She steps onto the low stage and taps the microphone. A brief buzz of feedback squalls in the air. ‘Brothers and sisters, comrades, friends,’ she begins – her standard opener, a nervous glint in her eye.
‘We have called our Citadel home for just over a year. We’ve achieved so much in that short time. Think how much we could change in another year. But that isn’t how Pendragon see it.’
The crowd erupts into hisses and boos. Nell nods slowly, sadly, an ironic upturn to her lips.
‘They call us spongers, scroungers, criminals. They intimidate us, they harass us – but why?’ Someone shouts evil, another shouts money. ‘What are they so afraid of? Democracy? Equality? Justice?’
Nell’s words wash over Frank. He has heard this speech, in various guises, before, and finds himself tuning out. He scans faces, seeking out new ones. He tracks the movement of birds in the sky. Half an ear is cocked to Nell’s words.
Things felt different the night they arrived. Lali introduced them to the other residents. Strangers called them comrade; they greeted the brothers like long-lost friends. They ate stew, drank wine, and talked for hours about how the city was changing: bad new government, streets on fire. The news was awash with aster-cam footage of tanks on blockaded streets, of candlelit vigils at community halls, of the homeless roaming the streets in droves. Arriving at the Citadel had felt like reaching the top of a mountain, everything suddenly clear. The world was a landscape of stark opposition, of moral continents. On one long and whiskey-addled night, Caspar told the brothers all about Pendragon, the company who owned the land on which the Citadel stood. They were just one serpent-head of the hydra of neo-liberal greed, a metastatic network of subsidiaries, sub-subsidiaries, contractors, and shell companies owned by a cabal of crooked billionaires and exiled oligarchs, who funnelled profits from oil and war and exploitation through warrens of offshore shell companies, and were based in a smoked-glass campus with a legal department more populous than most small towns. They were the Citadel’s arch-enemy – and for a few weeks the story made sense.
People have begun to argue, cross-talking on the roof.
‘They’ll come at us with everything,’ Caspar yells. ‘Police. Blackvests. Cannons. Mace. Truncheons. Trucks. Lie down and it’ll be slaughter.’
‘No one is going to die,’ says Marco.
‘People are dying every day,’ Lali replies. ‘Innocent people, murdered by the state, and you’re here giving us this mindfulness guru bullshit. If people want change they fight for it.’
Arthur – who has lain in a deck chair till now, leather coat pooled around him, chain-smoking unfiltered rollies and sipping a breakfast beer – calls for an all-or-nothing kamikaze battle, a carnival of communal violence.
‘How many policemen does it take to push an innocent man down the stairs?’ he asks, harsh voice cracking across the crowd. ‘None. He fell.’
His asthmatic cackle shudders through the air.
Nell counters with a plea for peace. She wants non-violent resistance. A human chain.
‘Arthur has a point,’ Lali yells. ‘Literally hundreds of people have died after police contact in the last five years. Guess how many convictions there have been?’
‘Zero,’ shouts a stranger, raising their fist at the sky.
The clarity is ugly and abrupt, like being woken from a dream.
Frank doesn’t want to be here.
He wants his brother; he wants to leave.
Marco attempts to tune a guitar. People yell at him to be quiet.
Nell takes to the microphone to call for quiet. ‘If we can – please – if we can just – listen to each other – listen –’
Light rigs mounted on the tops of vans throw long, sharp shadows on the dust. Raindrops flash as they needle the glare. Jackson arrived in a rush a few moments ago to find the street lit up like a film set, blackvests and lifters gathered outside. Further off, double-decker buses wait to haul protestors to detention cells. Cameramen aim their lenses at the Citadel’s gate. Presenters in suits clutch microphones, wires coiling into their ears. Jackson doubles back on himself. He cycles along the plywood wall and along the canal. Arkady is dark. His phone is dead. He calls Frank’s name. No answer.
Over the plywood wall, the high fronds of the knotweed thickets, and the curved bulk of the nearest hangar, searchlights swing through the Citadel’s grounds. The asters’ blades beat in time with his heart as he hauls himself over the wall. Rubble slips and tumbles underfoot. He hacks his way through a thicket of brambles. Soon he reaches the Citadel’s entrance, dust ablaze in the light from the vans.
