The Voids

As I sit here writing this, everything has already happened. The past and the future no longer exist. Either for me or for you. Nothing remains but the words.

If it were possible to disintegrate time, I could show you how easily things fall apart. If it were possible to disintegrate time, I could show you how easily life disintegrates.

1

I was living on the fourteenth floor of a condemned high-rise. I was all alone up there. One of the few remaining tenants in the building. The others, a character known as the Birdman and several pensioners who hadn’t set foot on terra firma for years, were scattered throughout the floors below.

At some point all maintenance had ceased. Then the lifts had been decommissioned. Then the intercom system stopped working. It was only a matter of time before they disconnected the utilities. After this, those of us who remained would be cut off altogether. We were the irredeemable. The unremembered.

The Birdman was in his late forties and had a flat on the fourth floor that he shared with a flock of pigeons. Regardless of the weather, his living-room window was always open to allow the birds to come and go. Every morning he’d be there in his guano-covered dressing gown, dragging his oxygen tank back and forth as he fed the pigeons jostling and cooing loudly on his windowsill. I’d call up to him from the car park and ask how things were, and he’d smile and respond with the same answer every time.

‘Look around,’ he’d yell with his arms outstretched like some profane Christ the Redeemer heralding catastrophe, ‘can you no see? It’s shite. The world is full of shite and getting shite-er.’

Then he’d laugh himself into a coughing and wheezing fit and start groping for his oxygen mask while being engulfed by a storm of wings.

As for the pensioners, I would never have known they were there if I hadn’t looked up as I walked towards the high-rise and caught sight of them standing at their windows. Sometimes there’d only be one or two, at other times there would be several of them scattered across the great geometric sweep of its façade. Forgotten sentinels hovering behind clouds or sunlight reflecting off the glass, like ghost figures in double negatives.

The only people I came into direct contact with were the heroin addicts. Desperate for their fix, they’d shoot up as soon as they managed to get inside the building and were usually too strung out to make it up more than a few flights of stairs. I’d pass them gouching in the foyer or dragging themselves up the stairwell. Emaciated, dying of a thirst that would never be quenched, like pilgrims lost in the desert. One guy made it as far as the seventh floor once. He was slouched in the corner of the landing and nodding off as I came down the stairs towards him. Hearing my footsteps, he looked up and asked, ‘Am ah there? Have ah made it?’

‘Made it where?’ I asked him.

‘The top of the world,’ he replied.

I didn’t want to lie to a dying man. At the same time, I didn’t have the heart to break his high and what was left of his spirit by explaining that he’d only managed to crawl a third of the way up a condemned high-rise.

‘Nearly. You’re headed in the right direction. Don’t give up. Keep going,’ I told him. The fire in him had almost been extinguished. I half-expected to see it flicker and burn out right there and then. Instead, a beautiful smile lit up his ravaged face and illuminated the entire high-rise. I’d seen him a few times before, but after that day, I never saw him again.

When demolition was first mentioned, most people said they would never leave, that they would fight till the end. When it was confirmed, a petition was launched and residents’ meetings were held. One of my neighbours, a gigantic brute with a head like a smashed pumpkin and huge, spade-like hands that looked rusted from all the roll-ups he smoked, was the first and last to sacrifice himself for the cause.

Out on life licence for attempted murder, Mondo wasn’t much of a conversationalist. What he did have was a predilection for grand idiosyncratic statements and capital letters. I knew this because the summer afternoon he moved in, he forced a huge Christmas card through my letter box with I AM YOUR NEIGHBOUR AND I LOVE YOU NOW scrawled inside the mangled card. I didn’t know whether to be touched or terrified. When he knew I was home he’d leave his front door ajar and have music playing at just the right volume. Never too loud, it seemed purposely set to lure me across the landing into his flat, like a tacit invite. It was usually a Meat Loaf song, most often ‘You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth’. I wondered if this was how he used to serenade his fellow prisoners. Mondo’s was a classic case of a body that had been freed, but a mind that was still deep inside.

