Arkady

by Patrick Langley

  Frank sits up from his half-snooze and yawns. Sunlight stuns the water; it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust. The heat is so intense Frank can hear it. That wilting sound. That sizzle.

  ‘Water?’ Jackson asks, passing Frank the bottle.

  Frank swallows a mouthful of lukewarm, plastic-tainted water. He hasn’t felt this close to Jackson in months. Not talking. Not needing to talk. Doing stuff together: that’s all.

  Later that afternoon, the brothers climb down to the mud with a pair of spades. Jackson hands Frank a pot of gloss and instructs him to paint the name of the boat on the prow, to christen their floating home. Frank considers this for a moment, but really it could only be one name. He paints the capitals slanting across the prow: ARKADY.

  The tide is low but not fully out. Ankle deep in the mud, they dig around the bottom of the barge. It has been here for so long that, even at high tide, when the water laps almost as high as the portholes, it stays glued to the creek bed.

  They dig for about an hour. A moat appears around the edge of the boat, slowly filling with water. It deepens, but the barge doesn’t move. So the brothers dig deeper, spade after spade.

  Without warning, a mudbank collapses. The boat springs forward with a sharp crunch. Frank dives sideways just in time. The barge almost crushed his legs. He fumbles and slips like an injured seal. Jackson hasn’t noticed Frank’s face-plant. He’s too excited about the barge. It has slipped. It will float. They are free.

  ‘Excuse me!’ Frank says. ‘A little help?’

  ‘Look at that,’ says Jackson, hands on hips. ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘I’m trapped,’ Frank yells. ‘Trapped!’

  Jackson, finally noticing Frank, grabs his hand and pulls him upright. A thick, pasty layer of stinking clay clings to Frank’s body. He sputters and spits, shakes his arms.

  Jackson guides Frank by the elbow, ankles squelching in the mud. The tide is not fully out. Further down there is a bend in the creek where the water slows and pools. It is astonishingly clear. Frank can see the algae-slicked stones and gravel, chunks of reddish brick and emerald weed. A school of tiny fish dart at his shadow. He peels off his clothes to his boxers and lowers into the water. Stunned by the heat, he lies still, eyes closed, as water flows across his body. Jackson lifts handfuls of water and pours them over Frank’s chest and legs. Frank kneels and submerges his head. Soon all the mud has gone. The water is deliciously cool. He stands up and stares at his wet, pale hands. They sparkle like sand in the sun.

  The brothers are hungry and tired. At dusk, once the sky turns powder-blue with ragged gashes of ember-red, they cycle northwest in search of food. A swarm of black asters hangs low in the sky, haunting the streets with the roar of their blades. People walk briskly, gripping their bags to their chests. Figures zoom on mopeds down the streets. Blackvest vans skip red lights. Teenagers stand in groups on street corners, swigging beers, smoking, laughing, listening to tunes. Frank wants to hang out and get drunk, but Jackson is pedalling hard already, sloping right to overtake a lumbering truck. Frank quickens his pace to keep up.

  The brothers stop for food in a chip shop. Jackson’s phone died a few hours ago; he plugs it into the wall at the table near the stuttering light. They eat fish and chips in silence. Frank goes heavy on the salt and mayo. He watches figures move down the darkling street through the ghost reflection of the room in the glass. Jackson’s phone buzzes and jumps on the plastic top.

  A flat screen is perched on the drinks fridge: BREAKING. The footage is shot from above, revealing an isometric view of the city, a thin crowd gathered at a cordon. Black smoke billows through the dusk, a vertical column slanted by wind. Flames roar from blackened windows and creep up supports. Rumours have been flying round for months now: there will be soldiers at train stations, tanks on the streets, but so far they haven’t appeared. Perhaps this is it, Frank wonders.

  Jackson taps and swipes his phone. His eyes are lit blue by the screen.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Frank asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jackson says, ‘but people are saying it wasn’t the rioters.’

  The brothers wipe their Styrofoam boxes with their last salt-dusted chips and wash them down with tap water. On the screen, the camera cuts to a close up of masked figures leaping over fences as blackvests give chase.

