Arkady

by Patrick Langley

  Frank crouches in the smouldering glow of the Citadel’s yard. His ribs sting his chest as he inhales. The last few hours have been a treadmill. Corridors. Rooftops. Garden paths. He has been running for hours and his muscles burn. He has scanned every face and he has called out his brother’s name. But no one is Jackson, his brother is lost.

  Frank will run back to the boat. Fuck wishing that Jackson will call, fuck trying to join a revolution he knew would fail, and fuck the risk. He will swallow his pride, like Leonard always said he should, and he will run back to the barge like a good boy, and wait.

  Then he looks up.

  A firework flares and in the light of its sputtering tracery he sees an outline of his brother. Perched on the parapet’s edge with his head in his hands.

  Frank cries out. He cannot help himself. His voice is a reedy whine against the discord of the night but he keeps on screaming his brother’s name. Jackson. Jackson. But Jackson doesn’t turn.

  He can run back to the boat or he can run towards his brother.

  If he stays, he will be caught; if he’s caught he’ll be arrested; if he’s arrested he might as well die.

  The blackvests have breached the front doors. Buckled plastic lies twisted and torn like surfboards washed up by a tidal wave. He slips past a lifter who reels in the wake of a blow – a protestor with bloodied teeth wields a plank of screw-studded wood.

  Frank ducks past him and into the lobby – a blur of heat and a tussle of limbs. Grey boiler suits. Banners. White helmets. Chains. Bruised skin. Raised arms.

  He dashes and ducks through the crowd like a fish through coral. A stray elbow smacks him in the cheek but he squirms loose and drops to all fours, forcing his way through a thicket of knees and shins. Phrases churn about his head like startled bats, a swirl of unfinished statements.

  ‘You’re a—’

  ‘Fuck look what—’

  ‘—puppet of—’

  ‘—hurts it—’

  ‘—will be—’

  ‘—doing someone—’

  ‘—on the—’

  ‘—hurts it—’

  ‘—stop him someone—’

  ‘—back off, back – back – back—’

  ‘—stop.’

  He surfaces again in the kitchen corridor.

  There.

  Jackson stumbles down the stairwell, crashing against the wall. His eyes are empty and black as bullet holes. Ash is plastered to the sweat on his forehead. They run for the kitchen.

  A young protestor, maybe fifteen years old, is in the middle of the room. He is armed with a wooden spoon and colander helmet, plastic bin lid as a shield. Over the toppled fridge, visible through the plastic-paned windows, red-orange sparks sputter and fly from the back door’s frame. A grey blur of toothed metal slips through the lock and into the room. The door flies open.

  There is nothing left to do but act like kids and hide.

  A grey door off the kitchen opens onto a cramped room, roughly the size of a toilet cubicle, the crooked shelves laden with tins of ossified eggshell and bottles of bleach, a mop’s head flopped in the corner like a lost toupee. Through the thin door the brothers hear the footsteps pounding through the kitchen, down the corridor, up the stairs. They wait in darkness, the strip of light under the door a flicker, black boots rushing past. Jackson leans against the door; the handle rattles but doesn’t budge.

  ‘Your fault,’ he hisses a moment later. ‘Idiot. Coming back like that, for what?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘We’re fucked. That’s it.’

  ‘I’m—’

  ‘Gone. Over. Done.’

  ‘Will you let me speak? If we’re playing the blame game then I’m hardly the champion here. You fucked off. You went for—’

  ‘Shhhhh!’ he says, lashing out to kick his brother below the knee.

  The corridor quietens. Bent double, Frank rubs his injured shin.

  Jackson opens the door a sliver and peers through, squints, opens it wider, gestures at his brother to follow. Frank limps into the pale glare of striplights.

  ‘Quiet,’ Jackson hisses.

  The corridor echoes with noises. Shouts, slammed doors, wolfish howls, the pop and tinkle of smashed glass, and a wheezy thumping like the beating of a huge, rust-riddled heart.

  ‘We can’t just leave them,’ Frank hisses as they near the lobby.