As it turned out, we never did get the chance to know one another. When demolition was proposed, he expressed himself no less emphatically on that front too, scuppering any possibility of forging a friendship. On a huge banner fashioned from several white sheets that he hung from his living room window he declared — I WILL MOVE OUT OVER MY DEAD BODY! Unfortunately for Mondo, the public declaration of this impossible threat broke several of his bail conditions, and when the police turned up to arrest him an altercation ensued. A small group that had gathered outside his door to support him cheered in solidarity as they heard him yell, ‘Pick a windae, ye fucking bastards! Yer leaving!’ to the police officers. But the only person leaving was Mondo, in a brutal restraint hold via his front door.

Mondo’s suppression and swift removal only increased the residents’ rage and sense of injustice. ‘Free Mondo’ meetings were held. People wore T-shirts with a blurred image of his face printed on the front like some parody of the Turin Shroud. Photocopies of the same image with MONDO NEEDS YOU emblazoned beneath his mugshot, were stuck on lamp posts and bus shelters. Intended as recruitment posters, they looked more like Victorian-era wanted posters and scared the shit out of the local kids and the elderly. Plans were made to set up roadblocks and to barricade the entrances to the high-rise. Exhilarated by these events and giddy with righteousness and rebellion, people vowed to fight to the end. Some even swore they’d lay down their lives if they had to. Then the cheques started arriving for those who had applied for home loss and disturbance payments. When word of their financial windfall got out, it spread through the building like a disease everyone was dying to catch. Overnight, Mondo went from being a travesty of justice to simply being a travesty. Soon after, an unholy exodus ensued.

In less than a month, occupancy in the high-rise went from full to almost empty. It started slowly enough. A couple of people one day, a few more the next. I didn’t really pay much attention in the beginning. Then entire families started bailing out with their belongings any way they could. Clothes jammed into swollen suitcases. Linen stuffed into bursting black bin bags. Shoes, toys, pots and pans piled high in stolen shopping trolleys. Pillowcases filled with bric-a-brac and tied around bicycles like packs strapped to mules. Heirlooms carefully laid out on duvets, then rolled up and carried into the lifts like the dead. Huge items of furniture secured with ropes and lowered down the outside of the building. Small children and pets wheeled out on hand carts and trucks. It went on like this, day and night. A steady stream of people and possessions flowing out of the high-rise like grains of sand from a broken hourglass.

While the exodus was in full swing there was a carnival atmosphere. Protests mutated into parties. Teenage scouts, who’d previously patrolled the perimeter watching for hostile bodies, were instead sent out on booze runs. Communal lunches and dinners were cooked on disposable barbecues that burned around the base of the high-rise throughout the day and smouldered through the night. Within days the place began to resemble an encampment of disparate communities displaced by war. The wretched absurdity of it all. Honestly, if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. Not that anyone else was thinking such thoughts. On the contrary, with peace bought and further conflict averted, suddenly everyone was happy and a comrade. Euphoric racists shook the hands of puzzled immigrants, grizzled alcoholics raised a toast with young junkies, Catholics sang songs with Protestants, and the army of security guards laughed at the jokes of departing residents while soft-pedalling their evictions. Everyone behaved as if their hopes and dreams were waiting for them just around the corner. Like they were on their way to Shangri-La. Watching them reminded me of cartoon characters speeding off a cliff desperate to escape some adversary. Their desperation keeps them suspended in mid-air for a time, but the moment they look down, they fall.

Initially, I found the departure of the residents disorientating. When it continued unabated, I began to find it unnerving. The increasing isolation. The haunting silence building itself around me. The intense stillness that resonated throughout the vast interior. It was so quiet I would lie in bed at night listening to my breathing, terrified of all that uninhabited space, feeling myself atomise into the darkness. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if the others had left us or if we had left them.

Besides Mondo, there were two families on my floor. A Malawian family and an Iraqi family. During those first days, with the hours moving as slowly as photographed clouds in a photographed sky, it was these neighbours I missed the most. Encountering the aromatic warmth of the food they cooked as I stepped out of the lift onto our landing. Listening to their music drift through the walls of my flat. Hearing their children play in the hallway outside my door in the evenings, their laughter colouring the grey concrete floors and grimy magnolia-painted walls. Sometimes when I closed my eyes and began to fall away in sleep or stupor, I would dream I was in Lilongwe or Nineveh, searching for my neighbours. I loved straying into these terrae incognitae. They were my very own cities of the red night and my heart would sink when I’d wake and find myself back in my flat.

