Arkady Read online

  Jackson feels suddenly, painfully hungry, as though he hasn’t eaten in weeks.

  ‘Listen,’ the woman says. ‘I’m staying just up the road. It’s not far. I could carry your brother on the chair, and maybe you too, if you hang on the back.’

  ‘That?’ says Jackson, pointing.

  ‘It’s faster than it looks. You’d be surprised.’

  The coastal road edges the foothills, overlooking the town and the sea. The wind is warm. It smells of dead leaves and ground pepper. Anita was right – her chair is faster than it looks. All she has to do is push the lever forward and it zooms like a rocket. Jackson stands on a thin metal shelf on the back. He grips the plastic handles either side of the chair, which are sculpted for larger fingers than his. The breeze rushes through his hair and he feels like he’s flying, a bird in the night. He lets out a long, high scream. The wind roars in his open mouth and teases tears from his eyes. Anita laughs and he forgets where he is: there is only their laughter, the smell of shampoo, and strange hair in his teeth. Now and then a car rushes past and the road glows white. Then the car will disappear and darkness will swallow the road.

  Frank is asleep in Anita’s lap, wrapped in her coat. Her hair flutters in Jackson’s face as the wind shifts. Now and then she shouts things at him. She asks him what food he likes.

  ‘Rice,’ he says. ‘Yellow melon. Calamari.’

  ‘What would you like to be when you grow up?’

  ‘A man from space.’

  ‘An astronaut?’

  He shakes his head. ‘A man from space.’

  ‘You’re an interesting boy,’ Anita says.

  Jackson’s eyes are fixed on the side of the road. His mother might be waiting in the shadows under the trees, or beside the rocks: in the secret chambers of the land, like where the lizard vanished earlier. But the steeper the road, the more his gaze is tugged towards the moonlit blackness of the sea, which is bigger than everything, which swallows the sky.

  A jolt makes Anita’s chair jump. She shrieks wildly; Jackson laughs.

  ‘That’s where I’m staying,’ she shouts. A short way down the road is a row of buildings, their front gardens crowded with spiky palms. ‘We’ll be there in a jiffy.’ She says the last bit in a funny accent, with a silly posh twang.

  A convertible car drives down the road in the same direction. Five men and two women are crammed into it, shouting and laughing. Two women are perched on the back where the roof is folded, bottles in their hands. The men wear the collars of their polo shirts up; the women wear dresses with straps. The car slows to a crawl beside Anita’s chair.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell!’ says one of the men.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ says another.

  They are from Jackson’s city.

  ‘Leave it off,’ says one of the women.

  ‘Looks like a tank fucked a baby chair.’

  A few start laughing. The exhaust tastes bitter, burnt.

  ‘Haven’t you got better things to do?’ Anita yells.

  ‘Saw her on the edge of the dance floor,’ one of them shouts, ‘and I was like – who invited Stephen Hawking?’

  The country beyond the road is very dark. Anita’s building looked close before. Now it is far away.

  ‘She’s got a baby with her.’

  ‘Fuck me, it spawned!’

  ‘I said leave it off!’

  ‘She nicked them. She zooms around snatching kids in her chair – like some fuckin’ – like some fuckin’…’

  ‘Come on,’ Anita shouts, ‘say something funny.’

  Another car pulls up behind the convertible. It honks its horn several times and the driver yells in Spanish.

  The convertible accelerates. The women on the back aren’t wearing seatbelts. They shriek as the car speeds off, almost tumbling onto the road. One of them lets go of her cigarette, which sheds a trail of dying sparks as it flies. Soon both cars are gone and the road is empty again, the bare rocks silent at the side of the tarmac.

  Anita’s house is very large. In the tiled living room there is a big TV, white leather furniture, an indoor bar, and an aquarium. Bright fish swim around branching coral, wavering water plants, and purple rocks. Outside, through the glass windows, deck chairs are placed round a swimming pool. On low wooden tables around the pool are bottles and narrow glasses, bowls of olives and plates of crusty bread.

  Jackson carries Frank to the sofa and sits beside him. The leather creaks. Anita makes a phone call in the corridor. Her voice sounds muffled down the hall. She rolls into the living room, parks her chair beside the other sofa, and hauls herself onto it using her arms. Her leg gets caught on the sofa’s arm; she lifts it over then smoothes her dress out over her thighs.

  ‘Do you need me to help?’ Jackson asks.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘This is nothing. But thanks.’

  She pours herself white wine and asks Jackson if he is thirsty. ‘Help yourself,’ she says, pointing at the open door.

