Jim Crace - Arcadia

Some stayed all day, most of the night. In fact, in that last week between Christmas and New Year, the night took over from the day. The alcohol replaced the fruit. Trade gave way to pleasure. Some single traders ceased to trade. They did not rise at dawn to fidget over crops or fuss with decorations to their stalls. They got up late. They stayed up late. They drank like camels. Who gave a damn what fortune and the car parks held? There was a party to attend. A wake? A christening? Or both? No one had time to wonder or to care. Even those five men who’d been with Victor at his birthday lunch and were too old to take much pleasure out of noise and drink were not allowed to go home sober. How could they refuse a toast to ‘Ourselves’? And then another toast to ‘All these years we’ve shared’? And more: ‘To all our loyal customers’. ‘To the new year and the old’. ‘To Health, Wealth and Women’. ‘To Arcadia’. Quite soon they had the Gypsy and his bewitching concertina at their table and were dredging for the words and tune of

‘Are you for sale, sweet market maid?

(And if so, can I squeeze you?)

How much a kilo of your breasts?

(I’ll take a pair, so please you.)

How much for thighs?

And how much eyes?

Oh, tell me that you’re merchandise.

Sweet maid, I long to lease you.

What is your fee?

That’s fine by me!

Now settle down upon my knee,

before my missus sees you …’

These were nights too good to end, so full of sin and yet so blameless and so virtuous. The celebration would not last. On the morning of January first the market would be cleared. The hoardings and barriers would go up. The diggers and the trenchers would move in. The soil beneath the stones would be on show, flints and shattered cobbles blinking in the light for the first time in six hundred years.

Rook wished to save the cobblestones. And himself. There was no place for him in Victor’s car park, or in Arcadia. They’d not marked out a site for him, where he could trade on having been the Woodgate boy, the firebrand of the marketplace, the boss’s right-hand man, the soapies’ champion. On New Year’s Day his world would be reduced to the four small rooms of his apartment. He’d be the undisputed king of walls and furniture. He’d have no reputation on the streets. Unless, that is, he took this final chance to make his mark, to take revenge, upon the town.

On New Year’s Eve there was no room at his usual table in the Soap Market. Young men and women he had never seen before, and all the residents from thereabouts, had joined the traders, porters, drivers to celebrate year’s end and mark the closing of the Soap Market.

At seven, the mayor had come, with cameramen, representatives from the Busi Partnership, and Victor’s development and trading managers. The police had cleared a path and set up metal barriers so that the city mayor could be the first customer to shop unimpeded in the Soap Market without the pressure of a crowd. The route which he would take was set, as was the stall where he would pause, the conversation he would have with the chosen soapie, the single orange — already washed and wrapped by a town-hall official — that he would buy and peel and eat. There’d be a photo-call (‘Please bite the orange, Mr Mayor. A wider mouth. Smile!’), an interview, a walkabout, a hasty departure to give a speech to city businessmen at their annual dinner. A secretary made a note that in two years’ time, this mayor, or the next, would need to buy a second orange and eat it for the cameras to mark the opening of Arcadia.

So much for the proprieties. Now the traders were free — and glad — to dismantle and to stow their market stalls for the last time. They did not pack them in the usual way, or lay them down for rest on their trading pitches, but followed the instructions which had been sent to them from Anna in Big Vic. They folded their awnings and their trestles, packed and boxed their unsold fruit and vegetables, fixed on a numbered label, inked in their names, and carried their trading rigs to two collection points behind the bars. Victor’s lorries would arrive at dawn to take the stalls across Link Highway Red to their new car-park homes.

For once the cleansing teams could be as careless as they wished with their sweepers and their hoses. They washed the cobbles wet and black, removed the daily waste, and left the market clean for its dawn clearance. The traders joined the party in the garden, their grimy aprons and hats persuading people in the crowd that they were soapies and should be let through and served at once, much in the way that funeral crowds defer to family mourners.

The cobbled oval which surrounded the garden and the bars was emptier than it had ever been. The new arrivals took advantage of the space to park their cars close to the bars. It only took one car to brave the medieval cordon of the cobblestones, for a hundred, then five hundred more to follow. You did not need a ticket there. You parked for free. There was a short-lived symmetry in this — a car park lost to marketeers below Big Vic, a car park gained in market space at the centre of the old town.

The Soap Market gleamed. The windscreens and the roofs of cars caught, tossed back, the street and building lights. The cars were silky, sated beetles, nesting on the corpse while it was wet and warm. The wise drivers put their windows up, retracted their radio aerials, locked their cars before they headed for the bars. They did not like the look of those men and women who hung around, the beggars and the drunks, the homeless, jobless, feckless, hopeless, ancient men, the ones who counted cobblestones as bed, the petrol sniffers overawed by such a choice of petrol tanks.

Where would the nighttime soapies sleep that night? Where were their nests? Where could they light their fires? They called to Rook, the ones that knew his face. ‘What’s going on?’ they asked. The quieter ones just walked around between the cars with nowhere else to go. Some tried the handles of saloons. Some pulled off petrol caps and dined on vapour. Some sat on bonnets passing bottles, bothering the passers-by for cash or cigarettes. It was too late to think of somewhere else. This was a home to them, and they were as nervous and volatile as if they were bereaved.

Rook stood and watched, debating with himself whether now was the time — before he grew too troublesome — to go back home, to see the old year out, soberly, alone, in bed. He was not well. The evening damp was sitting on his chest. His head was crammed. He felt close to tears. Then he saw Joseph for the fourth and final time. The boy was sitting with his back against the smaller pile of stalls, asleep. The only sleeper there. Rook could not resist the opportunity. He leant to wake the boy.

‘It’s me,’ Rook said, the Devil shaking Faust. Joseph’s nose was running. His eyes were wet. He smelt of alcohol and fuel. He could not hold his head up straight. His breath could bubble paint. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’ Rook searched his pockets, found his wallet, and produced the ten half-notes. ‘You have your halves, I hope? I’ll give you my halves tonight. I’ll make you rich if …’ If you can shake a wand and make the market whole again. If you can mug me back my job. If you can kidnap Anna from Big Vic and place her in my bed. If you can trick the lines to leave my face, the grey to leave my hair, and make me young and dressed in black again. If you can stop the city in its tracks.

‘If what?’ asked Joseph, half awake. Rook tapped the stack of trading stalls with his toe.

‘We’ll have a bonfire, eh?’ he said. ‘To end all this, to see the old year out.’ He produced a book of matches — free from the Excelsior — and dropped them into Joseph’s hand. ‘Set fire to all this wood and canvas. And then the other pile as well. That’s all you have to do. It’s money for nothing.’