What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata, a physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost in the tops of bamboo trees.
Toby lay on his back in the grass while I worked my way through lux, aer and aqua, but stirred when I started adding my second-order effects with impello, iactus, palma and my personal favourite scindere. Then he jumped up and started chasing my little globes of water around the playground. He seemed to particularly enjoy the way they burst when he bit them.
Just as I’d expected she would, Sky appeared and chased after Toby and the water globes. I added a couple of low level werelights to follow them both — for fun and because it was good practice. When I paused for breath Sky rushed over and grabbed my hand.
‘Follow me,’ she said.
‘Where?’ I asked.
She put her hands on her hips and pushed out her lip. ‘Just follow, okay?’
‘Okay,’ I said and when she skipped off I followed. When we reached the edge of the playground she did a sharp turn and followed its perimeter. Once we’d completed a circuit and returned to where we’d started, she turned and gave me a cross look.
‘You’ve got to do the dance,’ she said.
It’s a sad fact of modern life that sooner or later you will end up on YouTube doing something stupid. The trick, according to my dad, is to make a fool of yourself to the best of your ability.
The sun dropped into the dark slot between the blocks and the garden was filled with a dusty orange light. Sky danced around the dismantled playground and me and Toby followed. He yapped at my heels as I tried to match her turns and stretches and suddenly I was feeling it — feeling that now familiar change in the phase state of existence, like a catch in the silence at the moment of creation.
And then she jumped and spun sideways, lifted whirling into the air like a leaf on the wind. Or like Zhang Ziyi in a flying rig. She touched down a few metres further away and, spinning, danced on. I caught up and matched her step for step, move for move and when she jumped again I followed.
And for a second I felt the wind lifting me and experienced a surge of joy at my escape from the constant pull of the earth, my freedom.
And then the ground smacked me in the gob.
I lay face down for a while, soil and grass mixing with blood in my mouth. Two metres away Sky had collapsed in a heap and was laughing hysterically, drumming her heels on the grass and pausing only to draw breath and point.
I spat the grass out of my mouth and sat up. I’d bitten my lip, not badly but just enough to draw blood.
‘It’s not that funny,’ I said but obviously Sky thought it was. Toby did a lap of honour around the playground, yapping occasionally.
The shadow of the blocks had stretched across the gardens, except for the strip of sunlight we were sitting in. I looked up and saw that the dirty brown concrete had been shaded russet by the sun, which reflected a brilliant orange off the windows. Now I knew what to look for, I could easily spot Jake Phillips’ balcony with its palm and trails of honeysuckle and ivy.
I looked further up to the top of the tower, but at this angle I couldn’t see anything on the roof proper.
I called Sky, who had at least stopped laughing by then, and she wriggled over on her belly until she was by my side. I noticed that if she was getting grass stains on her dress, they were blending imperceptibly into the fabric.
‘Sky,’ I asked.
‘What d’you want?’
‘Is there still music coming from the top of the tower?’
Sky arched her back to stare up at the top of the tower, her face screwing up in concentration.
‘Yep,’ she said and collapsed on her face.
I calmed my breathing and waited for Toby to shut up — then I listened carefully. There was traffic on the Walworth Road, and behind that the background thrum of the city. I think there might have been a snatch of conversation from somewhere halfway up the tower. But no music — at least nothing I could hear.
‘Is it coming from the very top or from the floor below?’ I asked.
Sky gave it some thought.
‘Top,’ she shouted and pointed to the sky. ‘Top, top, top!’
‘Would you like to come and have a look with me?’ I asked as I stood up.
Sky shuddered. ‘Nope. It’s cold — bedtime,’ she said, and I saw that the sun had set behind us and the shadow had crept all the way to the base of the tower. Sky followed me up and gave me a little wave.
‘Bye bye,’ she said and walked away into the gloom.
I took Toby back to the flat where he stuck his face happily in a bowl full of biscuits while I asked myself — what could be going on at the top of the tower?
I still had the skeleton key in my pocket, so I put on a jumper and took the lift to the top floor and used it to access the stairs to the roof. While I was travelling up I composed a text explaining where I was going and sent it to Lesley and Nightingale. Your colleagues can’t come and rescue you if they don’t know where you are.
God, I’m seeing a lot of the city these days, I thought as I stepped out onto the roof. The sun was sinking into the folds of West London and I might have spent more time picking out landmarks if I hadn’t been losing the light and not carrying a torch. The first thing that struck me was the strange hexagonal structure at the centre which rose like a truncated gazebo roof and was surmounted by a concrete cylinder, three metres across and four tall.
It wasn’t a water tank or pumping station, because Skygarden had four conventional tanks all mounted in an offset cruciform over four of the housing stacks. It couldn’t be the housing for the lift machinery because it was mounted dead centre right over the tower’s hollow central shaft. The only thing I could think it might be was part of the building’s tuned mass damper.
Beyond their limitations as social housing, tall buildings have another problem — which is that they sway in the wind. If the swaying motion amplifies it can quickly exceed the structural integrity of the building and, in a system-built structure, many of the inhabitants get to be the squishy filling in a concrete sandwich. Even the most idealistic architect tries to keep fatalities to a minimum and the standard answer is a tuned mass damper. This is essentially one or more compensating heavy weights which swing left when the building swings right, and vice versa, dampening the oscillation and thus avoiding embarrassing questions like ‘Where’s the skyline gone?’
When I say heavy weights, I mean heavy. For a building the size and height of Skygarden, a couple of tons at least.
There was a single door set into the ridged concrete side of the mysterious cylinder. The door’s surface was metal but old, pitted and rusted at the edges — definitely not the work of County Gard. Amazingly, with a bit of artistic jiggling, the skeleton key worked, which meant that the door dated back to the original build.
Inside, it was very dark but I am, if not exactly a master, then definitely an apprentice in the secret arts. And as such I laugh in the face of darkness.