Jim Crace - Arcadia

Em slept. She was so tired, and dreaming too. The noise and smoke, they said, must have been the scenery of dreams, so that they did not threaten her or make her wake. The smoke — they said, they said — would have sunk into her room from the attic and curled up where she lay and hugged her tight and dry before the flames came down the stairs. They said she would have dreamed her death and felt no pain. But who can tell? Perhaps the truth is this, Em woke. Who would not wake when there was so much noise and anarchy, when the timbers cracked and grumbled like Epimenides the Slumberer who woke, stiff and dry and fiery, from two hundred years of sleep? Her eyes were smarting; from dreams, she thought at first. But then the smell, the boiling vapours of the house, the smoke, the drumming hubbub of the flames, made confusions of that kind short-lived. She would have called at once for Victor, and gone down on her hands and knees to scrabble for him where she thought he slept. How long was it before she realized that he was safe? Or thought that he was dead? Or took the chance to save herself and all the rest be damned?

The smoke by then was far too thick and acrid for Em to see the window light, suffused by shadow and by whitewash even when there was no fire. She could only guess where the door was. Perhaps she found the wall and felt along it for the architraves. And then, empowered by some ancient sense of flight, found easy passage through her neighbours’ rooms into the hotter, fresh-brewed smoke which furnaced from the few remaining timbers in the flaming, disappearing stairwell. Did she die there, gasping, gaping like a fish on land for moist and icy oxygen and finding only pungent, scalding gas? Or did she simply curl up to drown beneath the fervent, swirling blanket of smoke in her own room, her husband’s unlit candle melting in her hand, her family’s spilt and puddled urine holding back the flames for just a trice, because she did not wish to live without her son? These are the questions everybody asked — and answered — for a day or two. But no one volunteered the truth, or called the owner in for questioning, or wondered why Princesses should play with fire at dawn. And no one asked, of course, how it could be that sixty-seven people slept in this four-storey house that had been built for ten. Or how they lived with just three taps and no gaslight and just two toilets in the yard. Or where the singed and heated dispossessed had found themselves new ‘homes’. Or why it was that no one came to name or claim the single blackened corpse.

Aunt should not take any blame. She and her nephew were moved away by policemen with the others in the crowd. The policemen did not care if those they moved were gawpers from the neighbourhood or residents. ‘Move on, move on,’ was all they understood, as if the drama of the streets was a private spectacle, cordoned off to everyone except those few who wore the ticket of a uniform. There were no firemen there or fire appliances. In neighbourhoods like that all epidemics, rioting and fires were left to run their course. The buildings, bodies, laws were not worth keeping thereabouts, it was thought. In fact, a city councillor had said the week before that the best prospect for the city was for all the tenements to be consumed by flames, for all the lawless poor to be dispersed by heat like rodents in a forest fire, for the squalid quarters of the city to be fumigated, cauterized. ‘Let’s build again. From scratch,’ he’d said.

Aunt and Victor were driven back along the street towards the bakery. Victor was crying from the shock and drama of the fire. He wanted Em. He wanted Mother now. He would not walk a pace, so Aunt was forced to lift him on her shoulders until the policemen judged that they had driven back the crowd to a safe and sterile distance. They turned and watched the smoke knit grey scarves above the roofs, with flecks of dying orange made by airborne sparks. Aunt asked those Princesses she recognized if they’d seen Em. They thought they had. They weren’t sure. Yes, yes, they’d seen her standing in the street eating bread with Aunt and Victor just a while ago. Or no, they hadn’t seen her, not for days. Em who? They didn’t know her by a name.

Aunt did not panic. She was sure that Em was safe. She’d heard it said the building had been cleared. In any case, the fire had started in the attic rooms, and all the attic girls seemed well enough if not exactly dressed for shopping or a ball. Em would have had more chance than them to wake, to dress, to come downstairs, to go in search of her sister and her son. What could Aunt do except stay calm? She was the calmest woman on the street. She was just glad that she had remembered to put on her hat, her battered cloche. It’s known that flames make snacks of straw.

The crowds were thickening, drawn by the smoke. Some men were trying to breach the line of police. They lived in houses close to the burning building. They knew that fire had legs and wings and that their rooms and homes were next in line. They’d only come onto the street to see what all the fracas was and, when they knew, to find a certain place of safety for their families. They’d found themselves expelled, pushed back from their front stairs, spectators to the colonizing heat.

‘Let’s fight the fire,’ they begged. ‘At least let us go home and save a thing or two, before it all goes up in smoke.’

‘Keep back,’ the policemen said.

Their commandant did not organize a chain of buckets or send for nurses from the sanatorium, or for the water pumps. He sent instead for mounted policemen and another van of men. This was his district and he knew that trouble on the streets would be a black mark in his book.

It was not long before the word was out that the city councillor who’d recommended, just a week before, that tenements like these should be brought down to earth by fire had got his way. How was it that the police were there, at dawn and in such numbers? Why was it that no one was allowed to investigate or to fight the fire? The police, the politicians, the nobs and profiteers who wanted all the city to themselves had come before the sun was up to make a furnace for the poor. It was not only hotheads in the crowd who now found cobblestones and staves or started pushing against the policemen’s chests. The neighbourhood — in both respects — was now inflamed. They’d beat themselves like moths against the cordon of the law to get nearer to the flames.

If there was fighting to be done, then districts such as this were good for volunteers. Young men with little else to do got out of bed and ran into the street. Beggars, hawkers, prostitutes, the unemployed, the young, the criminals, the men and women with grudges and with principles, in fact the sort who had scores to settle with the city and the police, were glad to add their lungs and muscles to the throng. The crowds were driven from the rear by rumours and by the more mature of troublemakers who, hanging back, felt safe to bruise the air with threats and insults. Their curses and their slogans, lobbed at the riot from the rear, caused punches, cobbles, bricks to be thrown at the front.

Riots are like fires. They look their best at night. They smoulder and they flare with greater drama when the sky is dark. They beckon and they mesmerize. This breakfast riot was short-lived. The city had no need of it. It had its work to do, its schedules and appointments to address, its daylight hours to endure. Those men — and the few women — hurrying down the pavements at that hour on their way to work had only time to poke their noses down the narrow lanes where they could see the police and smoke and hear the curses of the neighbourhood.

If this had been at dusk, not dawn, with all the duties of the day despatched, then only the most innocuous, the wariest, would pass the mayhem by. That’s something every beggar knows — that breakfast times are dead, that crowds proliferate when work is done and time is no longer money. At dusk the riot would have spread out of the narrow lanes, beyond the burning tenements. It would have helped itself to food and clothes through the broken glass of windows. It would have picked on men in carriages or cars and taken wallets, watches, hats, and paid for them with beatings. It would have toppled tram-cars, and started new and spiteful fires in districts where the residents were rich. But it was dawn, and spite was still abed. The police soon gained control with their horses and their truncheons and their farmdog expertise in splitting herds and cutting out the single troublemaker from the pack.