Jackson looks up from his phone. ‘You know what happens if you fall, right?’
‘I’m familiar with gravity, yes,’ says Frank.
A bead of sweat dribbles down his spine. Later this afternoon, the heat will reach that itchy, aggravating pitch that inspires drunk people to brawl.
‘Is something going on today?’ he asks, glimpsing hints of a distant park. ‘A protest maybe?’
‘Not that I know of,’ says Jackson. ‘Why?’
‘No reason,’ says Frank.
The roof is one of their favourite places. The faulty fire exit is easily opened from a back alley, and the stairwell leads straight up to the unlocked door. They’ve been coming here for months and only once got caught. Frank doesn’t mind the risk. He likes the view. He can see for miles. North, towards the hills and the pylons. East, towards the estuary. South, towards the forests of cranes.
At night the brothers climb up with cans of beer. They lie on their backs with rucksacks for pillows. They stare at the blanket of zero stars as the sky-snakes unfurl in the eastern districts: shimmers of crimson and indigo as the factories blow waste-vapours into the breeze. The smoke is toxic. Everyone knows and nothing changes. In sheltered dwellings across the marshes, babies are born with no eyes, four arms, webbed toes, no legs, or so the rumours go. Someone told Frank that the colours are added to the gases, a hypnotic distraction from the damage they cause.
He remembers one particular night. The sky was a different colour because of the moon. Something to do with a shift in the atmosphere, which worked on the sky like a lens. The pitted orb was comically huge. It looked like it would crash into earth any moment.
‘There are oceans on the moon,’ said Frank, feeling recklessly sentimental and dizzily drunk.
‘Fuck off,’ Jackson replied.
‘The Sea of Tranquillity. The Sea of Fecundity.’
‘The Sea of Bullshit.’
‘I’m serious!’ said Frank, a chuckle sparking inside him. ‘The Serpent Sea. The Sea of… Cold, I think.’
He remembers that night so clearly because of how strong and strange it felt to want to tell his brother he loved him. He wanted to say it as simply and as stupidly as that. It was embarrassing. He didn’t care. He would tell his brother he loved him because one day they’d both be dead and maybe Jackson would never know. But the feeling failed to summon the words, so he said something stupid instead.
‘One of them’s called The Sea of Moisture.’ He waited a moment, heart pounding. ‘That’s a fucking weird name for a sea.’
Jackson kept a wad of money in a box at the bottom of his rucksack, cash set aside from his decorating jobs. He blew his money on a bicycle, second-hand, picked up off some guy on a forum who swore he hadn’t stolen the thing but was blatantly lying. Sprayed black, the bike had drop handlebars and old-style lever gears. The chain clicked and flickered as Jackson cycled, pedalling so hard the headlamps blurred as he overtook cars and trucks, wind screaming like a plane engine in his ears. Drivers honked as he veered across the lanes; they wound down their windows and hurled abuse until their faces turned puce with road-rage. Jackson didn’t give a shit. He was moving through the city, a dizzy rush of limbs and gears. He had places to be.
Somewhere else. The phrase sang in his head as he cycled. Somewhere else. Somewhere else. Somewhere else. He was sick of here. This. These streets. These people. This sky. He wanted a world beyond it all. Beyond the pigeon-nibbled chicken bones and dirty curbs. Beyond the stop-start traffic lights and the pavements that teemed like virulent petri dishes. Beyond the dim scream of his nervous system, the endless pressure in his head. Somewhere else. He didn’t know where it was – that was the point – but he knew how to look for it. He got lost. And when he was lost, he kept going.
It was late. He’d been cycling for hours and the city was deserted. He scanned the empty street, trying, and failing, to get his bearings.
He slowed to a crawl, tyres crackling like static on the rain-wet road, and glanced up at the bright signs of a handful of shops. A column of compacted flesh rotated slowly in a kebab shop window. Jackson considered asking the guy behind the counter what part of the city he’d strayed into, but then he realised that he didn’t want to know. He felt like a kid again. Roaming the streets for no other reason than a hunger to run, to get lost. He turned left at the junction, peeled off down a twisting road. At the roundabout he took the darkest, narrowest turning, and his bike began to judder as the tarmac gave way to cobblestones. The long street curved past corrugated walls and wire-mesh fences. He saw brown brick structures, crumbling smokestacks, gleaming conjunctions of glass and steel. And then, to his right, the gaping entrance to a wasteland. An old and faded sign, daubed on a plank of wood by hand, was fixed to the wonky gate with a rusty screw: Ever wondered what happens when you die?, it read. Trespass here and find out!
