Jackson almost laughs. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he says. ‘I don’t know. We had a plan before, didn’t we?’
‘We were heading out to sea, but I’m not sure—’
Jackson shakes his head, narrows his eyes, and stubs his cigarette out on the wall.
‘We should never have stopped,’ he sighs. His eyes look hollow, drained. ‘Get up. Let’s go.’
The buoy is joyful. Frank watches it dance, slapped about by playful waves. A beard of ragged seaweed flails beneath its tangerine scalp. It leaps up, splashes under, lollops sideways, flops on its face.
‘Don’t know why you’re laughing,’ Jackson says. He scans the horizon. The wind makes a rasping noise as it buffets his hood. Light rain sparkles in the air.
‘The buoy,’ says Frank.
‘What about it?’
‘Look at it go!’
The brothers have sailed as far out as they dare. Apart from the rainclouds and the endlessly trafficking aeroplanes, the sky is clear. Wind turbines bristle nearby. Further off is a pair of container ships, monolithic and grey.
‘I guess this is it,’ says Frank.
Jackson nods but says nothing.
The army’s tidal islands are the closest part of land: long, low strips of mud patterned silver and black, like mackerel. Red signal lights warn ships to steer clear.
‘You sure we’re doing the right thing?’ Frank asks.
‘Not really,’ Jackson replies. ‘We have to do something, though. We can’t just…’
‘I know, but…’
‘It’s better this way.’
They’ve laid the man out at the rear of the boat, near the rusted red hatch where the engine lurks.
‘He’s not going to wake up, is he?’ Frank asks. ‘He’s, what do they call it…’
Out in the open, exposed to air and rain, the man’s cheeks have begun to blush.
Jackson frowns. ‘He’s gone,’ he says. ‘We tried everything. Even if we got him to hospital right now…’
‘It would be too late?’
‘You don’t come back from something like that.’
Frank watches the man’s eyeballs, which seem to shift, like a dreamer’s, beneath their lids: light playing over the skin in the prickling rain.
‘We would have had to get him help last night, like straight away,’ he says.
‘And we didn’t.’
‘We couldn’t.’
The company’s logo is embroidered on the boiler suit’s breast pocket, near the man’s heart. A red circle. Inside it is an armoured knight, mounted, clutching a jousting stick, with a St George’s flag on his shield. The brothers see the logo all over the city. On hoardings, building sites, offices, uniforms, locked doors.
‘He’s one of them,’ says Frank.
Jackson nods. ‘They would have made an example of us,’ he says. ‘You saw what they were doing to the others. They had vans full of them, all tied up. Truncheons. Water cannons. You know how they’ll spin it.’
Last night is a blur of violence, panic, fire.
‘It doesn’t feel right,’ he says. ‘He’s a person.’
‘You’ve done it already.’
‘I didn’t have a choice, it was him or you. What about family? He might have kids.’
‘You can’t think about that. You can’t let thoughts like that in your head.’
‘But it’s already in there.’
Frank watches the orange buoy lollop and dance. It no longer looks funny and free, but mocking.
‘Listen,’ Jackson says. ‘There’s no good way. There’s just really, really bad, and then there’s something worse than that. Those are the options. That’s it.’
The man is wrapped up in blue ropes. Earlier, Frank carried armfuls of heavy objects from the boat and onto the roof. Frying pans. A metal stool. Two crowbars. A full can of gloss. Tins of soup, ravioli, beans. The unwieldy weights are knotted and cinched at points all over the man: arms, torso, waist, feet, neck.
‘He looks like a charm bracelet,’ says Frank. ‘Will it work?’
‘Maybe. I guess he’ll sink for a bit and then…’
‘The tide?’
Jackson shrugs. ‘We’ll be gone by then. Or caught. Either way…’
Frank pictures the body’s descent through the water. Shapes emerge from the murk: archipelagos of sunken stone, forests of swaying seaweed, the sandy blankness of the ocean floor.
‘Ready?’ Jackson asks.
Frank nods. ‘We should say something first.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. An apology? A prayer?’
‘This isn’t a funeral. We don’t even know the guy.’
‘But—’
‘Do it,’ Jackson snaps. ‘The sooner you do it, the sooner we go.’
Frank tightens his grip on the hammer. It has begun to feel like an extension of his body, a familiar, almost comforting weight. He lifts it high above his head and readies his body to strike.
He has decided to aim for the temple, the weakest spot in the skull. One swift, hard blow to end it, finally. Then, as he’s about to strike, Frank’s muscles seize up. A sick feeling blooms in his stomach. Raindrops crackle at his ears.
‘Jackson,’ he hisses, pointing.
But his brother has seen it already: the man’s open eyes.
VI. THE WHITE BIRD
I had the drowning dream again. I had it for years as a child, once a week at least, and it has recently returned. In the dream, our mother appears as a shadowed swimmer, a kind of mermaid. The long green water is body-warm and I’m surrounded by music. Sunlight plays on the ocean’s surface, a second sky, as sunken bells toll in the valley below.
My phone’s alarm is screaming, drilling noise into the tender core of my head.
I hit Snooze. Turn over. Sink my face in the pillow’s protection.
The wall can wait
despite what he says
because the bedding’s still warm
with the imprint of
heat from
my sleep
and
Alarm! Drilling my brainstem.
I thumb Off
and push back the bedding. My limbs greet the morning chill. It is bright outside but the sky is restless, clouds scudded white on the blue, and in the dimness of the waking room I feel the chill of a cold day approaching.
Sit up. Lean forward. Observe.
6.42am
Well.
I stand in my boxers on the carpet’s fuzz and squint through my sleep at the world. A melody loops in my head, a catchy constellation of fading notes, half-remembered from the dream.
I peer through the window at the yard and the field.
I breathe on the pane and draw an eye on the condensation.
The windows are single-glazed, the frames warped in their casings. But the view of sloping streets, the slanted field, and the glancing curve of the river through a lattice of trees will sometimes floor me.
In my room, with its cod-Victorian metal-framed bed, and its gloomy vine-patterned wallpaper, I have two luxuries. One is the window, which bathes me in view; the other’s the sink, in which I bathe myself.
There is a mirror above the sink, spattered with globs of toothpaste and soap-froth, and in its grubby doubling I wince at my morning face, that manic glint in my eyes. I hover in the mirror like a ghoul.
Soon the sink is filled.
I dunk my face in the brief lucid shock of the water and hold my breath.
Eyes open.
Porcelain-white like an acre of snow.
Somewhere I read that putting your face below water like this triggers the diving response in your body, which slows your heart and brings calm to your functions. There have been times when I have needed this influence, when it felt like my heart would burst. The water brings me back to my pulse. In that process of returning, I remember two things: my body is living; another has drowned.
The comparison calms me. I don’t know why.
/> Lean back. Dry my face with the scratchy towel.
I love the parched nature of this old washed thing, the thirst with which its fibres guzzle water off my cheeks. I brush my teeth and, scrubbing, foamy-mouthed, the window catches me again. I see the crispness of the light outside, the edges of everything sharp.
I remember my mission and quickly get dressed.
The drystone wall disintegrated. It happened last week when the river burst. In the mornings I stood at this window and watched the flooded field. The waters were clear and flat. Shadows moved through the sunken grass. The stones of the drystone grew buoyant.
When the river went back to normal, the lawn was scattered with crazy paving, no barrier left between the land and the path.
Dressed in jeans, boots, T-shirt, and jacket, I creep down creaking stairs and into the kitchen, the slanted light cool on the night-cooled floor. It feels like the world is sleeping. Like time just stopped.
If time has stopped I have time for a coffee.
I fill a saucepan, set it on the hotplate, and wait for the water to seethe.
Funny how brains behave when half asleep.
Warped memories and dream-dregs slosh in the skull.
I see:
myself on Leonard’s balcony with Jackson, chucking planes at warm winds/a city alight in a torrent of rain, asters circling as lightning flares/our landscape from above, wooded in places, rusted in others, slashed with suburban grey/a long, winding river inscribed in the land, leading out to sea/a crimson wound in a crushed skull/a jungle asleep under stars.
The water boils and I make the coffee, black and strong, two sugars, stirring the granules and watching them foam and dissolve on the steaming whirlpool.
I could drink it in this kitchen, domestic implements for company. But there is work to do, before more work.
I step outside.
The woods that surround our town are turning green.
February.
Winter should be its most tenacious, but spring, it
seems, is here.
Listen… That murmuring rumour of growth in the soil. The street’s far end is shot with yellow, daffodils defying the cold soil, cute fuck-yous to the fading frost.
The paved street crackles under my boots as I walk.
Sunshine thumps through blue pools in the clouds overhead, smacking the slate roofs, making them hum with light. The blissful weather makes me urge for nicotine.
I pat my pockets. No tobacco.
Oh well.
Left at the corner, I head for the square which is really a circle: the empty core of the old town’s concentric design.
There is an object here which I sit on sometimes, an upturned barrow with gnarled old wheels. I sit and scratch my head and inhale the herbal fragrance of rained-on grass and watch the droop-headed daffodils nod in the breeze.
I have a problem with the news. I check it compulsively, reflexively, without really knowing why. It’s a habit that brings me nothing but low-level stress and fragmented distraction – for once, I won’t do it.
For a few minutes, sipping coffee, I consider sending Jackson a pic of my boots or the morning sky. When he wakes up later this morning, he will see the photograph and notice the time-stamp and think, with a twinge of jealous pride:
Frank was awake before me?
I don’t send the photo. Instead, I watch an aeroplane crawl through the sky and wonder how many messages, how many billions of bytes, are being transmitted right now through the upper atmosphere where the oxygen thins and the signals fly quicker.
Our phones were dead when we arrived. We didn’t know if we’d found the right place. It was a warren of crooked shells. Half the roofs had collapsed. The floors were overgrown with tangled bushes, moss-carpets, flourishing vines.
The rusted pipes gave nothing. The sockets were cold.
We stood in a tumbledown kitchen and laughed.
For months, it was Jackson and I and the buildings. Hiding out because we had to, scratching nourishment from the woods.
We lived off huge alien mushrooms and bitter leaves. We slaked our thirst at the brownish river, hoping it wasn’t poisoned, swimming with cowshit: we couldn’t complain.
We’d arrived, after all.
Survived.
We weren’t locked up, or dead, or worse.
(There is worse.)
In a strange way, we had what we wanted.
In a sense, we were free.
So even in the midst of the hunger, the itching filth, the panic that kept us awake if the night-foxes didn’t, in the midst of a chronic discomfort we’d brought upon ourselves, there was a kernel of silvery something – call it relief.
The city was sinking. That much was clear. The slush-corrupted, tidal earth was slowly guzzling the buried foundations, gnawing the paving, chewing the streets.
‘I guess that’s why everyone left,’ I said, ‘all those years ago? Basements filled with water. Sofas floating out the door.’
Jackson nodded: ‘Hmmmmmmmh.’
He knew a few facts.
At first it was a rumour he couldn’t qualify, having never been here. A tale he’d heard somewhere, mentioned once or twice in the Citadel, about a town that had been abandoned, the streets lined with empty rooms.
They’d poured the concrete into trenches dug deep in the earth but the earth was soaking. It was riddled with hair’s-breadth waterways and stagnating pools. Amphibians luxuriated. Pond-weed skimmed the puddles. The river (we learned the hard way) flooded every spring.
I stand and cross the square to the fountain in the centre, a stone basin, unadorned. The windows of buildings opposite are dark, the others not yet awake.