  ‘Yes we can,’ Jackson hisses back. ‘If we don’t we’re—’

  ‘We can stop them,’ says Frank, louder now. ‘We just need people, that’s what—’

  ‘People don’t matter,’ Jackson shouts, grabbing his brother by the shoulders. ‘None of this fucking matters, all of it’s bullshit, we can’t get out, we can’t stop it, they’ve won, they win, it’s what they fucking do, they crush us and they crush us until we’re dead, we don’t have energy, we give up, we give in, they beat us and they wrap our wrists in cable ties and push us face-first in the dirt, because of what? Because we made life hard for them, because we are people, and they fucking hate people, it isn’t worth it, it isn’t worth it, fucking hell, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.’

  The words rush out in a torrent. Frank has never seen Jackson ramble like that, the hot gush of addled sentences, and he’s too stunned to reply.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jackson says, tone switching so quickly it’s like he never stumbled at all, ‘I thought you wanted to leave? You were begging—’

  ‘Not begging.’

  ‘—us to – grovelling to leave. Have anger, Frank. If I die tomorrow—’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘If I’m gone—’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘If we don’t get out of this, if I fall behind, if they catch me—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just run. Keep running. Promise.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll find you.’

  The lobby is almost deserted. A row of handcuffed protesters kneel as if awaiting a firing squad: wrists tied behind their backs, heads lowered, faces bloody and slicked with spit. A trio of blackvests stands watch. And there’s the lifter Jackson tussled with earlier, out near the gate, the one who kicked him in the ribs. He’s missing his helmet, his boiler suit slathered with mud. He turns and shouts as the brothers pace over the broken doors and into the rush of the rain-whipped air.

  Arthur’s wall is ruined. The flames have died to smoking shards and twisted husks. The windows of the glass towers over the plywood are broken, glass panes jagged, yawning. The Citadel’s roof blazes like the head of a match, an angry knot of flames.

  A trio of protestors have chained themselves to barrels in a corner of the roof; a blackvest ascends on a cherry picker. A protestor fumbles a purple flare and slips on the parapet’s rain-slicked edge. She hangs from the roof by her fingers, by the chains wrapped tight round her chest: the others grab her shirt and tug upwards but she’s slipping, slipping, caught in an awkward harness of fabric and chains.

  The brothers see all this as a slow-motion blur, a rush of light glanced in the slip of their vision.

  Frank lags. The lifter is behind them already, keeping pace as the brothers run.

  The Citadel’s grounds enclose them, slippery and labyrinthine, twisted paths unravelling as they run until, abruptly, they hit the open space of the driveway.

  Blackvests throng the gate. Arrested protestors are being guided into open vans. Wrists cable-tied, they sulk and spit. A beam swings over Jackson, a bleaching flash. For an instant he feels like an angel, a luminous thing, his scrawny arms ablaze with white fire.

  When the light fades he knows he’s alone. His brother is lost somewhere behind him, lost in the thickets of weeds.

  He sees the smashed windows and dancing bodies on the roof of the glass towers, the aster’s swinging beam, thick plumes of purple smoke, and, rushing towards him down the path, a lifter. His dull grey boiler suit a perfect camouflage against the shadows. Jackson grips the brick and sets it loose.
He turns to run before it lands but hears the thud and the howl behind him.

  Cars stream over the flyover. The bright lights of the shopping mall leak into the sky and taint it red, white, violet. Water glitters in a gap between buildings, a black flatness fizzy with rain. Under the skittering beat of his heart he hears the glassy hush of it flooding, rich in rain, ready to carry him out of the city.

  He reaches the wall in a handful of strides and sees the canal through the slit in the panels. The toothed edge of the plywood nips the hem of his coat as he edges through and snaps shut behind him.

  A lifter’s boot crunches on concrete: Jackson turns. The man’s boiler suit is sodden, dark with dirt. For a second they watch each other, immobile, two figures in the slanting dark. Asters shudder. Sirens howl.

  Jackson runs to the barge in a handful of strides but the lifter is quicker, stronger. He slips on the rain-glossed deck, catching a glimpse of the flag as he falls, a ragged streak of fabric in the rain. The lifter knees Jackson in the small of his spine and bends his mouth to Jackson’s ear.

  ‘It hurts more if you fight it.’

  He can taste the lifter’s uniform. Its fabric has absorbed the harshness of smoke, the trapped-animal stink of sweat. The lifter is heavy but quick. He mushes Jackson’s nose against the rasping deck. Dirt on his teeth. Rain in his throat. The lifter shifts his tone, becomes imploring, matey: not an adversary but a friend.