After locking his bike to a drainpipe, he heaved himself over the wall. The gravel expanse held a strange glow in the darkness, as if its surface was dusted with pulverised moonlight. Squat plants jutted through the sheet of powdered rock, and black tyres were stacked in towers amidst the stiff, twisted fronds. When Jackson reached the far end of the clearing, he tasted water on the air. It was a creek. The muddy banks gleamed beneath the amber of the streetlamps, lamps he could not see directly but whose glow was reflected and diffused by the pollution that hung above the city like the dome of a cathedral. A silver trail ran down the centre of the channel, flowing towards the river, the gaping estuary, the sea. Footprints littered across the mud, tiny asterisks left by wandering birds. Reeds bristled against the brick, black rubber, and iron, while the far bank, now he looked closer, was clotted with broken wood, and draped with capes of algae. How had he never been here before? This tiny, twisting creek had escaped Jackson’s meticulous mapping.
It was late but he wasn’t tired. He went exploring, wandering down the skinny ledge that ran alongside the banks. The cold rising off the mud was pungent. It smelled somehow nutritious, laced with minerals, vitamins, and other strange, good things, despite the copper-salt tang of rotting seaweed.
He saw the boat a short while later. Something about the angle at which it rested, not quite flush with the wall, intrigued him. He had passed other boats already, barges with protruding ribs and rotten boards, boats with busted hulls and gaping sides. But this particular boat looked different, promising, and oddly familiar, like a face he dimly remembered but could not put a name to. As he edged towards the boat, step by slow step down the wall, Jackson was overcome by the sensation that he was walking towards his own death. By stepping into the lightless void of the boat’s interior, he would enter a kind of Hades: a dark inversion of the city he hated and loved, around which he would drift like a pale, forgotten thing, a shadow of a shadow of a shadow. He liked the idea of oblivion. If this boat was his tomb, so what? Nothingness would be a relief. The padlock on the wheelhouse door came loose with a quick smack, and he stepped into the dark.
For a moment, there was nothing. No light. No sound. Then, steadily, his senses adjusted.
Pale light sifted through slits in the curtains, falling in pools on the speckled carpet. The air was thick with a fug of mildew and mould. He held his breath and listened. The sound of the water rushing past the boat echoed the pulsing of blood in his veins, the ceaseless tides within his body. Breathing again, he inspected the rooms at the back of the boat, grim little cabins with squishy-looking mattresses he half expected to find corpses lying in, their leathery skin stretched loose over cages of bone. Back in the main room, he opened the stove. Its metal chamber was dusted with ash. He scrunched up an old receipt and lit it with his lighter, watched it curl and burn and cast a brief, amber light on the floor.
The flames sank and finally died: darkness flooded the room. The boat had changed somehow; it felt different, every particle strangely charged. He saw what it would look like in daylight, clean and fixed and sailing smoothly. The night was cold but his blood was burning. He
stood in the wheelhouse as the dark water flowed and saw it lead him away from here, out of the city.
They cycle to the derelict stretches of the city’s southeast. Frank has never been here before. It feels like a different city, a grey maze of empty yards and anonymous warehouses. The pavements are pale and strangely clean, as if freshly unwrapped from the package. The boxy trains on the overpass drive themselves. An old brick bridge stretches over fenced yards and a clutter of buildings, low and stooped beneath sheet-metal roofs. In a row of garages and wrecking yards, mechanics prowl round the gnarled hulks of crashed cars. An LED screen flashes red and blue above the door of Mount Ararat Ministries, garish against the rain-washed paint:
THE END OF ALL FLESH IS COME BEFORE ME FOR THE EARTH IS FILLED WITH VIOLENCE
The brothers have been cycling for over an hour, rucksacks knocking on their spines. Frank is sticky with sweat all over. Chests heaving, they take turns with a plastic bottle.
‘Don’t backwash,’ Jackson says.
