The Roof

The one more thing turned out to be on a roof.

This required taking a lift in an old department store that was mostly closed down, its lower floors empty and dark behind locked glass doors. The lift still worked though. Mrs. Obi pressed the button for the top floor without any hesitation and the lift went up with a mechanical groan that made Zara grip the handrail.

"Is this allowed?" Zara asked.

"Nobody has told me it is not allowed," Mrs. Obi said, which was not quite the same thing but Zara let it go.

The top floor of the department store was an empty room with dusty floors and tall windows. At the far end was a fire door. Mrs. Obi pushed it open and they went up a short flight of stairs and out onto the roof.

Zara had never been on a roof before. Not a proper roof, high enough to see properly. She walked to the edge and put her hands on the low parapet wall and looked out.

The city spread out in every direction. She could see streets she had walked down and streets she had not. She could see the river, brown and wide, and the bridges crossing it. She could see parks, green squares scattered between the buildings. She could see church towers and cranes and blocks of flats and old houses squeezed between new ones and the distant shapes of taller buildings far away, their windows catching the afternoon sun.

And she could see the gaps. Now that she was looking for them she could see them everywhere. Little courtyards and alleyways and walled gardens, invisible from the street but perfectly visible from up here. The hidden city inside the regular city.

Mrs. Obi came and stood beside her.

"There," she said. "Now you know where to look."

Zara pointed at a patch of green she could see a few streets away, behind a row of tall buildings. It looked like a garden, a real one with trees, completely surrounded by buildings on all sides. "What is that?" she asked.

"I do not know," Mrs. Obi said. "I have never been to that one."

Zara looked at her.

"Sixty years and I have still not found everything," Mrs. Obi said. "That is the other good thing about this city. You never run out."

They stood on the roof for a while longer. Mrs. Obi pointed out things she knew. A street where all the houses were the same blue colour because of a bet made a hundred years ago. A tower that had been a windmill once. The remains of a Roman wall, barely visible but there if you knew the angle to look from.

Zara listened to all of it and looked at all of it and felt the city getting larger around her in a way that felt wonderful rather than overwhelming.

When they came back down and said goodbye at the bottom of the steps where they had met, Mrs. Obi said: "Same time tomorrow, if you want. I will be here eating my sandwich."

Zara said: "Yes please."

She walked back to the flat quickly, took the stairs two at a time, burst through the door and went straight to the window. The window that she had thought looked out at nothing now looked out at a building with three different kinds of brickwork, which meant it had been repaired and added to over many years, and a roofline with a chimney that had a small iron weathervane on top that she had never noticed before.

She pressed her nose against the glass and looked at it for a long time.