These families were also the most reluctant to leave. The immigrants. The migrants. The refugees. The so-called outsiders. They didn’t want the resettlement money. To move on again. They wanted homes. An opportunity to rebuild their lives. They didn’t understand why the authorities wanted to tear down the high-rise. To erase all these rooms from the sky. Why they would further disperse the already dispersed and dispossessed.

Late one night, back when demolition was first mentioned, the intercom in my flat buzzed. It was Zamir, my Iraqi neighbour. He’d forgotten his fob for the main door and didn’t want to wake his wife and children. He kept apologising for disturbing me and I tried to reassure him that I was awake anyway, but I don’t think he believed me, so I decided to wait for him on our landing after buzzing him in. He emerged from the piss-pale light of the lift with his head down and was surprised to see me when he looked up.

‘Neighbour, my good neighbour,’ he smiled, ‘Thank you, thank you. I am so sorry to awaken you.’

‘It’s fine, really. I was awake anyway,’ I told him. There was a fresh cut on his forehead and blood on the yellow sports jacket he was wearing. ‘Are you okay? What happened?’ I asked him.

‘This thing,’ he said, pointing to the ceiling, but referring to the cut on his head, ‘nothing. Babies, babies who don’t understand anything. But the other thing, why are they doing this? This is something I do not understand.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Kaboom,’ he said, opening his arms and looking around to indicate he meant the high-rise.

‘They call it regeneration.’

‘What is regeneration?’

‘They tear down old stuff and build new stuff.’

‘This is good is it not?’ he asked.

‘It’s supposed to be. But it isn’t, not really. The people who live here now can’t afford the new stuff, so they get moved on.’

Zamir looked puzzled. Either he hadn’t a clue what I was going on about, or else he was trying to understand why they would do such a terrible thing.

‘Something does not sound right,’ he said.

‘I know. I’m sorry. I’m not being very clear,’ I smiled.

‘No, I understand you. What they are doing does not sound right.’

It wasn’t. It was basically a land grab. Opportunism disguised as opportunity. Developers in cahoots with the council, they’d been doing it for decades. Reappropriating formerly undesirable areas that were now desired — minus the undesirables.

‘It’s not right. It’s like a trick. An illusion,’ I said.

‘Illusion?’

‘You know, like Houdini?’

‘Yes. Magicians.’

‘Exactly. They pretend they’re doing one thing, in order to hide what they’re actually doing. In this case, that they’re giving you something better than what you had.’

‘Ah, tricksters.’

‘Yes, tricksters.’

‘Like the people smugglers.’ Zamir mock-spat.

‘Yeah I suppose, like them. But then everything in life is a dirty trick,’ I added.

‘No, my neighbour, not everything. Life can be good. Very good. Haven’t you seen my wife?’ He winked and smiled.

‘I have, she’s very beautiful,’ I agreed.

‘You’ve looked at my wife?’ he asked angrily.

‘Well. No. I just. You know,’ I mumbled.

‘My neighbour, my neighbour, I am funning with you,’ Zamir said, laughing loudly. Then he came forwards and flung his arms around me, hugging me with an embrace full of heart. Just then his front door opened and his wife appeared.

‘Zami, in, now.’

‘Beautiful and the boss,’ he said beneath his breath. ‘By the way, my favourite trick is the Indian rope trick. It does not seem possible. And yet on they get, and up and up they go.’ He said, smiling warmly, before turning and walking towards his wife with his arms wide open.

A week after most of the residents had left, the sense of seclusion intensified. As well as my neighbours I began to miss the things I’d formerly hated about living in the high-rise. The sound of garbage bags and bottles tumbling and crashing down the waste-disposal chute. Front doors slamming shut. The creaking and rattling of the lift cables. People yelling from their windows throughout the night. The senseless violence that would suddenly flair up outside the entrance of the building for no apparent reason, but that I couldn’t stop myself watching from above, despite the fact it made me feel sick. I even missed the couple who lived in the flat above mine and who were always fighting with each other. Dead-end battles fuelled by alcohol and hopelessness. The two of them screaming questions neither of them had the answers to. Who’d paid for the booze? Who’d hidden the booze? Who’d drunk all the booze? For the love of God, how were they going to get more booze? Crazy altercations that wouldn’t stop until one of them passed out or they started fucking, or they both passed out while they were fucking. They’d regularly call the police on one another to report an incident of domestic abuse. You’d hear their door being knocked, then moments later, from lungs filled with love and despair would come that bittersweet duet, when in unison they’d tell the police to ‘Fuck off and mind yer own business!’ Tommy and Moira, raging like two star-crossed drunks in a Pogues song. Held hostage by dramas they themselves had written and in which they played the lead roles. Crying their hearts out for creating each other’s misery.

