This place didn’t use to exist. Mum’s told me about it: how it was all boarded up, cut off from everywhere else. You used to drive past and not even think there might be something behind the fences, she said. Unless you were the kind of person who looked at maps, or happened to be on the other side of the river, looking across, you’d not know it was there. It was like a blind spot, she told me, you just didn’t see it. Later, when they started getting excited about the idea of that hedgehog of a building, people started noticing.
‘Don’t you remember?’ she asked, ‘That time we climbed under the fence?’ I was five she says, maybe even younger. Dad was still around. My brother wasn’t born yet.
‘The three of us, mud on our shoes, sneaking about like criminals, not that anyone seemed bothered we were there. Don’t you remember, looking at the dome, half made – like a skeleton coming out of the ground?’
I pretend to remember, because I’d like to. I stand on the tarmacked path and look through the blue mesh fence and I try to picture a tiny version of me, one of them on either side, holding my hands so I won’t fall. I try to take the white curve of the O2 away, to vanish the huge cylinders mum says have got something to do with ventilation. I try to see through the tarmac and the paving slabs to wet mud that would curl up around the soles of your shoes.
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