market Square. They might never know the seeds of separation that had been sewn the day Little Bassington had learned of the Tower’s fate, or understand the means by which the future had been written; in the slipstream of a choice made by one person, one unremarkable day. They would never guess the flurry of conversation that had followed, or be able to deduce where the path of those heated words had eventually led. The Tower would become just another facet of days gone by; partitioned into a listless category of mildly interesting nostalgia, whose entries were scattered like breadcrumbs around the village’s gossip circles. Like the story of the sweet shop that was now the Pharmacy, or the tale of Mr Fielding who’d clutched his chest behind the counter of the Post Office one Wednesday afternoon, closed his eyes and never opened them again.