Patrick Langley: Arkady

Summer in London can be temperate, all cloud and shifting breeze, but sometimes it’s stultifying. Time becomes treacle and the city’s waterways bloom with algae’s chemical green. Extremity turns ominous. An oppressive atmosphere becomes synonymous with worldly chaos, as it did in Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04, where hurricanes were seeded in the ocean below New York and “unseasonable warmth” signaled mild apocalypse. The summers I’ve spent here have seen stabbings and riots, people turned out into the streets and flowers wrapped around light posts where cops had killed kids. A crackdown on knife crimes meant a rise in attacks that used only acid – the liquid sizzling as it corroded skin, the zip-tie rip of motorbikes escaping down slip-roads following. There was an anxiety of knowing that danger often lay concealed,