  In the kitchen he drinks a huge glass of water then fills the glass up again and carries it into the living room. He pours a little into Frank’s mouth, even though he’s half asleep. Frank swallows and stretches his arms.

  ‘Someone’s coming to collect you,’ Anita says. ‘They sounded relieved.’

  Jackson nods. ‘Who were those people? The ones on the road.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Anita. ‘Them.’ She takes a big mouthful from her glass, a distant look on her face. ‘People with cruel hearts and low IQs. Lottie included.’

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘The one on the back. She met a tribe of cognitively challenged primates at the place we were at before.’

  ‘The woman in the car was your friend?’

  Anita finds this funny. ‘Exactly,’ she says. ‘Past tense.’

  Dog-eared magazines are raggedly stacked on the coffee table. There are bottles and glasses everywhere, beer and wine, and napkins with olive pips and smears of lipstick on them. Earlier, Anita had opened the big French windows. The room is filled with the lull of the sea. Jackson stares across the pool at the darkness beyond. Specks of light are swirling, stars or insects: hard to tell.

  The doorbell cries out. Jackson runs to answer it, convinced that it will be her: mousy hair at her shoulders, smile wide under pale brown eyes, purse and car keys clutched in her hands, and the particular smell of her skin at her neck when she hugs him – biscuity, sandy-sweet, warm. He yanks open the door, heart pounding, a grin twisting his face. Something plummets in his chest. It’s a couple, but they aren’t his parents. Blue uniforms. Black caps.

  ‘You!’ the woman snaps. ‘Why did you go off like that?’

  ‘Are you insane?’ says the man. ‘Where is your brother?’

  ‘It was very bad thing you did,’ says the woman, ‘very bad, very childish. You just like him, is that it? Your father? We all completely lose our—’

  ‘I want my dad,’ Jackson says.

  The policeman’s expression changes. ‘Well, maybe you don’t want to see him. Not now what he did. Very stupid, very bad. We try and understand where this comes from, but…’ He shrugs.

  ‘Still,’ says the woman, smiling at Jackson, ‘we’re glad you’re okay.’

  She does not sound glad.

  ‘What did he do?’ Jackson asks. ‘Where is he?’

  The policeman ignores his question. ‘There was a woman who rang, earlier?’ asks the man. He has taken his hat off. His black fringe is flattened, glossy with sweat. ‘Is she inside?’

  When the policeman sees Anita’s chair, he halts and says: ‘Oh.’

  Bent at the waist, he holds his hand out for her to shake, which she does.

  ‘Thank you so much. I mean—’ he chuckles ‘—really.’ He goes to pick up Frank but Jackson leaps between them.

  ‘Don’t touch him,’ Jackson snaps. He will carry his brother himself.

  Jackson mumbles thanks to Anita, who tells him: ‘Any time.’ She smiles but looks tired. There is a brie
f silence before the policeman steps forward.

  ‘Alright,’ he says. ‘Now we get in the car.’

  The road twists away from the town along the steep rocky parts of the land, and the world grows smaller as they rise. Soon the valley looks like a map: blurry humps and lakes of shadow, dotted lights that look like fires. There are mountains in the distance, saw-tooth gaps where there aren’t any stars. At the bottom of the valley is the riverbed, white stones aglow in the light of the moon. The journey felt so hot and so long that they would die before it ended, but now it looks as thin and insignificant as a snail’s trail. He rests his head against the window. The car’s engine purrs in his skull. Frank is fast asleep. Jackson leans over and touches his brother’s hot head. He tries to send him a message, but the police will not shut up. They chatter noisily in Spanish. The woman throws her head back and laughs, her bared teeth reflected in the windshield. There is a bend in the road and the headlamps make a pale tree glow. Soon the hotel is visible, a silhouette against the moonlit sky. Jackson cradles Frank’s head in his arms. He ducks into the shadows and shuts his eyes.

  II. LESSONS

  Tuesday morning. Double English. Old poems. Jackson lurks in the back of Learning Suite 7 with his head hanging low. He doodles a boat in the margins and quivers with scorn for his classmates, existence, the world. Hayley – hockey star, budding smoker, setter of trends – is sitting beside him.

  ‘Oi,’ she stage-whispers, ‘my pen broke. Pass me yours.’

  A blank expression is Jackson’s answer: he stares at her wide brown eyes.

  Hayley erupts. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ she yells, face screwed in a scowl of repulsion.

