Jim Crace - Arcadia

He found and gave them his staff pass. He would have ripped it into two if laminated plastic had been more biddable and if he could have controlled his shaking hands.

‘We’d better go,’ they said, and led him through the offices to Reception and the lifts. There was no sign of life. Even Anna had disappeared. Someone had had the cruel sense to ask the staff to keep away while Rook was led ‘outside’. He let them take him to the lift. He let them walk him to the tasselled rope and join him — three to one segment — in the automatic door. He let it sweep him into the rain and wind beyond. He wrapped his fingers round his keys, key tips protruding through his knuckles, so that his punches when they came would do the greatest harm. But the moment never came. Such moments never do, except in books and films. His warders were too proper and too big to fight.

‘Thank you, sir,’ the commissionaire said, deferential to the last, as he watched Rook pass from the dry into the wet. No one offered to summon a company Panache, or a taxi. He was expected now to take his chances on the street. He was of less importance than a perch.

He knew, he felt it in his water and his bones, that already Victor was at work, no longer hiding from the world. Security would call and say, ‘He’s gone!’ and Victor could count it safe enough to come downstairs and sit behind his desk as if he had no hand in all the harm that had been done, and would be done. Would he miss Rook? What should he miss? His fixer’s willingness to serve? His care and knowledge of the marketplace, his intimacy with vegetables and fruit, his office cheeriness, his social skills? No, Victor had the wealth and power to replace these things, to find another yet more honest Rook, who would be glad to be old Victor’s aide. He hardly gave the man another thought. He was too old and crammed.

Beyond the tinted, toughened glass of Victor’s suite the wind was fast and strong and sharp with rain. Big Vic was swaying slightly at its top, and whistling. Victor’s coffee moved inside its cup. His office door fell open, then fell shut. A paperweight shaped out of polished serpentine slid across the old man’s desk. And Rook, once more, was out upon the canyon floor, between the gleaming, swaying, whistling cliffs of glass and steel and stone.

WHAT WOULD YOU expect of Rook? That he would decompose without the frigorific regime of the working day? Most city people — men at least — are wedded to their jobs, and when you take those jobs away they soon become as empty and as brittle as blown eggs. Work is for the idle. It gives a chaptered, tramline narrative to life; it empties suburbs and estates and provides the displaced, liberated residents with dramas structured by the clock. It then provides the wages note, the cheque, the cash, the banking draft which, more than where you’re born or live, is what it takes to be a citizen. A salary can make an interloper feel at home; ‘An empty purse’, or so the saying goes, ‘makes strangers of us all.’ But no, Rook, weak and self-indulgent though he seemed, was not the sort to crumble like dry pastry. He was — like everybody else with any sense — too selfish and too vain to sacrifice himself. He spent three days indoors, bereaved. He would not answer Anna’s calls from work, or let her in when she came round to the apartment in the evenings, or respond when she delivered a snapshot of her — younger — self, inscribed ‘Let’s meet and talk’. What was the point? He did not even read the baffled notes which she left in his letterbox to reassure him that ‘whatever Victor does can make no difference to us’. Rook knew better. She would not seek him out once she had learnt exactly what his ‘contacts and activities’ had been. Why nourish love when it was bound to fail? He dared not think of her or quantify his loss. He needed first to concentrate on how he could excrete, transmit, the anger that he felt. He was consumed by malice, but none of it was turned upon himself. What had he done, except to be a cheerful pragmatist who’d seen a chance and taken it? He blamed the cheerless millionaire. He blamed the hidebound traders in the Soap Market. He blamed the coward who had gone behind his back to blab. Who blabbed? Rook did not find it very hard to know who told and when. It must have been one of Victor’s cronies, one of the five arthritic soapies who had shared the birthday lunch. Which one? He could not tell — so, for the moment, he would blame them all.

He’d once seen a film — One Deadly Kiss — in which an English lord had hunted down, one by one, the five male passengers on a country post-chaise bound for London. His motive? One of the men — and only one — had ‘kissed and robbed’ his wife as she slept in the cushions of the coach. ‘Better that all five die than that one blackguard lives to taint again the honour of a lady,’ the Englishman had said, in those vaulting, vowelly tones that English gentry, and English actors, used to have. He bribed the coachman, richly, to reveal the passenger list, and set off across the country in wild and righteous pursuit. He did not know, as he despatched another with a pistol or a knife, that all five men were guilty of some other, capital offence — arson, murder, treachery — and so ‘deserved’ to die. He did not know — how simple these films are! — that none of the five had touched his wife. The rapist was the bribed and silent coachman, free, as the credits rolled, to kiss and rob some more!

The English love these ironies, and Rook took pleasure in them, too. Rook dreamed the film, but in his dream the passengers were greengrocers, the coach was Victor’s birthday lunch. Rook became a younger man, the firebrand dressed in black. He hunted down and polished off the five. They fell amongst their fruit. They died on beds of spinach. Who was the coachman, free to sin again? Rook’s dream was crowded out by deeper sleep before the credits rolled.

By day, Rook fantasized; and in these angered fantasies he would avenge the noon indignity of being thrown out, a vagrant, from Big Vic. He would be the English lord, though more heroic and less mannered. His weapon would be Joseph’s knife. He practised with the blade, and mimed the damage he might do. He punched the bathroom door. He bit off the nails on both his hands. He masturbated, but could not hold the image of a woman in his head. He lay in bed too long. He stayed up late, and drank too much of the Boulevard Liqueur he had bought for Anna during the weekend. His breathing became laboured, first with nerves, and then his asthma took hold in his right-side chest, brought on, intensified, by his loss of work and income and the anger that he felt. He nebulized more often than he should. He grew lightheaded and unsteady from the alcohol and medicine and from the cheap narcosis of his dream.

At last — for wrath’s a sprinter and soon tires — he became more calm, less frantic. Bruised, he was, discoloured by the blows that he’d endured. But it slowly dawned on Rook, the self-approving optimist, that he was not weakened as a man, but made more potent. He was persuaded now that Victor had freed him from a curse. The job that Rook had lost was no great loss. Good riddance to it. He’d paid for it a dozen years before, with … what word is there to use but ‘soul’? The moment that young Black Rook had taken Victor and his cheque by the hand he’d dropped the sanction of the street, he’d lost the casual chatter of the marketplace. The city sparrow had spread its wings to rise on cushioned thermals beyond the pavement commonwealth and join the austere governance of hawks. Now he was back on earth again.

He felt too sick to eat, too shaky in the hand to lift a fork or pour a cup of coffee, but now at least he looked ahead as much as he looked back. What could he do with this new potency, this rediscovered soul? He was too old to start a fresh career. But, surely, he was rich enough to set up a modest business of his own. He checked the balance of his savings. He counted all the currency notes which he’d amassed. He had no debts, no obligations, no family to maintain. His situation could be worse. To be a rich man without work was not the meanest fate of all. There was no rush. He’d take a month or two of rest, and keep his eyes peeled for … for what? A bar, perhaps? A shop? He was alarmed by the dullness in prospect. Could he afford six months of rest? Or nine? He deserved a little breathing space to plan his future years. At least the spare time on his hands could be good fun. He’d please himself and no one else. His tie could hang loose all the time. He need not wear a tie. He need not wear a suit. That was the uniform of servitude. He need not hasten through the city streets, his coffee hardly drunk, to be at work on time.