Far From The Madding Crowd

Chapter One

 

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 sighs, 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 I was young, I imagined we were sealed inside the tip of a bomb that had never gone off. The silence wasn’t safety. It was suspense.

Mother said it was a gift, living here. A miracle. That we had “inherited peace.” Her voice always dropped on that word, as though it might be fragile. She said it mostly to herself. We were supposed to be grateful. So we were.

The space itself was absurd. Vast, open-plan, echoing. But somehow, impossibly, still cluttered. No defined rooms. No defined rules. The ceilings were so high that even her loudest lectures could not fill them, and she had stopped trying by then. A great open plan of low bookshelves, high windows, scatter rugs that curled at the edges. Surfaces disappeared under objects. Nothing matched. A velvet couch from another era bled stuffing. Nearby, a medical trolley carried half-dismantled clocks. Everything smelled like the ghosts of old books and half-clean metal.

There was one surviving fire door from the original building, bolted shut. My brother Callum and I once imagined it led to another family, a mirror of ours, living backward in time. We had plans to one day knock.

At the far end of the flat was the old Arsenal turret, now converted into a study-slash-sanctum where Mother kept most of what she called “the serious things.” We were not supposed to enter without asking, though of course we did. On the rare days she left the flat—alone, always—we’d sneak in and touch the backs of the empty chairs, listen to the clicks of the settling building. The desk smelled of oranges and ink. One of the drawers was always locked. I think we respected that.

Today, her voice came faintly from that turret room. She was reciting something, maybe Latin, maybe prayer, maybe poetry. It had no rhythm, no end. I couldn’t tell if she was reading aloud or simply speaking to someone we couldn’t see.

I didn’t ask Callum what he thought she was doing. That kind of question had long since become rhetorical. The answer was always the same.

She’s remembering, he would say.

And we would leave it at that. 

There was a kind of choreography to walking the flat—unspoken but precise. Callum and I moved carefully, instinctively, like rodents in a forgotten attic. Each path was a corridor of memory. A wrong step could disturb a precarious tower of books or a mysterious paper nest perched atop a lamp. Once, I knocked over a stack of antique anatomy manuals. I was eight. I cried before they even hit the floor. Not from guilt—just from the sound they made.

We lived not with books but inside them. They lined the floors, walled off corners, spilled from crates. They balanced on radiator pipes and lay in thick piles beneath the windows like insulation. Mother had arranged them by some private logic: not alphabetical, not by subject. Maybe by mood. A book on particle physics beside a dog-eared collection of Greek lyric poetry. Something on the Treaty of Utrecht, spine cracked and splayed, next to a pulp novel with a weeping woman on the cover. Some of them were open-faced, like birds stunned mid-flight.

The light through the window shafts was golden but dusty, thick with that slow-drifting weightless matter that never seemed to land. Dust motes hovered like punctuation marks between the pages. Somewhere, something ticked—but no clocks worked.

There was a piano we weren’t allowed to play. Mother insisted it was out of tune and dangerous. “It has very sharp teeth,” she said once, cryptically. I wasn’t sure if she meant metaphorically or not. Callum liked to lift the lid just to look at the strings. He’d stare as if hoping to see something else inside. Sometimes I thought he did.

By the window, a birdcage with no bird. Inside: a single paper feather and a polished stone. We never asked. There were dozens of these small mysteries: glass jars full of sewing needles, a heap of obsolete coins from countries that no longer existed, a pair of ballet shoes with something scratched on the soles—one of our names, but faded.

We moved through it all with reverence. We didn’t know what any of it meant, but meaning didn’t seem to matter in our house. Everything felt sacred simply by being old, or unread, or unlabeled.

Callum picked up a book that had been lying open-faced for weeks. “She hasn’t touched this,” he whispered, flipping through the pages slowly, like something might fly out.

I didn’t respond. I was watching the light shift across the arm of a chair—sunlight refracting off a brass belt buckle someone had hung there, casting a bent arc on the floor.

