Jim Crace - Arcadia

The local police — exhausted, shocked — did not need a permit from a priest or mayor to draw their truncheons, raise their shields, and bruise the crowd. What was the point in holding back, in softening their blows? If they did not put an end to this disturbance now, then who could tell where it might lead and what it might achieve?

SO FAR, SO GOOD. A little local trouble, nurtured at the festive chest of New Year’s Eve. But though the cobbles held the flames at bay, the heat and passion spread. Emptied bottles soon were filled with fuel from cars and stopped with rags and lit and thrown. What had held beer arced through the night like fairground comets, falling short on cars, exploding in the air, or showering the firemen and the police in flaming rain. In other times the older traders would have called for calm for fear their pitches might be destroyed, their customers abused. But what had they to lose now that the marketplace was stripped, their trestles and their canvas already up in flames, their stomachs full of drink? It shouldn’t end like this, they thought, but not with sufficient certainty to interfere. Instead they raised their arms and voices with the mob. Midnight made them brave, eloquent, and loud.

What wisdom caused the captain of the police to radio for help? Why did he lose his nerve? Was he alarmed he could not stop his men from cracking heads? Was it the flaming bottles? Was it the cars? Or was he simply calm and procedural, judging that his men were now outnumbered by a mob and that diplomacy and night would not damp down its fire?

He radioed for help at five-past one on that first, smoke-filled morning of the year, though what he said to his superiors is in dispute. The public enquiry that was held could not unravel truth and lies. But this is sure, his plea for — so he claimed — another fifty policemen at the most, disturbed the brandy and cigars of the city’s powered notables. The chief of police, the mayor, the owner-publisher of all three city newspapers (my remote, rotund boss), three of the city’s four leading financiers (no Victor, naturally), their partners and their consorts (my boss’s blatant wife), had all been top-table guests at the businessmen’s annual dinner. They’d made their annual speeches, dispensed their annual handshakes and their pledges. They’d joined in the choruses of New Year songs. (Once more the buxom sisters of the Band Accord were wheezing music for a fee.) And now they were alone, except for waitresses and cocktail staff, in a private suite.

The chief of police was trying hard to understand an anecdote the mayor was telling when a waitress brought him a folded note on an enamelled Persian tray. He read: ‘HAPPY NEW YEAR, and to celebrate the occasion there is organized rioting in the market area. Briefly: arson, vehicles and property destroyed, incendiary devices, injuries (fatalities?). The district captain is flapping like a scorched moth. Requests urgent help. What action?’ The ornamented B.L. below the note was the signature of the chief’s uniformed aide.

‘At last, the Revolution,’ the chief said, and read the note out loud.

His wife raised her eyebrows. ‘I suppose this means we have to leave,’ she said. ‘Who’d be married to a policeman? I never get to finish meals. Or drink. Though duty never calls so loudly during working hours. Oddly.’

‘We stay,’ her husband said. ‘That is my resolution for the New Year. Never leave a party before you’ve smoked the butt and drunk the dregs.’

‘And what about the Revolution, dear? That starchy little man who calls himself your aide won’t give you any peace until you’ve done his bidding. I’m never sure who works for whom.’

The chief preferred his wife when she was sober, and out of sight. He passed her comments off as family jokes. ‘I do not need to leave the room to settle this,’ he said. He took a ballpoint from his jacket and added just two words to his aide’s short note. ‘Deploy URCU.’ His signature, attempted with a flourish, pierced and tore the paper. He held the paper up dramatically.

‘That should do the trick,’ he said. ‘Revolution ends before cigar, I think.’

On public holidays, such as New Year, he explained, it was not easy to solve problems of this kind. District policemen, it seemed, were in short supply at such a time. The ones that were not working on the New Year’s shift were either out of town or drunk or celebrating on the street. But there were young men in the barracks who’d been on duty all night long, denied a drink, denied cigars, denied festivities. Let loose a bored detachment from the Urban Rapid Control Unit, the chief assured the other guests, and there would be — he sought a phrase which could be both manly and dispassionate — ‘sudden order on the streets’. How simple it felt, amid such comfort and such company, to settle revolutions with a phrase. He called the waitress. He placed his two-word note upon the tray and sent her off whence she had come to activate his aide and URCU.

The district police had been extemporary. Their blows had been offhand, and improvised. Their strategy was unrehearsed. They were the jazzmen of the law. But URCU were the classicists, contrapuntal, harmonized, notated, drilled. Their last note was implicit in their first. And their first note was this: a barrack klaxon call that in less than four minutes filled the barrack yard with two hundred and twenty men, selected for URCU duties because their deference, their height, their eagerness to please suggested they were loyal to orders and to masters rather than to class. Kitted out in Impact Hats and blue-black riot overalls and keen to stretch their limbs after an evening spent crouched over dominoes, letters home, and boot polish, they listened to instructions (‘Suppress, contain, arrest’) with the queasy eagerness of footballers at a pre-match briefing. Defenders had been issued with long transparent, perspex shields. The strikers, divided into eight snatch-squads of six, had short shields, nightsticks made out of toughened PVC, and lighter boots for running swiftly and for kicking with numbing accuracy. The specialists had short-barrelled weapons, or plastic-baton launchers, or canisters of gas, or dogs — and — perks for the elite — hip-flasks of rum to keep them warm and reckless until their specialities were called upon. Someone set up the URCU ‘anthem’ beating on his shield, the unforgiving sound of PVC on perspex. In seconds every shield was shivering in unison. Dum dum dum-dum-dump. Dum. Dum. Dum-dum. Dump!

URCU rode across the city in their Sweepers — blue-black riot coaches (to coordinate with overalls), their fishnet windows grilled, their foremost fenders prowed and aproned like snow-ploughs. Soon there would be field toilets, civilian backup units, refreshment vans for officers and ranks, the paramedics, the parasites. Already trams and traffic had been stopped from entering the older parts of town. Already marksmen with infrared night-sights were seeking out the attic rooms in those offices and homes which looked down on the fringes of the Soap Market. Camera crews, from police and television, buzzed and hovered like carcass bees. Police radio wavelengths were as overloaded and as chattering as a telephone line sagging with its swifts and swallows on summer’s last warm day. Here was a city at full stretch, able — as only cities are — to Suppress, Contain, Arrest the chaos of the human heart as if it were as fettered and as mindless as a tram.

So when the URCU came, what could the soapies do, that undrilled coalition of beggars, fruiterers, revellers, ne’er-do-wells? Disperse? They were ‘bottled up’, to use the phrase preferred by the URCU foot soldiers to the euphemistic ‘contained’ of their officers. Where could they go but back towards the flames? Those few who sought to leave by calmly walking at the police were driven off with dum-dum-dump, or driven back by water jets, or knocked onto the cobbles by boots and sticks, or told — if they were too old and smartly dressed to be struck or kicked or drenched — ‘Get back in there. You don’t come out until we say.’