The Tower

Once I read a story about a woman who became trapped in a suffocating vision of the afterlife, condemned to wander through time and relive her memories on a loop for ever more, so that after a while she was merely an exhausted observer of her own life and fate.

‘You think the past affects the future,’ a character says to her as she confronts for the hundredth time a particularly painful episode. ‘Has it never struck you that the future may affect the past?’

I had never thought of time as so plainly a two-way trip, and of cause and effect as return passengers. Though I couldn’t work out if it was for good or ill, I didn’t doubt for a minute that the assessment was completely and complicatedly true. Were it not, I would probably be telling you a different story now.

But before I came to know this story properly, before I came to, I think, understand it, the one I’m about to tell you, about a girl – or a woman – and a tower on a hill, I didn’t hear how, in it, the past and the future spoke to each other. I didn’t see that the past was only what it was, a tragedy, because the future had conspired to make it so. I didn’t see how, because of this whispered communion between the past and the future (a future which was, in any case, already the past to some other future), two lives became joined together, easily, as if instinctively, as if they always had been, eliding great differences, to speak as one.

Or howl. A howl of all time, like a discordant chorus cast from the heights of Babel across a flooded land, where the ground mirrors the sky and no one can be sure which way is up or down, which way back and which forwards, what happened and what was only in the mind. I fear I haven’t explained it at all clearly. But I hope you’ll come to see what I mean. Perhaps for now I should simply say that we don’t always tell the story we want to tell. We can’t always choose our place in it, nor how it ends, or if it even does. That, reader, is the stuff of fiction.

I . A GIRL

I.

Years and years ago, a man told a woman a story about a girl who died in a tower, in a place hundreds of miles north from them and more than a century past. From that moment, every few months, the woman would lead the man through the hoops of the story. But so she died in there…? Did someone tell you this or was there a plaque, something written…? They must have had the same conversation a hundred times or more, his words becoming fewer and flightier with each retelling, the weighted silence of brain-racking and hesitation taking over.

It was so long ago, he’d say, even in the early days when it wasn’t.

Information was nibbled away by the moths of forgetfulness, doubt and distraction, and she did nothing to stop holes forming. She – let’s call her T – wrote no details down, which went against her usual habit of capturing a good story, with a half-thought that she’d make use of it in some shape, at some point (you should know she made a living telling other people’s stories). The more stubborn elements – I’m not sure I can say facts – belonged to a different register, like a few scattered stones that might be bits of bone or a trick of the light that could be a human face suspended in air.

In the beginning this is what she knew: one autumn, her boyfriend, as he was at the time, went on a trip with his father, walking in the north of the country, where they encountered a strange structure, a little tower; ‘a folly’, he called it. Back home, he showed her a photograph of it on his phone and, even then, she remembered wishing he hadn’t. An octagonal tower on two levels: mostly glass upstairs and too-white masonry below, beneath a steep slate roof. The tower’s banal appearance didn’t seem to match his story, she thought, about a young woman with tuberculosis who was confined for three years by her father, and died there sometime in the early 1900s.

I called it his story just now, but she had claimed it as her own before he had stopped talking, before even she was aware of having done so.

Over the years, she found online more images like the one he had shown her, snapped by ramblers and posted with sparse and sceptical commentary. It is commonly thought… Locals believe… They say… As if those people weren’t themselves saying it, some part of them believing it, or wanting to. She wondered why they distanced themselves like that, as if they were looking down from a great height. She read them all, must have found every blog there was to be found, gulped them like cheap lemonade on a hot day. They gave her a rush. In one image, apparently photocopied and then scanned from a newspaper of the 1940s and so grainy it was almost pointillist, a cow called Daisy had found her way into the tower and peered out of an upstairs window, as if deciding what to wear for the weather. In another, the tower was in ruins, only half of the base still standing, its stone unmasked and its doorway gaping. Like an open mouth, she said to herself. Like an open grave.

For some time after the events of our story had run their course, she wished the tower still looked that way, undistinguished and grey, fuzzed by moss. She wished they had never rebuilt it, reconstructing the past, Disneyfying tragedy for just anyone walking by to notice; an ambush on the feelings and imagination, a trap for the vulnerable or foolish. She spent nights willing the thing to crumble again, picturing stones in the grass without apparent pattern or purpose. If the tower disappeared, she thought, perhaps everything else would, too.

(…)