Far From The Madding Crowd

Beneath the floorboards, the air was never dry.

You could smell it if you leaned close enough to the cracks—sweet and root-heavy, like something growing in the dark. My father had told me once that the Arsenal buildings were raised on piled earth, and beneath that, the river reclaimed itself in slow floods. But this wasn’t river water. This was still water. Black, thick, motionless. A fen, he called it.

We never saw it.

But we heard it.

When the wind in the girders went quiet, you could catch the slow breath of it—tiny bubbles rising through rot, a distant drip like someone was pacing in boots through the shallows.

The boys pretended not to hear. I think they didn’t want to give it shape. If you named a sound in our home, it had a way of staying.

Some nights the youngest, who spoke so rarely I would sometimes think he had forgotten how, would tell me in a whisper, “It’s listening back.”

I didn’t ask what he meant.

We both knew.

Sometimes I thought the fen was the oldest part of the building—older than the bomb casings, older than the bricks, older even than the mud of the riverbank. As if the building hadn’t been constructed here at all, but had grown like a reed from its surface, drawing its weight from below. And if you listened long enough to the hum through the boards, it began to sound less like water and more like a voice rehearsing words it couldn’t yet speak.

It was my grandfather who first brought us here.

Not here exactly—the building then was nothing but stacked shadow and rusting girders, gutted after the war. He was a quartermaster, precise in his movements, cataloguing the unusable, boxing the still-dangerous. There were stories of him keeping whole shipments of shells locked away in underground rooms because he “didn’t like their sound.” That’s how they spoke of him—like a man who could hear danger before it happened.

We never called him superstitious. We called him necessary.

And when the Arsenal finally closed, he signed papers none of us understood, and the penthouse became ours. Not bought, not gifted—kept, like you keep a key to a room no one remembers.

The guilt of the place was baked into its concrete.

They said the air in here was cleaner than the river wind, but I never believed it. You could taste iron if you breathed deep enough, the residue of decades where men in pressed uniforms oversaw the shaping of death. I used to imagine the walls holding their breath during the bomb raids, waiting for their own work to fall back on them.

The boys never knew the full of it.

I told them stories of our inheritance in half-shadows. A grandfather who kept meticulous ledgers but never smiled in photographs. A building that once hummed not with wind but with the machinery of assembly, parts rolling along belts into waiting hands.

But the rest I kept from them.

The things grandfather traded. The ledger pages that were torn out. The underground rooms sealed before I was born.

It’s easier, here, to live in a state of forgetting.

The flat helps. The winding paths through our possessions mean you can lose your train of thought between one corner and the next. The wind in the girders carries enough voices to drown your own. And beneath it all, the slow breath of the fen rises through the floorboards, a constant reminder that the ground will take everything back in time.

Some nights, when the youngest lingers too long near the turret threshold, I want to tell him—about the ledger, the trades, the fire door, the sound of boots in the shallow water below.

But I don’t.

He’s still learning to listen. And I’m still learning how not to.

The fen was older than the building, older than the river’s bend, older than the maps that pretended it wasn’t there.

It wasn’t just water—peat had been building there for centuries, thick with the slow work of decay. Grandfather once told me that peat didn’t just keep what it swallowed; it kept some things exactly as they had been. Skin, cloth, hair—memories. Whole winters pressed flat between layers of moss and root, waiting to be read like a book no one dared open.

I didn’t understand it then.

I do now.

The fen did not only hold the past—it worked on it.

Grandfather never said that part aloud, but I saw it in the way he walked the flat in his last years, lighter somehow, as though the floor carried part of his weight. He would stand in the turret at dusk, his ledger on the sill, the pages trembling in his hands, and he would read to the dark like a confession. The fen listened.

I think it understood that remembering is a wound that can’t close if you keep pressing on it.

So it took the memory into itself, pressed it down through moss and water, through years of dark, until the edges softened. The truth remained—but the sting went out of it.

The boys didn’t know this.

The eldest only knew that some days the air smelled sweeter, like cut grass in late summer, and those were the days we could speak of the father without the room bending in on itself.

The youngest… the mirror boy… I sometimes thought he was the fen’s work entirely. A restoration, not an invention. As though the peat had pulled him out of some older hurt and returned him to us—not to replace what was lost, but to remind us what it had been like before losing was all we knew.

But there is a danger in healing like this.

If you leave something in the fen too long, it doesn’t just lose its pain—it loses its sharpness, its name, its place in the world. It becomes part of the peat itself. That was what happened to the father. He left too much of himself in the water, and when he tried to draw it back, there was nothing left to lift.

Even so, I have begun to give the fen pieces of my own—small things, easy things.

A photograph with the faces worn out.

A page from the ledger with the numbers half-smudged.

The first time I told the youngest boy not to ask questions.

And in return, it gives me mornings when I can breathe.

It gives me days where the wind in the girders sounds less like guilt and more like weather.

The fen didn’t just preserve the dead. It preserved the truth of things.

And truth, left too long, begins to breathe.

It was from the fen that I learned forgetting isn’t the same as losing.

Some things sink until they can no longer be seen, but they remain underfoot, softening the ground, reshaping it. That was how grandfather lived with what he had done. He let the building feed its guilt into the fen, year after year, until the water was black with it.

The boys moved carefully here, but differently. The youngest watched the fen through the cracks in the floor, though he would never admit it. The eldest… I have always known he was not entirely mine.

Sometimes, when the two boys are together, they blur in my vision. Not vanish—not fade—just tilt out of alignment with the rest of the room, like a reflection that’s begun to ripple.

And on those nights, the peat beneath us feels warmer, as if the earth itself is remembering something too close to the surface.

I’ve never told the eldest which one he is.

I’m not sure I could.