Arkady
Page 16
Hot chunks stood in a jagged heap with thick dust floating off them.
The debris was studded with jutting metal and glass and in places I spotted crushed sofas, smashed fridges, broken mirrors, broken window frames – a blitzed heap of a ruined building, a tangle of broken homes.
Jackson tied a bed sheet round my neck, swimming goggles over my eyes. I was a comic-book hero, a dirty city Superboy, cape afloat behind me as I climbed.
My brother had begun to teach me about the world and our place within it, how we lived in the shadows, unwanted, unseen. We were kids who came from nothing, were nothing. The city would only make room for us if we forced it to, the way you force a door with a crowbar, or use plumber’s freeze to smash a lock:
these little acts were ways of opening space to breathe in a city that didn’t want us, wouldn’t protect us, narrowed choices to a flatline.
That afternoon, a Sunday I think, the building site a burning basin of heat and light, we summoned a kingdom of dust. It lasted a couple of hours, but in those hours we were electric.
I began to understand
or maybe just feel
a sense of freedom on the rubble’s peak, white dust-spires swaying like serpents around me,
my hands on my hips and the sun in my eyes and a thick taste of dust in my mouth.
I squinted down the mountain at the chunk of shadow in which my brother stood.
It must have been an illusion: the city disappeared.
All I could see was Jackson, the patch of ground he stood on, like an island in empty space. I lifted my hand and waved at him, screamed at him to join me, watched him clamber up the concrete and into the heat of the sun.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to: Jacques Testard, for guidance, insight, and support, without which this book would not exist; Alice Hattrick, for invaluable conversations about structure and tone – much of what’s best in this book is thanks to her; to Ray O’Meara, for his beautiful design; Ben Eastham and Matt Gold, who read the novel in early drafts and provided important feedback and much-needed encouragement; and Francesca Wade, for casting her precise eye across the final draft. I am grateful to Arts Council England, who provided a grant that enabled me to complete a first draft of the novel. I am also, as ever, grateful to my parents for their unflagging support, and to my sister, who helped me understand what it means to be a brother.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Langley is a writer who lives in London. He writes about art for frieze, Art Agenda, and other publications. He is a contributing editor at The White Review. Arkady is his first novel.
COPYRIGHT
Fitzcarraldo Editions
243 Knightsbridge
London, SW7 1DN
United Kingdom
Copyright © Patrick Langley, 2018
Images © Patrick Langley, 2018
Originally published in Great Britain
by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2018
The right of Patrick Langley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
ebook ISBN 978–1–910695–52–4
Design by Ray O’Meara
Typeset in Fitzcarraldo
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