‘Fuck off,’ Frank replies, grinning. He lifts the bottle to chug the last gulps and kicks dust at his brother.
They cycle down the road that curves off to a playground. Three young women spin on the merry-go-round, passing a joint back and forth. At the churchyard they take a sharp left, a right, left again, then straight down a cobbled street, past an abandoned café and a hand-wash garage. Bored workers are playing dominoes.
Frank detects a new smell as they move, a breath of salt and silt. A path leads off towards a bridge. The bro-thers walk down it and lock up their bikes.
Low tide in the creek. Rugs of emerald moss are draped on the mud. Heavy, brown-brick wharves huddle round the banks and machinery looms in the dust-spooked windows. A mouse darts over the wall, swift and silent as the shadow of a bird. Frank can hear the rush of traffic, the whir of the aster’s blades, but they are quieter than the sounds of the creek: the rush of water and the drip-dripping of moss.
‘How did you find this place?’ he asks.
‘I went for a walk,’ Jackson shrugs, a sly grin on his face.
Old boats litter the mud. Frank casts his eye across the discarded things, as useless as the wrecked and rusting cars he glimpsed in the MOT depots earlier.
The brothers make sure not to slip on the stretches of algae that interrupt the thin path. Moisture thickens the humid air, more of a mist than a rain. The creek bends right as they walk, curving as the water curves to open new views. Patches of flourishing buddleia burst through the brick walls on the opposite bank. Jackson slows to a halt.
When he sees what his brother is pointing at, Frank’s mouth flops open. ‘Are you kidding?’ he gasps.
It looks like a gnarled lump of coral, scorched and peeling, swelling from the stinking mud.
‘Needs a bit of work,’ says Jackson. ‘Nothing we can’t handle.’
‘It’s a ruin.’
‘Cosmetic,’ says Jackson. ‘Trust me.’
He steps on to the roof of the boat and unlocks the padlock in the wheelhouse door. Frank has no idea how his brother does it. He works ten-hour days painting walls, and spends hours each night on his bike, doing Frank doesn’t know what, before crashing in the bedsit for a couple of hours and starting over again.
Frank steps aboard. The paint is flaked and rusty, but the barge feels as solid as stone.
‘What is it about the words “trust me” that make me immediately suspicious of a person?’ he asks.
‘Cynicism,’ Jackson replies.
Frank grips the railing and leans overboard. The curved front of the barge is bearded with algae. Its lower regions are skirted with silt. He stares at the rusty hole from which an anchor might have dangled.
Frank holds his tongue. He hasn’t seen inside the boat yet. Maybe something awesome is lurking in this destitute shell. Maybe it marks the entrance to an underground lair, a hidden system of subterranean caves and thundering waterfalls. Why else would Jackson bother? The boat is a piece of shit. The rain-swollen wood of the wheelhouse has the porous look of wet bread.
Frank daydreams about swimming in cool, clear water as he stares at the banks of dull mud.
He follows Jackson into the wheelhouse. The space is occupied by a slanted panel inset with buttons, levers, keyholes, and dials, with a giant wooden wheel in the centre.
This, at least, is something.
Frank grips the wheel. He pictures himself as the captain, guiding the boat through mountains of thrashing water, or through the starry depths of outer space as celestial squid fly past. He bashes coloured buttons at random, but the wheel won’t budge. It annoys him. He grips a handle and yanks with all his strength. A grinding sound shudders in the bowels of the boat.
‘Shit – did I break it?’
Jackson laughs.
They step through the door in the back of the wheelhouse and into the main cabin. Patches of mildew blacken the walls. Moss has grown between window and frame. Beige fronds spill from the guts of a torn cushion. There’s a tiny kitchen to the right, furniture in the middle, and an iron stove at the far end. Frank blinks in the dimness, shifting his weight from foot to foot. The blue suede curtains dampen the light.
‘Couldn’t we just find a flat,’ he says, ‘or a warehouse or something? Someplace dry? This boat is… disgusting,’ he says, pretending to choke on the air.
Jackson stares at the stove. Fresh wood is piled beside it and crumbly ashes are heaped on the grate.
‘It’s about what it could become,’ he says. ‘It’s about picturing something insane, and then actually doing it.’
