grand, and castle-grey.
When Jackson told me he knew an empty town, I didn’t believe him. Sounded like bullshit to me. But
then we travelled along the river
through the city’s lights
past the ship yards and docks where the river twists inland and the city gives way to suburb
the suburb gives way to trees
the trees gather in woods that brood
on low hills and flood
the valleys
and there it was:
the dead place we’d come to revive.
A mad industrialist built it sometime last century, Jackson said. The plan was to revolutionise manufacture but the whole thing flopped. He was trying too hard to be opposites, I guessed: a filthy-rich utopian.
There were factories, a steel works, workers’ houses – a boom town, all of it shut down now.
The company busted and jobs dried up.
Since then it had been left to grow wild, coloured by spray-paint murals and darkened by scars of arson, but otherwise empty. If this had happened in the capital, our city of birth, the land would have been flattened decades ago and turned into a Bad Thing (as we saw it then) stuffed with luxury flats for numbskull squill-ionaires in cahoots with the Powers that Be, the Powers who’d scorned us, the Powers we loathed – opinions that make me cringe so hard today it feels like my face will implode.
I drift into the terraces, neat lines of near-identical two-up-two-downs. They look like copy-pasted jpegs.
This is where Jackson lives.
For a while we lived together under the same roof, partly out of fear – we thought we’d be busted in the early hours, like the night of eviction. But we drove each other nuts, and in time our shouting came to blows. So, for the last five years, we’ve kept a distance.
His house isn’t quite en-route, so I take a detour.
Squinting at the light streaming down from the sky, inhaling air that smells of coldness and silt from the river, I reach a front garden. An enamel bathtub is filled with rainwater. It wasn’t there the last time I passed. The soupy water is flecked with fallen leaves that pool around stone gnomes and clay pots filled with plastic roses.
Something tickles the back of my brain
like a waterweed brushing my foot as I swim.
It takes a while before I nail it: the Citadel’s front yard had a similar bath, and in the bath were plastic gnomes.
Jackson’s curtains are drawn.
For once I’m the early riser, the go-getter, and when I return triumphant to the yard, steaming with effort and strength, my face a little sun-brushed, my arms muscled and bulging and glossed with sweat, he will see that I’ve returned – his younger brother, his weaker other – and he will say:
‘Frank, by golly, you’ve fixed the wall!’
And I shall reply:
‘Yes, brother Jackson, I did so. Witness the birth of a new beginning.’
The road’s end. Another detour, to the factory this time. Ivy crawls over its outer walls. Ladders glimmer in the sliding light.
I pause.
Someone is watching.
I turn and scan the grass and the buildings’ windows, squinting across the dark panes. I think, perhaps, Jackson has followed. I wait for a while and watch.
My brother used to tell me that we’d never have a home unless we built it for ourselves. He wanted me to know that the world wasn’t easy, life was a grind. Getting dirty, being bruised, wrecked, ruined, broken by the world, were part of his bloody mind-set. He had a lot of rage back then (still does) but it was channelled in peculiar ways.
Most of the time, he worked his anger out through me.
I was a lightning rod, a punch-bag, a piece of clay.
I was his project, his burden, his brother.
And in his odd, awkward way I guess that’s what he meant by ‘a city inside us’.
He did mean an actual place, a physical structure, a solid version of those buildings he forced me to draw when we lived in the city. But more than that (I think) he wanted family.
A seagull swings into view, riding currents of air.
I can’t see Jackson or anyone else. So I continue my trudge to the factory, haunted by the sense of being watched, convincing myself it was just the white bird.
The factory is out of bounds. But no one obeys the rules, least of all me. The side-door creaks as I slip inside.
The cushioned smell of moss and the hush of the
building;
dust-motes thickened to mortar
in columns of solid sun.
For a while, I thought that Jackson and I could live in here. We would build four-poster beds in giant spaces and live like kings. I wandered through the rooms with my brother, astonished. Wild stuff had crept inside. The floors had bred carpets of earth.
Vines darkened the windows, thick webs like optical nerves.
Pigeons thronged the distant eaves, foxes padded through blast furnaces and rolling mills, mice scuttled down huge ceramic vats and spindly conveyor belts.
Trees grew slantwise in the mortar.
In one of the rooms, where a huge furnace stood like an oversized human heart, bulging with veins of chrome, a hole in the roof allowed sunlight to pierce the gloom, and in this pool of light a twisted, hard-leafed shrub had grown.
I kick a rusted bolt and watch it skitter: a dotted line dashed through the dust.
Some nights, if the weather’s bad, we will gather here, after dark, and drink, smoke, talk. Groups of us, ten or twenty. We might cook food. Someone might strum a guitar (I wish they wouldn’t). Someone might carry their laptop in, and we’ll watch something on the screen.
Jackson once said that two people could make a society. The way we were with each other, the way we behaved, could set the conditions for it. Now we have more than two. We have a town of strangers who’ve since become friends, people from the cities and suburbs or further afield.
I head back outside, squinting.
For days last week, the water was high but not yet muddy. You could see the grass sway in it like green hair. I ran down in the afternoon like an idiot, wearing nothing but underwear, and dove headfirst.
Now I head down the sloping grass towards the wall.
I’m not yet thirty – I’m no old man – but the morning keeps bringing me back, and now I see a night, many years ago now, which I’ve tried my best to bury.
We didn’t know what to do. We tried to wake the man but he was dead, we couldn’t wait. Asters circled overhead, the blackvest trucks were parked nearby: it would be minutes before they found us.
Jackson turned the key. The boat throbbed to life. I gripped the hammer – I couldn’t let go – as the boat slid along the canal.
The man lay sprawled at my feet like a rag doll, leaking blood on a crumpled rug. Through the windows I couldn’t see much, just water as we moved.
I tied the man’s wrists with duct tape and joined my brother in the wheelhouse. He didn’t say a word; he didn’t ask about the man; we stood in the tense wooden box, and the strangest thing happened.
It had not happened before that point. It has not happened since.
I felt his thoughts and he felt mine. We didn’t speak: we didn’t have to.
As the boat swung slowly round the bends in the branching canal and the buildings loomed dark and tall as cliffs we knew that any one of those broken windows could be hiding eyes, and that the skies were adrift with asters combing the ground with their lights.
In our panicked frame of mind we made a false equivalence: that if we were caught we might as well have been killed, because our lives would be over.
The boat swung round the canal’s last bend and we saw through the rain-spat windshield the river galloping past, lit by the firefly bulbs of the apartment buildings on the far banks, with the towers to the west and the skyscrapers to the east.
We entered the river’s flow and I slipped outside.
On the deck, in pummelling ra
in, I crept down the boat as it swayed on the river and gripped the skylight to steady myself. Beyond the clustered anonymous apartment complexes, past the building sites and ruined wharves, I caught a glimpse of the flicker of dying flames and the spotlights pointed down and the smoke leaking skyward, a tower of vapour.
I saw no eyes. I heard no sirens.
Instead I saw, further upriver, a clutch of boats and a crosshatch of bridges. The river thinned to a heart of light; downriver, the riverbanks widened into darkness. And even though it was the wrong direction, I told my brother to go that way – to strike out from the city.
Jackson nodded because he knew. He was already turning the wheel.
I check the damage to the drystone wall. I pull the gloves on and get to work, knees creaking as I duck and lift the stones.
Every stone is a different shape, has a different weight. Some are perfect rectangles, all sharp edges and clean lines; others are broken shards and flints, like you might find on a primitive weapon, or lodged in a caveman’s collarbone. A drystone wall is like a jigsaw. You fit the pieces back together until it’s fixed.
I get started.
