The Water Tower - Books 1-3

Chapter 2-3

Just for an afternoon. Just for an hour, even. Just to run her fingers across her daughter’s cheek, the way she had on that first morning when their eyes had met and she’d seen the birth of a whole new light.

She’d started drawing again. Constantine and Hilda had both encouraged her. It was the one thing she found tranquil, although she’d never admit that aloud. She was going to buy another sketchpad, maybe later that day if she could shake off the lethargy long enough to force herself out into the sun for a while. For the last week or so, she’d been using an old notepad she’d found in the kitchen drawer. Scooping up a pencil or a biro, whatever was to hand really, she’d sit downstairs with the curtains open long after night fell and sketch out Alice’s face, taking her time to delicately render every line and contour as accurately as possible. Some of her attempts had been more successful than others but those quiet, moonlit hours had soothed her, allowed her space and time to collect her thoughts. She didn’t need the shard then. And the drawings had given her a means by which to make sure she never forgot Alice’s face.

She shook herself out of her reverie, sucked in a breath, and then reached for the flannel, dousing it in the lukewarm water and pressing it to her skin.

Later, when she was ready, she washed the mirror shard in the bathroom sink, wrapped it in the old cloth and tucked it neatly in the drawer next to her bed, beneath the packets of prescription tablets and a broken music box that Uncle Sean had given to her when she was twelve.

* * *

The Whitechapel estate had been built just after the war, in a meaningful demonstration of the ways and means by which the country was going to get back on its feet. Its unwelcoming, unadorned blocks of council-owned housing were barely remarked upon at the time, the estate itself shielded from the heart of the village by the Water Tower. Nevertheless, by whatever means a person cared to measure, the Whitechapel estate was an extension of Little Bassington; it had always been intended that way, built as had been in the late 1940s within the village’s footprint, and separated only by chance and circumstance by the fields that lay behind the Tower. There had never been any intention other than to carry on building outwards; to expand the Whitechapel development onto the fields until the two conurbations met. That had never happened and, over time, the fields became as sacrosanct to the village as the Tower itself, whilst serving as a convenient means by which to allow the people there to keep their Whitechapel neighbours at arm’s length.

The name of the estate was derived from the site upon which it was built having once been home to a nonconformist chapel, demolished sometime in the late 1700s. The history books were vague as to why the demolition occurred, although irreparable damage to the roof following a heavy storm was widely accepted as the most probable reason. By the time the late 1940s came and the first streets of the estate were complete, Whitechapel became home to an array of post-war widows, rehoused families, and men who had married young, returning only then to wives and children they had barely seen. Over the decades, the estate grew in population as much as it was able, many of its compact homes becoming densely populated, and others positively bursting at the seams. It never prospered economically, as Little Bassington did, and eventually stood in sharp contrast to the village with which it remained intrinsically linked. As attentions inevitably focused on the opposite side of the Tower, Whitechapel became overlooked, discounted, and even intentionally snubbed by those who had the power to determine its future. Devoid of anyone to empower it or champion its cause, the estate gradually fell into a self-fulfilling prophecy of disrepair and deprivation. Worklessness and thanklessness set in, and one downturn followed another.

Nevertheless, the people who lived on Whitechapel freely considered Little Bassington to be their home. They shopped there, those who worshipped used its churches on Sunday mornings, and families would congregate on the Village Green (complete with its gleaming red telephone box and freshwater duck pond) for the annual Christmas carol service. But while they may have seen no distinction, no dividing line, between the two halves of the community they inhabited, others did. For many in Little Bassington, the Whitechapel estate was an inconvenience; a blemish on the landscape, a limb they had long wished they could sever. Its people may officially have been part and parcel of the same community, and they may have fallen under the umbrella of Bassington District Council (just as those who lived on the more prosperous side of the Tower or in the adjoining Bassington Town did), but for all the social niceties that needed to be observed, more and more of the villagers began to consider the Whitechapel estate an irritant, an inconvenience; one that couldn’t be easily ignored, yet wouldn’t simply go away.

The fields served as a convenient dividing line between the catchment areas for the two local schools within the Bassington district. The school that served the Whitechapel estate was built in the 1950s – Bell Heath was, from the outset, a ramshackle, poorly-funded and ultimately notorious establishment that chilled its students to the bone through many an unwelcome winter thanks to the dilapidated, and too often frozen, pipework that ran along its miserable, depressing corridors. Bell Heath’s crumbling, uninspired architecture was testament to a place that existed, but had never really been cared for. It was as if the people of Whitechapel had been handed the basics they would need in order to navigate life and then quietly tucked away, left to be forgotten, in the hope that somehow, one day, they would become someone else’s concern.

