Jim Crace - Arcadia

Rook hoped to meet her on the street, by chance. He was alert for her, for any word of her. Anna’s was the only face, he thought, from which he could get pleasure. For sure, he did not hope to see his mugger once again. The boy — whose ’nife’ he still possessed — had no importance in his life. Yet, on the morning of Rook’s tenth visit to the market bar, he encountered Joseph for the second time. The youth was barrowing red sacks of onions, three at a time, from an open truck which was parked amongst the vans and cars at the market edge. Rook was not pleased to see these two adversaries of his in such a partnership, with Joseph working for the man who’d always treated Rook with cold disdain. He was perplexed at first. He could not think what chance, what scheme, what machination, had brought these two together. But his confusion could not last because the moment that he focused on the strangeness of it all, he realized the truth. Rook did not need to draw himself a map. The mugging and the sacking of two weeks before now made full sense. Details that had escaped him returned in trusses and in clusters. Rook remembered now how Con had shaken the sealed envelope of pitch money so tauntingly in his face, a challenge on his lips. Then, within two hours at the most, Joseph — armed with a photograph, a knife — had tried … tried what? Tried at Con’s behest to resecure the envelope. And having failed to resecure it with a knife, what had Con done? He’d made a call, or sent an unsigned note, that afternoon to Victor. And here was Joseph, still in Con’s employ. And here was Rook, disinherited, without a job to do. Those five blameless party guests! Those harmless, dry old men! Rook found it grimly comic that he’d dreamed of tracking down and wiping out such innocents. So now he knew who’d caused this chaos in his life. If he had half a chance he’d see to it that Con was sent the bill.

But, for the moment, it was Joseph on his mind, not Con. He’d beaten Joseph once before; he’d beat him yet again. So when a few days later Rook spotted him in the Soap Market, he determined they should speak. It was quite late and dark. It was that summer’s warmest night and the city had its sleeves rolled up and could not sleep. For once, Rook had outstayed the waiter’s welcome at the market bar. The Soap Garden was becoming his backyard. He and three other men had played domino dice until all the other empty chairs and tables had been stacked and the bar staff had changed into their own clothes.

The barman closed the shutters and rinsed the final glasses and left the four men in the midnight July gloom to finish off their game. Rook was the last to leave. He was not skilled at dice and he had chanced his stake on one hot throw. He’d won, against three lukewarm throws from his companions. They’d settled up in thousand notes, and Rook had ten of them, folded in the pocket of his leather coat, as he set off for home.

The sweep-jeeps and the men with hoses had been at work and what had been a dusty, waste-strewn space, cluttered with dismantled stalls and flattened produce boxes, was now as gleaming and as scrubbed as a spray-washed shingle beach — except that night-time beaches reflect the white lights of the sky, and smell of medicine, and perform a nocturne, made from water, wind, and stone. This washed place smelt more of soup. It honked the jazz of traffic horns and voices in the summer night. It was lit by the yellow, oblong constellations of distant windows in offices and rooms where no one had the energy, in such a heat as this, to pull the blinds or go to bed.

In the summer there was hardly space for all the dispossessed and homeless who came to roost in the dripping troughs and crevices of the Soap Market. Why sleep indoors, in derelicts or hostels or up against the bricks and tiles of bridges, subways, underpasses? Why squat in dark, abandoned flats — your only privacy an unused mattress up against the window or the door — when it’s July and there’s no rain and the sun has been so fierce by day that all the midnight, city air is swollen with the heat?

There was no need to light a fire from packing debris, but there were fires because the poor are always cold in spirit and need the optimistic mesmerism of the flames to take them through the night, to help them kindle just a little desperate joy amongst such misery. Some of the fires would not last long. Their purpose was to shed a canopy like bulbs shed light, making rounded rooms with walls of melting night for children who could not sleep without the fantasy of ‘home’. Some fires would burn till dawn, topped up by sleepless residents whose thirst for alcohol could not be blunted by their desperation or fatigue. One fire gave light for noisy games of cards. Another was the fire where spuds and sweetcorn, gleaned from the market floor, were ember-baked on skewers made from cycle spokes. Another warmed the singers’ throats — the singing broken up by coughs, those two most humble sounds of human life becoming tangled in the mouth. In this, their simple warmth and light and sound, the night-time soapies were the closest citizens in town to the earth’s enduring elements. They understood what every moth must understand, that flame is enemy and friend. Some found in it good cause to smile, but others were expressionless or else astonished beyond words by the scalding visions that the flames revealed. But mostly people sat or slept alone, disgruntled, shamed, made volatile and distant by a life which cast them as the rootless, parasitic clinker weeds amongst the steady stems of native bedding plants. Some slept on cobbles, statuesque, their heads upon their knees, their arms looped round their legs. Some curled on cardboard mattresses with pillow-sacks, or nested in the timber and the canvas of the market stalls. Women — rarer, older than the men — looped their arms through plastic bags of clothes and dozed, or pretended to. To seem asleep was their frontier against the raids and sorties of the town. It gave them some respite from their pain — their swollen feet, necrotic toes, their boils, and coughs, their migraines and their chills. Men talked in voices that were stripped to wire, or muttered madly to their chests, or carried their misfortune squarely, cleanly, without shame. Until they slept, that is. Who could tell the shameless from the lost, when all of them seemed just as thin and innocent and urinous beneath the duvet of the night?

Rook walked as quickly as he could between the starvelings and the vagabonds, the gangrels and the drunks. He was an easy target for their wit or for the begging hands which waved at him or tugged his trouser cuffs, or for their savage mutterings. He did not like the market when the awnings and the stalls were felled, and when the ripe and appetizing daytime colours of the crops were replaced by the moistened greys of night. He did not look when he heard oaths or offers. It was not wise to be waylaid by their ill-luck. If he gave cash or time to one, then all of them would rush to him like mallards in the park, pecking for a crust.

Ahead he spotted three young men, as awkward on their legs as day-old foals. They called him to them, but he did not go. He could not quite unscramble what they said. But he was certain he knew what they held inside their paper cups, their shallow plastic trays, their makeshift dishes. These were what people nicknamed the Taxi Cabs, clumsy, noisy, slow, and fuelled by petrol. They sniffed whatever petrol they could steal. They did not care that nowadays the petrol contained an Anti-Sniff. ‘Danger’ warned the stickers on the petrol caps. ‘Ethyl Mercaptan’. It smelt of skunk. So what? The boys smelled just like skunks themselves. It did not dull their appetite for fuel, not even if the Anti-Sniff made them nauseous, hyperactive, violent. It blocked their tongues, and caused them to tremble like crones and greybeards made helpless by a stair or kerb.