‘It was a protest,’ Lali snaps, ‘with political aims. Do you even know what it was for, what we wanted to achieve?’
Frank shakes his head. She throws her hands up and sighs.
‘What’s the Citadel?’ Frank asks. He pictures an obsidian fortress surrounded by crackling storm clouds.
‘It’s a place,’ says Lali, ‘a long way north. They’ve been fighting the state for months. They organised the protest tonight.’
Frank doesn’t quite understand, but nods as though he does.
Time passes slowly out here, away from the quickening heat of the city centre. The minutes creep and stall. He listens to the rustle of life in the marshes’ dark, wild animals, insects, birds, and sees himself as a hunter, spear in hand, stalking the flat, wet land for deer. Then the factory catches his eye. If any deer lived on this land they’d be warped mutants with radioactive antlers and poisoned blood. He could try and catch a fish but it would probably give him cancer.
A strip of tarmac, cracked by weeds, stretches towards the canal; at its far end a gutted bi-plane rests lopsided on broken landing gear. Overcome by tiredness, Frank kneels on the dirt. Stiff reeds chatter softly. Fireflies drift over inky pools.
He spots a shadow moving through the reeds. The shadow raises its hand.
‘That’s him,’ says Frank. ‘I think he found it.’
They walk along the canal path. Beyond the foaming weir and the hunchbacked trees, beyond the whispering grasses and the lights of the other houseboats moored by the lock, is a haze of light. The city’s electricity seeps into the purple-dark sky. The horizon is lit by constellations of crane lights and interrupted by silhouettes: spires, obelisks, slanted wedges of construction.
Frank had expected a grotty hovel, a tumbledown hut built from maggoty boards. Instead it is a clean, new outhouse, freshly painted lilac blue, adjoining what looks like a holiday home: a two-storey cottage with a front garden and a thatched roof. People have gathered in the garden round the back around a small fire on a gravelled area seemingly built for that purpose. Maybe a dozen people are seated around it, chatting: their voices quieten slightly at the sight of the new arrivals. Several of the group were clearly at the protest. They wear dark hoodies, black jeans, and carry rucksacks adorned with red patches. A twisted yew tree grows nearby, the scarred bark of its bent trunk underlit by flames. Other camps further off in the marshes have also lit fires. There are smoky smears of reddish glow, soft heat on a blue-black field.
‘You found it!’ Lali beams.
Jackson says nothing, just grins like an idiot. Frank hasn’t seen his brother act like this in years, all floppy and eager to please, but he is tired and the marshes have chilled him, and he is eager to sit by the fire. He sits cross-legged at the edge of the gravel, half-listening as people talk about other protests, other riots, other cities: a country-wide uprising, a people’s revolt. Jackson is nearby, swigging rum from a hipflask and laughing. He settles his head on a folded jumper and peers at the sky. A satellite moves across it like a red lamp on a zip wire, a lone light tracing the dark.
IV. THE RED CITADEL
Kids from the Citadel kneel on a blue tarpaulin, armed with brushes, scissors, tape, and glue. They add the last flourishing touches to handmade placards, poster-paint houses with triangular roofs, stick-children weeping on crayoned lawns. Most of them are camo-patterned with spots of paint, faces slathered with finger-smears and daubs. Two boys wield placards like axes: they clash and tumble on the grass. Adults unravel banners, pull on baggy sloganed T-shirts, stuff leaflets into rucksacks, and fill flasks with steaming coffee and tea. There must be a hundred people outside already, and more are filtering through the gate. He watched the luggage pile up in the lobby last night, bin bags bulging with duvets, pillows, rugs, and clothes, hand-washed in the communal kitchen and hung to dry in the tin-roofed warehouse.
Two young men and a woman, older than Frank, drift past in torn jeans and battered caps. He asks for a light. The young woman’s black hair is shaved on one side, long on the other, sleek fringe swept like a raven’s wing over her forehead. She digs a Clipper from her jeans. Frank lights up and wishes he hadn’t. Smoke clings to his teeth like oil. He stifles a gag.
‘Do you live here?’ she asks. ‘Are you, like, involved?’
Frank nods. He declines to mention that he doesn’t actually live here, just shares a barge with his brother nearby.
