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  To read this book as the author intended – and for a fuller reading experience – turn on ‘original’ or ‘publisher’s font’ in your text display options.

  Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more.

  Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

  Walker Evans

  413

  The Thames is a tunnel.

  414

  The river is a tunnel, it’s civil infrastructure.

  415

  The river is a tunnel with an uncountable number of entrances

  416

  When you go into the river you discover a new entrance – and in yourself you uncover an exit, an unseen exit, your exit. (You brought it with you.)

  Roni Horn

  For the Nelson sisters who have had a profound influence on my life: May Walker, June Goodwin and Agnes Wheeler.

  And for Mel with my love.

  Prologue

  October 1987

  Clouds streamed across the sky. Street lights obliterated the stars; the moon wouldn’t rise until midnight, four hours away. A fierce wind rattled reed beds on Chiswick Eyot and tore through the undergrowth. Cross-currents on the river made rib-cage patterns; patches of stillness in the black water resembled corpses.

  The Thames was rising, a deadly confluence of tide and turbulence. Miniature waves broke across Chiswick Mall; water welled in gutters, covering kerbstones and lapping at the steps of St Nicholas’ church. A storm was gathering force.

  At night Chiswick Mall was outside time. Misty yellow light surrounding iron lamp standards might be gas lit, cars were carriages on cobblestones. On the foreshore of the Thames, the clank-clank of a barge’s mooring chain against the embankment wall beat the passing of no time at all.

  A shape reflected in the river was dashed by a squall; it resolved into a tower. Utilitarian, a cylindrical tank supported by stanchions, the water tower was built in the Second World War to protect riverside wharfs and factories from fires. Long in disuse, the wharfs demolished, the tank was empty, the pipes stripped out. Fifty metres high, it stood taller than the brewery and the church spire and dominated the west London skyline. Against streaming clouds and tossed boughs, the tower, designed to withstand bombs and tensile stresses, seemed as if forever falling.

  A cage attached to one supporting column housed five stairways connected by a platform; the last arrived at a narrow metal walkway that gave access to the tower. Violent gusts harassed the grille, testing steel rivets.

  A man hurried through the church gates, skirting the water; he ducked into an alley between the brewery buildings and struggled up the staircases into the tower, head bowed against the wind. Minutes later, a woman emerged from the subway by the Hogarth roundabout and went into the alley. Checking about her, she pulled on the cage door and, both hands on the guard rail, began an awkward ascent.

  ‘I hate this place.’ Her voice rang in the concrete tank.

  He watched as she zipped up her slacks, smacking at dirt although there was none; he kept it clean. Grimacing, she eased on brown leather faux-Victorian boots, doing up the laces with slick-snapping efficiency.

  ‘You wanted secrecy.’ The man pulled on underpants, his nakedness absurd as their intimacy of the afternoon ebbed. Her boots had heels. He had advised flat shoes for safety, but was glad she had ignored him. She was his fantasy woman.

  He had put himself out to get the key from the engineer. The man had kept it after the developers went bust – as ineffectual revenge for non-payment – but there was no point in telling her of this effort: it would not convince her to leave her husband.

  ‘Come and be with me.’

  She had insisted that they leave no spending trail. No hotels, no meals out. No risk of meeting anyone they knew or being remembered by strangers. She had admitted that nylon sleeping bags on the tank floor, drinking wine from the bottle and feeding each other wedges of Brie on bite-size water biscuits spiced up the sex. Strangely there was no handle on the inside: he propped open the thick metal door with a brick and, once she was inside, he locked what he called the ‘front door’ after her. She’d surprised him by saying that the danger of being locked in made her feel alive.

  ‘You’d feel alive all the time with me.’

  She knew that, she had told him.

  ‘The apartment has a view of the sea.’ He had told her he would take a year’s lease. Things had changed, she’d said as soon as she arrived. It had spoiled his performance.

  ‘Another bloody excuse!’ He shouldn’t have said that.

  He buttoned his shirt, saw he’d missed a button and started again. She was pouting and air-kissing into her compact mirror. Already she had ‘gone’, planning the kids’ meal, back to her life that was death. The knickers he had bought her lay discarded beside the used condom – just the one this time. Last time she had agreed to leave; today she said her family needed her.

  ‘I need you.’

  ‘The flat does sound beautiful.’ She appeased him, shrugging into her coat.

  ‘Then leave!’ He always tried to be everything her husband was not. Mr Perfect. He’d once let her know the other girls didn’t need persuading. She knew there were no other girls.

  She smoothed her skirt over her stomach and he was aroused all over again.

  ‘You look lovely.’

  ‘That wind nearly blew me off my feet,’ she said again as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘There’s a storm getting up.’

  ‘It’s not all that’s “getting up”!’

  She came over, put a hand on his crotch and whispered, ‘Next week.’ She didn’t usually do this when she was about to go; he dared to hope it meant something good.

  ‘I can’t hear any wind,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘You told me this place is soundproofed!’ She looked about her as if she’d just arrived. ‘It’s like a prison cell.’