While children from Whitechapel travelled west to Bell Heath (the school that, true to form, became known as the place in which no one wanted to teach, with its sullied reputation and ever diminishing outcomes), those who were fortunate enough to have grown up in Little Bassington proper headed south, through the town, to Bassington Lodge High School and Sixth Form College. Well-funded, soundly maintained, “the Lodge” (as it was known) thrived with the financial and political support of Bassington District Council, who cultivated its reputation and never missed an opportunity to showcase their pride in its position on the league tables.

Bell Heath, in contrast, was casually disregarded, a small degree of lip service paid to it every now and then on the unspoken understanding that, whilst it came under their remit, it was and always would be “the problem school”. There had even been talk of knocking Bell Heath down in years past, but those discussions had only served to throw up another set of problems: where would the money come from to rebuild or replace it? Where would the teenagers of Whitechapel be sent in the meantime, given that the prospect of them merging with the Lodge’s intake was seemingly too horrible an idea to contemplate?

There was always the other notion; that, somehow, the Whitechapel estate could be cast adrift completely, freed from the auspices of Bassington District Council altogether. Yet, a few tentative opening gambits aside, this had never come to fruition.

So it remained that Whitechapel became the village’s “poor relation”. The link in the chain which, in spite of the best efforts of some, couldn’t be severed. The place where the overlooked, the impoverished and the disadvantaged lived, whose windows nevertheless offered the same view afforded to so many of their contemporaries in Little Bassington: a view of green fields, unspoilt and undiminished; of a familiar outlook which, despite the complications they all faced in life, they were proud to call home; and of the Water Tower that stood sentinel over them all.

* * *

If Bell Heath had been the District Council’s “problem school”, then it was little wonder Madison Carter had so often been categorised as their “problem child”. She’d lived on Whitechapel all of her life. Growing up on the estate meant she knew every nook and cranny of the place like the back of her hand: the alleyways where the smokers would congregate; the open stretch of scarred concrete that led to the back of the garage site which someone had christened “the Runway”; the place where Aaron Campbell had once had a fight with Tony Stanley and landed up in hospital; even the ginnel between Singh’s Corner Shop and the flat-roofed houses with their creaking gutters, where Naomi Anderson had once taken E and f****d Craig Martin up against the rough brick walls one Saturday night after catching the last bus back from town.

Madison had longed to get away from school; to escape Bell Heath and its freezing corridors. The only lessons she’d really wanted to stay for were Art, where the gentle timbre of Miss Bloomfield had been a refuge of encouragement and reassurance in the storm of her adolescence. She’d enjoyed developing her pencil sketches; relishing those smooth grey lines of shading that she’d gently smudged with her fingers to create just the right effect. She’d enjoyed painting too; alternating between thin, flat brushes and those with coarser bristles, the scar-free arms she’d had back then steering the tips through short, controlled strokes. They’d even put some of her work on display once. It had lasted two weeks before some skinny kid from the year below had shaken up a can of Coke and sprayed its contents over the wall.

She’d given into frustration then. She’d wanted to run and so that’s what she did. She’d started playing truant, slipping out of the gap between the hedges after her Mum had dropped her off or, when she was older, not even bothering to turn up at all. She’d throw on her school uniform all the same before she left the house, playing her part and going through the pretence, although they’d both known the reality. There were times she could have sworn her Mum didn’t care, or perhaps she’d just given up trying by then because it was too hard to do anything else. It hadn’t come as a surprise to either of them when she’d failed her exams; when she’d left school without a single qualification to her name. She’d thought about trying to get her Art GCSE, half in hope that it would give her Mum and Uncle Sean something to smile about. Miss Bloomfield had encouraged her to take the exam, but the idea had quickly fallen flat. She’d been too consumed by other things; first the junk, then the imminent arrival of Alice. It had been so much easier to just turn her back on that corner of her life.

easierShe hadn’t played truant every day, but she’d done it often enough throughout the years that her teachers at Bell Heath despaired. She’d slipped back home one day when she was fourteen, giving the others some forgettable, offhand excuse, and found herself looking through the front window of her Mum’s sorry two-bed terrace in Langley Court, with its chipped paintwork and broken front step, where she’d seen them together. Her Mum and Uncle Sean had been on the couch; they hadn’t even bothered to close the curtains properly. Mum had been riding him hard, her head tipped back as she edged closer to a cheap o****m, an expression of unbridled pleasure stitched onto her face, while both hands rolled across Sean’s tight, compact chest as he savoured every moment.

Madison had drifted away, disgusted, although certain they hadn’t spotted her. She’d found the rest of the “runners” – the ones she’d hung around with in those days – and they’d used their free bus passes for the journey into town. She hadn’t said anything to her Mum that night, or any night afterwards. She’d just treated it like any other day. They’d all been empty days really, filled with nothing much to talk about.