The barge was a small, slow vessel. Its engine hummed and throbbed, a senile putter, no urgency, maddeningly slow. The far banks dribbled past. We were overtaken by other, faster vessels that shed expanding Vs of wake and made our barge sway as we moved.
Soon we were under the financial towers rising miles into the sky like crystal cliffs, the air around them radiated with turquoise light. At their tops they gave off gusts of white smoke, red lights flashing to warn off planes.
We sailed on.
The boat in its highest gear.
But still we dawdled, pottered, dragged our wet heels through the water as the sky began to brighten overhead and the banks on either side resolved to vague forms, a wall of shadow becoming distance becoming beach.
I think we’d lost our minds by that point. But we tried to bury our burden.
Black sand under our fingernails.
Grit of crustacean shells.
We travelled across the estuary in the pale dawn, bone-tired, Jackson at the wheel. I gripped the rungs on the front of the boat squinting into the rain and the cold stinging air.
I went back down into the boat, not knowing what else to do, and squatted and peered at the lifter’s face. It was like a joke-shop zombie mask, lifeless rubber, but his eyes were spinning beneath closed lids.
My instinct was to hit him.
To kill him properly and for good.
This dead man, now alive, or half alive, was possibly brain-dead; at minimum, very badly concussed. I did the only thing I could have done. I called my brother.
Daylight on the river. Across the estuary we saw the enormous commercial ports with their red-blue-yellow containers stacked like toys.
Further out, wind turbines stood like mechanical daffodils, slow blades keeping time in the ocean’s distance. The boat chugged petrol and we steered a slow course back in the direction we’d sailed from, back to land.
One option.
We came to a shuddering halt beside a wharf on the northern bank. Near was a boatworks with skippers, trawlers, lasers, longboats in the driveway. The lifter was almost awake, baby-talking, stringing half-words together as I wrapped a strip of fabric round his eyes (he’d seen us already – we hoped he’d forget).
Together we lugged him ashore for the second time that morning.
I thought that maybe we were trapped in an infinite loop: purgatory. He could stagger, just about, with us for balance as he stumbled, us caked in sand. We slumped up a ramp and down a sideroad.
An alcove between two buildings; a shadowed lee in which to hide.
Both our phones were dead so Jackson emptied his wallet, found two silver coins, and ran off for a payphone, if payphones still existed, we didn’t know. And then it was me and him, the man I’d almost killed.
He was groaning, his head to one side. I felt sorry for him then – for the first time ever, actually. He looked like a fever-sick kid.
Motherless, lost.
I saw myself as Jackson once described me. Sitting on a rock, happy, laughing, knowing nothing as we walked through a valley in punishing sun.
The man was pawing at the blindfold, breathing deep erratic breaths, and so I told him to stop. He wasn’t blind, he’d had an accident, that’s all.
I teased his hands away.
At first it was babble-snatches.
Later, half-formed words emerged.
He asked me where he was and what had happened.
I think that’s what he asked, anyway; the words turned to mush in his mouth. I told him he’d tripped and banged his head, fallen into the river, and help was on its way.
Jackson appeared at the end of the road. I put a finger to my lips; my brother whispered he’d made the call and he told me to leave. I lingered. The man was drifting in and out of consciousness, writhing in delirious pain. I found it hard to leave him
but Jackson tugged my arm again: he hadn’t told me to leave but to lift.
We needed to dunk the man. Get rid of our fingerprints, skin cells, hair, the fibres of our clothes – any microscopic, miniscule thing that could connect us to him.
So we carried the mumbling man to the cold brown water. We unzipped the grey boiler suit, tugged it off his arms, torso, legs, and waist. He lay there naked in the dawn. His skin was as pale as candlewax; he was tugging at his blindfold like a nervous dog. We dunked his body in the slosh –
the strangest thing happened.
His body went limp. His muscles relaxed.
An almost-smile dawned on his face.
We lowered his head after that, performing what must have looked from afar like a baptism. Then we dragged him onto shore, jumped aboard the boat, and sailed away.
