FICTION: Piloti

Trident House is an aching place where nobody dwells by choice. The Inquiry team was sent to Trident House ostensibly because it was the only office building in the Council’s property estate with space for enough desks and for the hundreds of boxes of historic paperwork. That it is a distasteful business – that the Council is ashamed of and embarrassed by the Inquiry – also played a part. Trident House is out of sight, on the wrong side of the ring road, where nobody from the Council has to think about it between those uncomfortable hearings that take place in the main chamber every few months. The Council was once proud of Trident House as a symbol of its arrival in the twentieth century. It was declared open by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1971 and there was a souvenir brochure. But fashions change and brand new buildings age. They darken. They weep black and green. Now, Trident House is one of the Council’s greatest problems, not quite abandoned, but with more empty floors and more…