Jim Crace - Arcadia

The dipping and the begging became less urgent. They lived on love and bed. These were sufficient for a while. So when they woke, curve-wrapped on their mattress like two bananas on one bunch, Dip breathing through the filter of Aunt’s hair, Aunt folded like an infant in his arms, it was not often long before they found themselves embracing face to face or delving in the blankets for a breast, a testicle, a pinch of fat. Sex was breakfast for these two. It fuelled them for the day. Sometimes they breakfasted at leisure, no stone unturned. At other times Aunt merely turned away and let Dip wriggle into her, to puff and quiver, for a minute at the most, at her buttocks and her back. Aunt did not care for breakfast much. Her appetite for love grew with the day. But she was content to let Dip make use of her after dawn, so long as — in the afternoons, at night — he’d do what she desired.

Each day they washed with water from a jug which Aunt had filled from the public fountain the evening before. They dried themselves on air. They dressed in their best, only clothes, and walked out into town not like the cockroaches they were, but eagerly and hand-in-hand. They had to eat. Aunt dealt with that. She knew which market men would happily part with bruised fruit, which bakeries threw out collapsed or wounded loaves, where trays of eggs were stored and could be reached by someone small and agile like herself, where it was easiest to snatch the bread or chops off diners’ plates in restaurants.

They needed money, too. Youth and love are spendthrifts both. Here Dip’s expertise gave them an undulating income. One day he’d lift a wallet with enough inside to last the week; and then a week would pass and all he’d get would be ‘blind purses’ containing buttons, tokens, keys, eau de Cologne, but not one coin. Dip did not choose his victims well. He’d rather pick their pockets comically so that Aunt — his witness from across the street — would be amused. He did not concentrate. He was on show. He took it as a challenge to remove a worthless glass and metal brooch from the lapel of a stern-faced, clucking woman, and lost all taste for lucrative yet humdrum theft. Aunt satisfied the predator in him. The time would come when he’d insist that she stayed in the room when he went out to work. He’d say she soured his good luck. But in those months when they first met he did not care if business was not good. A note or two, some silver change, would be enough to reunite their hands while they, leaving Victor in the room with blankets for his toys, went off to find a bar.

Aunt had a liking for the clear, cheap, country spirit known then as glee water, but now, of course, tamed and bottled by the drink barons and marketed as Boulevard Liqueur. It did not take a lot to make her drunk. One shot, and she would lay her hat and head on Dip’s shoulder, her hand upon his knee, her foot on his. Two shots, and she would press her lips against his ear and say what they’d do to pass the time when they got home, if Victor were asleep. She’d be a ‘Princess’ and she’d let him buy her for the afternoon. She’d be as hard as nails for him. Or else they’d make imagination manifest: ‘Let’s sit apart and masturbate.’ Or else, ‘Let’s buy some honey, Dip. We’ll put it on and lick it off. I’ll put some on my breasts and you can feed off me …’ Or else, ‘Do you want to do me in my hat? I’ll do a show for you. You toss-and-pitch and watch. For every coin that you land inside the brim I’ll take something off.’

Once, when she had watched Dip lifting purses from the smarter ladies of the town, she asked, ‘Why don’t you try to burgle me?’: ‘Just like we’re in a crowd,’ she said. ‘You come up and dip your hands inside my clothes and try to find my purse.’ For Aunt the narrative of sex, the scene, the characters, were seldom twice the same. Her passions were theatrical. She cast herself in parts in which the heroine was more slender and had better skin than her, in which she was in charge, desired, insatiable, amused, in which she could transcend herself, become any one of those grand or glamorous women on the street.

The Princesses were wrong. Hilarity was not the word, though laughter was a part of sexual pleasure. Euphoria was what she felt. When she and Dip were making, staging love, it seemed the real world could be kept at bay. She could have kept the world at bay all day! What was the hurry? What was the point in hurtling, like men, through such sustainable pleasures to the brief and unreliable moment when the bubble shudders, bursts? She could not understand how Dip, at breakfast time, was so easily, so speedily, so undramatically relieved. That was his word, ‘Relief’ — ‘Give me relief,’ he said. For Aunt not-making-love was not the absence of relief, but a muting of that part of her which found its best expression in the gift of love.

They’d put ‘the kid’ to sleep when they’d first met and kissed. Of course, tired and dispirited though he was, he did not sleep for ever. For Aunt and Dip to live the life they chose, to play such parts each afternoon, to spend those hours drinking glee, they needed privacy, the privacy of two, not three, bananas to the bunch. A child of Victor’s age was old enough to inhibit anything beyond a kiss. Both Aunt and Dip had understood, the day they met, that if their passion for each other was to boil and whistle like a kettle and not steam and simmer like the water in an open pot, they would require time to themselves.

‘We’ll put the boy to work,’ Dip said, when he had suffered inhibitions for long enough. ‘He’s missing his mum and this’ll give him something else to do.’

What kind of work? Aunt raised an eyebrow almost to her cloche’s brim.

‘The boy can hardly walk,’ she said. ‘And I won’t have him begging on his own. Besides, he’s just a baby, though he’s big. He’s hardly weaned … He isn’t bright enough. He isn’t tough …’

‘I’ll fix him up,’ said Dip. ‘The streets are full of kids like him, and doing very nicely, too.’

‘But doing what?’

Dip hadn’t thought it out, but now he had to find a scheme and find it quickly, too, before he lost his patience with the boy and showed it with his fists. He settled for the first idea that came. The boy could build a future out of eggs.

‘What eggs?’ Aunt asked.

‘The eggs you steal from out the back of that big storehouse.’

‘Then what? You think he’ll build a nest and hatch them out?’

‘We’ll boil them up, what else?’

‘What else? It’s juggling that you have in mind, I guess. Or sulphur bombs.’

‘We’ll boil them up. Get the kid a little bag or tray, some twists of salt. He’ll have a business on his hands! When I was little, that was lunch at harvest time, or if we had to travel anywhere outside the village. One boiled egg. The only salt we had was sweat. My grandma used to tell our fortunes from the broken shell. The shell could show how long you’d live. Perhaps the kid can trade in fortunes, too.’

‘He’s hardly seven years of age.’

‘Seven’s an old man in this town.’

So it was that Victor first became a marketeer, a soapie at the age of seven. Aunt was his wholesaler. She crept into the storehouse from which she’d stolen — but more modestly — a dozen times before. It was late at night, after the fresh eggs had been brought from the railway station, sorted, placed in straw-lined trays. She lined a muslin bag with paper, lifted the one loose wallboard which provided access from the city lane at the rear of the building, and crept into the midnight room.

On that first night she was afraid. She’d stolen eggs before, but only one or two. A watchman, catching her, would not call on the police or his employer for what it took a hen a day to make. He’d settle for the lecture he could give or, at worst, demand some other recompense.