The chain-link gate has been patchworked with sheet metal, steel rods. Razor wire curls along the top edge. Sheets of screwed and bolted scrapmetal howl as the blackvests pound it with their battering rams. A head appears above the gate and yells through a megaphone: ‘We hereby assert authority to repossess the following property or properties. Failure to comply with this order in a reasonable, peaceful and timely manner will be considered under Common Law as a Breach of the—’
Arthur wears a dinked tin helmet over bug-eye flying goggles. Black epaulettes adorn the shoulders of his camouflage coat. Jackson recognises the clothes; Arthur found them in one of the storage rooms upstairs. ‘Shove your poxy jargon up your arseholes and fuck off back where you came from.’
Dark shapes slide like eels from the banks of knotweed. They gather in shoals near the gate, hoods up, faces masked in shadow. Fat chains drape in swags around their necks and limbs, links glinting like scales as they twist in the lamps. A group sits cross-legged on the earth, arms threaded into plastic tubes. Others handcuff themselves to iron drains and throw the keys into the rain-pummelled dark.
‘Trespassers must immediately quit the property,’ the voice rings out. ‘Failure to do so will constitute a breach of the—’
The battering begins again, a heart-attack trill of irregular beats. Bolts and hinges rattle in the gate.
‘Dude!’
Jackson recoils at the voice beside him. A guy in huge sunglasses and a pea-coat is seated in the lotus position, bare feet slimed with mud and rain. ‘Get involved – I got a load more here.’ He gestures to his open rucksack. A coiled chain gleams in the depths of the bag. ‘Quick, yeah – they’ll be through in a second, we’ve got—’
The front gate buckles with a wrenching howl. Patchworked metal groans beneath the wheels of a reinforced van; as soon as the gate falls forward the blackvests and lifters start streaming in, dozens of them, sheathed in dark grey boilersuits or shiny plastic armour. Jackson finds a narrow gap in Arthur’s wall and crawls through, hands and knees dirty, feeling like vermin. His trousers snag and rip against the twisted head of an exposed screw. He’s sure that Frank is nearby, but when he reaches the wall’s far side and looks up at the smouldering, spot-lit roof, all he sees are silhouettes.
A figure lurches from the shadows: bushy beard, thick glasses, darting eyes.
‘Marco,’ Jackson says, voice ragged in his throat, ‘where’s Frank?’
Marco holds a camera to his chest, its glossy lens like a crow’s black eye. ‘Don’t know,’ he says, ‘but you should see this footage, man.’
He flips the camera’s window and plays a clip. There’s a smear of fire and rushing feet, of flowers and plastic barrels, then the lens levels on a figure on the corner of the roof, leaning with one foot forward, the Citadel spread out beneath him, bright lights blurred beyond the limit of the lens’s focus. He sparks a flare, lifts the sputtering fire above his head. The screen burns scarlet, soaked in red, skeins of thick smoke flooding into the air above his raised fist.
‘Have you seen my brother?’ Jackson asks, exasperated.
Marco gazes in the gate’s direction. Spotlights whiten his lenses as they swing. ‘Last time I saw him was on the roof,’ says Marco. ‘You’ll need to use the fire exit. Front door’s barricaded. Look.’
The Citadel’s front doors, like the gate and Arthur’s wall, have been reinforce
d using scraps and fragments. A fat steel pole is threaded through the handles of the doors. Shopping trolleys and bulky chests of drawers are piled up against the glass. A pair of bodies slump on the ground outside. Then Jackson sees the chains threaded round the handles, the handcuffs at their wrists.
Metal drums are filled with fires that blaze and crackle in the slanting rain. Bouquets of blackened wood spit ember-plumes and gusts of smoke and an oily reek of petrol stains the air. Jackson picks his way past leaf-heaped planters, glass bottles, and stacks of bricks, scanning the smoke for his brother. He checks his phone again. The screen is an infuriating blankness specked with rain – he fights the urge to smash it on the floor. He strides to the roof’s edge and looks at the yard. Lifters breach the wall, clawing and pawing the scrap with gloved hands. They reach the chained protestors. Cries ring out.
‘Where’s Marco?’ someone yells. ‘Is he getting this?’
