Some days the wind rages so hard it seems to bend the steel window frames. Other days are so still that you can hear the rusty squeak of playground swings from the 29th floor.

Other sounds can rise up like balloons, from the world outside. an ice-cream van, a distant police siren, Arabic music, floating from a floor below.

The Red Road flats have been grim icons of the Glasgow skyline for the past 40 years — and for the past week the backdrop to a triple suicide of mother, father and son.

Scots used to live in these nosebleed heights. Now the tower blocks contain not so much homes as uneasy pauses for people who spend the rest of their lives either in terror or transit.

Spend long enough in the disinfectant-heavy stairwells and you will find a face from every troublespot in the world.

For the asylum seekers corralled here as they wait for the Home Office decisions, the most frightening sound is an unexpected knock on the door.

When Ledia Tewelde, 22, heard “very bad noises” in the night last year, she didn’t wait to face the officials she feared were coming for her. She threw herself out a third-floor window.

“I thought they were coming inside to kill us. Or take us away. They had already taken one lady.” She broke both legs and ankles and her back. In hospital, she discovered the noise had been only drunks outside.

“I was crazy,” she remembers. “I thought, what has happened to me? I started thinking why I had jumped. It was stress, depression.

“When I heard others had died, I could imagine their depression. You see us, with nice clothes, a house, but inside our hearts are black.”

In a friend’s ninth-floor flat, Ledia tells the story of her journey from Eritrea, through Sudan, Libya and Italy. The flat’s standard issue blue sofa, blue carpet and bare cream walls are brightened with East African fabrics.

Her friend, Hewi, 40, is a striking woman. Also from Eritrea, she laughs and jokes as she roasts coffee beans and ginger over a portable gas stove, keeping one eye on her son, Daniel, whom she can see from the window, riding his bike in the playground, and shouting to friends in a Scottish accent.

Hewi saw a “jumper” once. She watched him fall from the opposite block. “I remember his jacket most. It was caught by the wind, and flapped around him.”

The threat “ . . . or I’ll throw myself off the Red Road flats” has been common parlance in Glasgow for decades.

The towers were built in the Sixties to solve overcrowding in Glasgow slums, but the problems were only made vertical and over the next decade the towers that were once the highest in Europe will be demolished. Until then, the Home Office keeps stacking asylum seekers 30 storeys high, as it has been since changes in asylum and immigration policy in 2000. Officials aim to consider applications within 30 days, but many tenants claim they have been waiting months, even years.

Compared with the constant threat of expulsion, demolition seems a distant prospect. “I’ll be long gone by then,” says Tina, 39, who lives on the 29th floor. The view is still a novelty for the single mother from Liberia, ten weeks after she moved in with her five-year-old son and newborn daughter.

She surveys the distant spire of Glasgow Cathedral, the faraway factories, an entire, unknown city. “It’s so high,” she marvels. “You can see so far, especially all the lights at night. Maybe that is the whole idea — as if to make you aware, you can see us, but you’re still not part of us, so don’t be getting any ideas.” Then she laughs.

A haulage yard and a park with rusting goalposts lie 29 floors below. The estate has 4,700 people but there is very little movement. Pinprick figures make their way to meetings with Home Office case workers, or buy rations with their top-up cards. But most of the time, they sit inside, like Tina.

Ahmed Syed lives on the 19th floor and is worried about his wife. When the bodies lay in white sheets below their balcony, Ansa, 34, stood silently staring at them through the wire netting. They have been waiting for nine months for a decision on their case. At 4.20pm every Wednesday, they get the bus to UK Border Agency offices for their allowance of £35 each. Each week they wonder if they will make the return journey or get deported.

“We don’t really know what is happening,” says Ansa. “I am always so worried. I remain in a black hole.” Her husband shows a GP’s report detailing her fragile mental state.

Ansa says: “Why do they not believe me? How can they decide I’m wrong? My plan is suicide. I am always thinking of it, because I cannot see my path now. I plan it when my lawyer says we have no more options.” She gestures to the memorial under her balcony. “I can feel the emotions of those people,” she says. “I think death is better.” Mr Syed puts his arm around her, and tells us this winter was the first time their two young daughters had seen snow.

There are no official figures on how many asylum seekers commit suicide. The Institute for Race Relations recorded the deaths of 213 asylum seekers, refugees and migrant workers from 1989 to 2006. Of those, 57 had committed suicide. Nine set themselves on fire, several publicly, and 11 killed themselves while being detained. It is estimated that there have been at least another 39 deaths since then. Throughout the afternoon, the lifts ferry a desperate diaspora — Somalis, Zimbabweans, Chinese, Afghans and Iraqis — up and down. Many are hospitable. Iranian families offer us fruit, Pakistani couples insist on tea.

Mohsen Radi, 42, a former militia officer from Tehran, lives two floors above the boarded-up flat where the dead family were. The last time he saw them he saw the mother crying but, as Mohsen adds, tears are not unusual in Red Road. “That is the reality of life here. I am not blaming anyone. I saw the man at the Home Office. He was tired too. He doesn’t have the answers either.

“I sit in this flat and I cry. I see people taking children to the park. I am not jealous, I am happy they’re having a good time, but I do not have anyone to hug as a relative, or a friend.”

The officer begins to cry. “That is when I think, what is the point of my existence? Maybe I will go to the middle of a shopping centre and kill myself. I am sure there is no future for me.”

The sound of an ice cream van starts up. “I am dying, slowly, slowly, but no one listens to me,”says Mosen.

Red Road blues

The eight blocks of the Red Road flats were built in Springburn as a fast and cost-effective solution to overcrowding. Two are wide-fronted “slabs” and six are “points” of a more traditional tower block shape. The tallest has 31 storeys.

They were a big improvement on the slums, but by the mid-1970s the estate had a reputation for crime, drugs and disaffected youth. The height of the blocks and a lack of amenities also led to problems for young families and the elderly.

In the 1980s, two buildings were taken over for student residences and the YMCA. Changes to immigration and asylum policy have brought more than 18,000 asylum seekers to Glasgow since 2001. Many have been housed in a Red Road block managed by the YMCA.

In 2003 the flats were transferred to the Glasgow Housing Association, which said in 2005 that it would demolish all of them. Preparations for the demolition of the first block are being made. The flats featured in the 2006 film Red Road, which won the Prix de Jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival