‘How do you know? It’s the city. Everywhere’s bad.’
The army owns the silvery spits of land. They use it for testing weapons. Bombs and bullets are absorbed and erased by the liquid mud. Sometimes the explosions can be felt from the city, bass-thumps resonating in the cavity of your chest. From here it looks like nothing, just an empty stretch of land.
‘Government owns it,’ says Frank. ‘No one lives there.’
Jackson tilts his head at the window. His cropped hair glows.
‘Alright,’ he sighs, frowning. His head hangs loose. ‘There’s nowhere else to go.’
‘Don’t be like that,’ says Frank.
‘Like what?’
‘Moaning. Sighing. Giving up.’
‘How the fuck am I meant to act?’
‘I don’t know, I’m just saying. It could be worse.’
‘Could be worse?’
The wheelhouse door is open. A cold, clean smell of salt flows in.
‘It could always be worse,’ says Frank. ‘You could be dead. I could be dead.’
Jackson scans the horizon. Another plane rises; another plane lands.
‘Kind of wish I was dead,’ he says.
‘But you’re not.’
‘Guess so.’
‘And it had to be one of us, didn’t it?’
Jackson grips the wheel. The clouds have begun to break open, thaw. Light like meltwater drenches the port.
‘So it had to be him.’
‘I know,’ says Jackson. ‘I’m just… tired. My brain. It’s stopped working. I try and think about things and nothing, my head fogs up. I feel like I’m not inside myself. Does that make sense?’
Frank shrugs.
‘We got any whiskey left?’ Jackson asks, brightness flaring in his eyes.
‘Maybe,’ says Frank. The brothers keep alcohol under the sink, cheap spirits and cans of beer. But with the last few weeks at the Citadel, the long drunken night by the bonfire, slugging murky cocktails for added warmth, Frank suspects it’s all used up. ‘I’ll check,’ he says.
The tide is strong in this part of the estuary. It coaxes Arkady towards the shore. Through the slits in the curtains Frank picks out leafless trees, their twisted forms confused with nearby pylons and the skeletal cranes of the port. Further off is the city. Distance has compressed the jutting towers, skinny skyscrapers, office blocks, and looping overpasses into a low haze. Sunlight flashes off windows and curtain walls. The city glimmers like a spillage of quartz.
Something rattles to Frank’s right as he walks: insect-clicks of cutlery as forks and spoons rock back and forth on ceramic tile.
The floor is littered with broken glass. To his immediate right is the kitchen, grubby gaps where the fridge and the hob would stand. Toppled tins of food and heaps of crockery crowd the cupboards. Plates lie shattered on the floor in sharp white chunks, like sharks’ teeth.
Frank’s body has stiffened against the sight of the man, who haunts the corner of the room. He glances over, unable to help himself.
Swaddled in his boiler suit, wrapped in a truss of blue rope, the man is. His face is hidden beneath a tea towel and his legs are stretched.
‘Whiskey,’ Frank says to no one, distracting himself from the body, reminding himself of his task.
He opens the cupboard under the sink. Cleaning products. Tools.
Maybe his brother was right. Frank feels outside himself, behind himself, watching his hands through a telescope’s lens.
Lurking at the back beneath a crisp blue husk of an ancient J-cloth is a vodka bottle, roughly a quarter full. Frank unscrews the cap and sniffs. He drinks a slug.
The burn in his throat fades to numbness; the numbness brings relief.
‘Got some,’ he shouts.
He feels instantaneously drunk. The room takes on an edge of giddy delirium, atoms throbbing in the gloom.
No reply. The engine must have muffled his voice.
‘Jackson?’
Nothing.
He shrugs, tucks the bottle into his jacket pocket.
Instead of walking towards the wheelhouse door, his legs carry him into the boat.
Through swaying curtains to his right he sees nothing but ocean. Low, muted sounds move through the boat, the thock and slump of waves as they trouble the hull.
Vodka sloshes in Frank’s pocket as he walks. There is music in his head, a haunting, looping melody that always features in his dreams about drowning. A shoal of notes hang in the air.
The coffee table comes into view. Its surface is a chaos of papers, books, itineraries, articles. The brothers’ plans – drawn, refined, erased, and re-drawn with a meticulous self-importance – embarrass Frank. He wants to burn them, forget them.
The boat abruptly lurches as Jackson turns the wheel. Frank reaches out to steady himself on a window. His hand leaves a print of condensation on the pane. Splayed fingers. It looks like a starfish.
He takes another slug of vodka. Fortified, he looks down.
Maybe it’s just the weather. Maybe it’s just the light. But something about the man has changed, an almost imperceptible shift.
Frank leans forward, panic overpowering restraint. He plucks the tea towel off the man’s head. His stare darts up and down.
The foot looks the same, swollen and pale. The legs are tied together, as before. The head is tilted towards the stove, the temple resting against the black metal, the hairline flush with the handle’s edge. The mouth hangs slightly open. Nothing has moved or altered. If it has, the boat’s motion explains it – its cradle-like, back-and-forth rocking.
When the brothers carried the body through earlier, and laid it out on the floor, pausing briefly to catch their breath and look into each other’s eyes, the man’s palms were loosely clasped. The palms faced each other, as if in prayer, the knuckles’ bony ridges exposed.
Now the hands are open. The inner wrists are visible, their branching veins vivid blue. A tiny scar, shaped like a comma, brightens the skin of a finger.
Frank examines the head again. He follows the line of the stubbled jaw to the earlobe, along the cheekbone, to the eyeballs nestled in their caves of bruised skin. From the eyelids, Frank examines the nose, the cartilage slightly bent where the head’s weight presses it into the metal.
His gaze trails the short distance from the base of the nose to the mouth. The lips are parted, as before, although their colour is different: less blue.
The teeth are visible, as before.
Here is the difference, finally, so small he could have easily missed it: on the ruby-dark lower lip, a bubble forms.
Collapses.
Forms again.
Frank slams through the open door and crashes shoulder-first into the control panel. He stares at Jackson with flung-wide, blinkless eyes.
‘Why—’ Jackson begins to ask, but the look on his brother’s face stops him.
‘You need to see – to see,’ Frank blurts.
‘See what?’
‘The guy – the man,’ he gasps, ‘the body – the person we – back in the – fuck – I mean – Jackson he—’
‘What—’
‘—killed but he – you have to – we—’
‘Frank, slow down.’
‘—I just walked in – and – he was – he was – I think he was—’
‘Have you been drinking?’
‘A bubble.’
‘What?’
‘A bubble – on his lip.’
‘A bubble,’ says Jackson.
‘I think – the man – he’s…’
‘There’s vodka in your pocket.’
‘He’s breathing.’
‘He isn’t breathing.’
‘He is!’ Frank snaps. ‘You didn’t see him – I saw him – I saw—’
‘Dead people don’t breathe,’ says Jackson. ‘How much is left? You didn’t finish it, did you?’
‘I’m serious – stood there and—’
‘Bubbles, yes. You said,’ says
Jackson. ‘A bubble. Pass the bottle. I can’t believe you just tucked in without me.’
‘Listen to me!’
Jackson swigs and winces. Tears brighten his eyes. He inhales once, very slowly. Eyes closed, he shakes his head. ‘Better,’ he says.
‘His lips though,’ says Frank. ‘It was on his lips. It came out, and then—’
‘He’s wet,’ says Jackson. He swallows another mouthful, dries his mouth with the back of his hand, and plonks the bottle on the control panel: a dulled clunk of glass on wood. Arkady has strayed a long way down the shore, but the orange buoy still looks far away. ‘Wet things make bubbles,’ says Jackson. ‘It was nothing.’
Frank curls his toes in his sodden boots. His hands ball themselves into impotent fists. ‘You’re being an irresponsible adult,’ he snaps.
The words surprise both of the brothers.
‘Wow,’ says Jackson. A grin spreads over his face. ‘Alright then, kid. What do you want?’
The light that fills the cabin is tinted and textured by water, filtered by rainclouds and mirrored by sea. Daylight dissolves through the curtains, reaching towards, but not quite touching, the shadowed far reach of the room. Dust-motes sway like plankton. They drift open in spiralling shoals as Jackson kneels.
‘Look,’ says Frank. ‘There.’
