Jim Crace - Arcadia

The market drains — muzzled already by the leaves and peel of fruit — could not cope with the water from the hoses. The drains were hydrants, tumbling with water and not removing it. They soaked and drowned the cobblestones. What flames there were found ducking, orange twins to dance with in the flood, and there were silver floodlamps for the dancers, too, from police and TV helicopters whose rotaries sent frowns across the water.

The wisest men and women stood at the market’s heart, ankle-deep in water, breathless and demoralized in the smoke and clamour. Rook was there. He held his chest. He held a handkerchief to his mouth. He felt exultant and dismayed. Who now could doubt the power and the patience of the rich? They held the ground. They held the sky. The city was all theirs. Had Rook not told the soapies so? He looked towards the conifer of lights which was Big Vic at night. Was Victor the Insomniac looking down upon the Soap Market? Was his permission sought before the URCU squads were sent to put a cordon round his tenants on his territory? Whoever’d given Victor his first name had chosen well. Who was the victor now?

Rook found his nebulizer. He held it to his mouth. He sucked on its fine mist. It was no match for damp and fire and night. He wished he had a desk on which to rest his head, or Anna’s chest. He wished he had the skill to rise above all this, say twenty-seven storeys up beyond the smoke and noise and danger of the street. If Rook was silent at the centre of the storm, then Joseph was at the typhoon’s active edge. His jacket top was thrown off. His sleeves were up despite the time of year, despite the hour. He pulled at cobblestones. He helped with flaming bottles, upturned cars, with threats and challenges in the puddled, twenty-metre showground between the people and the police. He took his work shirt off. The smoke from the wet fires was just as gelid as the steam and vapours of the train, the Salad Bowl Express, in which he’d bared himself at home, when he had raised the produce boxes to his head and steadied them, his face well hidden, his body on display. Now he did not hide his face, and what he hoisted overhead and shook were fists. The noses and the foreheads pressed to glass were not rich women’s or their daughters’ on weekend shopping sprees but those of URCU; unpowdered, unpampered noses and foreheads, unpainted mouths steaming up the perspex of their shields and waiting for the order to Advance-dumdum, Suppress-dum-dum, Arrest-dum-dump.

It was Joseph who found the stacks of unsold fruit and vegetables, as yet untouched by fire. He held a mauving loose-leafed cabbage in his hand, as light, for all its size, as a can of beer. He was a child. He had no self-control. He ran out in the showground, hoisted the cabbage in the air with all the might that comes from years of lifting sacks. Many were the times when cutting cabbages he’d found a damaged one and, just for fun, had launched it in the air to reach the hedge or scare the girls or break the boredom of the work. His training helped him now. The mauving cabbage held its own against the pull of earth and seemed to hang inside the helicopter searchlight from above as if it were a pastel moon that had till dawn to land.

The men of URCU watched the cabbage arc towards them through the night. Not one amongst them knew what threat it posed, but certainly it looked more menacing than cobblestones or petrol bombs. What escalation did it represent? How would their shields withstand a missile that was so large and pale and full of flight? The line of long shields tensed. The squad knee-ducked to halve the impact of the foliage bomb. The cabbage, dropping now, unnerved them more than stones or flame. Four men from URCU, directly in the cabbage path, fell onto the ground in preparation for its blow. The cabbage struck a shield square on. It hardly made a sound. A chicken’s egg could make more noise and do more harm. The cabbage fell apart. Its leaves were sheets, were flakes. The target URCU fell onto his back and, if blushes weighed as much as stones, he would have died beneath the load.

The laughter and jeers from the Soap Market were louder even than the helicopter blades. Now everybody ran to arm themselves with fruit and vegetables. Never had shopkeepers and shoplifters been in such harmony. They knew — this is the lesson of the insurrectionist — that ridicule and laughter are more subversive, more disarming than bullets. What can a line of soldiers do against a fusillade of cabbages? Put down their shields and face the leaves? Hold up their shields and face the jeers?

Quite soon the air was thick with greengrocery. Potatoes were quite damaging and could be thrown further than even cobbles or bottles. Apples, pears, and avocados beat tattoos — dum-dump — on shields. Tomatoes blooded them, or burst on blue-black overalls or overpolished boots. The comedians sent bananas through the air. ‘Like boomerangs,’ they said. Indeed, some did return. You can’t control the tempers of young URCU men who’re made to feel like village clods. They sent bananas back. An URCU officer was uncapped by an aubergine. A courgette caught a policeman in the corner of his eye. A TV cameraman took on his cheek the full deceit of a peach: first the tight and rubbery impact of the skin, and then the sticky embrace of the flesh, and finally the wrinkled bullet at its heart. The peach stone split. It cut his cheek. His blood was peach juice, and his juice was blood.

Joseph indulged himself. He was a citizen at last. He held the front of stage, and worked his way through fruit. The snatch-squad leader noted him. ‘We’ll have him first,’ he told his men. ‘The comic with the birthmark on his cheek. We’ll give that bastard birthmarks, head to toe.’ The police and press took Joseph’s photograph. They had a picture of him with his fists high in the air. They had him holding cobbles in his hand. And cabbages. And Ogen melons. And pomegranate hand grenades.

At 1.45 a.m. the senior officer sustained a chest wound from a sugar beet. It struck him between his heart and epaulette and knocked him to the ground. What could he say, to all who’d seen him tumbling on the cobblestones, except, ‘Enough’s enough. Go forward. Clear the market. Let them know who runs this town.’ So they were beating shields again. Each blow upon the perspex shields took the URCU cordon one step closer to the produce-bombardiers, the upturned cars, the scorched remains of trees and stalls and bars, to vaunting, topless Joseph, and to Rook.

This is the classic public-order manoeuvre,’ explained the police PRs. Undermine resistance with a show of strength and noise. And then send in the Short Shields to arrest the troublemakers. And then send up the canisters of Green Grief, the gas that blinds the rioters and dyes them green and makes them weep and grimace like Picasso’s Cubist lovers. And then mop up.

They griefed the centre of the market first. The police — though they had masks — did not wish to gas their own advance. Rook kicked a canister away. His legs and shoes took on the airborne moss. His skin turned ghostly, applewhite, while Grief, as light and volatile as gnats, rose to his waist, his chest, his throat, his eyes. It was a pity all the lemons had been used as missiles. Lemon juice, rubbed on the face, is some protection against gas.

Rook felt for safety. He found a car. He crouched. His eyes and chest were tight. Rioters should not mix drink and gas. Asthmatics should shun crowds. He clutched the front tyre of the car. He alternated handkerchief and nebulizer at his mouth. He coughed. But coughing did not clear his chest. The sticky sputum that landed on the cobblestones and on the rubber tyre and in his hand was lining from his lungs. Its release left him raw. It hurt to swallow smoke and Grief. It hurt to barter oxygen with CO 2. His bellows wheezed and tightened if they were opened wider than a crack. He had to pant as quickly and as shallowly as marsh frogs do, his chest distended, his lungs migrating to his throat, his upper orifices strung like candle-tops with waxy phlegm.