  The instructor snaps a warning, but Hayley has a point. What is wrong with Jackson?

  When he was younger, he often flew into inexplicable rages, but these have steadily begun to subside: his violent outbursts have been subsumed into an eerie air of vigilant reservation, of monkish quiet. Some of the instructors have diagnosed him as mute; others ‘on the spectrum’. Others still have been stunned by his work. They praise him in the margins – ‘Excellent!!’, ‘Powerfully argued!’ – but express concern about his pessimism, jabbing him with questions after class. He answers easily, if quietly, somewhat stiltedly, picking his way from word to word. She makes encouraging noises. She calls him a ‘dark horse’. He must try to speak more in class.

  Jackson stares at the photocopied poem, which, the instructor explained at the start of the lesson, was written in the seventeenth century. The poet believed in God, which means the poet must have been stupid. Two lines sharpen into focus, distilling themselves from the fog of Jackson’s impulsive but total dismissal of the poem.

  My mirth and edge was lost, a blunted knife

  Was of more use than I.

  Despite his abiding suspicion that poetry is a grandiose conspiracy of words, whose function is to enshrine the authority of the instructors who teach them, the lines trigger something in Jackson. He reads them again, again. They resound in his head like a mantra, and he is troubled by the changes they bring. He scribbles circles around the word ‘knife’ until it resembles a malevolent sun that sheds concentric ripples, scratched ink that blackens the page.

  A siren announces the lesson’s end. He waits for the room to clear before slipping outside.

  Dust-haze hangs across the field as students skirmish, fighting or playing football, it’s hard to tell. Jackson heads round the back of the Annexe, where two younger students, crouched in the murk of the huge dead bush, are fumbling a lighter and a joint. He slips round the thorny ruins of the droughted rosebeds that edge the outer wall, and climbs into the tree where he’s arranged to meet Frank. A shell of leaves surrounds him, chopping the sun to soft coins of light. Carved names scar the trunk. Scorched roaches are wedged in the cracks of the branches.

  Frank will be five minutes, at least; longer if he’s done something bad. Jackson rests his head against the trunk and shuts his eyes.

  Some people find it hard to believe that the brothers are brothers. While Jackson prickles at the edges, blank-faced or scowling, and more or less mute, Frank is a show-off, an extrovert. He joined the District Institute this year and has been wreaking gleeful havoc ever since. He dances on desks and sets fire alarms wailing; he graffitis elaborate though anatomically improbable dicks, fannies, and faces on corridor walls. He runs rings around his instructors – actual rings, tiny dizzying circuits, like a crazed dog chasing its tail.

  Leonard diagnosed boredom.

  ‘It’s simple, isn’t?’ Leonard snapped. ‘He’s smart. He need something to do – not a bunch of jobsworth cretins ramming propaganda down his throat.’

  The N.D.I. wouldn’t, or couldn’t, give Frank ‘something to do’. His behaviour got worse. Once, during French, he jumped on a table, stripped naked, and howled like a wolf: ‘Yeee ooooo ooooo oooo oo wo wow oooooooo wwwwwwwwwwwww!’ The red-faced instructor tried and failed to tame Frank, but he was naked, it was awkward, and pretty soon the tears were rolling down her face. His classmates cackled, gawped, and no-fucking-wayed. He scribbled tattoos on his face and chest with a marker, and jumped from chair to chair.

  ‘Aaaaaaa oo woooooo oooooo hhhhhhh www ooo owwwwwwwwww woooooo oooooo oooo ooooo ohhhhh hhhh rrr ghhhh h!’

  Jackson is quietly impressed by his brother’s behaviour: the elaborate lies and fantastical stories, his cheerful indifference to punishment.

  And then there is the man Frank repeatedly draws, in notebooks and on corridor walls: a looming figure with a blank, faceless head and a blue-and-white striped shirt. Frank insists the man, called Arkady, is real; that he visits him in his dreams: a strange protector or vengeful foe. Frank began drawing him a while back, around the time the brothers moved into Leonard’s flat.

  Jackson remembers, or thinks he remembers, the night they arrived, unannounced, at the door. Frank, in his yellow poncho, was holding Jackson’s hand. He remembers the pattern of rainwater pooled on the floor: the image is like a photograph, clear and precise. Leonard loomed in the opened doorway, stick-thin and crookedly stooped, his bright eyes hooded in cavernous sockets. He glowered at the boys:

  ‘No fucking way.’

