In the lobby, he presses the button to call the lift. The LED screen flashes dumbly: E-E-E.
‘Not again,’ Frank groans, rolling his eyes.
The brothers climb the narrow stairwell, thighs aching, grumpy with hunger, until they reach the twenty-first floor. A striplight twitches in the corridor. Canned laughter, muffled by a neighbour’s front door, reaches the brothers’ ears.
Leonard is at the stove, whistling atonally to an advert. The TV is perched on the barstool in the corner, wires trailing out to a daisy-chained extension cable. His walking stick is propped against the fridge, his rain mac draped across the door of an open cupboard. Packets of food are piled up in the corner: bags of potatoes, out-of-date ready meals, bricks of cheese.
‘Where you been?’ he asks, without turning to greet them. His hair is so thin it almost doesn’t exist: it hangs like a layer of fog around the wrinkly dome of his skull.
‘Football,’ Jackson sighs. ‘Bumped into some mates in the park.’
‘Bollocks,’ Leonard replies.
His skin is dappled with liver spots, freckles, and moles. On hot days, slumped in his deck chair, he snoozes in the wedge of heat that falls through the balcony door. He doesn’t walk so much as prowl, head low, knees bent, eyes searching. His incisors are uncommonly sharp. Frank once called him Leopard. The nickname stuck. The flat was the Leopard’s lair.
The lair is small enough that words like ‘living room’ and ‘bedroom’ have lost their meaning. Sometimes the brothers eat dinner on Leonard’s creaking bed, other times in the living room, surrounded by towers of cardboard boxes filled with the broken electrical goods Leonard fixes and resells to supplement his pension. Sometimes they sit in the kitchen and watch TV, which shows the brothers an unfamiliar world: aster footage of burning tower blocks, glitchy phone recordings of random attacks, politicians at podiums. Tonight, the TV is on, so they will eat in the tiny kitchen. Steam condenses on the ceiling in yellowish drips.
‘Give me a hand,’ says Leonard, and Jackson slouches over.
Dinner is fried tomatoes draped in ribbons of blackened onion, served with boiled rice and white beans. Jackson drools like a dog at the prospect of food. Leonard wheezes, his leathery neck expanding and contracting with each inhale, fingers flexing as he works.
‘Your instructor called,’ he croaks.
‘Did she? Why?’
‘I’m not a fucking idiot,’ Leonard says. ‘Don’t treat me like one.’
Years ago, if the brothers got into trouble, Leonard would slap them with the back of his hand. His knuckles, gravel-sharp, left deep bruises on their tender cheeks. He threw the brothers under cold showers, fully clothed, or locked them in the cupboard for hours on end.
‘What did she say?’ asks Jackson.
Leonard scrapes the last of the bubbling beans onto a plate.
‘She tried to fine me. I said be my guest – I can’t pay it. Not my fault if the kids went AWOL from your state-sponsored boot camp.’
Jackson carries his plate to the table. Frank taps a beat on the chequered plastic. ‘You aren’t mad?’
Leonard sighs. ‘It’s all politics, isn’t it?’ Everything is politics, according to Leonard. E-numbers. Adverts. Sea levels. Wars. ‘A bunch of cynical careerists and incompetent backstabbers,’ he snarls, lowering himself into his armchair, ‘sitting smug in their ivory towers, carpet-bombing instructors with regulations, and now this bureaucratic nonsense? Honestly, the sodding state of this cunting country.’
They gather round the tiny table. Trapped steam haloes the TV screen, diffusing its twitching light.
Jackson feels strangely nervous about the absence of punishment. Leonard used to tower above them, but now he is shrunken, brittle-looking, his skin so thin it looks almost translucent. He eats less, coughs more. The ranting rage has faded, and in its absence a sulking resignation has taken hold. Jackson told Leonard to see the doctor. But Leonard has seen the doctors – all the doctors, too many to count. He had the scans, tests, operations, inspections, drips and drugs and drainings. He watched blood get sucked from his shrivelled veins. He shat in a plastic pot. What more does Jackson want?
‘Ffanks for dinneh,’ Frank utters through a mouth crammed with food.
‘Frank,’ says Jackson. ‘Please.’
