Jim Crace - Arcadia

‘What for?’

‘Just do it. Either you burn that or I’ll burn these.’ He flexed the ten half-notes he held. He put them back inside his wallet. ‘Wait ten minutes. Do your job. Then find me here tomorrow. Start the new year ten thousand richer than today.’

Rook would not go home to sleep soberly or alone that night. He wished to see what mayhem he could cause. But he would need an alibi. He must be seen, a noisy innocent, when the fires began. He made his way between the cars. He pushed a passage through the crowds until he reached the scuffed winter lawns of the Soap Garden. He got himself an empty glass in time for midnight, and as the toasts for Health and Wealth were offered to the crowds Rook was the noisiest respondent, like the worst of sinners at a mass. He called out madly. He made ironic toasts for Victor, for Arcadia. He stood on tables, made a nuisance of himself with women, traders, young men in garish clothes. He let them know his name. ‘I’m Rook, and this is my backyard.’ He was unforgettable. No one noticed that there was orange dawn rising from the west, with clouds of smoke. And no one turned to sniff the old and woody smell that comes from country hearths and bakeries and forest fires.

The first to warm their faces and their hands upon the flames were the market’s night-guests. Their nests were going up in smoke, but they were cheerful with the light and colours reflected in all the windscreens of the marketplace. They squatted on their haunches with their bottles and let their faces redden with the drink and heat. They cheered as flames collapsed the tepees made from wood and canvas. The heat compacted and sent its front-row audience back down the aisles of cars where it was darker, safer, less intense.

The crowd was growing. Late arrivals who had parked on pavements in the Woodgate district and who were too elated by the date and time to go back home, were making for the market bars when they were blocked by smoke and fire and crowds. They were not alarmed. The midnight fire was not a threat to them. It only marked the closing of the market or the closing of the year. It gave a cheerful touch to New Year’s Eve. The drunks and beggars pestered them for cigarettes and one or two lit up their cigarettes with embers from the fires.

The fire itself was changing mood. It spat. It was exasperated, and trapped. Fires by their nature sink and spread. They smoulder at their edges and colonize the land around. But cobbles do not burn. They kept the fire at bay. The heat grew angrier, but it could not do much except startle everybody there with the pistol shot of cobbles splitting underneath the fire and timber detonating.

There’s a winter city wind we call the Midnight Wheeze. The night-time warmth of city life is dragged up by the moon, and colder country air is sucked in underneath, along the pavements and the alleyways and the tram routes, and blows till dawn. It and the fires made rendez-vous. They waltzed. Their gowns flew up and sent out puffs of heat. The flames were animated now. They dipped and reached, they stretched, recoiled, as the wind shadow-boxed the night. The smallest of the fires had stretched the furthest — and, at last, it held on to the leafless twigs of two snag trees which grew behind a bar. It turned them black. The flames had hardly touched. But those who watched saw fifty airborne smokers draw on fifty cigarettes as the twig tips drew in wind and glowed as redly as an owlet’s eyes. The cigarettes caught fire. The flames now skipped like elves amongst the branches, feasting on the bark. The revellers in the Soap Garden looked up to see two trees on fire and giving voice to wind as trumpets do. Already twigs were falling onto roofs, and roofs were chattering with debris and shrugging noisily at the sudden warmth. Already insects filled the air. And there were rats and bats and cockroaches that sought to flee the flames.

The wind now turned. It let the trees collapse. It blew back on the marketplace where the crowd had grown quieter, less amused. The fires hissed. Flames curled like Chinese waves and broke onto the bonnets and the windscreens of the nearest cars. A tongue of heat blackened, shrank, a linen football flag that some young man had tied to the radio aerial of his creaky van. It scorched the chrome on ancient bumpers, drew acrid smells from new ones moulded out of plastic.

Rook saw the trees go up, and he was gripped with guilt and fear and exhilaration. He ran, when everybody ran, to see what happened. He joined in the panic, whipped it up, agreed with, echoed every shout from every trader who read conspiracy in every flame, in every car, in every stranger’s face. ‘They’ve burnt our stalls!’ Too late to recover anything. Too hot and dangerous. ‘They’ve set fire to us now,’ though who ‘They’ were, they did not say. ‘They’ were the mayor, and architects, and businessmen, and Victor. ‘They’ were the men who came at dawn to ‘start from scratch’.

Who was the first to overturn a car? Not Rook. He was too small and breathless and had no comrades. Some young men who loved their cars had tried to back them out of danger, reversing into spaces where people stood, pressing their bumpers against the bumpers of the car behind, attempting three-point turns where there was not sufficient room to turn a hand-cart. Some drivers at the front tried to clear a path at the fire’s feet. They blared their horns, were more concerned for paintwork than for flesh. They found themselves enclosed by men. Their cars were rocked and turned. They had to scramble free. One young man — his back tyres melting smoke, his windscreen smashed — sought reparation with a flaming stick. He’d kill to save his car.

The Soap Market did not have enough exits for all the vehicles that were parked. Besides, the narrow roads and pavements which led away were blocked by other cars and more crowds, drawn to the place by noise and light and smoke. What chance then for the fire brigade? Their engines could get no closer to the fires than the hydrants at Tower Square and on Saints Row would allow. The hoses that they ran could not reach the market rim. The firemen did not care. This fire was self-contained. It could not leap the cobbles to the town. Besides, at dawn, as everybody knew, the demolition would begin. So ‘Let the fire burn out,’ the police advised. ‘We’ll clear the marketplace of people. We don’t want injuries.’ But try to separate a drunken crowd from fire, or owners from their cars, or market men from what was left of all their working lives. No one would budge, though the captain of the district police made announcements with his megaphone.

It did not take long for those two trees to burn. The flames climbed down the trunk and sped along the ground. They jumped like cats across the roofs of outhouses and drink stores and kitchens at the back of bars. The drinkers and the beggars took their chance to loot before the fire drank all the beer and wine. They dragged out cases, smashing open bottles. They helped themselves to anything to eat or spend or sell. They fought the fire with German lager. They egged it on with Scotch and rum and wooden chairs. The bars and gardens had no time to bargain with the flames. There was too much wood. Only the burgher laurels were reluctant to join in. Their leaves seemed proofed, their branches far too flexible for flames. But when they burned at last, their molten marzipan hung in a cloud of country cooking which settled on the night like frost on fields.

The city police are not as patient as their country brothers. It seemed to them that this was a market protest which had gone mad. They well remembered what the market traders had done to the traffic when they marched on Big Vic, and — years before — the mayhem of the produce strike. The soapies had a reputation for independence, for cussedness. The police had little time for marketeers. And they were not fond, either, of the ‘dross’, the down-and-outs, who slept out there. Now these two groups were teaming up with young drunk men. A fearsome trinity. And there was fighting, looting, fires. Already there were pockets of disturbance on the streets beyond the Soap Market. Young men attacked big cars, blocked trams, uprooted shrubs in the Mathematical Park. They took revenge on everything and everyone as if violence was the only way to make the city notice them. They knew instinctively that they were invisible unless they rioted and smashed and stole. And then their faces made the television screen.