Jim Crace - Arcadia

Rook did not lift his head to face the Taxi Cabs; or even to trade signals with Cellophane who was still on his feet and summoning Rook, ‘This way. This way. Then right. And straight ahead,’ as if Rook were a van that’s passage blocked the marketplace. He chose a route which took him to the market’s edge, near the house where he had lived when young. He liked to walk those streets and look up at the cluttered windows of the carpet salesmen. Was that cracked glass the same that he’d pressed his face against, what? thirty years ago and more? for private, hawk-eye glimpses of the local girls? His mind was already set on women. The July heat, the weeks since he’d last slept with Anna, made him wonder what he’d do if some young woman bedded down on polythene amongst the cobblestones asked for money in return for sex. He did not trust himself. He was afraid.

He walked a little quicker now, the touch of panic and arousal at his heels. He almost stumbled over Joseph, sleeping at the market edge amongst the padlocked carts and barrows. The mugger’s face was busy with its dreams. It was not proud or shy in sleep, but blinked and gaped and made no secret of its missing tooth, the cherry birth-stain on its cheek, the pitted craters on its nostrils and its chin, the meagre, ill-advised moustache, the crusty scar above the eye where he’d been wounded by a key. The skin was just as cracked but not as bronzed as it had been when he’d fled the countryside by Salad Bowl Express. The city life had whitened him. He looked as harmless and as dull as bread.

What made Rook feel again as tough and sentimental as a movie star? Was it the triumph of his fists, that time so long ago? Was it the residue of how he felt about old Victor, Anna, Con? Or just his dreadful appetite for girls transformed to violence when he saw the sleeping boy?

He thought he’d wake him with a kick. But what if Joseph yelled? The mob would come. He’d have a tottering circle made from drunks and Taxi Cabs. Rook was tempted to drop a coin in the open mouth and creep off to watch the boy awake, or choke. Instead, he searched his pockets for the knife. He sprung the blade and squatted at Joseph’s side. Just like a father with an oversleeping child, he squeezed Joseph’s ear lobe, a parent’s trick to open up the eyes. He waved the knife across his face, and said, ‘It’s Joseph’s “Nife” — without the K. Is this your property?’ He lay the flat blade on the young man’s nose.

‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘We owe each other favours, don’t we? Don’t shake your head. Don’t move. I gave you that.’ Rook pointed at the scar. ‘And you’ve scarred me. I ought to hand you over to the police. At least you’d have a decent place to sleep …’

Joseph sat up. He recognized Rook’s face at last, despite the lack of tie and suit. He was not frightened by the knife or anything this thin-faced man might do. His own face was wide enough to take more scars. He did not care. He’d snap this man in half for waking him. He’d punish him for being rich when he was poor. Rook stood and backed away, the knife less certain in his hand.

‘Have you got money?’ Joseph asked.

‘What’s that to you?’

‘Or cigarettes?’

Rook shook his head. Joseph put his hand out, palm upturned. ‘You woke me. You’d better watch it, mister. I know you now. You’ll pay for what you’ve done … Come on, give me some money for some food.’

‘Go to hell.’

‘Piss off yourself!’

Rook was nervous of the threat that Joseph posed. He knew how strong the young man was. He’d seen him tossing onion sacks as if an onion grew fat and ripe on helium. He should have turned and walked away. Or run. But Joseph’s words, ‘You’d better watch it, mister. You’ll pay for what you’ve done!’ convinced him that the two of them should now negotiate for peace.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I only meant to give you back the knife.’ He pressed the blade into the handle and gave it to Joseph. ‘Hold on!’ He found a crumpled nest of notes inside his jacket pocket. He pulled them out one by one, looking for a fifty. But the first ten were thousands, his winnings from the dice. He smoothed them out and held them in his left hand. He found the fifty, let it loop and float onto the cobblestones at Joseph’s feet, and then spread out the ten one-thousand notes. He’d put them to good use.

‘How’d you like to earn a wad like this?’

‘For doing what?’ Joseph was certain now that Rook was looking for a man to share his bed. He’d been approached before, but not for so much cash. For money of that kind he’d take a chance. To make a living he would do ‘bad things’ — his simple phrase for kicking down a door or kicking in a rib or letting some dull man pay for his touch. Whatever Rook was offering, there was bound to be a way of cheating on the deal. Ten thousand? What might that buy? What might a man like Rook expect for such a fee?

Rook himself had not yet formulated what he wanted Joseph for. But he was market-wise. He knew that Joseph could be bought, by Victor, Con, by anyone. Rook knew he had to purchase this On the Town before he went elsewhere. Here was a bargain too tough and useful to be missed. Buy in haste, use at leisure. He’d take his time dreaming up some useful task for this hireling to commit , something to damage Victor, Con, or anyone.

‘I’ll speak to you again, be sure of that,’ he said. ‘Do what I ask and this little bunch of notes is yours.’

Joseph was not pleased. ‘“If and when” don’t butter bread,’ he said, but for an instant he saw himself as the well-dressed model in the catalogue, his pockets stuffed with one-thousand notes. He would — with Rook’s fat fee — sit at the bar and hold the barmaid by the wrist. He would drink muscatino from midnight till midday. He held his hand out for the notes.

‘Just wait!’

‘I’m sick of waiting. Give me something now!’

Rook arranged the ten one-thousand notes so that they made a perfect sheaf. He folded them in half.

‘Give me the knife,’ he said.

The knife had danced between the pair of them so often now that one more time was neither here nor there. Joseph returned the knife. The blade was sprung. Rook slipped the knife inside the notes and cut along the fold.

‘Money is the peacemaker!’ He mimicked Victor perfectly. ‘One half for you. One half for me.’ He put one set of severed half-notes in his pocket, and gave the matching set to Joseph, wrapped round his knife. ‘So now you know I’m serious.’

‘I can’t spend this.’

‘Nor can I!’

‘So what’s the point?’

‘The point, dear Joseph, is that we will have to talk again. As friends. I’ve got a job for you. Don’t ask me what. But when that job is done, I’ll add my half to yours.’

VICTOR WAS flattered by the courting of the architects, their optimism. He liked the language that they used; the ease with which they sang of pits and peaks and galleries and foliage travertines and moduled trading canyons, as if the market buildings which they had conceived were ancient caves, or forests, mountains, landscape parks, as if they were importing countryside to colonize the city’s heart.

In November — five months after Rook’s dismissal — building plans which were jostling for the privilege of standing at the ancient market site were presented to Victor in his offices by men who looked like poets or composers dressed as restaurateurs. Expensive suntans, casual suits, the glistening, barracuda eyes of those who live by their imaginations and their wits. Not one contested that the existing market was diseased. Their diagnoses matched. They were agreed on its ill-health, its pathology, what treatment it should get, what surgery. The old Soap Market was a tumour at the city’s heart and had to be removed. They prescribed the chemotherapy of the bulldozer, the radiation of the great iron ball. ‘Reduce the little that is there to rubble. And rebuild.’