The Water Tower - Books 1-3

Prologue

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a perfect world?

Imagine, if you will, a snow globe resting on a mantelpiece or a windowsill, in the corner of a quiet sitting room; it must be somewhere unremarkable, a non-descript home on a forgettable street will serve you best. Look inside the snow globe. Picture it in your mind’s eye. Two ornamental figures are standing there, facing the window. They seem comfortable, content; neither one of them ever appears despondent or hopeless.

Some of us are raised in our own private snow globes; where an indiscernible shield is cast around us to protect us from the inadequacies that thrive outside our lovely, little domain.

The world we inhabit is such a bleak place, after all. We all breathe imperfect air, we tread imperfect footsteps, and we dwell in imperfect moments.

As for love – love is the greatest imperfection of them all. Indelibly fragile, lastingly delicate, we place love on a platter and allow it be cross-examined, studied and interrogated. It is commented and remarked upon, analysed and dissected. It makes imperfect men and women of us all.

So, just for a moment, allow all of that to be pushed to one side and return to the snow globe. Imagine you are inside it.

What, in your mind’s eye, does your perfect world look like? Perfection is in the gift of the beholder, after all. A perfect song, a perfect letter, a perfect symphony; all of these are just concepts that we pursue within the framework of our own ideals.

There are those for whom perfection could only take shape with money, or inconceivable wealth; with others, it comes from a type of intangible happiness that they have sought for as long as they are able to recall. For many, a perfect world exists only in those small, indiscernible moments between breaths when they lie contentedly in the arms of another, a spread of stars casting their pearl-white light down from the balconies of heaven. For a select few, their perfect world is made real in the instant that they break away from everything that has come before; when suddenly, unexpectedly, they are wonderfully, breathtakingly, mesmerizingly free.

Perhaps, for you, it lies in words on a page, in the fictions we create for one another, where the imperfections of our hearts can be washed away like blemishes with blotting paper? In the perfect worlds we craft in storybooks, no one has to die, no one has to lose, and no one has to make impossible choices that ferment the fires of separation and division. Happy endings abound – if there ever has to be an ending at all.

But perhaps there is another answer to this question.

Perhaps there is no such thing as a perfect world.

Perhaps there are only the two ornamental figures, inside a snow globe, watching the window, where the light from across the street has been smudged by the rain.