Jim Crace - Arcadia

The truth is, Victor grew to like his aunt’s brash tones, despite his inability to understand the words. He liked the way she walked the streets and joined in badinage and arguments and helped herself — and him — to uneaten titbits from restaurants. He began to lift his head more often now or find a sideways view onto the world of streets and bars. Aunt did not care enough to push him back to feed. She’d tired of having sticky honey on her blouse, of having this stretched infant invade her clothes. Life was more comic and more profitable if she just put him down inside a restaurant gate and let him topple under waiters’ feet while she did routines with her tongue and hat. Here was an education of a kind. He learnt about the legs of chairs, and shoes. And once — the final straw — he learnt that tablecloths could move, if tugged. He learnt, too, what fun it was to have a bowl of lukewarm noodles smash onto the floor. He’d never had a toy so wonderful as noodles and the broken bowl. The mistress of the restaurant, of course, was not charmed by Victor’s play, or by the mess of tablecloth and food. ‘I do not care to see you back in here,’ she told Aunt, as Victor draped the noodles round his fingers. ‘Not unless you’re eating à la carte. Get off our premises. Remove yourselves. Go back into the haystack where you belong. No beggars here. Understand? If you don’t want to eat, stay on the street.’

She took Aunt by the arm and pushed her towards the doorway.

‘And don’t forget the kid,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have a kid. It’s not his fault. Look at the state of him! What kind of person lets their little boy crawl on the floor like that? You shouldn’t even have a kid if you can’t live respectably …’

‘All right,’ said Aunt, to stifled laughter from the clientele, as Victor stretched the noodles in his hands, as Victor squashed the noodles on his legs. ‘No need to work up blisters on your lips.’

‘That could have been a bowl of soup,’ Em said, when Aunt recalled their escapades that night. ‘You could have scalded him!’ The time had come, it seemed to Aunt, when her sister was a hindrance in her life. Victor, too. He had lost her more than she could earn if she were on her own. At four, at almost five, the boy was far too big for comfort. More frequently she failed to turn up at the marketplace to take the child off Em. Or else she said, ‘Why don’t you keep the kid and stay here longer? You’ll get more. You’re his proper mum, and people aren’t fooled by me. Not any more.’

So Victor lost the chance he’d had with Aunt to lift his head more frequently, to glimpse the world with one eye shut, to study feet and floors. He was back, full time, where he belonged, an outsized infant on his mother’s breast. He was confined again.

AND WHAT OF EM? How did she feel? How did she fill her time? She thought of nothing else but getting home, though home was not the five-by-five she shared with Aunt, but the sagging country cottage with a yard and thatch and pigs where she herself was raised, or the saddlemaker’s rented workshop where she had snubbed her husband’s candle out. Just as Victor came to live on fictions of the countryside, so Em looked back upon the village she had known. She made a tinselled paradise of it. It was the marketplace transformed, the ranks of vegetables, the fruit, strewn loosely in arcadia. It was a world where everything was ripe and colourful and sweet and free. It was a buffed and shiny version of the village she had known before her husband had — both country phrases — earth as eyelids , and his eternal freehold on a narrow strip of land .

How wonderful the city had once seemed, how promising. But now she felt that she had reached her highest rung and that her city life was in descent. How long would it be before she was as blunted by the foraging for food and cash as those other mothers she had met? The ones who hired their children out. For what? They dared not ask. The ones who used creams and grease and face ointments to make their kids seem daft or ill or menacing. The ones who kept their ageing babies on the breast by stunning them with pods of opium or mandrax tea.

A country beggar such as her must have good looks or youth or, at least, a helpless infant to hook the passers-by. She’d lost her looks. Her hair was now as lifeless as the leaf tuft on a pulled beetroot. Her clothes sat on her like a saddle on a goat’s back. Em was so thin — said Aunt, who had a phrase for everything — that her belly-button and her backbone kissed, and squeaked. She’d lost her youth, as well. Five years and more of city life could take the paint off carriages or stunt a country oak, make flowers grey, drain country faces of their rosy brightness and etch in lines as ploughs put furrows in a field. She’d still got Victor. What use would he be when he grew? He was only helpless now because she and beggaring had kept him so. How long before he turned his back on her and said, ‘Enough’s enough. I’ve spent too long already in your lap. I’m going to open my eyes and stretch my legs and see this city for myself.’

Small children ran past Em when she was begging in her usual spot, children who were younger than Victor but already had loud voices and strong legs and who were never still. Yet Victor, as he aged, moved with less frequency, not more. He was inert, as if these years of falsifying on his mother’s breast had robbed him of pluck.

Em knew that you could train or trick a chicken to lay down dead, as motionless as stone. She’d seen it done when she was young. It was a common village trick. You pushed the chicken to the ground. You held its wings. You pressed its beak into the dust, and drew a hard and short and rapid line in coal, or chalk, or channelled in the soil, out from its beak end. The hen was hypnotized. It was geometrically transfixed. It could not lift its beak clear of the line. You had to rap the chicken’s beak to make it stand again and take part in the world. They said that without this liberating rap upon its beak the chicken would just fade away, pressed to the dust by weights that could not be seen or touched. What should Em do to lift the weights from Victor’s head? She feared that he would fade away as well, made weak and thin by too much breast and too much mother’s lap, his rigid, geometric life. Her only remedy — given that to stay in town meant begging could not end — was to retrace the journey out of town. To walk back down the boulevards until the tram tracks reached the turning gear, and metalled roads grew narrower and rutted, and drains were ditches, and gas streetlamps no longer held their sway amongst the stars or repelled the flimsy light of dawn.

‘The first thing you’ll see beyond the blue of manac beans,’ she told her son, her palm outstretched, his hands both tucked and curled beneath her shawl, ‘is how our village seems to have a mind that’s all its own. The river there, it doesn’t run fast and straight, not like the drains and culverts of the city do. The river takes its time. It’s like a snoozer snake. That’s the slowest snake there is. It coils between the fields so slowly that you never see it move. Or else it moves, but only when our backs are turned, at night perhaps, on days when it is raining pips and pods and we are kept indoors. Except your father never stayed indoors. He used to love the rain and stand in it. To get the smell of leather out, he said. He’d wash the leather and the tannin out of him with rain, and let it run off down the gutters of the lane into the snoozer snake, then downriver till the smell and dye on him was swept right out to sea. That’s what he said, “Right out to sea,” though we were nowhere near the sea. I loved it when your father spoke like that. It made the sea seem ours. It smelt like the saddles that your father made.’