  ‘Listen mate, it’s nothing. I tie you up, you come with me, and then it’s over. Simple. Quick. I’m only doing my job.’

  Jackson’s head has been yelling like a fire alarm, a panic so total and shrill all sound is subsumed into its piercing trill. Now the energy left in him drains from his arms. He stops writhing for air, like a landed fish. He’ll give up, give in. Surrender feels blissful and bleak in equal measure. The pressure of decisions and the itching of anger melt to liquid, fade: he is a vessel of resignation and numb fatigue. His body grows still, his eyes unfocused. The lifter tugs a cable tie from his pocket, knees crushing the muscles at Jackson’s spine. In one practised, careless gesture, he grabs Jackson’s wrists and yanks them tight with a quick zipping sound.

  ‘There,’ the man says, squatting. ‘Done.’ He pauses. Something in his silence feels considered, hesitant, as though he is balancing his words before he speaks again.

  The flyover’s bright lights seem to fade, and at the edges of that darkness another figure appears, a slender silhouette, arm raised. Hood up, he swallows the gap between boat and wall in a fluent leap that makes no sound. The heavy thing hangs in his hand. Its curled tongs and its blunt head catch the light.

  Figures are frozen in brief tableaux. In the foreground: the lifter’s muscled shoulders and stubbled skull. Behind him: the frail figure of the hammer-wielding boy.

  Jackson stares into the blank of his brother’s open hood. He wants to cry out and tell him to run, but then he doesn’t need to: Frank lowers the hammer slowly, halfway to disarming himself, when the lifter jerks upright, opens his mouth.

  ‘I—’

  Frank swings the hammer – the man’s head whips to one side. The sound is sudden and unnaturally loud, a thunderclap crunching of bone. Sprawled on the boat’s roof, skull slick with blood, the lifter stares dumb at the sky. Frank lifts the hammer and strikes again. The lifter’s body snaps limp.

  Jackson kneels on the boat, hands tied behind him, and looks up at his younger brother. Frank lit from behind by fire. He holds the hammer in his hand, the blunt tip dripping with blood.

  V. FIRST LIGHT

  The man lies flat on the sand, legs outstretched, arms at rest. His eyes are closed but his mouth is open, slack lips parted on the dark red muscle of his tongue. In the sockets of his eyes, the flesh is patterned with shades of lavender, ash, and sulphur, the soft meat swollen and deeply bruised. Weeds, sprouting from a slope of shingle, form a crooked halo around his head. Their bony trunks pierce a tangle of rust-coloured seaweed, which is shrivelled-up, jewelled with salt. Jackson inspects the plants. The brittle canes are hung with rattling seedpods, spiked with thorny leaves and needles pale as bone. Harsh gusts quicken the churning waves. The dry weeds shiver.

  Jackson turns to his younger brother, who is standing a short way further down the beach.

  ‘Is he really dead?’ Frank asks. His voice is thin, distant.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jackson replies. ‘Is he breathing?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like he’s breathing.’

  ‘We need a mirror.’

  Dawn is breaking on the estuary, wads of cloud soaked in colourless light. Hair worms over Frank’s forehead, reaching into his eyes. He squints askance at Jackson.

  ‘A mirror?’

  ‘You’re meant to hold one up to his mouth,’ says Jackson. ‘See if you get condensation. That’s how you know for sure.’

  He clutches himself, a reflex. He is cold to his marrow.

  ‘Says who?’

  Jackson shrugs. ‘Can’t remember.’

  The shoreline is wind-scoured, blasted, bleak. Old battlements hunker down the sand, obsolete defences that resemble totems now, crumbled by age and weather. Their innards are riddled with nets of wire and mottled with luminous algae.

  Frank runs a hand through his wet black hair. Raindrops leap and seethe as they hit the sand.

  ‘We don’t have a mirror,’ says Frank. He folds his arms, copying Jackson, to preserve what little warmth is left in his shivering body. ‘We don’t need a mirror.’ He recoils a few inches, snarling. ‘Look at him,’ he says. ‘Look.’

  Jackson would rather not.

  ‘Alright,’ he says.