Jackson should never have left. He was weak and confused; it was stupid to go; he should have realised that the only important thing was Frank, the boat, their one way out. Now he is here in the roar of the night, watching Arthur prowl through the darkness below.
Arthur lights a flare and hurls it, the hot tip burning an arc. His goggles have gone but he still has his helmet and crowbar. Face creased in an impish grin, he screams at a phalanx of blackvests as they move down the path.
Caspar’s friends pull shards of burning wood from the fires with charred barbecue tongs. They drop the flaming splints off the side of the roof, through a rushing tilt of rain: the fragments flicker on the wet mud far below. Another group of lifters prowl towards the Citadel, white helmets gleaming like teeth in the jaw of the dark. Vague figures emerge from the undergrowth, clods and clots of bodies, darkly clothed, like shadows in human form. Grouped together, they block the lifters’ path and seal the gap in Arthur’s wall with their bodies.
A lifter stands before a protestor, tilts his head at her; words are exchanged. It’s hard to tell in the rain but she appears to spit in the lifter’s face. A scuffle breaks out, a tangle of limbs and chains and tugged wet clothing, jumpers twisting inside out, long hair flaring, truncheons raised. A walkie-talkie crackles at Caspar’s waist. ‘There were dogs. German Shepherds. A whole truck of them, barking.’ Vans roll slowly down the path. The windshields, protected by metal cages, hide the drivers from view. Water cannons squat like limpets on the roofs. Caspar takes a run and chucks a wine bottle towards them, flinging it hard, overarm, like a javelin. It lances through the air and bursts to powder where it lands, a brief dry pop at a lifter’s feet.
‘Jackson,’ yells Caspar. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ His cheeks are gaunt, his forearms swimming with tattoos, his fingernails sceptred with dirt, his swagger cruel and streetwise, but he can’t hide that private-school accent, that luxurious inflection in the vowels. ‘Pick something up. What are you – a tourist?’
He presses a bottle into Jackson’s hand. A grubby rag sprouts from its mouth; the inside, through the brownish glass, is filled with murky fluid.
‘Fuck this,’ Jackson yells. ‘Where’s Frank? Have you seen him?’
Caspar shrugs: ‘Sure, he was here just now – used my phone.’
Lali’s told Jackson things about Caspar’s life that he’d rather not know. Like how Caspar’s rich father, estranged, is a prominent politician; how he steeped himself in anarchist philosophies in a redbrick university. Details gather round Caspar’s scrawny, vulpine head, a constellation of things to detest. Jackson says nothing.
‘Everything according to plan,’ says Caspar, firelight dancing in his eyes. ‘You seen the cameras? Look up. Asters in the sky. Two for the state, one for us – not that anyone trusts the TV – but listen, fuck it – we promised a show.’
He’s on something. Not coke, which fucks with his ethics, but a dark-web upper of some kind. He grins, twitches. His huge dark pupils swallow light.
Jackson asks Caspar about Frank again and doesn’t bother to hide the desperation. Caspar shrugs. He says sure. Frank was here a while ago and was asking for Jackson; he borrowed Caspar’s phone and tried to call but the line was dead. Maybe Lali knows; maybe Nell. Caspar has other things to do: he turns to greet his friends; a motley dozen in black.
‘Ready?’ he cheers.
Smoke floods the roof as the aster-lights swing.
A grinding warble reaches Jackson’s ears: the hollow, howling whine that you hear in old films before the bombs start to fall. Arthur is still below but his outfit has loosened, his jacket open on a grubby vest. He cranks the rusty arm of an air-raid siren, old-style, howling in the night.
Caspar’s group clink their bottles with each other, grinning. They light the rags on the flaming barrels and send them sailing down at Arthur’s wall, a shower of amber. Bottles burst into flowers of flame. Soon other objects are burning. Low fire slithers and leaps through the heaped stuff of Arthur’s wall. The wall was never meant to keep the blackvests out – not even Arthur was that crazed, that idealistic. He’d built the wall as a weapon, a trap that would catch fire, its gutter with petrol.
Someone calls his name. ‘Jackson, I thought you left. Your brother—’
Lali sits with her back to the parapet. Her fingers skitter across the keyboard in her lap as tabs and windows multiply over her screen. One shows a feed of Marco’s camera, a smear of fire-lit faces and shadowed plants. Others show streams, status updates, emails, and chat boxes, a shifting grid of interactions. She navigates the screen with a fluent haste, typing quickly, never blinking, a dawn-blue glow on her cheeks.