  ‘Told you something was happening,’ says Frank. ‘On the roof, remember? You—’

  ‘My phone was dead. People have been messaging me all morning.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Everything. It’s kicking off. Some kind of march is going on nearby… Too much to follow, confusing… But one thing people keep saying, even the news.’

  ‘What?’ Frank asks.

  ‘Two people are dead.’

  The owner wearily nods at the flatscreen and tells the brothers he’s closing early. Jackson’s phone is at thirty per cent. They head back outside. Shadows gather in the trees of the park. Invisible asters thrum above, searchlights swinging through the night. The streetlamps diffuse a strange glare on the streets as the brothers ride. Frank wants to go home, wherever home is: Jackson’s cramped pay-per-week bedsit, maybe, or back to the boat. His muscles ache, his eyes twitch. He is desperate for sleep. Jackson steers his bike with one hand, taps his phone with the other, checking notifications and maps. The streets are quiet for a moment. Frank could complain about the long day, his exhaustion. He could admit to feeling scared about where they are headed. But his brother would never listen. For the next ten minutes, hot wind in his face, Jackson barely looks up from his phone.

  Slanted windows glow turquoise. Their pale light conjures shadow-puppets on the brick walls of the buildings nearby. The brothers lock their bikes and climb onto the warehouse roofs round the back of the high street, from where they can watch the march without being seen. Frank leaps across the luminous panes. The glass could crack and swallow him in a shower of glinting blades, but he knows how to listen for weakness underfoot. His ears attune to the rattled music of the building as he runs: the click-clack thud of fat bolts jumping in their holes, the creaky whinge of the sheet metal bending. Buildings sing to him in moments like this. A wrong step could be the difference between living and not.

  The brothers pause by a chimneystack overlooking the street. Frank rests his palm on the brick. A fire exit runs down to the alley; the alley leads onto the street. Whatever they saw on the news is only part of the story. Protestors have gathered outside a blackvest station – a couple of hundred, Frank would guess.

  ‘Why are we here?’ he asks.

  ‘Go home if you want,’ says Jackson. ‘I don’t care.’

  The crowd stirs outside the station. Kettledrums pulse at the heart of the march. A lit flare arcs overhead and the street burns crimson. It snaps off a double-decker and cartwheels over the street. Red smoke swells from a sputtering flame and drifts across an agitated crowd. The protest is muddled, unfocused. Placards show politicians’ faces photoshopped with bullet-holes and bloodstained hands; others, hand-painted on cardboard, curse the brutality of privatised police. A banner has been hung across a shop front – PEOPLE not PROFIT – the capitals picked out in black. But the corner of the banner is torn, the plastic sheeting frayed to shreds, swastikas scrawled in felt tip in the centre of each O.

  A smoke grenade hisses nearby, thickening the air with eruptions of lilac. Lamps darken and distance dissolves. Frank can barely count the fingers of his hands as they walk.

  A rangy guy in a boiler suit drifts into the brothers’ path. Smoke clings to the cricket bat in his hand, elastic strands like molten marshmallow. He wears a scarf over his mouth, his high forehead shiny with sweat. A young woman follows close behind, her face obscured by a gas mask that makes her look insectile, alien. Frank catches a flash of dark eyes in the circular lenses before she melts into smoke.

  His mouth hangs open. The air tastes like burnt caramel, acrid and sweet. He turns to face his brother, but instead of seeing Jackson, there is a whir
l of red smoke.

  Frank shouts his brother’s name in a mouse-squeak voice. The street is too loud and too quiet: everyone is shouting, but the thick smoke muffles the sound. Frank jogs in random starts and spurts, bumping into strangers. Shadows swim through the smoke. Disembodied heads and limbs leap into view before dissolving just as quickly. So many faces, so many cliques and crowds, but Jackson has disappeared. Frank coughs up a mouthful of something that tastes like blood.

  Another double-decker looms. Parked awry on the kerb, its windows are scrawled with spray-paint glyphs and symbols. Head down, eyes up, Frank scurries towards it. Blue trucks’ engines throb nearby. Drums thump a slow, hypnotic rhythm at the heart of the march. A firework roars towards an aster overhead. It explodes in a willow of amber sparks that momentarily brighten the street.

