Jim Crace - Arcadia

Quite what he meant no one was sure. They stood and watched him as he turned his back and went into his private lift, with Anna at his side, his papers in her hands. Would he go up or down? He could have said to Anna, ‘Phone the commissionaires and ask them to select a couple from the crowd who are presentable. I’ll talk to them. And phone the police to clear the others from the mall.’ Instead he said, ‘Let’s get it over with.’

‘What? Up or down?’

He pointed at his shoes.

It was simple, icy curiosity, not pluck or duty, which determined Victor to descend. His earlier rooftop view of what was happening below — even with Signor Busi as his sharper eyes — had not been satisfactory. It all had been a little out of tune, a half turn out of focus, just as the television was these days for him, for all old men. Words and images had frayed for him. Their selvages had gone. When Signor Busi had spoken for so long that morning, over breakfast, Victor had simply stared, uncertain when to nod or laugh or show concern. His hearing aid was temperamental. It worked more clearly in shuttered rooms than in the open air. Weak light was a thinner filter for the sound. It left the consonants intact. It did not squeeze the words. At breakfast there was too much light, and too much accent in Signor Busi’s speech. At times, it seemed to Victor, the architect had retreated into Italian, or else was speaking seamless prose in which the pauses were as crammed with words as the sentences themselves. Was that a question that he asked? All Victor did was shake his head — a gesture which he hoped would be appropriate. The animation of the younger man was tiring. What kind of dilettante was he that he chattered while he ate? What sort of breakfast guest was too insensitive to match his host’s own reticence?

Victor had been relieved — though startled for a moment — when Signor Busi had so suddenly left the table to peer down on the mall. ‘Who are these people?’ Victor had not got a clue. It seemed to him the tide was going out and beaching him with failing faculties. It ebbed, it ebbed, it ebbed. Quite soon the only sounds and images which were defined would be those troubling ones — of Em and Aunt and eggs and fire — which were his memory.

Now that he was in the lift with Anna, though, his hearing aid was working perfectly. He heard the whisper of the steel hawsers, the detonation of the papers which Anna was tapping on her leg, the brittle timpani of his own bones. He even heard and felt the air grow thicker as the lift went down. How long since he had last been to the lobby? How much longer since he’d passed through Big Vic’s revolving doors? Three months at least. How long since God had last descended from the heavens to stand with mortals on the ground?

The power of the speech that he had been obliged to make for the journalists, the felicity of the words that came with such simplicity, had fired the old man with sufficient self-esteem to think he could anaesthetize the crowd with ‘Arcadia will make you rich’. He was not nervous in the least — except, perhaps, that he was uneasy in the lift. It had dropped through twenty floors and more and seemed to travel at a speed and with a purpose that was reckless. He had to steady himself on the lift’s steel walls, and then on Anna’s arm. He was not sorry when his first journey for three months at least came to an end. The single door drew back and Victor looked out on the foliage of the atrium. All the ground-floor staff — receptionists, security, commissionaires — were looking out onto the mall where marketeers were drenched in rain and indignation. Victor pushed his hair back — needlessly — with his hand. He buttoned his coat, and walked across the atrium and stood, the shortest, oldest man, behind the crowd who blocked the exit doors. No one gave way. No one deferred. No one noticed him. He did not pass through these revolving doors each day on his way to work or on his way back home. The man was not familiar.

Anna tried to clear a path, but did not have the voice or strength to cut into the crowd. But when the press arrived a minute or so later, packed into Big Vic’s main lifts, the crowd was soon pushed back and Victor was identified by cameramen and journalists who wished to winkle from him some idea of what he meant to say to the soapies on the far, wet side of the revolving doors.

Now Security did its work. It cleared a path. It made the staff give way. It made the pressmen step aside, and let Anna, Victor, and the breathless publicity manager whose face they knew, proceed towards their confrontation on the mall. Rank, age, and power, and the circling quarters of the automatic doors — too fast and intimate for more than one high-ranker at a time, or so the doorman judged — conspired to send the old man, first and singly, into the rain. The taxi captain knew his boss’s face. He’d been at Big Vic since the start. He hurried over with a black umbrella and followed Victor as he crossed from private territory into the public domain of the mall. There was no sudden wind. The sun did not break through to mark this unaccustomed meeting between the subjects and their distant king. The rain was democratic and it fell as dully everywhere — except that Victor was not wet. He had his canopy, and now a retinue of three — Anna, PR, and the umbrella man.

The stout commissionaire — the one who had escorted Rook out of Big Vic with such inflexible diplomacy — took it on himself to block the building’s exits. If the boss was on the mall, then it became Victor’s private place and no one could presume the right to go outside and join him there unless they had appointments to do so. The newspaper and the television cameramen had to press their lenses to the rain-splashed, tinted glass, while the soundmen and the scribes stood by helplessly or made the best of their imprisonment by interviewing Signor Busi.

Victor’s hearing suffered in the air and light. He was surrounded by the banners and the slogans of the marketeers, but he could not make sense of what they said. The news that he was Victor had somehow spread. It rippled every placard there. It made each demonstrator briefly vehement in preparation for the quiet they knew must come. They crowded him. They waved their placards and their leaflets — and, one or two, their fists. If only Victor could have separated sound from sound he would have understood the essence of their anger, that a man who lived in grandeur in an office penthouse on a business mall could, by decree, destroy their livelihoods, could build on them, could sweep them up and bin them out like worthless market waste.

‘Who speaks for you?’ he asked.

They pushed Con forward and made him stand square on to Victor so that the rain which ran off the black umbrella splashed at his feet.

‘You have been misinformed,’ Victor told the man. ‘You’ve been misled.’ He took the leaflet from the trader’s hand. ‘I don’t know how you got hold of this.’ He pointed at the illustration of Arcadia, taken from Busi’s confidential plans. ‘But had you been more patient you would have heard the good news that we have prepared for you. “Arcadia? Who pays?”, your leaflet asks.’ He put his finger to his chest. ‘I pay. Who else? Sixty million US dollars it will cost, but not one dollar of that comes from you. I take the risk. I tremble at the bills. And who will benefit from this? Who will have dry and permanent premises? Who will no longer need to put up and pack away the stalls each day? Who will no longer need to barrow in the produce from the market edge, but will have storage space and access for the lorries and dumper lifts to bring the produce to the stalls?’ He spread his arms to encompass everybody there. He promised them that he would not betray his ‘market friends’. He spoke of meetings where all the details would be hammered out and all their worries could be voiced. He suggested there should be liaison every week, and a trading parliament inside Arcadia on which the marketeers could have their representatives, their ministers.