The woman shakes a cigarette out of the pack. ‘What’s it been like?’ she asks. ‘I’ve been meaning to come down for ages. I keep reading about you guys online, but then…’ Her sentence trails off with the smoke she exhales.
The guy with the glasses scowls. ‘It’s disgusting what they’re doing.’
‘We’re still here,’ Frank says, glancing at a restless blur on the horizon. The buzzsaw humming is so constant these days he barely hears it anymore, but there they are, in the rain-shivered sky: a trio of asters.
Plywood walls encircle the Citadel’s grounds, their royal blue paint rain-faded and graffiti-scrawled. The walls are tall and lend this patch of oil-soaked earth the feel of a city-state, a fortress of safety, walled against the outer world. The earth is lush with straggled carpets of overgrown weeds, most of which Nell cultivated. There are bristling strands of rhubarb-pink knotweed, their virulent roots spreading under the soil. Kudzu froths in great waves over hangars and crumbled walls. Narrow paths run from the padlocked gate, past the satellite huts and studios, and to the Citadel’s yard.
The woman with the black hair stamps: ‘Exactly. I’ll handcuff myself to the gate if I have to.’
‘Wow,’ says the guy in the glasses.
The path that runs past the canal is fringed on one side by bursts of buddleia. A handful of barges are moored beneath the flyover that curves overhead on fat stilts. Pot plants dot the barges’ roofs and lamps glow in the windows. At night, wood-smoke drifts from the chimneys. Ivy embroiders the flyover’s stilts. Tents and shacks have spread in the shadows. It feels different from the city Frank grew up in, colder, smaller, easier to navigate.
There are cities within the city. Unofficial districts have appeared in public parks and empty yards. Dwellings, assembled from scraps of fabric, metal, wood and wire, hunker and lean against brick walls and mesh fences. Plywood shacks spring up in a matter of minutes, bashed together with gaffa and nails: the rickety mansions collapse under heavy rain and are repaired within hours. Tents flourish overnight like nocturnal flowers, dusted with the exhaust of passing cars until the colours fade like someone turning down the saturation.
Frank and Jackson would see them on cycle rides and rambling walks. Tents at the edge of a green. Mattresses down an alley like beds on a hospital ward. A woman cooking food on a camping stove whilst kids played in the duvet-lined boot of her car. Lives were spilling out of buildings and flooding the streets. The Citadel was not the only occupation of its kind. Since winter, evicted families and rent-hike casualties have been living in empty flats, offices, garages. The crackdown was rapid. Blackvests flew from building to building, emptying occupations, arresting people by the busload. Only the Citadel is left. The High Court letter arrived a week ago; they’ll be here first thing tomorrow.
He steps into the wheelhouse and opens the door on the interior gloom. Jackson isn’t here – he left for work early this morning, long before Frank dredged himself from sleep – but something compels Frank to sit for a moment and wait. He rests on the steps in the dimness and breathes the comfy singed odour of ash from last night’s fire.
The city changed after the protest, after the meeting by the marsh. Its physical texture altered – the fences, bollards and spikes, the security kiosks that appeared on street corners, the council blocks that were blown up in controlled explosions and quivered to heaps of rubble – and so too did the way it felt, adjustments to mood which were harder to measure. The protest had been small but it was part of a chain reaction. The city erupted. Protests divided, multiplied, and catalysed into riots; riots trigge
red counter-protests and crackdowns. Blackvests began patrolling the streets, armies of salaried guards protecting the patchwork of private spaces the city had become. The brothers were afraid of what the city was becoming, day by grinding day – but they had the boat. The freedom Arkady afforded, its embodiment of escape, felt, in the definitive light of departure, unexpectedly sad. So Jackson hatched a simple plan: they would cross the country in search of the Citadel.
For weeks they travelled aimlessly, guiding their route afresh each day, surviving off a dwindling pile of cash. Soon they were halfway across the country, a world of unfamiliar accents, bad weather, and impossible skies. They worked as they travelled, gutting the interior, stripping and painting the walls, fixing the hinges of broken doors, and scavenging furniture, bedding, supplies, to fill the space and make it liveable.
