Jim Crace - Arcadia

The fat man did not feel the third impulse. Two fighting men, one pushing with stiff fingers and a spittled mouth, another walking backwards and attempting to defend himself with kicks, sent the table spinning on one leg, then sprawling, legs aloft, above the eggs and beer. So far as one could tell from the stream of threats and imprecations they exchanged, their differences would not be solved without the death of one.

They were two market traders, partners, neighbours, old-time friends — and what they’d fallen out about wasn’t worth a bead of phlegm, let alone the lungfuls that the two of them, now out of fighting range, were looping at each other through the air.

The younger of the two had wisecracked with the customers of the older man, the one whose fighting fingers were so certain and so stiff. He’d teased them, half cunningly and half in jest, that his neighbour’s produce was not fresh.

‘He’s selling fossils and antiques today,’ he’d said. The neighbour swore this foolishness, these lies, had cost him trade. And more. And worse. He knew for sure that, while his back was turned, the younger one pocketed the cash for onion clumps which they had purchased as partners and whose profits they should share. He did not listen to his friend’s defence — that ‘while my back was turned’ meant ‘while I filled myself with drink, while I let the business, onion clumps and all, slide into hell’. There were a hundred other microscopic aggravations between the men that, in the sudden heat of anger, seethed and thrived like viruses. ‘Go dine on shit,’ one said. The other held his little finger up, a gesture meant to show disdain, and said, with feeble dignity, ‘I’ll never talk to you again.’

The fat man filled his lungs and put some pressure on his stick. His knuckles whitened. It looked as if he were about to show how he could slay these two with just one etched and silver blow. But he was only holding tight so that he could stand. Once up — and once the two adversaries had quietened and were watching him — he dipped his hand into the inner pocket of his coat and pulled out a wallet. He took out one banknote. He unfolded it and held it up, theatrically, for all to see. A blue five-thousand note. A two-month wage. Enough to purchase a good horse, enough to buy a thousand eggs. The fat man folded the blue note in two, lengthways, exactly as he halved his eggs, and tore it carefully along the crease. What was he then? A conjurer? Would he set fire to those two halves, or chew them up, then make them whole again? Was this a good note? Was it counterfeit?

There was no movement in the Soap Garden. Even waiters, trays aloft, were frozen where they stood. Victor was not the only one who’d never seen a note as large as that before. What kind of man would tear such wealth in two?

The fat man flung out and spread his arms, a half-note in each hand. His voice was both bourgeois and everyday. It was, surprisingly, for one so large, a little reedy too.

‘One each,’ he said. He shook the worthless halves impatiently. ‘Come on. Step up.’

The younger man was the first to step forward. He did not look the fat man in the eye. He concentrated on the half-a-fortune and the walking stick, expecting there to be some finger trick or some low, crippling blow. He need not have feared. The stiff, blue piece of paper transferred to him with just the slightest reticence where the embossed printing snagged on the fat man’s dampened skin.

The elder of the two was also reticent. He recognized the fat man’s game. He had children of his own and knew how squabbles were resolved by parental trickery. You broke a ginger stick in half and let the children suck away their moods. Yet half a ginger stick had value on its own. It tasted just as good in pieces. But half a note? He could not formulate exactly what the trick might be, yet he was in no doubt, as he took in the fat man and his neighbour holding half a fortune in their hands, that he would be a fool to walk away. He might as well take half a note. To turn away would not look good or wise. Pride would not allow a market man to jeopardize just half a chance of making random, unearned cash.

He did not move. He put his hand out. Palm up. The cussed supplicant. Let Mammon come to him. The fat man was not proud. He did not mind that he would have to move a pace or two. He took three steps. He spread his weight across both legs and leant his stick against a chair. He rolled the half note in a ball, dismissively, with studied irony. He dropped it on the outstretched, flattened palm. And then he took the market trader’s hand in both of his and wrapped the fingers round the paper ball.

‘Now talk,’ the fat man said.

Both traders felt more foolish than they’d done since they were adolescents. They did not hang around. They did not walk away, of course, arms linked, their two half lives already interlocked. They disappeared like cats, their heads and shoulders down, their ears alert, their fur on end. They would not talk that night — but who can doubt that they would trade weak grins the following day and then handshakes? They’d see the sense in being partners once again.

The fat man did not watch them go. He waited for a moment, on his stick, while three waiters put the chairs and table back in place, wiped up the beer, removed the mushy eggs. The proprietor himself brought out a replacement beer, the best. ‘It’s on the house,’ he said, thankful for the damage and the mayhem that the blue note had thwarted and thankful, too, for all the rich absurdities which they had witnessed.

The fat man started on his beer, as unbothered, it would seem, by the spat which he had ended as by the money he had lost. The no-expression on his face said, Five thousand? That’s a morsel for a man like me. I’d throw a hundred of them to the wind just so long as I can have my beer and eggs in peace and quiet. He looked up, then. The thought of eggs had made him lift his eyes and run his baby tongue along his lips.

Victor was standing where he always stood. Hypnotized. The fat man held three fingers up. Victor selected three more eggs. He cracked their shells at their thick ends and peeled them white and bare. He brought the sugar from another table. He stood and took the coins from the fat man’s hand. He hoped that he would tear a note in half for him as well. He was not old enough to fully understand what he had witnessed: the fickle, slender contrivances, the artifices, the stratagems of wealth, its piety, its fraudulence, its crude finesse. But — given time — he’d understand it all and make a scripture out of it.

‘The fat man taught me,’ Victor explained, to those who wished to hear or read the complex moral of his anecdote, ‘that money talks.’ He did not know that such an insight was old hat and crassly simple. Or that his variations of this insight — such as ‘Money is the peacemaker’ and ‘Money’s muscle’ — were simple complications of the truth. What the fat man had displayed was cynicism, if cynicism is the trick of seeming to engage with chance and danger but without taking any risks. Money has no moral tact. It’s true, the rich have power to intervene, to heal and damage as they wish. Toss money in the ring and see the drama that it makes of other people’s lives. But, more, they have the power, if they choose, to stay more silent and discrete than monks. The rich — and here was Victor’s unacknowledged dream — can simply make a wall, a fortress shield of wealth, beyond which the dramas of the world can run their courses unobserved.

Victor so far — he was nine or ten — had led a life not free of drama of the tragic kind. The misfortune of his father’s death. The journey into town. The nights beneath the parasol. The fire. The days with Aunt and Dip. The liberation and the tyranny of eggs. His was a moral tale, an exemplar of how miserably the small fry of the world can fare. Someone could write a book on his first years and make it stand for all our city’s woes. No wonder, then, that Victor now wished for something more mundane than poverty. He wished to be a fat man, too, protected from the city by what his wallet held. In this, he sought what Joseph, decades later, sought. And that was privacy. He saw himself, an older, wealthy man, alone and dining in a public place. At times it was a city restaurant, at other times a trestle in the countryside, with chickens and with trees. There was no noise, except the sound of cutlery on plates. He was quite calm and unafraid. No one around was close enough to disappoint him or betray him. A waiter, paid to do his job, was all he needed. He did not need or want a family, or friends. He did not need the warmth of company or conversation, or the reassurances of praise. No one could come and give him Chinese burns. No one could let him down or disappear. There was no comfort which could not be bought. There was no problem that he could not solve by tearing notes in half. What is more eloquent and reassuring than a shield of private wealth?