They lived directly above me. I knew their names and intimacies, yet in all the time they were there I never met them. Which wasn’t that remarkable. One of the lifts stopped on the even-numbered floors, and the other on the odd-numbered floors. This meant that unless you went out of your way to do so, you never met half the residents in the high-rise, except briefly in the foyer. A high-rise is like two streets running parallel up into the sky. Two streets that never meet and that you’ll never find on any map or Google Earth.

The only people who did mix with everyone, regardless of which floor they lived on, were the alcoholics who rode the lifts with a bottle or a bag of cans. Vertical itinerants, going up and down, drinking and dreaming of the lives they used to lead. There was one old man I was particularly fond of — Pitter-Patter-Pete. So called, because after he’d had a few drinks he’d stand in the corner of the lift singing a song and doing a kind of old soft-shoe shuffle. Pete was different from the others you’d encounter. It wasn’t only the dancing. He always wore a suit, only drank White Horse whisky, and never drank it from the bottle. His drink was always in a glass. Pete and his wife Martha had moved from a tenement and were among the first to take up residency in the high-rise. While Martha was alive, I rarely saw him ride the lifts. Following her death, he began to ride them all the time. As far as I knew, he hadn’t set foot outside the building since returning from Martha’s funeral. Now the lone rider of the lifts, when I’d last spoken to him, he said the day he left would be his last on earth.

After a couple of weeks, I found myself standing outside the voids in the middle of the night listening for human activity, for any sign of life at all. Voids are flats that have been vacated, that will never be lived in again. But there never were any signs of life. Only the wind whistling through vacant interiors. The ghostly trill of it passing beneath front doors. The faintest whisper as it spilled across cold concrete and gathered in little pools of loneliness in the corners of landings.

After a month, I got used to the fact that there was almost no one in the high-rise. I made a covenant with loneliness and became drawn to the voids because they were derelict. I discovered that each one had its own musical composition. Like breath through an instrument, the passage of the wind was altered by what furniture and other remnants were inside each flat. Even wallpaper curling at its edge had an effect. Everything in them combined to produce different notes, tones, and cadences, and I’d move from door to door, listening to them. A multitude of requiems playing simultaneously in a huge, malfunctioning jukebox.

Wandering endlessly throughout the high-rise, I became increasingly fascinated by the voids. They were enigmas, black stars exerting an irresistible force on me. Determined to uncover their secrets, I began to break into them. Once inside I’d look for old messages left by past tenants or hurried dispatches written on the walls by the last occupants during their final days in the high-rise. There were always words left behind. Random inscriptions, notes written somewhere, and no matter how banal or meaningless they seemed, even if it was just a name and a date written in the faintest pencil on the back of a cupboard door, to me these inscriptions had all the substance and magic of love letters or prayers.

After the words, I’d look for objects and begin to compile inventories. This could take a few minutes or sometimes an entire day. People left all manner of things behind. Beds. Wardrobes. Sofas. In one flat the sofa had been too big to fit through the doorway and had been left where it was, trapped mid-air in the door frame. Armchairs. Dining tables and chairs. Coffee tables. Rugs. Vacuum cleaners. Lamps. Paintings. Televisions. DVD players. Video machines. Stereos. Clothes. CDs. Records. Books. Sex aids. A motorbike. A moped. And photographs, so many photographs and shopping lists and letters. In a flat on the nineteenth floor someone had gathered a thick pile of letters, photographs, and utility bills and nailed them to the ceiling like a seven-inch exclamation mark proclaiming the end of their old life.