  Frank curses his brother. The longer they spend here the higher the chance they’ll be kettled with hundreds of restless protestors, or hauled to an off-the-grid detention centre in the shadow of train lines and power stations. The thought of returning to one of those places fills Frank with dread. Strip-lights flicker in the cold grey room. You go for hours without food or water. Why risk it? He isn’t sure what the point of the protest is, what it could ever achieve.

  He stumbles on a clearing. Pink smoke swirls in billowing walls around the hazed edges, but the tarmac stage is empty and still. Torn leaflets stir among smashed placards in the heat. It is strangely calm in this pocket of air, like the eye of a storm. Bodies move behind the smoke, shadows swimming in coloured air. He indulges in a familiar daydream: that this is the moment his mother will return. She will walk out of the smoke, a wise smile on her face, stand in the clearing, and hold out her hand. I was lost. I was joking. I’m back.

  A giant stomps into the clearing. Ten feet tall, it staggers and howls. Slack limbs flail either side of its segmented torso. Dumbstruck, Frank stares at the monster and crouches, ready to run.

  The monster is two young men, one perched on the other’s shoulders, both yelling at the top of their lungs.

  Another firework pops above them, a sudden pulse of light beneath the aster’s anxious churn. Frank crouches, squinting for a route of escape, but the light keeps shifting, the smoke grows thicker, and his ears ache with the stampeding drums. Someone lights another flare and for a moment the world burns crimson, every surface ablaze. A rubber bullet smacks the man clean off the other’s shoulders. They topple like a felled tree, throwing sparks as they crash.

  Smoke shoots into his eyes. The air darkens to dusky purple. He splutters and gasps for oxygen, pawing his way through a substance so thick it feels viscous. A hand shoots out and grips his arm. His panicked feet stutter; he falls.

  Grit bites Frank’s palm where he lands. He expects to see his brother’s outstretched arm. Instead he sees the outline of Arkady, the man who haunts his dreams about drowning. Arkady’s head looms in the burning haze, inscrutable, featureless, dark. His black-gloved hand reaches out to pull Frank upright, to pull him elsewhere, into a different city, perhaps. Arkady says nothing. The world is silent.

  The smoke thins. Frank’s senses come back into focus. Arkady’s features shrink and solidify.

  Dark eyes peer through the black mask’s circular lenses. It’s the young woman Frank spotted earlier – she was prowling behind the man with the cricket bat. Now she is yanking his arm.

  ‘Frank?’ she yells, voice muffled by the mask. ‘You are Frank, right? Jackson’s this way.’

  Frank is too stunned to argue. He follows her through the protestors and the smoke begins to clear. An empty space stretches between the blackvests and the rioters, tarmac glittering with broken bottles and pocked with scorch-marks. Wheelie bins lie toppled, trash spilling from open lids, and looted shopfronts gape. Smashed windows lie in screes across the pavements, splintering the light from a burning car spewing smoke through a missing windshield. Graffiti crawls over the spider-webbed glass, spray-paint dripping: KILL PIGS.

  ‘This way,’ says the woman, and she points at an alley.

  Frank sees Jackson standing there, peering into the crowd.

  But things are happening all around him. A heartbeat later, a shopping trolley heaves into view, wheels squealing, weighed down with rags. They set the rags alight and push the flaming chariot through the front of a fabric shop. Within minutes, the shop is ablaze. The street out front burns amber; the sky darkens under a pall of smoke. The headache stench of burning rubber drifts down the street. A moment later, the blackvests, who’d been keeping their distance up til now, begin to march. Their armour plating shimmers in the heat-haze.

  The path between Frank and Jackson is blocked by obstacles and rushing bodies. Weaponry lines the street, lethal lengths of wood and metal poles, broken bottles with serrated jaws. The shop is blazing fiercely, pirouettes of black smoke whirling madly down the road. Frank hefts a chunk of brick. It misses the blackvests by miles, popping to dust where it smacks the pavement. Blackvests drive though the protestors’ ranks.

  A thrown bottle ricochets off Frank’s skull, shoots over the tarmac and whacks off a curb, spinning like a Catherine wheel beside a burning banner. He veers sideways, firelight dancing in his eyes, a clear, high sound in the air like the ringing of a faraway bell.