Jackson is in one of his abstract moods. He leads Frank to the room in the back of the boat. A bed is wedged against the curved wall, pillows dim in the portholes’ light. Frank peers at the words and the pictures. Maps, drawings, photographs, charts, photocopied pages and handwritten quotes are pinned collage-like to the walls. There’s a blurry photograph of their mother on the shingle in the blue night under the moon, a nuclear power station far away in sloped dark. He sees some of his own drawings, too. Like the portrait of himself as a monkey god. He hasn’t seen the drawing in ages. He had no idea Jackson had kept it.
Being in this room makes Frank feel as if he’s been sucked into Jackson’s head. There are confessional notes, diary entries, which Frank feels too embarrassed to read. There are maps and attempts at drawing. Hand-copied quotations from the essays Jackson argues about with strangers online. This boat, this visit, is not some spur-of-the-moment thing. Frank is here for a reason. There’s a dark spark in the back of Jackson’s eyes that Frank hasn’t seen since they lived with Leonard.
Jackson has assembled a makeshift desk from the door of a kitchen cabinet and two low stools. At the centre is a cardboard model of the boat, beads of dried glue gleaming at the joins. The tiny rooms are kitted out with model furniture. Circles the size of bottle caps are cut in the cardboard walls. Frank peers through them at the matchbox sofa and fights the urge to laugh. He rarely feels protective of his brother. But this model is so tiny, so fragile, that he begins to confuse it with Jackson, who seems equally vulnerable here.
A huge map of the country dominates the main wall. Jackson has embellished it with a network of blue lines. They branch like veins across the map.
‘Canals,’ says Jackson. ‘Old pathways. Hardly anyone uses them now. They’ll take us wherever we want.’
Frank follows the looping lines with his finger. He’s only been out of the city a couple of times. He went on a trip once with the District Institute, years ago, to a youth hostel, where they rambled round ruined castles and scooped pearls of gelatinous frogspawn into glass jars, waiting for them to hatch. But the only world he’s ever known is the one he grew up in. Tarmac. Sirens. Pollen. Towers. The thought of leaving fills him with a confusion of excitement and dread, a sense of anticipation that borders on fear. Jackson’s text said: something to show you, meet me at 8. No further explanation; no sense of destination or aim.
There is work to do, paint
ing and clearing. The brothers get dressed in paint-spattered shorts and T-shirts. It’s still too hot. Frank peels his top off and opens the windows, opens the doors. The breeze is feeble but better than nothing. Slowly, the tide fills the creek. Soon it is sliding calmly past the boat with a faint glassy sound. An old radio rests in the corner. It has a telescopic antenna and a horizontal dial. Broadcasts wrestle for frequency. Speed garage collides with hip-hop and dissolves into static, interrupted by billows of grainy opera. Frank fiddles with the dial. He feels that if he found the right frequency, he could tune into Jackson’s thoughts. Instead he finds local talk radio and pirate stations. He knows he is looking for something. A stray voice in an ocean of noise.
Frank goes slowly snow-blind, pushing, pulling the paint-soaked roller, eyes fixed on the whitening walls. He should be bored but he isn’t. It’s oddly fun to measure time by distance instead of duration, counting the hours by the square-metre, watching the work progress. The sound of the rollers calms him. But he is Frank. His mind wanders, gets lost in the woods. Soon his concentration slackens completely. He gibbers nonsense and stares at his toes.
‘Arrk arrk arrrrrrrrrkk,’ he squawks, flapping his arms. He stops. ‘Hey Jackson.’
‘What?’
‘It is kind of like an ark, isn’t it?’
Jackson claps his hands to get rid of the dust. ‘You need a break,’ he says.
They perch on the wall and watch a swan glide down the water. The bird is such a clean, bright white, and moves with such grace through this landscape of mud and rust that Frank believes it is a mythical creature, a minor god in animal form. Frank had no idea how hungry he was until now. He wolfs down fistfuls of bread, biscuits, crisps. After lunch he lies back and rests his head on a tuft of weed. His lids glow purplish red in the sun. Frank’s feelings have changed since this morning. Maybe Jackson is right. The barge is both a weapon and a refuge. It isn’t just a vehicle: it’s a key to unlock geography.
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