Jim Crace - Arcadia

Untutored in the waltz, the simple quick-quick-slow of passing through a crowd, Rook’s country shadow had been blocked by waiting cars and errand bikes, thwarted by citizens on opposing routes, stopped in his path by shopping bags, and kids, and snack-or-bargain carts. He’d been delayed by brochure touts and leafleteers, tackled at the knees and chest by rubbish cans, hydrants, signs, post boxes, newspaper stands. He’d been bumped and buffeted by the selective tidal chaos of the street which unfooted and swept away those newcomers who did not understand its current or its flow. This was a city at full pelt.

As Rook maintained his pace unerringly and blunder-less, the young man in his suit — whose name you’ll know before the day is out — was left, a stray, unable even to spot his quarry’s browsing head amongst the unremitting throng of citizens. He stopped and window-shopped himself, waylaid by seagull flights of lingerie, by jewels thrown out across a bed of sand as carelessly as stones, by chocolate truffles displayed like jewels on satin trays, by terraces of boots and shoes, by all the sorcery of Look, Don’t touch . He pressed his back against the window glass expecting eyes to look him up and down, and disapprove. But there were none. The only eyes that stared at him were in the plaster mannequins. They looked out, day and night, as if they dreamed the street, and all the passers-by were figments in the glass.

Who can resist the privacy of crowds? A crowd is people, freely voting for themselves. Rook’s shadow joined the crowd and went with it along Saints Row, around the Tower Square, and back again, until it beached him amongst the pavement tables of a bar. He sat. He’d sit until a waiter came, and then he’d hurry off again. He was not bored. The street was cabaret, with mime, and all the spoken badinage delivered stagily, in a whisper or a shout. He’d stay there for a while, he thought, and then go back to where he’d spotted Rook, where there were never crowds, in the ill-lit tunnel under Link Highway Red. That was the perfect spot for the ambush that he planned.

Rook, meanwhile, had gone beyond the bustle of the boutique street. He’d skirted round the boundaries of the Mathematical Park where flower beds were cut for every shape — an octagon of primulas, a perfect circle for begonias, roses in triangles and squares — and Pythagorean climbing frames and wooden seats designed impossibly like Mo¨bius strips. Now Rook was walking through the neighbourhood where he was born and raised, the Wood-gate district of our city.

Where were the wooden gates that gave the place its name, those medieval, oaken sentries to what had been an ancient town? Burned down, seventy-four years before, when Victor was a child of six. The incendiarists — so it was said — were city councillors who wanted to ‘better’ what had become a low-rent district of beggars, thieves, and prostitutes. Their improving additions were terraces of five-storey blocks — one floor retail, one floor wholesale, two floors apartments, attic, cellar, stables, yard, high rent. In their haste, they’d followed, not replaced, the charred and muddled labyrinth of medieval streets. The Woodgate district was then, and still was on Victor’s eightieth, best suited to the horse. Those narrow stable yards and culs-de-sac, those twisting alleyways that locals called the Squints, were scarcely wider than a mare is long. No motor vehicle could turn about inside the Squints. They were too tight and modest for the cussed constipation of the car.

The Woodgate neighbourhood had its vehicles, of course. A town must breathe, and there were straighter, wider ways which offered access to the Squints and provided Rook a fast, straightforward route to cakes and greenery. Now he was walking down the road, four mares in width, where he was raised. There were parking bays where he’d once played asthmatic ball-and-tag. The building where his parents had leased a flat was let to businesses — a barber on the pavement floor, an accountancy above, and then three floors of warehousing. The room which Rook had shared with a brother for ten years was wall to wall with mats and phaga rugs, and druggets from Kashmir. An asthmatic’s fibrous nightmare.

Neighbourhood was not the word. There were no longer neighbours there. At night the barbers and accountants, and the warehousemen, went home by car and bus and train to suburbs out of town. At night the Squints were dark and dead. But still the buildings were the ones Rook had known when he was small. There were no demolitions yet. And still there was a faint smell in the air, beneath the odour of the cars and the scent of secretaries, of ancient fire. And rotting vegetation, too, as if the area had been built against the odds on the sweet and sour of a swamp. For these were the borders of the Soap Market. The smell, an airborne punch of cabbage stalks, figs, olives, beet … had belched and yawned along these streets and down these Squints for six hundred years. The housing bricks and paving stones, they said, could boil down into soup; the place was steeped in root, and leaf, and fruit. So, of course, was Rook. Rook soup would taste as much of fruit as meat. Just like the merchant’s monkey in the song,

His testicles were mango stones,

(Quite normal in the Apes);

His cock was courgette on-the-bone.

He Shat Fresh Grapes

For all his coolness and his suits, Rook was a market boy, a Soapie through and through. His mother and his father made it so. His parents had rented a market stall and too frequent were the days when they’d encourage Rook to miss school and help them stack and sell their wares. He did not know, perhaps, the shape of continents or algebra when he was ten, but he could tell — by smell, by patina, by shape (no easy task) — a Trakana cherry from a Wijnkers, and know, before he broke the skin, which aubergines were soured, which peas had greyed inside their pods.

So it was in a sentimental mood that Rook, on Victor’s celebration day, walked the familiar hundred metres between his old home and the market rim beyond which, as yet, the colonizing barbers, the accountants, and warehousemen, had made no mark. The canyoned pattern of the city ended here in a huge 0-shaped, cobbled court, which could not be circled — Rook could guarantee — by a shallow-winded boy on a bike in less than fifteen minutes. Except for those few low-rise restaurants and bars in the Soap Garden which formed the centre of the 0, all buildings in the court were wood and canvas market stalls. The place was open to the sky, and could have been a medieval harvest fair. Except that Big Vic — as Victor’s office block was known — and the other high-rise monoliths of the new town cut off the market from the skyline hills, and fast and heavy traffic on the Link Highways beat drum rolls across the awnings and the roofs.

Inside the oval, there were no parking bays, traffic lights, or ordered flows. The marketeers parked where they chose, or where the Man in Cellophane (who took it madly on himself to block and beckon traffic) directed them. Their trucks and vans choked paths and access streets. Their barrows and their porter sleds were left where they were used. The wooden produce trays, the emptied sacks, the pallets, bins, and panniers which had held vegetables and fruit were piled and stacked unevenly, discarded like the crusts and rinds and eggshells of an outdoor meal. It was safe haven for a sprinting criminal pursued by police in cars.

The odours here were less opaque than those which spilled out, windborne, into the streets beyond. To walk amongst the stalls, eyes closed, would be to test one’s nose for all the subtleties of countryside and food. The practised nose — like Rook’s — could tell when barrows of potatoes were pushed by or where the garlic nests were hung or whether medlar fruit had bletted long enough and now were fit to eat, or when (the softest, then the foullest scents of all) guavas were for sale, or durians. But why would anybody want to close their eyes? No gallery of modern art could match the colours there, the tones, the shapes, the harmonies and conflicts on the stalls.