  ‘Sea view versus a mauso-bloody-leum!’ he snarled. Usually he toned down his accent.

  ‘In my heart I’m yours, you know that.’ An off-the-shelf response.

  It frightened him that he could hate her. He saw why people killed their lovers. If she were dead, she would stay.

  He tensed his jaw. ‘Do you have sex with him?’

  She was rootling in her handbag. She squirted perfume on her wrists – not for him, but to expunge him.

  ‘You promised to leave.’

  ‘You’d be horrified if I turned up with two kids in tow!’

  He tortured himself with a vision of her with a leg over the blubbery husband, letting him pump away inside her. In his dreams there were no kids in tow.

  ‘Bring the girl. Let him have the boy.’ Unlike the husband, he played fair.

  She laughed and looped her bag over her chest as he advised, for safety.

  ‘I’m leaving on Saturday.’ His palms tingled at the decision made there and then.

  ‘You said we had a month.’ As he had hoped, she was upset.

  ‘I’ll be at the station at three on Saturday. If you’re not there, I’m going.’

  ‘It’s too soon.’ She kicked the brick aside and stepped on to the spiral staircase.

  ‘It’s always “too soon”.’ In her heels he wanted her again.

  ‘I can’t just leave.’

  Not a ‘no’. His venom evaporated. ‘Be careful in those boots, that wind is strong.’ Too late he recalled he’d underplayed the wind.

  ‘I climb mountains in
these.’

  Not with me.

  He followed her down the staircase and stopped her in the lobby by the front door.

  ‘Promise me you’ll give it some thought,’ he said, but really he wanted her to give it no thought, just to leave. ‘I’ll be there next Saturday at Stamford Brook. At three. You won’t regret it!’

  ‘Darling, don’t—’

  He cut across her: ‘You owe it to yourself. We only have one life – let’s make the most of it! When we’re settled, we can get the kid. One step at a time. Your life now is like living in a coffin, you said so yourself!’

  He went towards her, but she blew a kiss and turned away. The bottom door shrieked when she opened it. He watched until she reached the caged staircase, and then he returned to their room.

  Without her the magic had gone; it was a just cold concrete tank. He stuffed everything into the holdall, anxious to follow her, to see her when she wasn’t with him. She had left him the Brie, not out of generosity, but because she wouldn’t want to explain how come she had it.

  Footsteps. She was coming back. He grew excited and regretted packing up the sleeping bags. ‘Hon, you came back. I knew you would!’

  There was a deafening report.

  The tank door had shut, he stared disbelieving at the grey metal. Beware the jokes of those with no sense of humour. The lack of handle wasn’t sexy now. She was on the other side of the double cladding, daring him to lose his nerve.

  ‘Good game!’ His temples thudded from the alcohol and he needed a pee. This was her revenge for his ultimatum. ‘Joke over!’

  Wind fluted through vents near the ceiling – she was right about the storm. Daylight no longer drifted in; the street lights didn’t reach so high. Bloody stupid to have said leave the boy, he liked him. The walls emanated chill.

  ‘He’s a good kid, I’ll treat him like my own son.’ His voice bounced off the concrete.

  There was a distant vibration – the bottom door slamming. There was no keyhole this side; his key was useless.

  ‘Maddie!’

  In the dark, the man wondered if, after all, it was not a joke.

  1

  Monday, 16 September 2013

  Forty-three minutes past eleven. Dead on time, Jack brought his train to a stop at Ealing Broadway Underground station. Late-night passengers decanted and straggled up the stairs to the street. As usual he had seven minutes and thirty seconds before his journey to Barking. He would stable the train at the Earl’s Court depot and then the night was his.

  Ealing Broadway was the end of the line. On autopilot, Jack strolled up the platform to what, with the ‘turn around’, was the front of the train, glancing into the carriages. There was one woman in the second car. She was leafing through a Metro and looked up as he came alongside her. He thought he saw a flicker of fear pass across her face and quickened his pace. At this time of night a woman travelling alone might feel vulnerable; Jack hoped she would see his uniform and know he was a driver and not a passenger who could threaten her.

  He opened the front cab door. Being a driver he swapped between different, but identical cabs at each end of the train during the course of a day or night. Travelling up and down the District line, he was never in one place for long: he thrived on the mix of stability and change. As the proprietor of a cleaning company, Stella restored stability in different locations. Pleased by this tenuous link between their working lives, Jack considered texting her. He put his hand in the fleece pocket of his uniform for his phone. But Stella called a spade a spade. His whimsy frustrated her and at this time of night would worry her. When Stella worried about Jack, she allocated him cleaning jobs – he worked part-time for her cleaning company, Clean Slate. Thinking of Stella made him wistful because since her mother had gone on holiday to Australia, she hadn’t been herself. The change was fractional: a pause before she replied, an arrangement misremembered, a minute late to meet him because she’d walked the dog. Stella cared about her mum more than she let on.