‘Sssshhhhhhhhh,’ Leonard hisses, jabbing a fork at the screen.
The newsreader sits beside a CGI graph: the red line plummets in a sawtoothed dive. Nonsense flashes on the bottom of the screen, ticker-tape strings of capital letters. The camera cuts to a pre-recorded report of a giant, sunstruck building. Dazed people flow from the revolving doors. They carry cardboard boxes filled with rulers, mugs, photos, files.
‘What are they doing?’ Jackson asks.
‘They got fired,’ says Leonard.
‘Why?’ asks Frank.
‘They broke the economy.’
Frank had no idea that you could break the economy. He doesn’t really know what ‘the economy’ is, exactly. He pictures a massive, infinitely complex machine: a computer the size of a mountain, denser than a city, shinier than gold, composed of intricate networks of iridescent strings. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The banks got greedy and now they’re fucked,’ says Leonard, dropping his fork to the table. ‘And so are we.’
On TV, the people walk away from the building, slightly aimless, lugging their boxes. ‘They going somewhere?’ Jackson asks.
‘Yeah,’ says Leonard. ‘To hell.’
Jackson remembers the early years in Leonard’s flat as a mixture of moods and confusions. Being in the flat felt like floating miles above the world, distant and superior, surveying the city spread below. At the same time, it felt like a dungeon, a prison, an underground cell. Some days the wind would barrel up the building’s side. The brothers let their paper planes shoot like rockets at the moon, their glowing bull’s eye. On calm nights they sent their planes sailing, spiralling, strafing through the cross-currents, and after their meandering fall they would land, many minutes later, on the car park below. It felt like sending messages, it felt like escape. Sometimes, Jackson remembered the flat was temporary. It brought him comfort. Other times he knew the opposite: that this was their life forever, this flat, this man, these walls, and this brought him comfort too. He couldn’t work it out. Some nights, he would creep onto the balcony and stand amid the plants whose leaves were blue-black in the darkness. He would look across the city and watch the streetlamps glow like Chinese lanterns on a tide, and feel alone, and feel connected to everything. He would sleep there, curled up on the balcony’s asphalt, dreaming of night winds and endless seas.
The brothers don’t have a bedroom. They sleep in a tumble of squishy cushions, sagging duvets, and bed sheets piled on the living room floor. It’s almost autumn, but the air is still warm, and so they leave the balcony door ajar. Fumes rise from the five-lane road. The city ticks and whirrs.
‘We going back to the office tomorrow?’ Frank whispers, kicking the duvet to make it dance.
‘Not tomorrow,’ says Jackson. ‘Soon.’
It’s time for the Dragon. Leonard lies pillow-propped in his bed, skin greyish in the light of the single bulb. His medicine box is like an advent calendar, a grid of miniature plastic chambers stuffed with an assortment of AM and PM pills. Leonard plucks a fat one from the box. Jackson watches the snake-like pulsing of Leonard’s throat as he swallows.
‘Where’d you go then?’ Leonard asks. His eyes are half-closed, his voice creaking. ‘You need to get better at lying. You don’t even like football.’
The Dragon – Frank gave it the name – is a dark green box, connected via a hose to a transparent plastic mask. Before, Leonard used it when he had an attack. Now he uses it every night.
Jackson flicks the switch. A coal-red light comes on and the Dragon whirrs.
‘I panicked,’ he confesses.
‘That’s why you have to prepare,’ says Leonard, raising a finger. ‘Otherwise they’ll ca
tch you. Didn’t you listen? I thought we went through it all. This is basic stuff.’
‘It’s harder with you,’ says Jackson. He tells Leonard about leaving the North District Institute that afternoon to visit the office he found. He explains it’s not the first lesson, they’ve been doing it for a while, and Leonard nods quietly, eyes half-open, wheezing. Jackson reaches the end of the story.
Leonard says nothing.
‘I thought you’d be mad,’ Jackson says.
Leonard just shakes his head. Jackson places the mask over Leonard’s mouth, which makes him look like a jetfighter pilot. He breathes long, rattling breaths and the Dragon breathes with him, in and out, in and out, pushing the oxygen deep inside and pulling the bad air out. Leonard’s asleep within moments. Jackson unclasps the mask from his face, tugs the duvet over his knees, and turns to leave. Leonard is already snoring. The shuddering glissando makes Jackson think of a bassoon, an instrument the brothers learned about on a science programme called The Beauty of Mathematics. The door shuts with a click. He turns to face the living room. Frank is asleep on the bedding on the floor, mouth agape, scribbled scraps of paper all over his chest.
III. A FLOATING HOME
Walking down the river path, Frank blinks towards the centre of town. Hot light slants from a restless sky, sheathing glass buildings in glare, reflecting off the tea-brown river to dazzle his eyes. The path teems with stressed-out commuters in sensible shoes. Leonard’s coat swings at Jackson’s shoulders, the black leather cracked like chapped skin. Frank scans the crowd as he walks. Most people’s gazes are zombie-vacant, transfixed by their phones or thin air. Others glower at the morning with radiant scorn.
Summer came early this year. Miasmas of rubbish-gas hang over bins. Brown grass crisps in the heat. There are rumours of rains but they never arrive. The papers are already calling it the hottest summer on record.
The brothers pass an ice cream truck. Bloody slicks of strawberry syrup ooze down white ridges of ice cream. They walk on. Coffee vapour haunts the air. Frank inhales the morning. Beneath the river’s brackish smell is something delicate and herbal, as though unseen flowers are blooming.
Stalled tourists squint at the river. An aster hangs high on a backdrop of clouds. The air throbs with the stuttering drone of its whirring blades. Frank should be used to the noise by now, but it always makes him nervous. Asters are meant to respond to riots, but Frank thinks they’re what start them. That sound. It does something to crowds. A barge tugs tonnes of junk downstream. Frank feels a brief pang of inexplicable joy.
The brothers take a left and reach an underpass under the train line. Curved brick amplifies the roar of passing cars. Trapped fumes linger, itchy at the back of Frank’s tonsils.
‘I’m hungry,’ he says.
‘You’re always hungry.’
‘I mean it this time.’
They emerge into the shadow of a half-built tower. Bundles of steel beams swing, glinting weightlessly mid-air. Glass panes flash in the rising light. Frank fixes his gaze to the pavement. Fissures branch like lightning through the slabs. A stupid thought occurs to him. Watching a tower get built is like watching a tower explode, except in reverse, in slow motion. He pictures a city of buildings of glass spires collapsing, reforming, collapsing.
A playground jumps with ballistic kids who scream as they fight and play, crisscrossing the rainbowed tarmac. Two weeks into the summer holidays, the city’s swimming pools are packed.
They head into a greenish patch of protected emptiness, ivy creeping up the walls. People in vests and straw hats kneel and make tea by a row of tents and airbeds under tarpaulin awnings. Others wash their hands in bowls of water. Hand-wrung clothes hang from a length of stretched twine. The brothers take a seat on a bench. Jackson breaks a flapjack and hands half to Frank. The sticky stodge reminds Frank of the honey toast Leonard cooked for pudding.
‘Listen,’ Jackson says, bringing Frank back to the garden. ‘I’ve found something. Something important. It floats.’
‘You’re not going to tell me about your shits, are you?’ Frank asks.
‘Drag your mind out of the gutter,’ says Jackson.
A pigeon struts in agitated pentagrams across the flagstone. The aster Frank saw earlier hangs in the morning, a fixed point, shredding the wind.
‘It’s a boat. A houseboat – one we can live in. It’s just sitting there. No one’s using it. We need somewhere to stay. So we take it. Simple as that.’
They walk towards the green. Jackson gestures at a stretch of blue hoarding at the far end of the road. A building has been partially demolished. Floor upon floor of flats stand gutted, wind rifling through the furniture. Yellowed wallpaper draped in peeling strips. Frayed sofas. Cracked basins. Tangled wires.
‘How about there instead?’ says Frank, grinning. ‘Set up in one of those rooms. Breeze would be nice in this heat.’
A digger’s toothed scoopers gnash the lip of a bathroom floor. A groan, a crack, and floorboards tumble: a sink breaks open, exhaling a cloud of pulverized plaster. Dust billows bright in the sun.
‘Listen,’ says Jackson, ‘I know it sounds weird but I’m being serious.’
‘I know,’ says Frank. ‘I’m just not sure what this is.’
Now and then, Frank and Jackson would return to Leonard’s flat – or what was left of it. The block had stood empty for months, inert as a headstone against the sky. Leonard had fought a bitter, bloody-minded battle with the council, who had offered him a smaller flat in a different city, miles away from anyone he knew. Jackson told him to take it. Frank stood in the doorway, peered through the cracked-open door, and watched them talk: Leonard, skeletal and whisper-quiet, low in his armchair and wheezing the Dragon; Jackson, arms folded, shivery with anger, pleading with the stubborn old man.
The building, when they returned, was a strange thing to look at. Frank had grown up there, could remember no previous home, but now it had the look of a dead thing, an architectural corpse. Growing up, the courtyards and alleys echoed with bouncing balls, running feet, and skittering radios. The balconies were stuffed with plants, bikes, drying clothes. Flags billowed here and there, like sails, and made the building look, to Frank, like an enormous and ramshackle cruise ship, sailing tall and proud through the city. He believed for a while that all towers were boats anchored to the earth, which at any moment could uncouple from gravity and sail away, should their captains decide to depart. What else could explain all those blocks that vanished overnight, and all those shiny new towers that sailed in to replace them?
It happened slowly at first. The evenings grew eerily quiet. Fewer lights in the windows. Letters slid under doors. Court cases between tenants and landlords fizzled out in defeat for the former. Protests were quietly ignored. Families vanished, there one evening, gone the next. Men in hardhats and hi-vis waistcoats materialised, sealing the doors of freshly vacated flats with sheets of perforated metal. They cling-filmed the windows and poured concrete down the toilets.
None of it made sense. So Frank and Jackson developed a theory: residents were being taken off and slaughtered. The word ‘decanting’ started floating around. The brothers came to believe that this was a gruesome form of industrialised murder. They pictured people being herded into vans, driven to out-of-town facilities, where they were blitzed to soup in giant blenders and poured into vats of gore.
The parapet is barely higher than Frank’s shin. He steps onto it and looks down. Sheer glass plummets beneath him, a wall of warped reflections doubling the street. Black stains of spat-out chewing gum dot the pavement. The distance bristles with cranes. Closer to, Frank glimpses unfinished structures of brick and steel, hollow shapes like excavated ruins or the skeletons of sunken galleons.
The air tastes singed. It must be laced with invisible dust, the atmosphere flooded with smog and scurf and powdered grit wafted up from sites all over the city, excavations, demolitions, endless pile-driving and digging unleashing clouds of particles like trees shedd
ing pollen in spring, the dead cells of vanished structures migrating down the streets and into his nose, his lungs, where they seep into his bloodstream, the city warping his biology, concrete hardening bone.
He wanders down the parapet. The blocks beneath his feet are wide, but when he stretches out his arms he feels like a tightrope walker. One misstep and he’ll fall.
‘A boat is a floating piece of space,’ Jackson declares, reading off his phone, ‘a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and… at the same time—’
Frank is fond of heights. He likes to climb cranes after dark and sit in the pods, pulling levers and pushing unresponsive buttons while he gazes over the amber grid, the lit channels of main roads and the bobbled black texture of public parks. Whenever he climbs a crane he reaches a point, roughly two thirds up, when the buildings fall away. It feels like bursting out of water and tasting air. He loves the freshness of cooler atmosphere, the wind on his cheeks, the horizon’s clean unbroken line. He watches heaps of sand and stone and the tangled metal beneath him, the silver-black river’s curved flank, countless points of light like a galaxy’s stars, his stiff fingers gripping the rungs. Being up here, on the parapet’s edge, feels like that, too. He is standing on the roof of the world: unseen, seeing everything. The world is a map.
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ he says.
‘It’s Foucault. He says this thing about boats which is really—’
Frank zones out: he finds it dull and annoying when Jackson talks about theory. It makes him feel like he’s at the Institute, which is not the point of these lessons. He makes a mental effort to blank out his brother’s words.
Buses throb in the stalling traffic. Frank pulls a fistful of crap from his pocket: a crumpled ticket, a chunk of gum like a broken tooth. The wind tugs flecks of lint from his palm and he watches them float like dandelion seeds, swirling in the dust of demolished buildings.
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