  The sand is chicken-poxed with blotches of oil. Heaps of knotted seaweed straggle the sand in clumps. Further up, beyond the chattering weeds, is a bank of rubbish. Dumped, a rusting, gutted washing machine, crushed beer cans glinting, a headless action figure, needle-thin fish spines, a stray flip-flop, tangled nets, and punctured buoys. Maybe they should leave the man here, Jackson wonders. An offering to the ocean, its hunger for tidal trash.

  ‘Check his pulse,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ Frank snaps. ‘You do it.’

  ‘It’s easy. Just your thumb against his neck, here,’ he says, showing Frank the spot on his own neck, ‘and see if you can feel the pulse.’

  A silence swells between them. Side by side, they stare at the man. It is hard to tell how old he is. His thinning hair forms a widow’s peak, is shot through with grey at the temples. His forehead is deeply lined: the creases look carved by a knife. But there’s a youthful plumpness in the swell of his wide, unwrinkled cheeks, his parted lips. He could be sleeping in a cot.

  ‘I’m not touching him,’ says Frank. ‘Let’s just go. Leave him. Cover him up with—’

  ‘We can’t just leave him,’ Jackson cuts in.

  ‘—rocks and. What?’

  ‘We can’t leave him,’ Jackson says, louder.

  ‘Bury him, not just leave him.’

  ‘If he’s alive, if he wakes up—’

  ‘Dead guys don’t wake up,’ Frank yells.

  ‘But if he does—’

  ‘You wanna call the police?’

  Drops of rain flick from Jackson’s nose, chin, ears as he shakes his head. His raincoat hangs open, limp as a rag, the damp and airless plastic sucking at the skin of his arms. The man is missing one shoe, his left.

  ‘What, then?’ Frank asks. ‘We don’t have all day, do we? He’s d—’ He stops. His mouth hangs open, eyes unfocused. ‘Dead,’ he says. The word is barely audible above the cackle of faraway gulls.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Jackson admits. ‘Don’t know anything any more.’

  Strange colours churn in the brightening sky: seaweed-green, mussel-shell blue, shot through with fissures of grey. He has been avoiding his reflection for most of his life, but earlier, washing his hands in the boat’s cramped bathroom, he caught a glimpse of himself in the window. The high, gaunt cheekbones. The pale lips. The buzzed hair crazily u
neven. And that look in those eyes, his eyes, like a stranger staring back.

  ‘He’s dead,’ says Frank.

  He picks up a long blond branch and prods the man’s belly, exposed by a gash in his clothing, the heavy flesh thatched with black hairs. The skin puckers. The man doesn’t flinch or groan. When Frank lifts the stick again, the puckered star stays white. He looks at Jackson. A slick of blood reddens his cheek like lipstick gone awry.

  ‘Try again,’ says Jackson. ‘Harder. In the neck.’

  ‘He’s dead, Jackson. Dead.’

  ‘Could be concussed.’

  ‘Look at him. Look at his lips. Have you ever seen lips that colour? Does he look concussed?’

  ‘A coma, then.’

  ‘Are you mental? We dropped him twice – and nothing, nothing, he’s gone.’

  Arkady is beached in the shallows. Lopsided in the tide, its black underside faces the shore. Looking at it now, Jackson marvels that the boat made it this far. Its sides, in a previous life, were ink-black and cherry-red, but the colours have since degraded, with scabrous imperfections where the paint has flaked away to reveal the dull metal beneath. The driver’s cabin is patched together with lengths of scrap, nails and screws jutting crookedly from the corners.

  ‘Think,’ says Jackson. He hasn’t slept properly in days. He smacks himself in the forehead, punches himself in the thigh. Pain brings him back to his senses. Everything is the colour it should be, but starker, more luminous.

  ‘We should bury him,’ says Frank.

  ‘With what? Where?’

  ‘Here,’ says Frank, kneeling down, ‘on the beach, with our hands.’

  The flatness of the marshes is unbroken by mountain or town. Tangled waterways and acres of reeking, sliding mud are interrupted only by boxy factories, steaming power plants, and the swooping wires of the skeletal pylons that march inland. Jackson feels, in the midst of this openness, dangerously exposed. The land is squashed flat by the weight of the sky and the sea goes on forever.

  He stares inland, yearning for a warm, dry room.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ says Frank.