  Frank’s favourite lesson, the only one he really behaves in, is Art. He loves the wide, scuffed desks that stretch beneath shelves of charcoal, chalk, newsprint, and paint; he loves the riverbed stink of wet clay as he mushes and tugs it into crocodiles, lions’ heads, submarines. The instructor lets him work on his private projects: posters for made-up films, illustrations of Arkady.

  ‘Hey.’

  Frank is in the branches’ shadow, squinting up at Jackson and clutching a long stick like a staff. He looks, from this height, even skinnier than usual. The T-shirt draped on his shoulders hangs loose round his whippet-thin torso, and his trousers are rolled at the ankles, swaying as he leans on his stick.

  ‘You’re late,’ says Jackson.

  ‘Yeeeeeeeeeaaaah,’ says Frank, kicking a pebble across the dry grass. His dark hair, shiny with sweat, crawls over his forehead and into his eyes. ‘There was a thing.’

  ‘A thing?’

  ‘A lizard.’

  Jackson sighs. ‘There wasn’t a lizard.’

  ‘There was! It went like that,’ Frank makes a scuttling motion with his hand, ‘all the way up the side of the Exercise Hall.’

  Jackson slips off the branch and lands with a smack on the root-riddled earth. ‘Why are you being a dickhead?’ he snaps. ‘If you’re going to be a prick about this, the lesson is cancelled, you’re staying here.’

  ‘I wasn’t even that late.’

  Arms folded, Jackson scowls at his brother. He is aware of the Institute’s bulk, its huge structures and unreadable windows, its screaming pupils and conspiring cliques, its warrens of portakabins and raggedy stretches of unkempt grass, but his attention is focused elsewhere: the abandoned office with its vast grey floors and its light-flooded windows.

  ‘Plllleeeeeeeaaaaaaaase
,’ Frank whines. His stick clatters to the ground as he clasps his hands. ‘I’m not a dickhead. I’m not! Tell me what to do.’

  Jackson scans the street from the top deck. His eye lingers on buildings he’s recently opened: the flat above the corner shop, the garage round the back of the creepy hotel with the permanent vacancies. His explorations have expanded; he ventures further and further afield. He pushes east through the city’s post-industrial districts, the warehouses converted into craft beer saloons or flattened altogether, until he hits the misty marshes on the city’s outer zones; west through a maze of neon, through the avenues of china-white townhouses, and into the tree-cushioned suburbs beyond; south through shopping villages, golf courses and ragged graveyards; or north past MOT garages piled with tyres, thatched-roof pubs and chain hotels until the orbital motorway roars. He sees things. Mountains of wooden pallets ablaze at night in a derelict yard. A man in a Snow White costume passed out in the dead centre of a four-lane road. A street lined with cars in which people are sleeping, empty tins of baked beans on the dashboards, clothes stuffed into bin bags or heaped in open cases, the glass opaque with condensing breath.

  He rests his head against the window, soothed by the hum of the glass. Frank scratches a face into the back of the seat in front using pencil.

  Part of Jackson wishes he was back at Leonard’s, curled up and warm on the floor. Before the Institute, before the Dragon entered their life, Leonard taught Jackson simple things. How to chop vegetables, how to fry meat. He took Jackson to the supermarket, gave him a fiver, and told him to buy stuff for dinner: he blew the first budget on iced buns, chocolates, and magazines. Outside, in public spaces, while Frank played on the swings, Leonard taught Jackson boxing. He lifted his pale, bony palms and told Jackson to punch them, left-right-left. Once, when they were younger, they travelled by train to a campsite. There was a lake nearby. Leonard took them swimming in water so cold it robbed the breath from their lungs when they leaped into the weedy shallows. He asked them if they trusted him, told them to hold their breaths, and held their heads underwater. They didn’t drown. They rowed across the water in a tiny wooden boat. The sky was cloudless, blazing bright. They lay in the boat while it drifted, trailing their hands in the cool, dark water. As they walked the wood’s paths padded with pine needles, he taught them how to make shelter. He stripped a pair of branches with a penknife and rested them against a tree. Across the triangular structure, he laid longer branches with leaves on them, forming a slanted roof. Jackson and Frank helped out. Soon there was a kind of tent. They climbed inside and sat in the darkness that smelled of cut leaves and dank soil. Leonard’s furry hat looked silly on his skull-like face. They roasted marshmallows on the ends of sticks and ate the sticky, goo-filled lumps of pink and white, and Jackson felt happy, and Frank was laughing, and Leonard was almost asleep against a tree, with the sound of a stream in the distance, under the shelter they had made.