Jim Crace - Arcadia

My God, how they were bored by meetings, and evenings spent in their hotels, and all the budget-bullied cutbacks from their plans which were required, and which themselves required new plans, new calculations, work. They did not like our city. Newcomers seldom do. They are not literate in what leads where, or how and when. These architects hoped they’d never need to know our city well. Their main desire was Do the Job, and Home . They set a day, the first day of the year, when building work on Arcadia — two years of it — would start. So New Year’s Eve would close the market and the decade down.

There was a problem. You did not need to be a space-time engineer to spot a two-year gap between the closure of the Soap Market and the opening of Arcadia. Those rash and early promises that builders and merchants could work in concord, the market stalls amongst the scaffolding, trade amongst construction, could not be kept. Were they naive, or mischievous, these undertakings? How had anybody ever thought that tomatoes by the kilo could be compatible with six-tonne shovels and ballast lorries and men in safety hats? No one on site! That was the builder’s sensible demand. It only needed some old lady laden down with cabbages and onions to take a fall or take a bruise from building work and she’d be shopping for a lawyer and for damages before her bruise was brown. So Victor’s managers were told they had to relocate the market stalls for at least two years.

Victor himself was sent a memorandum — but what did he employ managers for? Besides he only had to look out of his window to see the perfect and the only answer to the two-year gap. There were open fields of tarmac, parking for the mall’s nine thousand staff and more for visitors. Two areas, three hectares each, were underused. They were too far from offices, and windswept, dirty from Link Highway Red which passed close by. Blue whisker herb and smog-nettle had taken purchase in the tarmac, making do with lime from the painted parking grids and puddled rain for soil. At night this was where lovers came and prostitutes who traded from the kerb, with rocking cars and peeping Toms parked asymmetrically for privacy. By day it was as empty as a prison yard. With access from the highway and, for pedestrians, by tunnel, this was the perfect place for market stalls. Good news for everyone involved. Or so Big Vic would have the world believe.

People are ready to be fooled. That’s optimism. ‘This is the price you have to pay for Arcadia,’ the stallholders were told, when they were trying to make light of their predicament, their exile to the car park. ‘If you want your share of wealth then you must expect to take some risks, to suffer inconvenience. We’re talking business here, not charity.’

Who told them that? Why, Rook, of course. He was amused to tease them with their foolishness, their gullibility. Why had they ever thought that Victor’s plan was some crusade to make them more secure and wealthier?

‘Con led you down a cul-de-sac,’ he said. ‘You may be sure he ’ll turn out fine. They’ll keep him sweet and quiet at any cost. The last thing that they want is trouble on the mall again — so Victor’s men will take good care of Con. He’ll get prime site, you’ll see. But what about the little traders, the ones who don’t make noise but just scrape by, selling from the backs of vans? Or those who’ve got five kids to clothe? Or those …’ Rook was drunk and smart enough to make an endless list in which the only one who showed a profit from the move into the car-park site was Con.

No one doubted Rook was mischievous. He’d ducked and weaved too many times before. He’d broken free and realigned too frequently for any of his alliances to count for much. But it’s a fact that even fools and drunks and liars can sound alarms. What does it matter who shouts fire, or how, so long as there are flames? Here, then, was the Soap Market in its final weeks. It seemed the same as it had always been. There were no closing sales. No bargains to be had. Fresh food has a shelf life of a day, a little more in wintertime. There were no stocks to clear because in produce markets stocks are cleared each day and replenished overnight. But there was something stale upon the air, more pungent than the market waste or the odour of too many people in one place. This was the putrefaction of resolve, the enfeebling of that prod-and-nudge which got the traders from their beds each day at five to bargain with the wholesalers, which gave them pride and pleasure in the stall-top patterns they could make with what they had to sell, which made them cheeky, cheerful, quick with repartee. Now they did not wake with an appetite for work. They did not relish the day. They were offhand with fruit and customers. It did not matter which of these were bruised or handled without care. They left the business in the hands of sons and nieces and stood in circles, hands dug deeply into pockets, shoulders down, to hear the latest rumour or hard news about their prospects between the market and Arcadia.

The bars and restaurants which fringed the Soap Garden had most to fear. There’d be no place for them in Victor’s car park. They’d been promised leases in Arcadia, and there was compensation to be paid, negotiated by lawyers from Big Vic. They’d have to look for premises elsewhere. But for two years? What landlord would let his premises for just two years? Theirs was a quandary impossible to solve — to move, to stay, to wait and see? Yet, as the new year drew closer, so the market mood transformed again. Business boomed at all the bars. The marketeers were thirsty all day long. They stayed at tables, stood at counters, found perches on the weathered stones around the medieval washing fountains. You’d think they had no work to do, and had no end of cash. You’d think they were in celebratory mood, the noise they made, the bottles that they drank. Theirs was a carnival of despair, the despair of those whose rafts draw closer to the weir and see both the tumbling dangers and the placid pools beyond. No one is fool enough to swim, yet none looks forward to the rocks.

Of course, they played the game of If . What if they moved as docilely as lambs and did their best at what they did the best, that is, sell fruit and vegetables to people in the town, no matter where? Would car-park profits be the same as those made in the Soap Market? By spring, would they be smirking at the fears they’d had and wishing, secretly, for Arcadian delays so they could stay and flourish in the car park? What if, what if they’d stood their ground and said, We stay!? These cobblestones are ours. We don’t want risks and challenges. We want the market as it is. What if that Rook, that braggart Rook, that told-you-so, had not been sacked and still held Victor’s ear on their behalf? Would he have stopped Arcadia, as he now claimed? What if old Victor had not lived to be so old?

Rook was Cassandra now, the unregarded prophet whose truth was trash. He and Anna were no longer friends. A woman of her age does not need ballast of his kind. She kept away, and when she thought of Rook she flushed with anger not with love. As he grew freer of Big Vic so she became more part of it, more loyal to work which now she thought of as ‘career’. She wished the boss to favour her and so, of course, ambition ruled her tongue.

‘I have a name for you,’ she told Victor. ‘Remember what you said? The name of who it was leaked Signor Busi’s plans. You said I should enquire. I’m certain it was Rook, the day that he was sacked. He went into your room, I’m sure. He used the photocopier … I have informants in the Soap Market. They say he boasts about the theft.’ She knew the timing made no sense, that Rook had gone before the plans arrived. But she guessed — and hoped — the old man’s memory was logically unsound. He’d not know one month from the next when both these months were over one year old.