Jim Crace - Arcadia

‘Get lost,’ said Con. ‘I’ve work to do.’

‘But not for long,’ said Rook. ‘You’ll soon be out of work and rattling round the streets like me. Except you won’t have the savings I’ve got to make your unemployment pleasant.’

‘You’re farting through your mouth,’ said Con, but he was enticed enough to stop his efforts with his stall and turn to look Rook in the face.

Rook had prepared his speech. ‘Pay attention,’ he said, as if the trader were a six-year-old. ‘Don’t be a fool. We’ve more in common than you think … and I’m not blaming you.’

‘Not blaming me? For what?’

‘For that stupid scuffle with the country boy, and all your poke and squeak with Victor. For losing me my job. What do you think?’

‘You can blame yourself for that,’ said Con. He’d not bother to deny that he’d launched Joseph on the fumbled attempt to repossess his pitch payment. Why should he? It was reclamation, just and fair. He did not understand what ‘all your poke and squeak with Victor’ might be or why he should be blamed for Rook’s dismissal. Nor did he care. Rook was despicable, he thought, but as harmless as a snake that having lost its venom makes do with hiss. It did not matter what Rook knew about that farce with Joseph in the walkers’ tunnel. How could Rook damage Con now that he was, by all accounts, truncated from his boss for good?

‘You had it coming, and you got off lightly,’ he said. ‘I should have sent four boys, not one. You’d be on crutches now. Why should I feel guilty? I’m only sorry I wasn’t there myself.’

‘Don’t play the hero,’ said Rook. ‘If I was holding grudges I wouldn’t be here at all. I’d fix you privately. I’m here to help you out. Not that you deserve my help.’

‘Get lost.’

Rook wrapped his fingers round his keys. How he despised this man, his smell, his clothes, his tight and unforgiving face. But Rook had to persevere. His only route was Con. He put the yellow file of duplicate designs from the Busi Partnership on the trader’s stall, amongst the bruised fruit and the waste that Con would jettison. He took the top drawing out. There were the melting glass meringues, the starfish corridors, the indoor trees, the relocated cobblestones in wash and watercolour. There was the legend: ‘ARCADIA — a sketch’.

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s what dear Victor has in mind for you.’

Now Rook was free to make his speech. He told how Victor was not satisfied with profits from the marketplace, how he’d been prompted by his bankers and his strategists to build, how Signor Busi and Arcadia had won the old man’s ear — and eye. An easy task because Victor was demented with old age, indigestion, and his obsession with a statue of some kind: ‘A mother and a child, would you believe. And not a statue of himself!’

Rook made the most of his regrets that he was no longer in Victor’s pay. It was his view, he explained with patient irony, that since the one man who knew the Soap Market ‘from the inside out’ had been removed from Victor’s side, then Victor had been free to run amuck.

‘I protected you,’ he said. ‘Maybe you didn’t like to pay for that, but I protected you — and see what’s happened now that the Soap Market has got no one to speak for it inside Big Vic.’ He punched the drawings. ‘There’s a press conference in three days’ time,’ he said. ‘They think they’ve got the only set of plans. But your man Rook has earnt his pay and got a second set.’ Rook recalled for Con the chilling boasts of Busi, ‘There’s nothing to preserve’, ‘We level off and take away’, ‘We start from scratch’.

‘I don’t hold out much hope for you or this, unless you organize, unless you defend yourself. Yourselves,’ concluded Rook. He’d said enough. He pushed the file of papers towards Con.

‘Why me?’ asked Con. ‘Why not one of those old windsocks you hang out with in the bar?’

‘Because they’re windsocks, like you say. Limp when things are fine, and when it’s stormy full of air. But you, you’re not a windsock; you’re one of life’s malcontents. You’re not afraid of fights. You were the only one to give me any trouble over payments for your pitch. The only one from what? … from two hundred and eight stallholders. You’re one in two-o-eight. You, Con, are a natural troublemaker. And may you be in Heaven for an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead.’

‘All right, so I’m a malcontent. Then why not you? You’re the maestro amongst mischief-makers. You’ve got the plans. You know the innards of the man. God knows, you’ve got enough spare time to organize a global war. Why me?’

Rook spoke with passion now. He was not obliged to equivocate with abstracts. He spoke of his damaged reputation in the marketplace, how he might still be seen as Victor’s eyes and ears, as some double agent whose loyalties were as brief and unpredictable as shooting stars. Or else the word would be that the sacked factotum of the millionaire, disgruntled, venomous, was using marketeers to settle his own scores. The press and television would make a meal of that. They loved bad motives. They preferred an intrigue to the simple justice of a cause.

Or else no one would trust him. The older traders would not forget how Rook’s blinking leadership a dozen years before had been so readily tranquillized by Victor’s cheque. His appeasement had impoverished everyone but himself. Unless they were as forgetful and forgiving as chastised dogs they would suspect him.

‘Besides,’ said Rook, ‘I’ve got to stay out of sight. That architect has seen me with … the person from Big Vic who stole the plans for you. I can’t name names. The less you know of that the safer she, or he, will be. With luck they won’t trace the leak. But if Busi sees me with the plans he’ll make connections. He’s slow and foreign but he’s not stupid. Our routes to Victor and to Busi will be blocked and our informant will get sacked, at best. As things stand our sharpest weapon is surprise. What do you say?’

Con did not say a word. He gathered up the papers on his stall. He pushed them in his bag together with his newspaper, his change of shirt, his takings for the day. He’d sleep on it. Then, next morning, he would call a meeting of the marketeers and take directions, not from Rook but them.

He set to work dismantling his stall. He was dispirited by what he’d heard, though, normally, when work was at an end and home was near, he felt at his most contented. He wished that Victor’s man — he could not think of Rook in other terms — would take the hint and leave. He’d said his piece. He’d mixed his poison. He ought to disappear. But Rook seemed keen to stay. He was smiling, even; the same smile with which he’d burdened Con before they spoke.

Rook took the end of Con’s stall and helped him lift it from the trestles. He packed the produce boxes to one side. He unhooked the green and yellow awning and began — inexpertly, incorrectly — to fold the canvas. His hands and fingers were as soft and clean as soap. Con took the bulky canvas and unfolded it. He stowed it once again, so that it made an almost perfect square. He stood on it to clear the air. ‘I don’t need help,’ he said.

Rook shrugged. ‘We all need help.’

‘Get lost,’ said Con and, as he had his back to Rook, allowed himself the briefest smile, but one which packed his cheeks and creased his eyes and put his lips on show. It was true what Rook had said. He relished fights. He was the one in two-o-eight.

VICTOR AND Signor Busi were taking breakfast on the 28th when Con and his two hundred colleagues set out from the Soap Garden. Press cameramen and a television unit from the local studios were there to film the marketeers’ procession to Big Vic.