Eventually they reached the outer limits of a city smaller than the one they’d known, but which, like the place they had left, was built around a river. Its wide waters were green-black in the evening’s dark. The brothers, exhausted, guided the boat through a network of narrow canals and locks until they reached the place Lali had described. It looked like nothing. A strip of blue hoarding; a narrow path edging the canal; and, on the opposite bank, a flyover booming with cars at this late hour. They followed the hoarding round until they reached a gate. The Citadel stood on a huge plot of brownfield land. Frank was tired and cranky; he shouted at Jackson, said they’d reached the wrong place: the grounds were dead when they entered. Weeds surrounded them, untamed. The place was as hushed as a greenhouse, the humidity thickened with a late-summer fragrance of blooming and rot. Frank followed Jackson through crumbling buildings and rusted hangars, grumbling, kicking stones. Jackson was wrong. This wasn’t the place. Then his vision shifted. Signs of habitation began to emerge: lit windows, clotheslines limp between walls. Through gaps in the weeds they glimpsed a giant, hulking building, a crude cube clad in red metal. He saw figures outlined by a flickering bonfire. Since then, the brothers have stayed here: moored to the canal round the corner, visiting the Citadel often but keeping to its fringes.
Frank snaps himself out of his daydream. He calls out Jackson’s name but it’s clear from the clicking quiet that the boat is empty. He checks his phone but he needn’t have bothered: the screen is blank.
Nell’s shuttered door is open onto the cluttered space of her studio. Shelves heave with pot plants, canvases, and ceramic figurines shaped with her fingers and thumbs: harlequins gleaming with craquelured glaze. Frank flinches the moment he sees her, shields his eyes. Sparks flow from the joint in two lengths of steel, the stuttering light reflected in her letterbox visor. She turns off the welding torch and lifts the mask on her broad, striking face set with pond-green eyes.
‘Frank,’ she nods. ‘Morning.’
There is a wide patch of floor in the studio’s depths, which is cluttered with strange shapes. There are metal spheres with flexible tubes trailing out of their sides. Spidery cradles of welded steel. A spiked ball like a naval mine. Nell scours the canals and backstreets for discarded things, from which she assembles these dream-logic sculptures. Frank is puzzled by her art, which she hasn’t exhibited in years; he can’t tell if it’s great or shit, but he knows it makes him feel a certain way.
‘Thanks for coming. I could use your help with something.’
Nell moved into the old warehouse twelve years ago. She turned it into a studio and has been living here ever since. A short walk south, on a strip of brownfield, was the building that would later be named the Red Citadel: a giant commercial facility, a red-walled warren of windowless cells. An anthropomorphic cardboard box grinned over the driveway. The logo’s still there today, its toothy grin faded by rain.
The building in whose shadow she lived was a self-storage block, a temple to consumer stupidity. It absorbed the leaked excess of people’s homes, the sofas they bought but didn’t need, the crass lamps gifted by tasteless relatives, the exercise bikes they tricked themselves into thinking they’d one day use for cardio. Five years ago, Pendragon had bought a handful of plots – the land around Nell’s warehouse, the storage facility and a cluster of satellite buildings and brownfield swathes surrounding it – off the council, for a third of its worth. They emptied the buildings, most of which were already disused and tumbledown, and let the land lie fallow. Weeds dislodged the cobbles, wild things nested under spiderwebbed roofs, concrete cracked, disintegrated – and all the while the land crept up in value, month by month, as foreign money speculated on new developments, glass-and-steel ziggurats, gilded towers. Cramped, tight, lightless, the facility’s room’s were stuffed with forgotten furniture, juxtapositions of tacky lamps and lumpy armchairs, bags of clothes and rusting bicycles: a glut of discarded things that intensified the residents’ contempt for the city they felt had robbed them.
A group of activists, Nell among them, crowbarred the windows and changed the locks, turning the cell-like rooms into a network of rudimentary bedrooms. They drilled holes in the sheet-metal walls for ventilation; begged, borrowed, and stole bedding; and nailed pages of legal terminology to the front gates, talismans against eviction.
‘It’s a sty,’ she says, ushering Frank inside. ‘Can’t be helped. Or: can be helped. I can’t be bothered.’
‘Would be pointless anyway,’ says Frank. ‘You’ll be in jail this time tomorrow.’
Nell throws her head back and cackles, grey threads flashing in her hair.