The light was shifting toward its late afternoon quality, where everything seemed to slow, and sound dropped to a hush. That hour had its own gravity in our home—something between solemn and suspended. We knew she would appear soon.

And there she was. Mother emerged from the turret, still wearing the faint look of having been somewhere else. Her hair was pulled back carelessly, a pencil jutting from behind her ear, and she held two mugs with her fingertips like a waiter balancing plates. Tea, though the color never quite matched anything one would call tea.

“There you are,” she said, as though we’d been missing. “I thought you were hiding in the linen cupboard again.”

“We never hide,” said Callum, without looking up.

She paused by the piano and made a small sound of amusement. “No. Not anymore.”

She placed the mugs on a stack of geology books and sat, cross-legged, on the floor. Her movements were always strangely fluid, like someone who’d once studied ballet or mime and never quite unlearned it. The silence around her felt intentional, curated. Even her presence was a kind of composition.

“We’re very fortunate,” she said, not for the first time. “Simple people, blessed with enough.”

She didn’t look at us when she said it. She was adjusting something on her wrist—an old watch that didn’t work.

“You know, your great-grandfather was a quartermaster during the war,” she added. “Not a soldier, not a hero. Just a man who moved things where they needed to be. Shells, mostly. Munitions. He never saw battle, but he touched every bomb that killed someone.”

She sipped the tea, eyes glazed, voice almost dreamy. “He used to say, ‘Peace is what’s left when your war is someone else’s victory.’ Do you understand what that means?”

We didn’t, but we nodded anyway.

“He got in early, long before the reforms. Before tax meant theft.” She laughed quietly, bitterly. “And he had the good sense to buy land instead of love. Clever man. No one remembers clever men, only brave ones. But clever men live longer.”

She reached for something behind her—a small tin of sugared ginger—and tossed one to each of us without warning. It hit Callum in the shoulder. Mine missed entirely.

“So,” she said brightly, as though we’d agreed on something. “We don’t need anything new. We don’t need to go places. We don’t need things.” She gestured to the overrun room, the books, the odd objects peeking from drawers and corners. “These are just… companions. Like wallpaper.”

She smiled at us then, and it was the smile she used when she was most unreachable.

“We live off the interest,” she said. “Not just money. Interest in things. In thoughts. In old, forgotten knowledge. The world outside thinks we’re strange. But the world outside isn’t real, is it?”

We didn’t answer. Outside, the wind began to rise again, rattling the glass.

“Besides,” she added, standing and stretching like a cat, “we’re not strange. We’re rare. And rare things don’t have to explain themselves.”

Mother had gone back to her turret. Callum had curled into the sofa with a book he had no intention of reading, already half asleep with the spine pressed against his ribs. I wandered toward the south-facing windows—the highest panes in the Arsenal building—where the glass sloped outward slightly, and the view dropped vertiginously to the river and beyond.

There was no view, though. Not really. Just the tall, swaying hush of the rooftop reeds.

Mother had insisted they be planted years ago. “Ecological insulation,” she called it. “Nature’s own lungs.” They rustled against the glass like the hem of a great wet dress, hundreds of them, tall and thick and constant, grown in boxed beds of earth bolted to the rooftop’s metal flanges. It was like being underwater—but in reverse. We lived at the top of a building, yet the reeds surrounded us as if we were buried in them.

They moved when the wind came. Not just bending—shivering, like they heard something we couldn’t. From the inside, you could almost pretend you lived in a floating island of marsh. The flat no longer overlooked the world but sat surrounded by a sea of stalks. No buildings, no people, just the reeds brushing the glass with soft insistence.

As always in the evenings, we kept the electric lights off. Mother said they “cluttered the brainwaves,” and for once we didn’t protest. There was something sacred about the ritual. One by one, we lit the fat beeswax candles set in chipped teacups and old brass sconces. A single hurricane lantern hung near the dining area, casting its slow, syrup-colored light onto the walls like old film reels.

