Jim Crace - Arcadia

Thus Rook, on that summer Friday in our city, was armed with errands to gather cakes and greenery, as he descended the hundred metres and the twenty-seven floors by Victor’s private lift and walked towards the open air through the pampered, plastic foliage of the atriums which flared and billowed from the building like quilted valances of glass. He showed his face and his Staff Pass at the tasselled rope and stepped between the wings of a revolving door. THESE DOORS ARE AUTOMATIC, announced the sign. It was a warning and a boast: These Doors are Greater and More Permanent than You. They simply swept him in a rotating triangle of processed air into the sun and breeze beyond. All security ended there.

You note he did not choose to take a car. There was a man on duty at the doors who would have been glad to summon one, a taxi or a chauffeured company Panache. Rook was valued there as much as Victor’s perch — if not a little more — and he was not expected to take his chances on the street. But he preferred to walk. And who would know? Five minutes and he would be amongst the crowds, indistinguishable from all those other duplicates in office wear on worktime errands in the city. What could be sweeter than to pass unrecognized amongst familiar strangers, or to proffer half a nod, a shadow smile, to passers-by whose faces rang a bell? What democracy! — to dodge and jostle, tadpoles in the stream. But first he had to walk the hot and empty cloisters of the mall where the noise of distant traffic was waylaid by architectural water. It fell and fountained, day and night, with a rhythmic certainty no mountain stream could match. Rook did not pause, despite the heat and solitude, to sit beneath the award-winning lamp posts on the mall, or to play elaborate hopscotch on the coloured marble flagstones.

He chose a route which freed him from the shadows. He fixed his eye ahead, upon the skyline, where the unaspiring towers of the ancient town competed for light and oxygen with the mantis cranes of building sites and the skeletal scaffolding of half-completed office blocks, draped for modesty in flapping plastic skirts. Rook said he loved to see the cranes perched overhead. He loved it best, at Summerfest, when all the cranes were hung with streamers and with lights and there were fireworks. Then, for once, the streets were duller, darker than the night sky. He liked his city noisy, teeming, dressed in black. He saw himself as lean and black, a cliché creature of the night. Indeed, that’s partly why our Rook was known as Rook: the black clothes that he wore when he was young and on the streets. The rook-like nasal cawing of his laugh, too, his love of crowds, his foraging, his criminality. But more than that: the puff-chested, light-limbed posture of a bird.

They said he’d made his money out of Victor — that Victor, childless, heirless, treated Rook like a son and settled money on him in lieu of love. A cheque was Victor’s version of a kiss. ‘Money is the best embrace,’ he said. But there the gossip amongst the secretaries and clerks was way off mark. Victor — for all his years and for all his understanding of the blandishments of money, of how people could be purchased and caressed by cash — paid Rook a salary, no more. And Rook was wise enough to keep his office fingers clean. He knew how frayed and slender was the leash which tied him to the old man’s purse, and, indeed, how loosely that leash was now held, how easily his boss could let the leash go free. For two men who spent so much time together, they shared few sentiments or loyalties. Rook’s cheerfulness should not be taken as fondness for his boss or work, but more as his device for filling in the silences which were the heavy furniture of their daily intercourse. Victor did not appreciate Rook’s special knack of levity, his disregard of silence, his subversion of proprieties, his aggravating idleness. Victor’s simple creed was this: until a man agrees to dedicate himself to work, then he will not be rich, or valuable, or admirable, or — best of all — at peace.

Yet Rook was rich, there is no doubt. A poorer man would not pass up the offer of a limousine. It takes a man who’s certain of his wealth to choose to walk when he could ride. It also takes a man who’s used to streets, whose heels have eyes, to know when he is being followed and by whom. As those dismissive, automatic doors rotated Rook into the unconditioned air, a fellow, hardly in his twenties, with a cream and crumpled summer suit, detached himself from the hard shadows amongst the quirks of a colonnade and followed him onto the mall, keeping, catlike, to the sunless walls. He sauntered like a truant, faking interest in the fountains, the street lights, avoiding joins and fissures in the coloured marble flagstones. Here is, his manner meant to say, an innocent abroad. It said, instead, here is a ne’er-do-well at large. Stay clear. Watch out. Protect your pockets when you walk.

Rook’s ne’er-do-well was fresh in town. His nails were cracked like slate. His hands and neck were scorched. His eyes were streaming from the windborne grit and dust which pecked and spiralled at his face. He hadn’t learnt the city trick of squinting as he walked. He was jubilant at being there and far from home, and lost, and poor, and free. He had in his pocket an old flick-knife that’s spring was slow and temperamental. No cash. Sometime, on Victor’s birthday, he’d come face to face with Rook. Who’d come off worse? He was an optimist, though in the end, of course — unless there was murder on his mind — a boy like him was bound to come off worse. At best, there would be poverty ahead, and drink, and crime, and selling sex and favours in the street. At least while he was young. And then just poverty and drink.

If we were looking for two poles-apart to represent good fortune and bad luck we could not better these two men, the fixer and his shadow, as they ducked into the walkers’ tunnel and passed below Link Highway Red which separated the old town from the landscaped decks and platforms of the new. It was a tunnel built for beatings or for rape or for the urgent emptying of bladders or as a refuge from the rain and night for people without roofs. Pillars provided dark recesses for loiterers. Its low lighting winked and buzzed, failed at intervals or flared like photographic bulbs. The paper litter scooped and fluttered like a pigeon, trapped and fretful. The smell was urine mixed with street.

Rook thought his shadow might close the gap between them underground and there would be a tussle for his wallet, or he’d be cornered for ‘a loan’. He walked a little faster then, and breathlessly. He wrapped his fingers round his keys, so that any punches thrown by him would be hard and heavy. He was glad to see the daylight spilling down the steps at the far end of the tunnel and to hear the pavement clack of women’s heels, the vendor bells, the shop-front tannoys touting bargains for the town, the doors and horns and brakes of cars.

QUITE SOON he was a different Rook, not yet the firebrand that he’d been when young, not quite the wagging spaniel of the office block, but someone more relaxed than both. His pace had slowed. He strolled. His tie was loose. His shoulders dropped. His birdlike chest no longer heaved for air. There was no tension here, in public space, except the amiable and congested tension of the streets which kept the traffic and pedestrians apart, which made atonal harmonies with honking motor horns for brass, and news-stand yodellers as vocalists, and percussion from the beat of leather shoes on stone. Now Rook’s main quests upon this street of salons, boutiques, and restaurants, were oddballs, cronies, pretty girls, anyone to stare at, or anything to buy. He was on the lookout, yes, but not for thieves and trouble any more, not for the fellow in the cream and crumpled suit. Rook no longer gripped his keys. Somewhere between the new town and the old his ne’er-do-well had disappeared, swallowed raw by the pavement multitude.