Jim Crace - Arcadia

Street luck is what the city excels at. Aunt’s hat (a little passé now), her smile, the boyish burden on her back, attracted comment from the livelier of the men she passed. One followed her — a man about her age, but dressed much older and in the bar-room style with patent shoes and collar studs, a soft homburg, trousers with a centre crease, a jacket of the latest cut with sloping pockets and long revers.

‘What’s that you’ve got on your back?’ he asked. ‘The kid must have seen that hat and thought he’d take a donkey ride!’ She answered cheek with cheek. She said the kid was paying for his ride. She was a human tram. ‘Jump up, if you can find the fare,’ she said (and winked). ‘There’s room inside for a little one.’

‘There’s more to me than meets the eye,’ he said, matching winks with Aunt. ‘Want to see? Hold on a bit …’

‘What bit exactly should I hold?’

‘Your tongue!’ he said.

They called him Dip, though he was known by many other names. His speciality was crowds. He’d dip a hand and make off with your purse and the most you’d feel would be a sense of loss and an unaccustomed lightness in the pocket. He could unclip brooches, take watches out of fobs and replace them with stones of matching weight, remove a banknote from a billfold and then put back the fold, swap a necklace for a length of string, steal (it was said) the glasses off your nose. Hard luck the lady who took a helping hand off Dip, who let him take her arm to cross the street or welcomed his assistance with the too-high step to board a tram. One hand at the elbow left one hand free to browse the handbag or the purse. Tough luck the well-heeled man who hovered in the street when Dip walked by. It only took the slightest nudge from him, a stumble, an apology. The man would never guess his pockets had been searched and emptied, his tram fare and silver tie clip stolen, his saint medallion removed.

At first, Dip’s interest in Aunt had been professional. A woman forced to give a piggyback to a tired child might have an unattended purse or, perhaps, an outer pocket which he could open up with just one brushing cut from the pivot blade of his pig-sticker. He’d been surprised when she drew close how young she was. And poor. And to his taste. He liked these country girls, their jollity, their give-as-good-as-take, their duelling repartee. This one was plump and scruffy, it was true. Beneath the disguise of the broad-rimmed cloche, her forehead and her upper cheeks were dry and pocked like grapefruit skin. But she had level eyes, a playful face, a comic angle to her chin, and — Dip, like every other man, had fantasies too strange to name — she satisfied his liking, his desire, for girls in hats. He’d never met a woman before who wore her hat with more flirtatiousness than Aunt. One glimpse of that had put his rhubarb up.

‘Please let me help,’ he said. ‘I’ll carry him. Where to?’

She shrugged: ‘Who knows?’

‘What’s your boy’s name?’ he asked.

‘Victor … and, anyway, he isn’t mine. You go and tend your own potatoes. It’s not your business who he is.’ That’s what she said, but what she thought was something else: This man is sent to us to take the place of Em. She let Dip take the boy from off her back and lift him in a flying angel onto his shoulders.

‘Where to?’ he asked again.

She told him all about the fire and Em and what their life had been; and telling it, she buried it, still warm. Life was too blunt and short to waste it on the dead.

Dip was enthralled by how Aunt span her hat whenever she was lost for words. He held his breath, as if his lungs were as fragile as frost, when she recounted how the men in bars had tossed their coins in her hat-brim to win themselves short glimpses of her legs. Here was a woman, he was sure, who was a gift from heaven and from hell. He jangled stolen coins in his pocket and hoped that he would get a chance to toss them too.

His room, he said, was near. So near that he could smell the market fruit from it. He offered her some floor.

‘And what about the kid?’ she asked.

It’s true, he thought. The kid is in the way. But then, he’s small and young. He’ll sleep. And when he sleeps? Who knows what might occur?

They put ‘the kid’ to sleep, and then they set to work. Aunt did her best to seem experienced, though, truth be told, she’d never suffered this intimacy before. She knew about it, naturally, but only in the way of comic patter, the sexual flirting that it took to beg some coins from a man, the flush and stillness that settled on them when her legs were on display and she was trading winks and innuendo.

Some Princesses — the prostitutes, the opportunists — had kept them all amused one night with stories of their clientele. How one old boy had paid good cash to watch a girl spit on his feet. How others wanted armpits licked (‘My wife would never kiss me there!’) or asked for entry by the tradesman’s door, or took their pleasure spiced with oaths the like of which would shock the guardians of hell. How the teenage sons of bourgeoisie were brought by uncles, godfathers, family friends to girls like them to ‘taste the fruit’ but more often begged for mercy and their innocence; or wept; or failed ‘to stiffen the worm’; or changed their minds when they found out what, how and where, it all involved; or came into their underclothes before their trouser buttons were undone; or wet themselves.

Aunt was prepared for oddities. She was prepared, in fact, to be amused. Hilarity, it seemed from what the Princesses had said, was the stablemate of making love, and Dip had shown that he liked fun. But she soon found herself more startled than amused. Dip’s kisses were the colonizing kind. His hands — those hands so used to slipping gently and unnoticed into pockets, tucks and folds — seemed suddenly to lose their expertise. His fingers — adept in crowds at unloosening, unfastening, unbuttoning — were trembling at the strings of the nightcloth which she still wore beneath her coat. He seemed uncertain how to deal with the clips on his braces. He tried to pass his hands through solid cloth. He seemed unable, or unwilling, to push his trousers down without Aunt’s help. His breathing had become so uneven and so laboured that Aunt began to think that they had better stop before the poor man had a fit and her new dream of moving in with a good and handsome city thief was ended with a death. His temperature was fluctuating. His face was red. His levity, his measured confidence — those two characteristics which had made Dip so attractive to Aunt — had disappeared. Instead here was a man who did not seem able to form a simple sentence, but was behaving with the blunt and charmless urgency of a child denied the breast. Indeed, quite soon his mouth was partly on her breast, and partly chewing on her cotton undershift. One hand pulled her heavy coat and nightcloth to her waist; his other hand was pushed too tightly — and was trapped — beneath his trouser band, beneath his underclothes.

One gentle shove from Aunt would have sent this Dip toppling like a trussed piglet onto the bare floorboards of his room. But Aunt was in no mood to shove. Despite her bafflement, she was at least gratified to be the centre of attention, to be the focus of Dip’s ballet buffo. It kept the grief of sisterhood at bay. She let him slide onto the mattress, his sinking head pressed to her chest … her abdomen … her stomach … her crutch … her thighs … her knees. She let him put his tongue between her toes. She laughed and laughed. No wonder prostitutes were such a jolly breed.

‘Undress,’ he said. ‘But not the hat.’

NOW DO YOU SEE the charm of cities? None of this adventure could have happened on the village green where Aunt and Em had first played tip-and-kiss with boys. There were no flirting, pocket-picking strangers to encounter there, in patent shoes and collar studs, with private rooms. The only available men were cousins all. Or neighbours’ sons. Or daft. They were as solid and as passionate as trees, as heroic and original as farmyard hens. That is to say they were all dull and without sin; their only privacy was sleep and shit. But city air makes free — and country pullets can become street cockatoos or fighting birds or songsters once they’ve shaken hayseed from their wings. So, Aunt and Dip, two village souls gone free and wild in city streets, could no more pass each other by than cats can pass a dish of cream.