The flat changed at night. Its clutter softened, took on shape and meaning. Shadows filled the spaces between bookshelves and gave them architecture. Our clutter became curation, a strange museum of someone’s memory. Maybe Mother’s. Maybe not.

Callum was already cross-legged on the rug, flipping through a brittle hardcover with a flaking spine. It was written in some language neither of us could identify—half-Greek, half-scratch. He read it the way one reads dreams, mouth moving without sound.

“I think this one was from Syria,” he said, not looking up. “The pages smell like ash.”

I chose a novel, one whose cover had long since vanished. It had no title page. The story began mid-sentence and never explained who was who. I liked it for that reason. It trusted you to keep going.

Mother moved quietly between us. She never sat still for long. Sometimes she would linger behind one of us, fingers just grazing the back of our heads like a priest offering wordless blessing. Other times, she drifted to the shelves and stood for minutes at a time, tracing the spines with her fingernail as if searching for a pulse.

She wore long, shapeless dresses after sunset. Tonight’s was a dark brown, almost black, and shimmered at the hem when she passed the candlelight. Her hair—greying, but thick—was half unpinned, falling in loose spirals that glowed in the halo of flame. In that half-light, she was beautiful in the way statues are beautiful: specific, permanent, and slightly inhuman.

She said little. Only the occasional question: “Have you eaten?” Or “Which century is that from?” Always softly, and always with the air of someone reciting lines she’d said in a dream before waking.

We read. Or pretended to. The silence between us was not emptiness but density. I felt as if we were underwater again, not in reeds this time, but inside some slow-moving ocean of thought. The candles flickered with the rhythm of breath. I imagined the flat drifting gently toward the past.

That was how it felt, sometimes. Like we were drifting toward something very old.

Something none of us really quite remembered.

It was Callum who finally broke the trance. He closed his book with a soft snap and said, simply, “I’m hungry.”

Mother didn’t look up. “Then eat,” she said.

But of course, there was no room to. Not really. The dining table was a misnomer—a heavy slab covered in stacks of newspapers, globes, candle stumps, a box of antique dental molds, and at least three rotary phones that no longer rang.

So, as always, we cleared a space on the floor. A slow, deliberate excavation. We worked without speaking. Books were stacked higher. Trinkets shifted to ledges. One of the rugs was pulled back to reveal the parquet floor beneath—warped and water-stained, with an inlaid starburst at the center.

We called this the clearing, and it was where all real things happened: meals, games, moments of declared truce. It took on the shape of ceremony through repetition. Even Mother helped tonight, sweeping crumbs and dislodging a rusted compass from underfoot.

Dinner came in three chipped bowls—two of them matching, one floral. Stew, thin and steaming, ladled from a pot that lived permanently on the hob. It tasted like every other stew she made: lentils, garlic, something rootlike. We never asked what.

We sat cross-legged, knees touching by accident or intent. The only sound was the clink of spoons, the dull ceramic tap as one of us reached for the chipped enamel jug of water and passed it wordlessly to another. No toast. No thanks. Not even a comment on the flavor. That was never the point.

Afterward, Mother produced a deck of cards from her sleeve—literally, as if by magic. It was an old, foreign deck, the kind with painted faces and strange suits: suns, knives, ropes, and birds. We didn’t know the rules, and she never explained them, but we played anyway. You were winning if Mother smiled at you, and losing if she did not.

For twenty minutes—maybe thirty—we existed in the same space. Not just physically, but truly. Time slowed down inside the candlelight. The wind outside softened, and the reeds hushed like they were listening.

Then, as always, it ended without a signal. Mother stood and vanished into the turret. Callum yawned, dragged a blanket from the back of the chair, and curled up on the couch. I remained in the clearing, knees cold against the floor, staring at the flame in the hurricane lamp.

It danced

It bent and recoiled like it knew something it couldn’t say.

I watched until it blurred, until the shadows around it softened into something like sleep.