Jim Crace - Arcadia

Five buildings burned. The Woodgate district lost its wooden gates. But only Em was killed. The tiles and timbers of the tenement fell all around her like the trees had fallen once across her village lane, that other breakfast time when the winds had stretched the memory and bent the tallest, oldest pines beyond endurance. The sun fell onto the cobbles of the street for the first time in who-knows-how-many? years. The fire-shortened tenements had cleared a path for it. It thinly penetrated smoke and waltzed like light on water as the wind gathered, turned and spread the ashy air.

The crowd were now subdued. The ones whose homes were outside the police lines went home. The unlucky ones stayed put. And waited. They prayed the wind would settle down and let the fires die. The residents of the five damaged buildings would be happy now to see the wind and flames whip up so that their grief could spread itself throughout the town, so everybody would know what it meant to wake at dawn in purgatory, and without blame, and with no hope of heaven as reward. But there is no patterned justice to the wind or rain. And rain there was, quite soon. It made the timbers steam. It dampened spirits. It cleared and cleaned the streets, so that the rivulets of rain which sped along the gutters took off the ash and dust which had so recently settled.

Em had been roasted and then dusted by the ash. The rain was her undertaker. It showered her. It made her cold and shiny almost, as ready as she could ever be for her discovery two hours later by, at first, a pair of dogs and then a sergeant in the police. By noon they’d brought a box for her. It was not easy to lift her body from the rubble. She was too well cooked. Her flesh was falling from the bone. They wrapped her in a blanket then and lifted her. They kept her in the city morgue, in ice, and out of sight. But no one came and so they gave her earthy eyelids in the common grave and put her on the register as ‘Woman, unidentified’.

Aunt still was calm. She knew where she should rendezvous with Em. The marketplace, of course. Em’s place of work. Her pitch where she had sat with Victor on her breast, palm out and up and heavy with coins.

‘You have to walk yourself,’ she said to Victor. ‘I’m not a donkey. Walk!’ She made him stand. She held his hand. ‘Come on. She’s waiting for us. Walk a little way, and then I’ll let you have a ride.’

Victor was shocked. Not by the fire, and not by fears of losing Em. But by the clutter and the hardness of the streets, by the smoke and horses, by the anger and the weeping, by his aunt’s strange mix of harshness and attention, her calmness and her urgency.

When he was eighty and looked back, it seemed to Victor that this was his first unfettered image of the town, that up till then he’d only glimpsed the city streets. At most he’d seen those dislocated country views of fruit in carts, of vegetables displayed on stalls, of shoppers, traders, bar loafers, from the waists down. He did not like what he was seeing now. He clung to Aunt’s hand and her skirts. His cheeks were wet. His chest was shaking, partly from the morning cold and partly from the bubble sobs which he could not suppress. He walked — a little gawkily, of course. He was still young. He was not strong — and wished that he could be elsewhere. His head was full of countryside; the snoozer snake, the falling fruit, the little king returning home in a carriage made for melons, the burning, lucky candle on the step, the birthday chair that’s legs were saplings, that’s back was green and woven like a wreath.

WHEN VICTOR WAS an older, richer man, a twenty-six-year-old with property and prospects and — already — half a grip on all the riches of the Soap Market, he found the time and sentiment to search the city archives for the bound and brittle volumes in which the local newspapers were preserved. He knew the year and month that Em had disappeared. He knew there’d been a fire and still retained the snapshot memory of being lifted to Aunt’s back and watching flames and scarves of smoke across her shoulder.

It was a morning’s work to find the thumbnail news item, amid reports of city trade and gossip and a world gone mad with war: ‘Five tenement houses frequented by itinerants, prostitutes, and beggars were fired during dawn disturbances yesterday in the city’s Woodgate district. Several rioters were detained and charged with assault and theft following attacks on police, fire officers, and local trading premises. The disturbances were initially occasioned, it is reported, by rivalry between criminal groups. The body of an unidentified woman was removed from the debris.’ The single-column headline was BREAKFAST ARSONISTS DETAINED.

But at the time Victor had no apprehension that his mother might be harmed. His aunt had said, ‘Come on, she’s waiting for us.’ His only fear was that he would be obliged to walk too far, before his aunt rewarded him with the donkey ride she’d promised on her back. He tugged her hand, so that his walking dragged on her. But she was tough and unlike Em. His tugs earned harder tugs from her. Her grip on his small hand was only soft if he matched steps with her. The instant that he slowed or faltered she bunched his finger bones. ‘Keep up,’ she said. Or, ‘Quickly now.’ He had to run to keep in step. Four trots of his to match her single stride. He’d rarely run before, except in play, and then the distance had been little more than wall to wall in their small room. He hadn’t realized the urgency, the clumsiness of speed, or how painful it could be.

Who knows what ants or termites feel when boys or bounty hunters kill the queen? Their structures fall apart. The soft, iron magnet lets her fleshy filings go, so even those far from the nest who have not witnessed the sacking of the royal chamber or seen the assassin’s needle impale the queen go listless-haywire at the instant of her death. Looking back, it seemed to Victor that the world that day was a pandemonium of ants, and ants without a queen. How else could he make sense of city streets, or cars and trams and carriages, of random, indiscriminating sounds, of pavement anti-patterns in which bodies flocked and fled like cream turned in a whisk, of Aunt once madly kind and now so rushed and unforgiving?

Aunt was quite certain, as she dragged her nephew by his finger to the marketplace, of two things — that Em was waiting in her usual place, that Em had perished in the fire. Or else a nightmare mixture of the two — that they’d find Em, her blackened palm outstretched, her thin, charred back propped up against the usual snag tree on the edges of the Soap Garden.

If they’d found Em, alive and well, their future would have been the past. They would have gone back ‘home’, to the countryside in May. At worst the springs and cushions of a swelling hedgerow are better bedding than the embers of a city fire. But his mother was elsewhere, and Aunt was not nostalgic for the pains and pleasures of the earth. She sat cross-legged all day at Em’s worn pitch. She’d give her sister till the night to resurrect herself and then she’d set about the task of finding once again a nesting box. Aunt did not try to put her nephew to the breast, or beg from passers-by. Victor was left to shuffle in the garden and the marketplace at will. At last. He loved and hated what he saw. He felt like we all feel when we’re first left at school — condemned to a freedom that at first seems narrower and more enclosed than the cell that’s family and home. The market paid him little heed, except to bruise and buffet him, and startle him with noise and colour.

His aunt was not a callous woman. She guessed the worst when Em did not show up. Her eyes were damp despite herself. But nor was she the sort to mope. If Em had disappeared, had died, was lost, had fled without her son, was lying in a pauper’s ward scorched and bruised by smoke and truncheons, then still the world went round, and breakfast followed dawn, and shitting followed food, and life went on. She gave her old straw cloche a whirl. She primped its dog-eared dog-rose sprigs in felt. She made its deep brim curl and grin and made a face herself to match. She wiped her eyes and, dutifully, checking one last time for Em, she went in search of Victor; and then, her nephew clinging to her back, she headed for the town.