  By the time Frank reaches Jackson, the blackvests have surrounded the protest. The brothers are crushed into the space between the bank and the van, the windows of the shop fronts cracking under the impact of lengths of scaffolding swung by protestors in head-to-toe black. Frank recognises one of them from the cricket bat he holds in his hand, the skull-scarf pulled over his mouth. The young woman with the gas mask gestures desperately at him, but he shakes his head and turns.

  ‘Where the fuck did you go?’ Jackson shouts. He clips Frank round the cheek. The impact stings a little, but the adrenaline in his system numbs the pain.

  ‘Come on then,’ the woman yells, a new edge of desperation to her voice. ‘The way out. Where is it?’

  They push through the crowd, hand-in-hand as they duck through the smoke. Frank keeps an eye on the chimneystack. Soon they reach their escape: the shadowed alley, the roughness of brick, the cold relief of metal stairs leading up to the roof.

  The marshes murmur with insects kindled to life by the dark. Fireflies sway over channels of water that branch through beds of reeds, twisted, tangled streams in whose dull waters lurk fat fish. Frank lifts his nose to the wayward wind. It carries a fragrance of burning wood and the fermented stench of marsh-mud. Sleepless factories stand nearby, chrome flues leaking neon into throbbing pools. He scratches the back of his neck and glances up at the shivering sky.

  ‘I’m starving,’ he says.

  He isn’t particularly hungry, but the silence has begun to unnerve him.

  Lali crouches in the dirt, twisting blades of grass around her fingers and methodically ripping them apart. Her gas mask rests beside her, a shed skin or a second face, its hollow discs facing the sky.

  ‘Don’t have any food,’ she says. ‘It was a protest, not a picnic. Isn’t there stuff on your boat?’

  ‘We only just got it today,’ Frank says, feeling slightly dizzy from the beer.

  Lali rocks on her heels.

  Frank has been watching the path for what feels like hours. Sometimes headlights comb the marsh and turn the reeds to glowing filaments. A car will park for a moment, engine on, and drive away a short while later. Motorbikes stutter down the path, headlights jolted by divots and ruts, the canal water flashing like a blade.

  Earlier, the three of them had slipped like cats across the roof and dropped into the streets beyond. Endorphins barrelling through their blood, nerves lit up like Christmas trees, they’d bent double in breathless laughter, cackling under the headlamps and coughing up lungfuls of smoke. Then, once the giggles faded, they’d headed back to the boat – Lali limping; she’d done something to her ankle landing from the roof – and started guzzling cans of beer, the alcohol a balm to frayed tempers. Lali didn’t dr
ink. She was agitated. She needed to go; she’d lost her friends, who weren’t answering texts or calls; they’d agreed to meet at some hut in the marshes, a location agreed in advance. Jackson said they’d take her in the boat. He didn’t ask Frank what he thought, just checked a map: it wasn’t far. Maybe Jackson was drunk, or just showing off, but in moments the engine was running, and Frank ran outside to watch the water churn white as they set off.

  ‘It’s just you two, then? You and your brother?’

  The question is so direct, the answer so obvious, that for a moment Frank just gawps.

  Lali stands upright and narrows her eyes. She is as tall as Frank, and just as skinny, but her poise is faintly menacing, as though she might slit his throat with a practiced flash of her arm. He’d seen it in the protest: the feral quickness with which she moved. Now that her mask is off, Frank can see her fox-like eyes, freckled cheeks, and the short boyish cut of her hair.

  ‘Who else would there be?’ he asks.

  ‘Comrades,’ she says, her tone flat, as though the answer was obvious.

  The word is unfamiliar to Frank, but he nods sagely, clenching his jaw to convey his authority, experience, and understanding. He wishes his brother would return. Jackson elected to roam the dark marshes in search of the hut, volunteering after Lali’s bad ankle got twisted in a ditch.

  ‘You were there because of the Citadel’s mail-out, right?’ she asks. ‘I didn’t see you at the demonstration. Just after, when things got messy. Who told you it was happening?’

  Frank shrugs.

  ‘Wait – you weren’t there on purpose?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve never heard of the Citadel? The Red Citadel?’

  ‘We do stuff,’ Frank shrugs, defensive, wishing Lali would shut up. ‘We go out. We don’t get involved. Sometimes it gets involved with us. We didn’t have to help you out, but we did.’