‘This is so much bigger than us,’ she says. ‘Bigger than the Citadel, even.’ She opens an email, subject heading: <3. The attachment shows a tower to the city’s north, a banner hanging from the balcony, protestors gathered in the windows. ‘We aren’t alone,’ says Lali. ‘We started something.’
‘We started throwing rocks,’ says Jackson.
Lali tuts. ‘Don’t be so obtuse. That was Caspar, not me. Did you find him? Frank? He was up here just now. He was looking for you.’
‘Where did he go? Where’s Nell?’
‘How should I know?’
Jackson is overcome by a weariness he can’t explain, an inertia that pools in his stomach and weighs down his arms. He sits on the parapet’s edge.
‘We should have gone,’ he says. ‘We should have gone. We should have—’
‘Gone? The whole point is to stay,’ says Lali, ‘even if we lose. Don’t you get it? Being here – beaten, arrested even – all of it matters. It’s doing something for once. Not just sitting there feeling depressed, or having arguments about—’
‘I don’t care about the Citadel,’ says Jackson. ‘I never did.’
‘I know,’ Lali replies. ‘Precious Frank.’
‘It wasn’t about you either,’ Jackson replies, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking.’ Lali’s sheer cheeks and sharp nose are softened in the amber, but her eyes have that keen, snarling look he knows well. ‘It was more than that. I was trying to work something out.’
‘Jackson,’ Lali gasps. ‘This isn’t a time for a fucking therapy session. We’ve talked already. I never made any promises. And now we’re here on a fucking roof and it’s fucking on fire and I’m fucking trying to fucking – wait… Where were you, anyway?’ Lali asks. This whole time, she hasn’t looked at him once. Her eyes have stayed fixed on the screen, that ferocious concentration he knows well. ‘You just… went,’ she says, ‘right when we needed you.’
‘I didn’t think they’d come until dawn,’ says Jackson. ‘I thought—’
The truth is that he didn’t think. It was a weekday. He went to work as planned. He painted walls with a break for lunch and his body was patterned a star-map of matt emulsion flecks. He finished at 7pm and he knew he should head straight back to the Citadel. His phone was in his pocket, but, consciously or otherwise, he hadn’t charged it overnight; the screen was dead already. He pictured the crowds at the Citadel. He
imagined the atmosphere: hope slowly crushed by the weight of an inevitable end. He would rather be anywhere else. Famished, he sat beneath a huge, shaggy tree in the park. The mood in the city shifted as daylight fell. Flotillas of cloud shed their misty payloads. When the park began to squall Jackson got on his bike and cycled through the rain to a busy square in which people were shopping, laughing, looking happy under neon, the flashing bright signs and enticements. He thought about the old office building he used to visit years ago with Frank, where, in anger at the District Institute, he would teach his brother lessons. In those days, in his mid-teens, his chest a barrel of feelings he could not name, his head a welter of indecisions and crass ideas that make him cringe, he leant on his younger brother more than Frank knew. He’d been cruel and controlling, he realised now, because he was frightened that Frank might leave him. He remembered that dark staircase and its old familiar smell, cringing at his self-directed sense of rebel heroism: how special he’d felt to have found it. People were drinking milkshakes, swinging bags of clothes. Elaborate fountains plashed. He wondered what the Citadel would look like a decade from now – he wondered if he cared, if the future was fixed or could be edited, written on a screen or on stone. He thought about Leonard: that tall and wild irascible moody creature who, despite being dead for years, still spoke clearly in Jackson’s mind. He thought, to his surprise, about his mother, the dark ocean that swayed under stars, the emptiness that entered him, infected him, changed him, poisoned his DNA, that scorched afternoon in his childhood. When tiredness overcame him, he lay on his back in lateral glow of shopfronts until, without warning, he buckled. Sobs snapped through him like a series of electric shocks. His face was a mess of tears and snot. He made ugly barking noises like a donkey in distress. But beneath the spasms, beneath the anguish, he was confused, almost amused, by a question: why the fuck was he crying?
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