Bare-brick walls support a distant ceiling. At the far end, a ladder leads up to a wooden mezzanine with a mattress in the middle, bookshelves on the wall, clothes’ racks hung with coats and shirts. Beneath it is a basic kitchen: a sink and an oven hooked up to an orange gas canister. A long worktable runs down the length of the room, its surface scarred and stained. On it are a notebook, a mug, a glass jar with a paintbrush jutting out of its milky fluid, and a litter of papers: court documents, official letters, leaflets and posters and placards. Frank skim-reads the letter at the top of the pile, which arrived a few days ago and has been circulated among the residents:
YOU ARE HEREBY NOTIFIED that effective 7 DAYS from the date of service…
surrender possession…
fail to do so, legal proceedings will be Instituted against…
on which date, having secured a WARRANT FOR POSSESSION from the High Court…
‘There isn’t a time on here,’ says Frank, ‘just tomorrow’s date. How do you know when they’ll come?’
Nell looks up from the kettle. ‘They always arrive at the crack of dawn. Maximum rudeness. Salt in the wound.’
‘They could come any time, though, right? Like four or three or six or—’
‘Thank you, Frank. I am familiar with the concept of time.’
They sit on a wrought iron bench in the garden out back of Nell’s studio. The lawn is fringed with wild bushes with purple, black, and white flowers. A few of Nell’s works are displayed here: glass bells mounted on metal blocks; an intricate iron-rod structure hung with mirrors that flash as they twist in the breeze.
Frank inspects his tea. Fragments of green stuff swim to the surface; others lurk in the depths of mug. ‘You said tea,’ he says, ‘not lawn trimmings.’
‘Green tea,’ Nell says. ‘It’s obscenely good for you. L-Thiamine. Antioxidants.’
‘Anti-whats?’
Music drifts from the Citadel’s radio, a swelling symphony, rich in cellos and horns, that warbles over the hubbub of the gathering crowd. A stray cat appears on the grass and picks his way towards a patch of sun, his tilted ears attuned to the murmurous building. Volunteers, led by Nell, have divided the land into allotments dotted with planters. Blue-green cabbages glisten with rain. Marrows fatten on yellowing vines. A scarecrow stands awry in a wither of brambles. On its face is a joke-shop Prime Minister mask, the pendulous, hollow-eyed face staring blind at the dirt.
‘Are you worried about tonight?’ Nell asks, peering at the quickening clouds.
‘Isn’t everyone?’ Frank replies. ‘The mood in the yard is… weird. All these strangers milling about.’
Evil-looking plants jut from the clay pot at her feet. Tight bunches of spiky, reddish heads are clustered round crazed clusters of roots. She started planting the Japanese Knotweed months ago, as deep as she could bury it, a virulent plant that would outlast the residents, a rebel weed that would crackle and creep through the buried foundations: a form of biological sabotage to lower the value of the land.
‘I guess it’s different for you and Jackson. At least those people are here for a reason. You don’t know if you’re staying or leaving.’
A dumb bee, drunk on pollen, staggers through the grass at Frank’s feet.
‘None of the options are good,’ he says. ‘Even if we win somehow, and we won’t, it won’t make any difference in the long run. What would victory even look like? Arthur thinks we have a chance of beating them, but that’s Arthur, he’s completely insane. You should have seen him at the gate. He was bashing a can with a crowbar.’
‘Surely not,’ says Nell, in a grimace of mock-surprise.
Arthur was one of the first to arrive at the Citadel. He formed the Committee with Nell, a group of activists who took possession of the old block and turned it into ad-hoc social housing.
Soon the whole building was filled. The waiting list grew by the day.
The brothers refused a room, preferring to live as the Citadel’s satellite. Moored to the canal nearby, they spend much of their time in the grounds, doing favours and scrounging hot meals, drinking beers and fixing rooms. But they’ve always felt like, or wanted to feel like, outsiders. Vulnerability was the root of authentic belonging, but vulnerable was a feeling or a state they struggled bitterly to avoid. Since they were never in need of the Citadel (they had the boat), they never truly belonged there (they could always leave). And unlike the anarchists, the Trotskyists, the anarcho-communists, the socialists and the socialist workers, the Sisters, the Blues, the Bohemians, all the other splintered, bickering factions who’d moved into the building, they never saw the Citadel as an opportunity to advance an agenda.
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