Far From The Madding Crowd

The First Sound

 The first sound was always the wind.

Not outside exactly – more like the echo of it, scraped into the bones of the building. It moved through the girders and concrete in slow, tonal signs, humming beneath the floors like something unmade. At the very top of the Arsenal buildings, high above the Thames, the air pressed hard against the glass. It had that dense, breathing quality that made it feel like the sky itself was trying to get in.

Our apartment – the penthouse, though we never called it that – had once been something industrial, bomb adjacent. There were bolts in the walls where mechanisms had been anchored, scarring the paint. You could feel the history in the floors, like a static current beneath your socks. When he was little, he used to say we lived inside the tip of a bomb that had never gone off. The silence wasn’t safety. It was suspense.

I told him that we had inherited peace.

I used to say it like a secret.

Now I say it out loud, just to see if the word still holds.

The space was too large, too echoing, too full. But not in the way people ,ran when they say cluttered. No. Ours was a curated chaos. Memory shaped into furniture. Books stacked in conversational groupings. Lamps without bulbs, standing crates of medical pamphlets and geological samples. A piano we weren’t allowed to play. A velvet chair that had belonged to someone whose name had been lost.

Nothing matched, that was the point.

We weren’t decorators. We were keepers.

There were no real rooms. Just zines. You moved through the flat like a tide shifting across ground that hadn’t been dry for decades. We had paths instead of corridors. The floor knew our feet. If I stepped left instead of right near the old lamp with the crooked arm, a paper tower might collapse. If I opened the wrong drawer, I might wake a memory I’d buried without knowing.

There was one fire door from the original structure. Bolted shut. Painter over. The children asked what was behind it, and I said another family. One just like us, only moving backwards through time. They liked that. They wanted to knock.

I told them not to.

But I didn’t tell them why.

In the evenings the light came through the high panes like it had somewhere else to be. Dust moved in columns. Objects took on weight. We turned off the electric lights – these were too bright, too fast – and lit the candles in their teacups and brass holders. The shadows helped us breath better.

He would sit near the window and watch the reeds outside. The rooftop beds had been planted years ago, for insulation, for beauty. They grew tall, thick, veiled the view. At a certain angle, it looked like we were living underwater – but in reverse. He liked that. Sid it made the world feel quiet.

The other one preferred the corners. He collected silence. Arranged it on shelves.

Sometimes they would trade places. Sometimes I think they were the same boy.

There were days when the flat felt full of listening. Not sound. Just the sense of being overheard by something larger than yourself. The kind of quiet that bends around your thoughts, so you have to be careful what you think.

We respected that.

The boys moved carefully through the flat. Even their footsteps had logic. They stepped over books, around nests of objects. I had told them early on: every pile, every arrangement, every placement meant something. They believed me. Or they pretended to.

One day I caught him – my youngest – standing in the turret threshold. Just standing. Not trying to enter. Just listening. His hand was pressed against the frame like he could feel the hum through the wood.

I didn’t say his name, I just watched.

Later, he placed a feather from the empty birdcage beside my teacup. Nothing else. No questions. He didn’t need to.

There was something beginning in him. A listening that hadn’t yet found its voice.

I had seen it before. In my father. They man who never stayed. In the mirror, sometimes, at night when I was half asleep and more honest.