‘I can’t see a bubble.’
‘It was there, right there,’ says Frank, jabbing.
‘You sure?’
‘I saw it. I saw it. Just wait.’
Jackson, squatting, does not wait. Instead, he lifts the man’s wrist. The motion is delicate, slow, as though the man’s body was spun from glass. Jackson peels the boiler suit back to the elbow, clearing the skin, then pushes his thumb into the man’s wrist, his eyes on the man’s shrouded face. Skin creases where Jackson presses into it, pressure firm as he digs for a pulse.
‘Can you feel anything?’ Frank asks. He tightens his grip on the hammer. It is more of a talisman now than a weapon or tool. Proof that he has mastered the man already: proof that he can do it again.
‘Be quiet,’ Jackson says.
Frank’s shoulders drop. The procedure unfolds.
The measured pace with which Jackson works reminds Frank of the times he was sick or injured himself, lying on a mattress, crying at the pain of cracked ribs, bruised muscles, bleeding wounds. Jackson would nourish Frank’s cuts with antiseptic, seal the deepest gashes with needle and thread. He poured numbing slugs of vodka into Frank’s mouth, fed him pills. It was an extension of everything else. Jackson as brother, parent, instructor, friend, protector, rival, nurse.
Jackson lowers the man’s arm so it lies at his side, palm-down on the carpet. He glances at Frank. His eyes are dark.
‘I knew it,’ says Frank.
They don’t have an anchor. They can’t let Arkady drift into open waters, or crash onto government land. And so they moor the boat to the first solid thing they can find. Frank stands out front whilst Jackson steers. The engine shudders. Smoke purls in the breeze. Frank flings a loop of rope around the wood and ties it firm. Jackson kills the engine. Arkady tugs the stump like a dog on a leash.
‘Where the fuck are we now?’ says Jackson.
‘I don’t know,’ says Frank. He racks his brain, scanning his memorised map. ‘Birds,’ he says.
‘Birds?’
‘Yeah,’ says Frank. ‘And power stations. Trees.’
‘I said where are we, not let’s play a fucking game of I Spy.’
Beyond the stump is a pebbled beach; beyond that a low wall, a signposted path running past it. Fresh tarmac. Further still are the sculpted reed-beds and zigzagging paths of the nature reserve. Birds move darkly in sinuous skeins. Others hang lonely in higher air, resting their wings on the wind.
‘We’re here,’ says Frank. ‘We’re somewhere. Who cares what it’s called.’
Jackson grips the railing, scans the path. ‘It looks like a place. A proper place. Money. People nearby. Not like before.’
‘Before was different,’ says Frank.
‘How?’
‘He was dead.’
Frank parts the curtains of two sea-facing windows. It’s a risk but the brothers need light. They lay the man out on the carpet. The ropes have begun to unravel, yet they cradle him, still, in a net of restriction. If he wakes and attempts to attack them, he will wriggle and squirm like a fish.
‘There,’ says Frank.
He splashes water across the man’s face. The man does not flinch. Water pools in his eye sockets, his ear.
‘Twice now,’ says Jackson. ‘Nothing.’
‘I told you,’ said Frank. ‘The sea would have done it. Water won’t work.’
Jackson, frowning, places the tips of his index and middle fingers over his mouth, just beneath his nose. He does this whenever he’s deep in thought.
‘How hard did you hit him?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know,’ says Frank. Sirens rang out like church bells. The skyline danced with fire. He can’t remember the gestures. ‘Pretty hard?’
‘If you hadn’t picked up that hammer,’ says Jackson, backlit by the window and the water’s leaden sway, ‘we wouldn’t be here.’
‘If I hadn’t picked up the hammer,’ says Frank, ‘you’d be dead.’
‘Are you fucking mad?’
‘That’s what I thought – okay? What the fuck was I meant to do? Just stand there and watch him strangle you? He was killing you – that’s what I saw – that’s what I thought I saw – that you were dying.’
He arrived at the boat and saw a man atop Jackson, crushing the life from his brother’s throat. What happened next happened so quickly and so fluently that it had felt, in the moment, like nothing at all, like breath. It hadn’t felt wrong. He didn’t hesitate. He’d lifted the hammer, lifted again.
