The Third Person

I never did say that to her, of course – I’m not that bad a man – but I think she probably heard it from me all the same. She probably couldn’t help but hear it in the silence between us, which was deafeningly loud. I wish I’d been selfless enough to say something to break that silence and hide that thought every time she could hear it. But I wasn’t. Instead, sometimes, it ended up like this: both of us sitting there, crying for our own reasons, so far apart in so many ways that we might as well have been in different rooms.

There are only two roads in and out of Uptown, but probably a hundred or more ways to actually get there. It’s a strange place. The place was founded about fifty years or so ago, in the northern part of the city, at a time when it was fashionable for offices to let their employees have access to the open space on the roofs of their buildings. The more prestigious companies even started to have their tops turfed and professionally landscaped: sculpted bushes and stereotypically pretty flowers were planted, and the grass was maintained at a very false, but undeniably vibrant, shade of green. You could take your sandwiches up top during your lunch break and catch some sun – and it was one of the few remaining areas of the city where you were actually allowed to smoke. I mean, if you wanted, you could even flick the butts over the edge of the building when you were done. Chances are there’d be nobody important underneath when they touched down.

It was only a matter of time before people had the bright idea of linking up the rooftops. The main points were already there, and it was just a matter of smoothing over the spaces in between. Building firms were drafted in to rig up supporting structures between the buildings, and then enormous, street-spanning platforms were constructed to connect the roofs. These, too, were turfed and tended. The council, unsure exactly how to deal with this, became guilty of letting all this grass grow under their feet, and by the time anybody started to object at the increasingly dark street-level, planning permission had been granted via backhanders to local politicians – which was normal – and large sections in the north of the city were already under cover. The companies with the most money bought roof space on the smaller buildings, extending their empire upside and building elaborate floral logo designs to catch the eye of captive audiences in passing planes. Then the whole thing began to really take off.

Houses. Shops. Whole mini-communities sprang up. Vice-presidents no longer went home for the night, but travelled two floors up and left a bit. Access was immediately restricted, with people once again being forced to smoke secretly in the toilets and grumble about how dark it was outside. They still flicked their butts out of the window, of course, but there were fewer people for them to land on now, and the ones who were still there were even less important than before. And getting paler by the day.

After a while, the council decided that enough was enough. It declared the green land between the rooftops as public property, looped the existing ring road up a few hundred feet, and then negotiated with the various ruling companies to create an effective network of streets and avenues, replete with sponsored signs and traffic police. Begrudgingly, they agreed, and Uptown was born. It became a place for the ridiculously rich to live, and the depressingly fashionable to window-shop and be seen. Underneath the surface – as always – it was a different story.

At the street-level, things were winding down. The air was becoming stuffy and unbreathable. The smaller businesses were either closing down through lack of traffic, or being driven out by the expansion of larger businesses. Disused buildings were boarded up, or cemented into solid pillars. These days, most of Downtown is superficially abandoned – with only the occasional through road, converted into a sealed, amber-lit tunnel, leading to ground-floor access for the richer companies. The rest of it is bricked up and forgotten by the mainstream. Generally, employees access the companies from the roof down. It’s safer.

It’s the same as it’s always been. The companies innovate and rebuild, restructuring a thousand lives along the way, and you’re still left with basically the same as you started with. In this case, everything was just a few hundred feet higher up. There’s talk of renovating the underside and clearing away the debris – turning it back into a proper place to live and work – but there’s always talk. Deep down everybody knows that it’s never going to happen. Because we need somewhere dark underneath it all for the bad things to be swept.

Just a quick point: everything that happens here is happening for a reason.