Jim Crace - Arcadia

But on that night she wanted fifty eggs at least, more hen’s work than could be shrugged off as ‘breakages’. If she was caught and put away then Victor would be orphaned once again. She did not trust her Dip — left as a sentry in the street with Victor sleeping on his shoulder and her hat in hand — to give the boy a home or love. She’d never seen them touch affectionately. Dip was the sort who having never been a cared-for child himself thought touch and tenderness were simply trinkets with which men could flatter, soften, win their women. But Aunt — persuaded now against all reason that Victor would be happier left on his own, the boiled-egg salesman of the marketplace — had made herself the promise that he would ‘always have a beam above his head at night’. If she could guarantee that he was safe and warm at night, then she could put him out of mind by day.

She was the cheerful type. What was the point in brewing guilt? Who’d benefit if she and Victor caressed and hugged all day, and let their empty stomachs shrink and pucker in the cold? It seemed to her, as she gained entry to the storeroom, that stealing eggs for Victor was the greatest gift that she could give because these eggs would free Em’s son from her, and leave her free of him.

That night the storeroom was not entirely dark. A late winter moon turned the skylight windowpanes a liquid silver and made the room look colder than it was, as if the ceiling had been tiled in translucent squares of ice. What light there was picked out the thousand brittle, bony skulls of eggs. The shells absorbed the light, reflecting none onto their bedding straw, like button mushrooms butting into oxygen from earth.

Aunt walked as gently as fear allows between the egg trays and the light. The odour was strong, and reminiscent too. The chicken dung, the straw, the timber of the room, the salt-and-semen smell of white and yolk, the moonlight dressing, was farmyard simplified, was field. Aunt took just five eggs from each tray and — counting in a whisper as she worked — filled her bag with sixty eggs. They were the size and weight of perfect plums. The only sounds she heard were Dip whistling in the lane outside — his warning that there were passers-by — and, far away, the midnight alarums of the drunks and revellers amongst the final trams and scuffles of the night. There were no rats to alarm her. The watchman slept on undisturbed. But still she was afraid. The eggs were ghosts. They looked like souls or sins encased in sculpted skin. To steal these icy eggs at night made Aunt feel like a grave-robber. Each one was someone dead and someone loved. Which were her parents? Which were the villagers who’d been alive when Aunt was born? Which one was Em?

She could not move. Dip whistled without cease, suspiciously and tunelessly. Perhaps there were policemen on the street — then whistling would only bring ill-luck to Dip. But if he stopped?

Aunt crouched beside her bag of eggs. A moth flew up from God-knows-where. A bat-moth, black, grey, and red. It landed on the back of Aunt’s right hand. It closed its wings and rested on her warmth. No great weight, no manacle, could have rendered Aunt more still or breathless than that one moth. Then Victor woke. She heard Dip curse, then whistle once again — a slower, sleepy version of the dance he’d been attempting before. But Victor would not settle to this bogus lullaby. His thin crow voice was raised in protest at the pressure of Dip’s hold, the darkness of the lane, his orphanage. ‘Shut up,’ Dip said. But Victor knew the power of his lungs and screamed. Nothing would make him happy now. He was alone, at midnight, in the city. Tomorrow he would earn his living — a marketeer at last. But for the moment, but for ever, Em was dead, the eggs were stolen, packed, and Aunt was crouching in that brittle-mushroom field, transfixed. She was not certain what had pinned her there — the screaming or the whistling or the moth. She only knew what everybody knew who’d come from village into town, that midnight is a lonely and ungenerous time when streetlamps blanket out the stars.

She held the bat-moth by the wings and put it on the eggs. She had to take the chance of climbing back into the town. Victor’s screaming, Dip’s slow dance, were loud and strange enough to bring the army out. She lifted the loose wallboard and looked outside. It seemed safe enough. She clambered through the gap and reached back into the storeroom for the bag of eggs, and then replaced the board to disguise her entry. Dip had seen her now, and stopped whistling. Victor screamed. Despite the hour the lane was busy. Men, mostly alone, were making for a brothel-bar where drinks and women could be bought until dawn. They passed between the distraught child and the woman thief without a comment or a glance. Crime and distress were the common starlings of the street. They could not give a damn.

A COUNTRY CHILD of six or seven might work all day at harvest time. Hard work, too; helping with the stacks, or pulling roots, or climbing to the furthest branches for the remotest plums. At dawn it very often was the child who was sent out to slop the pigs or strip the maize for chicken feed. The youngest daughter had the milking stool. The smallest son was sent at dusk to gate the herd or flock, and if he came home empty-handed — that’s to say, he’d found no firewood, mushrooms, nuts — then very often supper was withheld. ‘Empty hands, empty stomach,’ was the village phrase. At lambing or when the fruit was in its fullest blush, some girl or boy would have to keep the foxes or the applejays at bay. All it took would be a fire, a scare-drum, or a horn. A single child in every orchard or each field throughout the day or night would do the job at no expense, so long as they were vigilant and did not sleep. Nobody said, That kid’s misused. How could you leave a child so young, alone, for such a time, with so much danger all around? Rather, their childhood seemed ennobled by the tasks they had. Work made them independent, healthy, spirited. Why, then, the fuss when city children worked? Compared to country kids the poorest city children — homeless, reckless on the streets — had an easy time of it. At least they pleased themselves. If they were bored with holding carriage horses for small change, or selling matches, papers, sex, then they could take the time to share a cigarette with friends or join the shoal of sprat-sized thieves and beggars in the Soap Garden. They could vie with pigeons for rinds of bread, or glean the market for discarded fruit, or splash around in the motherly and greying laundry water of the public washing fountain.

Philanthropists, of course, would do their best to net the shoal, to place the best and brightest of the girls in houses where they’d be taught to iron and make the beds. They’d do their best to separate the boys from their bad ways, their friends, their cigarettes, their threadbare clothes, by indenturing them to coachbuilders, factory men, or anybody wanting hard work for no pay. They thought a hostel was a better place for orphans than the street, yet could not answer why it was that once their orphans had a bed, a schedule for their prayers, once they had work and food, a change of clothes, they still broke loose to join the starlings again.

The answer’s tough and simple. It is this: that routes to misery and hell are often much more fun, more challenging than routes to virtue and well-being. Why else, how else, would children such as those who thronged the Soap Garden and the Market, then and now, embrace the destitution of the city streets with such audacity and such appetite? We should not grieve too much for little Victor, then. Not yet, at least. The market was a warm and busy place, more cheerful than a four-walled room, more sociable, more nourishing than the four dry, sweet breasts that had sustained him till the fire. He was bereaved, twice over. He was not strong. Or wise. But he was young enough to mistake mischance for the natural order of his life.