One evening, I found a wooden rowing boat complete with oars. It was positioned in front of a bedroom wall decorated with photographic wallpaper depicting an expansive loch or fjord somewhere. A thick layer of dust coated the oars and the boat, as if its occupants had magicked themselves into the landscape and sailed off years ago. In another, someone had pre-commemorated the destruction that was about to come knocking. On their front door they’d daubed END OF DAYS in red paint and throughout the rooms they’d arranged life size inflatable dolls dressed and posed as if going about their daily routines, like the mannequins you’d see in old film footage of 1950s nuclear test sites.

Domestic integrities and intimacies. Memories flung up in the air and left wherever they landed. Sacred. Inviolate. Until I trespassed. Walking around the vacated flats, examining people’s belongings, I felt blessed and cursed in equal measure. Then one afternoon I discovered the paradox of an enigma. To be one, it must remain one. After breaking into a flat through which the wind was singing a beautiful lament and finding nothing in it at all, not even a nail sticking up between the joints of the floorboards, I realised I couldn’t crash my way into the mystery of things. That my inventories would never reveal any secrets. Only murder them.

Later that night I stood at my living-room window ripping the pages out of the book containing all the lists I’d compiled. Setting each page alight, I dropped them out of the window and watched them burn and curl, then float away like tiny ashen coracles.

Not that I stopped what I was doing altogether. Instead, I began to move all the mementos and objects I had collected to specific points in the high-rise, where I’d rearrange them and set up my own rooms. Create my own makeshift dwellings. Random spasms of interiors. Vignettes of domestic neurosis. Visions of homes. Lost homes. Broken homes. Longed-for homes. Homes designed as if someone had thrown furniture off the back of a moving van. The high-rise was sited below the flight path of jets leaving Glasgow Airport, and I’d choose a certain window on a particular floor to reveal a specific view towards the airport, to capture each jet in a framed moment of its going.

I’d watch the planes rise north-east, then bank hard right, where I’d lose them for a minute as they looped south, then passed back over the high-rise, before locking into invisible vectors to climb up and out towards their destinations. Sometimes I’d sit for hours gazing at them. If the sun was shining, I’d close my eyes and let it burn me. I’d blink into the light and through barely open eyes, glimpse jets disappearing from one life into the next.

2

Before moving to the high-rise, I’d couch-surfed for several months. Prior to that I’d been living with a young woman and had a job as a journalist. I met Lillian by chance near the end of July. It was one of those cloudless, incandescent afternoons when the sun erases the landscape, burning the heart of time, and with it your presence in the world. Sweltering beneath the khaki greatcoat I’d taken to wearing that summer, I was looking for somewhere cool to shelter from the heat and ended up in the restaurant where she worked as a waitress.

Unsteady and unsighted, I stepped from the blinding light of the street into the darkness of the interior. It took a moment before I was able to get my bearings and cross to a table in the centre of the room, where I believed I’d sat down on a chair. I discovered I hadn’t when the world in front of me disappeared in a nauseating rush to the head and I pitched backward and found myself gazing up at the ceiling. In the same place a decade earlier I’d have been laughed at and applauded, or quietly pitied then helped up. Back then this was an old-time boozer. Now it was a fine dining restaurant, and this was Finnieston, where gentrification had whitewashed heritage and banished human fallibility.

All the customers who’d seen me fall — and there were a few — pretended not to have noticed or looked away in disgust. I’d like to say I didn’t care, but I did. I felt an almighty wave of shame pass through me and lay there for a minute before managing to overcome the humiliation and find the will to feel my way back into my body. I rolled over onto my hands and knees and hung my head between my shoulders, unsure if I wanted to get up onto the seat or stay down on all fours and crawl out of there like a dog. I’ve often used music to overcome moments when I didn’t think I’d make it up off my backside or over some line. Now, with the help of a half-remembered hymn, I tinkered with the keys of my emotions again, working them first into sorrow and then a bruised sense of grace, while singing, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.

Gripping the edge of the table I pulled myself up off the floor and scanned the room to see if anyone had anything to say about my fall or continued presence. They didn’t, which was just as well, because the posturing was pure bravado. My only concern, once I was up and in my seat, was that a member of staff might have seen me fall and that my visit would be cut short, pushing my next drink further out of reach.

Viewed from a safe distance, such behaviour is considered tragic, pathetic, hilarious, or some combination of all three — arranged depending on your world view. But from my perspective there was an unheralded sense of glory tinged with pathos in getting