Jim Crace - Arcadia

He sat, contented, resigned, before his tray of eggs, exactly in the place — where else? — where he had sat and suckled for so long with Em. His back was set against his mother’s tree. It was a home of sorts. And though his face was not well known (how could it be, pressed up against his mother’s flesh and shrouded, swaddled from the light?), he knew enough about the tricks of trade to turn his thin mouth up and advertise his wares with what appeared as undesigning smiles. Indeed he was amused. What boy, a few weeks short of seven years of age, would not delight in sixty eggs of which he had sole charge?

Aunt and Dip were his first customers, pretending to be casual passers-by. They dropped their coins in his hand and made the most of choosing a well-boiled egg. They smelled the shells. They tapped the shells and held the oval echo to their ears. They ate their eggs exactly where they stood, stooping down theatrically to help themselves to salt.

‘Sweet God, these eggs are good,’ they said, to anyone who caught their eye. ‘Go on. Buy one. This kid has got the cheapest breakfast place in town.’

Victor was glad to see the back of them. It left him free to turn their coins in his hand, to wet his finger for a plunge of salt, to stare into the ranks of eggs, to study all the cracks and stains that came from boiling them, to wait in vain for someone else to stoop and buy.

It was not until he left this home of sorts to wander on his weakly and untutored legs amongst the cafe tables and the market panniers that he began to sell. He did not even have to smile. He did not have to cry his wares. ‘Boiled eggs! Boiled eggs!’ was a less eloquent sales pitch than the silent, hardened eggs themselves. Besides, this was a marketplace. No need to state your business here. Display was all it took to do the trick. By late lunchtime, on that first trading day, the fifty-eight remaining eggs had been reduced to three. The salt was gone. Victor’s pockets hung like udders with the weight of cash. It was not much in value but volume matters more to kids than value. They much prefer the playfulness of coins to any paper note.

Victor ate the last three eggs himself. He was not skilled at taking off the shells, and had to spit the bony flakes onto the cobbles and flagstones of the Soap Market. He turned to make his way back to the garden, to wash his mouth out in the fountain water. But first he was seduced by the clanking, twig-thin man who sold fruit juices out of spouted cans and called out what was seasonal: ‘Berries, honey gourds, oranges. Fresh juice. Fresh juice.’ Victor pointed at a spouted can. He could not tell what juice it held. The hawker rinsed a glass with water from a skin. He shook the glass dry and clean. With practised shrugs he tilted the can and filled the glass with bluish berry juice. He took a coin out of Victor’s hand. Victor stood, struck motionless. He was rejoicing in the simple algebra of buy-and-sell which had so quickly and so effortlessly transformed his boiled eggs into juice.

The street kids did their best, with threats and brittle charm, to make Victor one of them. They had their gangs. The Moths. The Dross. The Market Boys. The Fly-by-Nights. If Victor meant to limp with his burden of eggs between the market pitches or sell them to the cafe customers in the Soap Garden, then he at least should make his peace with those tough boys and girls who were the gangland chieftains or their generals. They seemed so competent at everything from marbles to manslaughter that, surely, they were the natural allies of any child out on the streets alone. But Victor had been buried for too long. He did not understand the courtesies of life amongst the pack. He did not wish to speak with his contemporaries, or take on board relationships which were not trading ones, which were not serious, which did not earn. These were the sort of boys who made their cash like tough old men, and blued it all on sweets, and toys, and cigarettes, not eggs. Victor thought these urchins far too trivial.

At first these gangsters — that’s the word — just circled him and nudged as if he were a goldfish in a tank of orfe. They helped themselves to eggs and pelted him with what they couldn’t eat. They kicked his shins. They found a name for him. They taunted him with ‘Vic the Prick’, or called him Goose because he walked unsteadily, and had a lot of eggs. They said he had to join the gang, or pay, or leave the marketplace, or else. Or else? They pressed their fists into his face. They burned his wrist with Chinese twists. They knocked his tray so that his eggs cracked on the cobblestones. They meant to illustrate what else might happen to a boy, alone, who did not court the approbation of the gang.

Victor did not understand what blows or twisted arms or threats with fists and knives were meant to signify. Their language was not his. What did their violence mean? He only understood that there was chaos on the streets more urgent than the protocol of gangs. Each day had its uncertainties: that it might rain. That nobody would want to dine on eggs that day. That there might be some pointless kindness from a marketeer who’d give away a damaged pear, or pay for eggs with too much cash and not require the change. That there’d be holidays when no one came — the market would be closed, the cafes shuttered, the cobbles and the sky laid close and listless, like sheet and mattress on an empty bed. He took it all. His job was selling on the streets. The eggs passed through his hands like worry beads. No Chinese burn, no punch, could deflect his armoured single-mindedness. He did not understand the power of cash yet. He was content that when he went back to Dip’s room at night his pockets were turned out and all the change removed as ‘payment for tomorrow’s eggs’. He had to learn a stranger and a tougher algebra of trade than the one which fed him berry juice — that is that all his patience and hard work upon the street could be so quickly and so effortlessly transformed into beer and other treats for Aunt and Dip. He was the middleman, the trading lime — and he was being squeezed.

Of course, Aunt no longer crept at night into the storeroom to steal the eggs for Victor. It had only taken three days for the packing foreman to observe that random eggs had disappeared, and that they disappeared at night.

‘You think they’re hatching into bats?’ he asked. ‘Or are we being robbed?’

He and the watchman found the loosened board and set a trap. They sat on stools behind the entry board with sticks upon their laps. They shared a bottle of aqua vitae, and suppered silently on pork and bread. One dozed while one kept watch.

At midnight Aunt arrived, a little slowed and fortified by drink. She had no appetite for foraging amongst the oval ghosts. But it was easy money, and Dip was far too tall and dandified to forage for himself. They’d been amazed how much their little Vic had earned on his first day. He’d made enough to win himself not-quite-a-hug from Dip. It was not enough to buy good clothes or meals in restaurants. There was enough, though, turned out from his trouser pockets (the country phrase, again), ‘to oil their throats and grease their bums’.

Aunt was too hurried to remove her hat. Her battered cloche, much loved, cleaved to her head as tightly as an acorn cup. Dip signalled that the lane was clear. Aunt freed the loose board with her foot and pushed her hat and head straight through the gap. The packing foreman, full of self-esteem and pork, woke up in time to see the watchman’s stick make contact with the straw. Aunt’s hat fell off, but — good friend that it was — it broke the blow. Her head went back into the town. She tore her chin on wood. She stood. She ran. Though she could have just as safely strolled away. The loose board was too narrow. The foreman and the watchman were twice Aunt’s size and had to satisfy themselves with that one battered trophy, that old straw cloche, that disembodied gaiety.