Jim Crace - Arcadia

Now he was ready to go out. He searched his wardrobe and he found the black leather jacket he’d once worn. The skin was scuffed and greying and the cuffs had split, but still it fitted, and the zip was good. The leather smelt a little of the marketplace, and the lining was stained beneath the arms and in the middle of the back from working sweat. He did not have the working trousers or the shirt to match — but he had dark and casual office clothes, and these he wore. He felt transformed. The jacket set him free. He had resurrected the man he’d been a dozen years before. He transferred his keys and wallet, his nebulizer, the Joseph ‘nife’ from his suit into the zipped pockets of the leather jacket. He tidied the apartment, read the notes that Anna had left, put her snapshot on the mantelshelf, and went into the town.

It was just a week since Victor’s birthday lunch, a week in which he’d rediscovered love, and lost his job, and soared and plummeted, one hundred metres, twenty-seven floors, onto the street. All in all he felt winded and invigorated, like some shaken boy who’s just stepped safely from a switchback ride. He set off for the Soap Market. The sooner he was seen amongst the stalls and soapies the better for his shaken self-esteem.

He walked between the banks of vegetables and fruit without a greeting or a glance. He was not snubbed. He was not recognized, at first. His leather coat was a disguise. It made his walk more bearlike, from the shoulders, hands in jacket pockets, collar up. The suited Rook had seemed a little taller, more loose-limbed, and walking from the hip. But once he sat amongst the traders at a bar in the Soap Garden, his face was known. He heard the whispers, and caught the glances and the nods. The waiter was his usual pleasant self, but waiters do not count. The market workers — the porters and the salesgirls — did not speak to him, but then they never had. He’d been too grand. He’d been the old man’s nuncio, his representative on Earth.

Rook did his best to seem relaxed. But he was not relaxed enough to hold his cup steady with one hand. He shook so badly that the sugar for his coffee trembled in the spoon. He wished he had a newspaper with which to shield himself. He wished that he could hide behind a cigarette without the smoke occasioning a fireball in his chest. Part of him feared that he would see one of the birthday guests, some arthritic merchant on a stick, and feel obliged, compelled, to make a scene. But mostly he feared what the market men might do to him now that he was stripped of office. He feared their jeers, their ironies, the jabs and punches they might give to him, and with good cause. Those modest tithes, those sweeteners, which Rook had levied every quarter and for which he’d guaranteed clean access to the boss’s ear, were now revealed as money down the pan. Rook was further now from Victor’s ear than any soapie in the market. He was the only one whose contact with the boss was limited to ‘the mediation of lawyers’.

Mid-morning, though, is not the time for arguments or scenes. The market was too busy and the traders too immersed in chalking prices for the day to spend much time on Rook. It was no secret, naturally, that he had lost his job — but no one there was certain why. The five old men were keeping quiet. Old men have enemies enough, and take more pleasure out of secrecy — their greenhouse secret with the boss — than spreading tales amongst the market hoi polloi. So Rook was noted, but not judged. The men who never cared for Rook, did not abhor him more or less because — or so the rumour was — he’d lost his job. Why would they like him any less because he was dismissed? The traders did not know the social protocol. His misfortune was, perhaps, good news for them. It might save them money. Who could tell? But then, there’d be new Rooks, and tougher ones whose pitch fees were less modest. They’d rather stick with their asthmatic. He was not loved but he was witty in his way and had the common touch. He had, at least, sprung from the marketplace. He’d robbed them, true, but done no lasting harm. Such is the vagrant logic of the street that Rook was almost popular with his old foes, just as a bully’s popular when he releases captives from his grip.

Those who’d been on good terms with Rook and considered the pitch payments to be bribes initiated by themselves, felt just as proprietorial now about their ‘man at Victor’s ear’, despite the fact that their man had been sacked. Indeed, they even felt a little guilty that their market cunning might have been the cause of Rook’s dismissal. They felt a little fearful, too. What might the old man do? They judged it best to wait and see. But there were one or two — the younger ones, the ones who’d had less coffee and more shot — who went across to Rook. They shook his trembling hand. ‘A bad business,’ they said, inviting Rook to reveal exactly what had occurred with Victor. And then to end the silence, ‘Let us know if you need any help.’ Or they put a shot down on the table and invited Rook to stun his bad luck with a little drink.

So Rook still had a welcome in the marketplace, somewhere to pass his time while he decided how to spend his life. He came each morning, exchanged a repertoire of gestures with Cellophane Man, who stood as usual at the market edge directing people, trolleys, vans, and sat amongst his allies there. If they enquired, ‘Come on, what did you do to get the push?’, he told no lies. But neither did he tell the truth. He was good at keeping quiet and hinting with his mouth and eyes that he was innocent of blame. Within a few days the market men behaved as if he’d never been their go-between, or in their pay, or they in his, and just enjoyed his dry sarcasm and his cawing, nasal laugh when he told stories of the boss amongst his cats and insects on the 28th. Market memories are short so long as debts are settled fast. A lasting grudge is one that’s waiting to be cashed.

Rook wandered through the alleys and the lanes of vegetables and fruit with fresh eyes now. He need not be as watchful as before, noting prices, faces, infringements of the market code. He need not be prepared to take pitch payments, surreptitiously, or listen to complaints about the price and quality of olives or pears. If he pushed through the crowds to the peaks and canyons of a citrus stall, no fruiterer would simply click his tongue and shake his head to signify ‘No need to pay!’ He was the public now and he was ruled, like anybody else, by the market creeds which one trader — tired of scrumpers or being asked for credit — had chalked up on his stall: ‘No Loot, No Fruit’, and ‘We take IOUs, but only in cash!’

Rook was content to be a simple shopper, thumbing, like all the other shoppers there, but with more blatant expertise, the skins of fruit to check their readiness. Or plucking one leaf from pineapple tufts and judging by its reticence the softness of the core. Or testing whether pod-beans would snap or bend between his fingers. Or lifting melons to his nose and knowing, from the smell, the reasty from the ripe. Or scratching new potatoes with his nails to see how well the blistered skins would lift. He knew the trick of listening to cabbages: the hearty ones were silent in the ear. He understood the colours of the carrot, and how the reddest roots were soapiest and only good for stews. You could not confuse him with a waxy pear, or with mushrooms ‘dirtied’ with a spray. A butcher might make a fool of Rook with some false cut, some trick with bone or fat, but no one in the Soap Market had greater, wider skill with fruits and roots and leaves.

Why waste such expertise? Why couldn’t he return from whence he’d come — the smart son of a marketeer — and become a marketeer himself, a soapie for the second time? Because of Victor? Because he was a snob, who having laboured at a desk was not prepared to rise at five to bend and lift and sell? Because he was too old to mend his ways? He was not rejuvenated by the thought of merchant Rook, his thin and greying head peering from behind a gleaming splash of fruit, his fortune measured out in paper bags. But neither was he much seduced by the alternative — a Rook with nothing much to do except to sit and age and spend. If only he could find the heart — and shamelessness — to lift a pen, a telephone, and answer Anna’s calls to him, then, maybe, having nothing much to do but spend would seem less mournful.