Langley Arkady

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-910695-52-4
Verlag: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Brothers Jackson and Frank live on the margins of a big urban sprawl. From abandoned tower blocks to gleaming skyscrapers, their city is brutal, beautiful and divided. As anti-government protests erupt across the teeming metropolis, the brothers sail in search of the Red Citadel and its promise of a radical new way of life. A striking portrait of the precarity of modern urban living, and of the fierce bonds that grow between brothers, Patrick Langley's debut Arkady is a brilliant coming-of-age novel, as brimming with vitality as the city itself.

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

Autoren/Hrsg.

Langley, Patrick

Leseproben

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...