Jackson stares at the window, Frank at the floor: pointless surfaces on which to rest their gaze whilst they quiver with hate for each other. The silence that swells between them has a physical texture. It curdles the air.
‘What would you have done if it was me?’ Frank asks. ‘If I was lying there, dying there, with someone’s hands on my throat? You wouldn’t have done it, is that what you’re saying? You’d have just, I don’t know… Watched?’
‘No – I was saying—’
‘Why is this even an issue?’ Frank snaps. ‘The man gets paid to rob sofas off people who can’t afford to eat. He’s the reason we’re here. I thought I was saving your life.’
‘I wouldn’t just have stood there and watched,’ says Jackson. He kicks a shard of dinner plate, which ricochets off the wall. ‘But I wouldn’t have tried to murder him for no reason. That’s what I’m saying.’
Tangled up in bickering, the brothers half forget the man. He is no longer the hulking beast he was last night. He is shrunken, tied-up, prostrate, damp. He has the look of a gravely ill child.
Exhaustion enhances the alcohol. A giddy sense of unreality trembles at the edges of things. Instead of splashing water on the man’s face, Frank holds the mug to his mouth.
‘Drink,’ he says.
Water pours through the man’s teeth and over his tongue. It pools in his throat and spills from his lips.
‘He’s not swallowing,’ says Frank. ‘He needs to drink.’
‘I felt a pulse. His heart’s beating.’
Frank slaps the man on the cheeks. No response. He tries again, harder. Harder. He pinches, he prods. Same story.
‘I don’t get it…’ Frank begins. ‘He’s alive. Technically. But…’
Jackson shrugs. He digs a tobacco pouch out of his pocket. ‘I’m not a doctor,’ he says.
‘He needs one,’ says Frank. ‘Like, immediately.’
‘I know.’
Frank leans forward, his nose almost touching the man’s. He pulls back an eyelid and looks into the flat-brown retina. The pupil is swollen, dark.
Frank yells at the top of his lungs.
‘WAKE UP.’
Not
hing. Feels like shouting at a doll. Facts flash through his head. You must keep a person awake after a bad concussion, otherwise – what? There are more neurons in the human brain than there are stars in the sky. In the city that’s fucking obvious: you can’t see stars at all.
‘WAKE UP. WAKE UP.’
A drop of Frank’s spittle glistens against the man’s cheek. He wipes it off with the hem of his jumper. Having done so, he licks his finger. A stubborn slick of dried blood clings to the man’s temple. Frank works at the mark with the thumb of his right hand, cradling the skull with his left, until the mark is gone.
‘I’M SORRY I KILLED YOU,’ Frank shouts.
‘He can’t hear you,’ Jackson says.
He holds the lighter’s flame to the ragged tip of his rollie. Inhales. Exhales. Smoke swims through the room. He rests his head against the wall and shuts his eyes.
Frank squats on his haunches, hugging his knees. ‘He’s not waking up,’ he says. ‘It’s not like a computer, is it? You can’t just turn a person off and on.’
‘Jesus,’ Jackson says. ‘I said leave it.’
‘How? He’s not going to disappear, is he?’
‘Frank – you’re not thinking, you’re just saying words. Think for one second, alright? Think.’
‘I think all the fucking time!’ Frank yells. ‘I just think the wrong things.’
Sea wind ruffles the reed-beds. Pebbles chatter as they turn in the waves. Even out here, in this tidal emptiness, the brothers hear a far-off crackle as the city warms to life.
‘We should call an ambulance,’ says Frank. ‘He’s probably bleeding in there. It looks bad. I feel bad. We could leave him on the path and call them later, when we’re far enough away.’
‘We’ll never be far enough away,’ says Jackson.
‘What do you mean?’
Jackson stares at the floor.
Frank shuts his eyes for a moment. Visualising stuff helps him think. The image that comes to mind is of a mountain stream. The water’s so clear he can see the bottom, dark fish flexing in the shallows, sunlight playing on the stones.
He opens his eyes.
‘Let’s kill him then,’ he says. ‘Properly this time.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. I could hit him, then at least we’d know he’s dead for real.’
Arkady Page 13
