Jim Crace - Arcadia

She could not carry him. He was too big and badly ballasted. But she was clear what they would do. At night the marketeers left wooden trolleys parked in the cobbled alleyways between the dormant trading mats and baskets. She’d help herself to one. The market owed her that. She knew which one to take. A trader who was kind to her and gave her fruit and greens when they were cheap possessed a painted cart which was not unlike a child’s perambulator. It had solid rubber tyres and, when he pushed it, it seemed quite light and manoeuvrable.

‘That’s your carriage passing by,’ she’d tell her son. ‘It’s full of winter melons now — but soon you’ll be travelling in it like a little king.’ Em smiled as sweetly as she could at her innocent benefactor and the means of her escape. It was not theft to take this cart from such a kindly man. She’d cushion it for Victor with all their clothes and they’d set off at night. She was not the sentimental sort, nor given to ungrounded optimism, yet at those moments when her mood was grey or stormy she could calm herself with just the thought of Victor in the cart at that point where the trams and city stopped and turned, and where blue fields began.

IT WAS AT DAWN, in fact, in May, when Victor was a month short of his sixth birthday, that Em at last gained freedom from the town. More freedom than she’d bargained for. She was asleep, and warm enough to have pushed her blanket back and stretched her naked arms beyond the pillow and her head. Her forehead was red and wet with perspiration. Her nose was blocked and whistling when she breathed. She had not been well. A cough had kept her sitting up until the early hours. The floorboards and the blankets puffed stale air and dust. The room was heavy with the smell of damp clothes and candle smoke and sleep. If she awoke she’d find her head was aching, a ring of pain which was most fierce and unforgiving behind her eyes and in the shallow dell between the tendons of her neck.

Victor had slept, of course. Or lain still, at least, throughout the night. But when the morning light started to infiltrate the room’s single whitewashed window glass, he sat up and crawled across the floorboards to the pot. He straddled it on hands and knees and spread his legs. He pissed like donkeys piss but with less steam. He had a donkey’s aim as well, and wet the floor a little. He watched his urine sink into the wood and make dramatic grains in what had been a grey and lifeless board. He called for Em to wake and see the patterns that he made. When she did not wake he kicked the pot — in irritation — with his heel, so that the triple waters of the night were spilled.

It was in part an accident, but one which suited him. He knelt and rocked upon his hands to watch the family waters as they sought the cracks and contours. The stewed-apple smell of urine. The apple yellow-green of bladder juice. He let the fluid swell and flow and soak. He let it coil and curl round knots of wood. The snoozer snake again. He watched the stream gain power on the floor until it reached the impasse of a raised timber. It formed a pool; it leaned and strained and then set off at a new angle. It had almost reached Aunt’s shoulder when Victor pulled her arm to wake her up. He called, ‘Water down!’ His words made Aunt sit up in alarm and look around, expecting ceiling leaks or Judgement Day. Em was too tired to wake for leaks or Judgement Day. The best that Aunt and Victor could do was watch the urine seep away, as Em slept on and coughed.

‘We’d better wash it down,’ Aunt said at last. ‘Get the water can.’ She dressed him in a pair of knee-length trousers and a jacket, no underclothes, no shoes, and put on her own coat and hat above her nightcloth.

‘We’ll see if we can earn ourselves a nice fresh loaf, as well,’ she said.

Together they went down the stairs, Aunt first, then Victor, bumping on his bottom down each step. They left the water can beside the tap in the yard and went outside. They walked along the central street, nipped narrow by the district’s pair of wooden gates, into a squint too rough and angular for carts or crowds. There was a bakery two streets away. The first loaves of the day were cooling in their tins. The men who sold them on the city streets from shallow raffia trays were gathering to load their merchandise and check that all the bread they took was free of pockmarks, burns, and splits. The loaves with blemishes would not be sold and so the traymen made the baker take them back into his shop. There’d be disputes. And sometimes, when a loaf was badly deformed or split enough to earn the name of Devil’s Hoof, the baker would toss it to the pigeons or to the early vagrants waiting there. Most mornings all they had to breakfast on was smell, though even the odours of a fresh, warm loaf are more filling than the scents of other streets where there are riches but no food. As luck would have it that day, the ovens had not let the baker down. His yeast had risen evenly. His dough had not bubbled into caves, or cloven like a devil’s hoof, or browned in patches. It all looked good and saleable and — with flour priced the way it was — expensive, too.

Aunt would not carry Victor, though he lobbied her for a piggyback. She made him walk, but let him hang onto her arm or hold her hand. He seemed unnerved to be out on the street and not pressed closely to his mother. He was free — if he wanted — to do what any other boy would do, that is to run ahead into the smell of bread which beckoned them. They moved through the almost empty, almost daytime streets, between two smells. The smell of loaves. And, now, behind them, out of sight, the smell of burning wood.

Which Princess knocked the candle over, or struck the careless match, it is hard to say. The girls themselves all blamed it on the one they liked the least, or else said arsonists (in the landlord’s pay) or some spurned man or neighbours with a grudge had set the attic room alight. Who said that candlelight was luck?

Why there should be matches, candles, arsonists in the apex of that building at dawn no one could readily explain. But what was sure was that there was fire and smoke. By the time the first Princess had woken, the flames had found a carriageway of draughts and were unrolling like a lizard’s tongue across the room. Less surreptitious, simpler flames climbed walls and snapped their lips at curtains and at paint. The smoke at first was almost white and then, when the fire had reached the Princesses’ mattresses and their clothes and had brewed sufficient heat to peel the blackened paint off window ledges, the smoke became heavier and darker. It was laden with the ash and dust which had been buoyed and agitated by the flames. Its colour now was blacker than the worst burnt loaf. It smelt and tasted like a new-shod horse.

The Princesses, when they woke — or were woken with a shake — did not stop to check the cause of the fire. Already they could hardly breathe, and one or two, the screamers there, had singed their throats. They ran, not for water to put out the fire, but for fresh air and safety in the street. The stairs were narrow. There were falls, and breakages. A young girl broke her begging wrist (and made a fortune out of that for the nineteen months she kept the bandage and the splint in place). Another broke her neck, and almost died before she reached the bottom step. But not one Princess was licked by too much flame. Nor did any one of them get left behind, curled up in blankets, to suffocate in the airless caverns hollowed by the heat. They banged on doors as they went down into the lower levels of the building. They raised their neighbours out of bed, but no one took it on themselves to check in every room that there was not a pet cat or a sleeping child that should be saved. They simply passed the message on, and messages are bound to end when they reach deaf or hidden ears. Once the refugees had reached the street, and looked around to check the faces there and comfort those who were blackened or distressed, no one noticed Em was not amongst the crowd. In fact, some swore they saw her standing there, with Aunt and Victor, breakfasting on bread.