Strange I can say that. The others. The friends, if that’s the word, with whom we live.
It wasn’t always the aim.
We went on walks to get a grip on the neighbourhood. The steel-works was a cathedral of rust. The houses were biscuits left out in the rain. The viaducts were highways of rubble and moss. We cycled down them. Ripples rang out as we crossed the puddles.
Months before arriving, we found some pictures of the place on our phones. They were film stock, black-and-white. I’d seen the diagrams, the architects’ schemes: colour-coded circles that intersected like atoms in molecules, Venn diagrams of idealised living.
A garden city.
That was the phrase.
I pictured a street lined with palm trees and dotted with towers of sunstruck gold, where lushness flourished in the gaps between sandstone palaces. I saw dirigibles sailing high over the glinting spires of ancient industry, a palace on a hill with steep steps all around.
Instead we got this dinner plate dropped on a marsh. Brick follies slowly sinking into mud beneath our boots, so wet you could practically swim in it. Unfinished roads thrusted like piers into grassy nothing, infrastructure patiently waiting for houses that never arrived.
On the far side of the cobbled square, the stones of which have been nudged loose by insistent grass, is the old Town Hall.
It’s my favourite part, right here, where the houses peter off and the main road slopes towards the factory brazen in morning sun. At the road’s end are the camouflage colours of the muddy grass, and, beyond that, the glint of the river.
The water flashes like a turning knife.
For a while I watch it stream.
Right there, beside the willow, is the patch of river-bank on which we landed.
I thought, back then, we were going to die.
Maybe starve. Maybe drown.
Most likely we’d be woken one morning by a knock on the door, and blackvests, lifters, or just a few men, would storm into our room and beat us.
I couldn’t eat. Jackson had slept so little his eyes were as wild as a trapped fox’s, scrabbling round the cage of our slow-moving barge.
We sailed for days and nights / moved through towns and fields / slept under stars / ate bitter berries / ducked from headlights / ran from bulls.
We smi
led at strangers on the waterways as if nothing at all was wrong. And then, after months, we arrived.
Unknown river. Strange trees.
No one anywhere.
Us.
I remember the feverish mood of the journey. Convinced we were being followed, I conjured spirits in every shadow, heard the madness of the chattering worms, and told myself the clouds were spacecraft, the sun a vast pitiless eye.
Every night, after mooring the boat, we would strike off into the fenlands, marshes, or fields beneath the crackling pylons. If there were woods nearby we would lose ourselves, lugging a two-man tent and a box of matches.
We foraged and stole our food.
Woody clumps of samphire burned our lips with salt.
I tightened my trousers with lengths of rope and swallowed pints of water for lunch.
Once I caught a rabbit, almost by accident. It was resting in a glade and I struck it. In the light of a sputtering fire, we began to skin the rabbit, fingers slick with its slippery, pastel guts. But the muscles beneath the fur were such a glossy, naked pink, so eerily like a newborn child’s, we couldn’t bring ourselves to eat it.
We spent about a year like that, patching up the old boat as best we could, losing our minds in that airless cabin, guided by fireflies and satellites, steering clear of the urban lights.
Things had begun to settle down, after the madness of the eviction, after that summer of riots.
But that was out there, in the country.
Our world was in here, on the boat.
Night in the woods had a feeling, one that cities hide us from: a daily dying of the world you only feel if you’re out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the skeletal shapes of ancient trees and the rustle of life in the undergrowth. The darkness creeps inside you. It taints your blood and stains your bones.
At night, the world died around us.
Every morning, it woke again.
The dawn was a pale blue medicine that soaked through a gauze of branches, tugging me out from shivering not-quite-sleep. It is dawn right now and I’m attuned to the music of water beyond the houses. Elastic shadows stretch across the street as I head for the river, ready to snap and vanish as the sun ascends.
The factory looms above the rooftops, tangled,
Arkady Page 14