  Her father too. Two years after his death she still cleaned his house, ate supper there and did her emails at his computer with no sign of selling the place. Jack had once asked her if she was maintaining it for her father’s ghost. She had retorted that she was waiting for the housing market to pick up. But prices were rising and even next to the Great West Road, the end of terrace in Hammersmith would fetch a small fortune. He dismissed the lurking notion that it was not a ghost Stella was waiting for, but a real live man. When Stella ended a relationship – eventually she always did – the dumped partner ceased to exist. Except her last man, the one who she thought a David Bowie lookalike, had left her with a dog; undeniable proof he had existed for her once.

  He felt something in his pocket and fumbling under his phone pulled out a folded slip of paper.

  To Let.

  Apartment in Water Tower.

  A cosy home with detailed views.

  If you crave silence and a bird’s eye view – Jack squinted at the type in the watery lamplight – then Palmyra Tower is your home. Guardian wanted for Grade 1 listed Water Tower. You will sign a year-long contract with no breaks and be available to take up residence as soon as your application is accepted.

  It was the flier he had found lying on the doormat when he left the house that morning. He had shoved it in his jacket pocket and, intent on getting to work, had thought no more about it. Reading it now, Jack was intrigued by the imperative you will. He touched his face to stop an involuntary twitch and, shivering, zipped up his fleece. The cheap pink paper didn’t compete with Clean Slate’s glossy brochure.

  The style was a marketing ploy that Stella would reject as too obvious an attempt to be different. However the paper did carry an unnerving air of authority, so in that sense it had worked.

  Beneath the text was a fuzzy photograph of the tower. It was functional, effectively a tank on stilts; a caged fire escape-like structure attached to one column gave access to it. It stood metres from Chiswick Eyot, an island in the Thames. As a boy, Jack had once tried to climb it, but couldn’t open the cage. The steep aluminium staircases and narrow treads were not for the vertiginous.

  There was no phone number on the flier. At last he found an email address in tiny lettering: [email protected]. Regardless of the amateur appearance, Jack guessed there would be a deluge of responses. For many, the tower would be the dream home. He scrunched up the flier and stuffed it back in his pocket. Leaning back on the cab door, Jack gazed up at the sky.

  This section of the District line was above ground. The moon was a waning crescent in the sign of Leo. Stella was a Leo, as his mother had been. Two women with attitude, courageous and strong-willed. Jack’s mother had died when he was a boy so what he didn’t know about her he made up; this meant she was his particular brand of perfection.

  A plane cut below the moon on its descent into Heathrow, the rumble of its engine carrying on the night breeze. Jack thought of the moon as his friend; it accompanied him on his walks. Or it had until he promised Stella to ‘stop all that’, although he doubted she understood what ‘all that’ was. The second hand on his watch ticked towards three minutes to twelve.

  As soon as he stepped into the cab, Jack had a premonition of what would happen when he turned the key – it had happened here before. The motor whirred, but didn’t start. His train was going nowhere.

  He reported the train out of service, activated the door at the rear of his cab and went down the aisle of the cars ushering passengers off: seven altogether. Vaguely he noticed that the woman he had seen earlier wasn’t among them. Back on the platform Jack felt a pricking at his temples: like last time, this breakdown was a sign. Like all signs, its meaning had yet to reveal itself.

  The coffee stand was shut; a metal box covered with stars, it might be a magic trick about to emit a cloud of doves and many wished-for things. The moon had gone behind a cloud and the temperature had dropped. Jack picked up an empty coffee cup from the platform and tossed it into a litte
r bin two metres feet away. Bull’s eye. The tracks hummed. He returned to the top end of the platform and, as the train approached, tipped a hand to the driver. His greeting wasn’t returned. When the train was stationary, he peered into the empty cab at the rear.

  With no train, he had no set number. Set numbers were the means of identifying a train and allocating it to a driver, but to Jack the set number was a sign. This train’s number was 126. The last time this happened, his set number was 236 and led him to Stella.

  Jack was tempted to rush from the station to evade whatever fate 126 decreed.

  Running away is no escape if you don’t know which direction is ‘away’.

  Jack rubbed his temples to eradicate the voice. Recently it came unbidden, like the voices of a high fever, and uttered dictums like a seer. It didn’t feel his own. He looked up and saw the driver walking the length of the train towards him.

  ‘All right?’ Jack nodded.

  ‘You’re Jack.’ The man had acne and looked no more than sixteen. ‘They said you’d be here.’ He offered no clue as to what he thought about this.

  ‘Yes.’ Jack agreed.

  ‘I wanted you as my trainer, but you were fully booked,’ the driver continued in a querulous tone.

  ‘Ah.’ Jack smiled. ‘No matter, we’re all the same.’ Not true. He knew he was the best trainer, as he knew, although Stella never told him, that he was her best cleaner. Fact. Jack climbed into the cab after the driver. The doors swished shut.

  The driver gripped the handle, his every nerve directed to his task. This wasn’t the first time Jack had witnessed the terror of a novice driver. For him, responsibility for hundreds of passengers had come naturally when he had settled into the seat for the first time. It had felt right. But Jack wasn’t like others.

  Hands resting on thighs, Jack gazed out at bunched cables and silver rails converging and parting as the train left the station and increased speed.