After that, we checked the news repeatedly. We googled:
man killed estuary
missing killers
jackson frank
citadel murder
coma lifter
missing suspects citadel assault
We even set up email alerts. But nothing, no news.
A year and a half after arriving here, once we had finally convinced each other that we hadn’t been tracked, we went to a payphone in a nearby town, in hats and scarves to hide our faces, and stood together in the plastic box as the rain poured around us and the bright yellow trams rattled past.
Jackson dialled Nell’s mobile. We weren’t sure she would answer, or if she even had the same number. Then her voice came on the line, croaky, distant, still familiar.
She was surprised, relieved, to hear from us. No one knew what had happened, where we’d gone. She asked us where we were. We didn’t tell her, didn’t know how far the word would spread.
She hadn’t heard about a lifter.
Actually no, she said, she had heard something, actually – but it was one among many – the eviction had been carnage, historic for all the wrong reasons. Hijacked. Corrupted.
They hadn’t been able to identify anyone. And yes, the blackvests asked her who it might have been, but no, she hadn’t told them.
Caspar hadn’t been so lucky. He’d gone to court with bloody stitches like a zip down the side of his head and would be in jail, it seemed, for a very long time.
Lali had also been arrested. Suspended sentence. We asked about Arthur. The line went quiet.
‘You haven’t heard?’
Arthur died that night.
It must have happened shortly after we left. Towards the end of the eviction, he rampaged around the Citadel’s empty rooms, setting light to mattresses, furniture, sheets: a blaze of glory (he’d have thought).
When they finally caught him, collapsed in the smoke of the blaze, he was lucid. Then, while they drove him away, he slumped.
Jackson went quiet.
We asked Nell what she was doing. We said she should come and live with us in the new place, our garden city. We would find somewhere for he
r to work; she could use the steel works as a studio. She said she’d think about it. We said goodbye. Swapped numbers. Lost contact over time. It’s been about a year since we spoke.
Once half the wall is fixed, I decide I’ve done enough.
I’m not being lazy, I never shirk. I think the wall looks better with a gap.
Here, though, we are surrounded by wilderness, beyond which lies a suburb, beyond which lies a city that barely knows we exist. We get visitors sometimes, boys who come to gawp and taunt on mini motorbikes and BMXs, new arrivals who’ve heard about us online, journalists sometimes, photographers, dog-walkers, wild-walkers, weirdos.
The stones are stacked. The wall is finished.
I wander towards the river, over shaggy grass dotted with flowers, in the direction of trees around which bracelets of drooping bluebells grow.
The steel works cast a long and complex shadow over the waters and the grass. Turning, I see the field slope up to the brick houses and streets, and, beyond it, the main road leading into haze. Soon I will go back there, knock on Jackson’s door, and we will sit down in the kitchen, drink two mugs of bitter coffee, and plan the day. I feel a pang of boredom at the thought. All this grass, this abundance of untainted air, leaves me longing for the grotty solid stuff of concrete and tarmac and clay, the itching of pollution in the air.
I walk to the water’s edge and dip my hands into the rushing water. Kneeling, I take a sip (ferrous, gum-achingly cold) and scoop handfuls of it over my head.
My mind drifts back to the time my brother
took me to that building site. It wasn’t the first
one, nor the last, but it sticks in my mind like a
shard of bottle-glass in river mud, catching the light.
It was summer. The city was melting. I think June.
Heat was trapped in the smog and pollen, the dusty
paving stones and gluey tarmac. Everyone sweating.
No one at work.
Topless men with football shirts tucked into the waistbands of shorts slouched down roasting streets with cans of lukewarm lager. Kids with sticky lollies stood squinting on street corners. Blood-heat, fighting heat, fucking heat.
We jumped a fence and ran along a gully past diggers until we reached a curved building shaped like a horseshoe, an old estate that shielded us from view. Half the building had been demolished; the other half would follow soon.
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