Jim Crace - Arcadia

That night she joined the others without homes, scavenging for fruit and coins amongst the mats and panniers of the market. She sucked the laxative and discarded fangs of rhubarb stems. She dined on dates and green tomatoes, while Victor made supper out of milk. She knew what she would have to do. At dawn she woke, wet with Victor’s urine, and disturbed by cold and the noise of porters, barrows, market girls. She turned her palm up for sympathy and cash. A market trader, fond of children, placed a perfect apple in her palm.

So Victor lived beneath a market parasol for eight, nine months. His mother found it thrown out. Some flower-trader, at a guess, had given up on it and bought another. Its wooden pole had snapped in two. Its green and yellow canvas canopy was torn. She made repairs as best she could without materials or tools. She made the most of nothing. Women had to then. A bit of canvas and a broken pole were better quarters than the trenches that their men would occupy when war broke out. Em set up her umbrella at the centre of the marketplace, between two bars and near the scrubbing stones. There was the flat, damp trunk of a snag tree for back support. There was market waste and mulch to soften cobblestones. Her begging pitch was chosen well. The drunks, the madwomen, the wretched ones, the innocents with visions, the dregs and cynics, assembled at the steps of churches, and begged for coins, alms, for holy charity, from worshippers, and penitents, and wedding guests. The ones with whistles, tricks with fire or balls stayed on the busy streets and entertained the hangers-out, the tramline queues, the cafe clientele for cash. Em’s kind of beggar, the kind that is the model of what could happen to us all, must be clean — and in the Soap Garden there was running water all day long. Crowds of people, too, with time to spare. The traffic there was mixed: market traders, bar girls, their customers, the women and their washing, the men who came to drink and talk. No one came there without a little cash. The bars, the girls, the market stalls weren’t charities. Gratitude was not the bargain that they sought.

So Victor’s mother did more than beg. She traded smiles and peace of mind. She did it well. She had a baby to support. The coloured, broken umbrella was the perfect touch. It was what country women used to shield themselves from the rain and sun when they came in to town to sell their flowers or their garlic cloves. Passers-by would look down to see what this woman had for sale. Em’s face was hidden by the parasol. Her breasts were on display — with Victor hard at work. The child in need. One hand — the one with a single wedding ring — was resting on her knee palm up. The other pressed the baby to her chest. She marketed herself. She felt no shame. Shame is a family, village thing. It doesn’t count for much amongst strangers. Her only fear — and hope — was that her sister would chance by and look beneath the parasol. She did her best to beg with pride. It was not sin, like drink or bed, that had brought her there. She pinned a browning photograph of her husband to the canvas of the parasol with a black silk funeral rosette. It signified, Here is a widow and her child. Look at their man. His death has made them homeless, poor.

What of Victor at this time? Are kids of less than five weeks old so self-engrossed and innocent that nothing in the outside world makes any impact on their lives so long as they are fed and warm and free from wind? The truth is, yes. The only bonding that there is takes place between the nipples and the lips. Victor was the kind of child who bonded to his mother’s breast with the tenacity and deliberation of a limpet on a stone. If he was sucking, he was well. Detach his gums, prise him loose with the gentlest finger, and he would imitate a seagull bickering for shrimps, his tiny call — not yet a voice — as querulous and fretful as a dirge.

Em thought this threnody would earn her cash, that Victor singing thinly for the breast would move the hardest passer-by to find a few spare coins. If her child could cry like that so readily she only had to pop her nipples free when people passed and she would earn a fortune in small change. No one was mean enough, she thought, to close their ears to babies in distress. But she was wrong. We in this city are the sentimental sort. We don’t like tragedy. That’s why the drunkard at the railway station gates, singing bits of opera in fake Italian and French, and bothering the women with his arias, earned more from begging than the trolley man who’d lost a wife, his mind, and both his legs in some forgotten war. To toss some coins in the drunk’s old opera hat was to show one’s liberality, one’s worldliness, one’s sense that all was well. To give cash to the trolley man — taken without a word or smile — was to price a life, a leg, a personality. At what? At less than one could spare. The coins clattered on the trolley floor. Enough small change to buy a rind of pork, a two-stop tramway ride, a piece of ribbon for your hair. The coins paid for guilt-free entry to the forecourt and the trains. Except, of course, the gateway where the trolley man lay in wait was the one least used. His naked stumps, his naked hopelessness, made people change their routes. The operatic drunkard got the crowd.

So it was with Em. When she took Victor off the breast, his protests cleared a space around their parasol. The shoppers did not look to see what was for sale. They knew. They heard the baby’s screams and kept their eyes away from this private tableau of distress. It would not do to stare. Or smile. Or break the moment with some coins in Em’s palm. Besides, what could a coin do for one so young? A coin would not change its life. What should they do then? Search their pockets for a little solid love? Hold out their hands and offer to this pair that spare room, rent-free? That job? That meal? That ticket home? No, Victor’s tears — and, here, who will not pause to note the leaden candour of the words? — were of no worth. But what could be more appealing than a baby on its mother’s nipple, the two most loved of natural shapes, the infant cheek, the breast? No need to look away from nakedness like that. You could study scenes more intimate in churches or in galleries. Madonna and her Child. The Infancy of Christ. First Born. Indeed, there was a sculpture reproduced on the lower-value silver coins of that time. A woman, Concord, held an infant to her breast, her tunic open to her waist, her thighs becoming tree trunk, tree bole, the tree becoming undergrowth, becoming Motherland. Here, then, was the sentimental counterpart of comic, operatic drunks. Em and Victor made a wholesome sight when Victor was asleep and on her breast. Coins dropped into the mother’s palm or on her shawl were tribute tithes for family life. Em understood. To earn the pity and the cash of citizens she had to seem respectable and, more than that, serene — a living sculpture labelled Motherhood.

FOR THOSE MEN who were not moved by Motherhood, Em acted Eve. She wore a mask of gormless innocence which was as challenging to them as the pouting and the paint upon the faces of the bar girls who sold real sex for cash. The market traders who passed her frequently and saw the way her expression seemed to fluctuate haphazardly between Eve and Motherhood thought — preferred to think, in fact — that Em was none too bright. They said she hadn’t got the sense that God gave lettuce. They labelled her ‘the Radish’. That was the nickname that they used for girls red-faced and odorous and from-the-soil like her. These traders had good cause to doubt the sharpness of her intellect, besides the permutations of her face. She muttered to her baby all day long, and in those slow and well-baked country tones which stretched the vowels and squashed the consonants and made the language sound like morse. Yet there was cunning just below the widow’s skin. Alms-givers welcome gormless gratitude. They do not give to people who seem wiser than themselves, no matter whether it be Eve or not. No, Victor’s mother was no fool, despite appearances. A fool would have an empty palm, but Em’s was always slightly curled and buttoned heavily with the copper brown of coinage.