Jim Crace - Arcadia

The country people say a dying man is concentrated in his thoughts. He sees the heights and depths of life ranged before him like coloured beads on a Chinese abacus. He’s deft and concentrated, accounting for his faults and triumphs. ‘The dying never lie,’ they say. But Rook was lying to himself. His abacus was ranged only with the whitest beads. His thoughts were hardly concentrated. His brain was in his throat, buffeted by outer, wicked air and inner, pinioned breath, now damp with bubble blood and overladen with the weight of mucus. His tongue and nails and lips were blue. He sweated and he trembled as he sank from sleep into coma. But then, perhaps, he was not dying after all. The rain, the breeze, the slight protection of the car, the gas-repellent sheet of water which cushioned cobbles (and in which he now fell forward, his cheek and ear submerged) might dampen down the asthma and save Rook from the suffocating embraces of the air. Perhaps he stood a chance, for help was close at hand.

What did the market look like, now that the police had broken ranks and were intent, like running boys with flocks of seagulls on the beach, to cause disordered flight amongst the trapped and agitated crowds? Helmets moved amongst bare heads. Soapies grouped, regrouped, broke up like antelope before the snapping jackal truncheons of the police. It seemed that URCU — far outnumbered by the crowd — were deadened men who had no pity and no fear. They went to work as if their orders were to complicate the mayhem of the night, not bring it to an end. Joseph was fleeing for his life. He’d already taken blows to his bare shoulder and his back. The Short Shields had him marked. They knew his face. His torso had been photographed. He was the prize stag in the herd. ‘Get the one without the shirt!’ He ducked and dived between the people and cars as lightly as he’d done when he’d played tag with other boys between the orchard sheds and trees when he was young. His life had led to this. He had a plan: to find an open car and force his way, between the springs and cushions of the rear seats, into the boot. Where else was there to hide or go? The URCU had the soapies bottled up, their clothing steeped in green, reduced by Grief from revellers to snivellers.

Joseph had tried two dozen doors before — exactly this — he stumbled over Rook. He recognized the face, the cough, the leather jacket that he wore. He sat Rook up. ‘What’s up?’ he said, too dull to find dramatic words. Rook did not speak. His eyes were shut. One ear was full of water. The other one was stained with Grief. He was unconscious now. The best of luck to him. To be unconscious is God’s way of settling the lungs. He did not fight the inner or the outer air. He breathed more shallowly, more evenly, less frequently. Joseph placed him with his back against the wheel arch. Rook’s head and chest fell forward. His diaphragm forced heavy air into his upper lungs. By chance, his breathing pipes were tipped at just the angle for recovery. Joseph beat him on the back. The blows expelled damp sods of air.

‘Come on. Wake up,’ said Joseph. ‘I want my money now.’ He slapped Rook’s face. The colour of his cheeks had turned from green to pink.

‘Give. Give,’ he said. ‘You’ve had your bonfire. Now you’ve got to pay for it.’

Rook was peaceful now. Too comfortable to wake and speak. He made a noise that found a passage through his nose. It was the noise that athletes make when marathons are run. It was a snore of restitution. It repaid the debt of oxygen. Joseph’s slaps and blows — who knows? — had saved Rook’s life.

Joseph had no time to spare. He heard the heavy boots close in, the cries of pain, the lifeless impacts made by sticks on men and cobblestones on shields. This place of safety by the car’s front wheel could not last long. He tugged on Rook’s coat. It would not shift, not speedily at least. He took his ‘nife’ from his trouser pocket. He placed it at Rook’s stooped back. He did not say a word, but opened up the leather purse of Rook, along the jacket’s backbone seam, the woollen shirt beneath, as if this were no man but some slain goat. The knife cut from the inside out. It meant no harm to Rook. He was not hurt, just robbed. Joseph pulled off the left half of the jacket and the shirt, by the sleeves. And then the right half too. He checked the inner pockets, found the outline of Rook’s wallet, and would have cut the pocket out, but Short Shields were too close. He stooped and ran again — and as he ran he pulled the two half-jackets with their half-shirt linings on his arms and round his shoulders. His leather jacket had a stripe of flesh down the centre of his back. His muscled torso had only partly disappeared. He looked like some stage-punk, prepared for surgery.

Rook was not aware that Joseph had come or gone, or what he’d done to save his life. He felt the cold of New Year’s dawn and all the fires put out and no shirt or jacket on. He shivered when he became conscious. He was startled by the noise and by his semi-nakedness. He almost stood, and as he almost stood two URCU saw his lack of clothes. He was the one without the shirt. They pulled Rook up. They hit his legs and then his back with swinging blows. They put the handle of their batons in his ribs and pressed. They kicked him in the face and testicles, their boots scooping water from the ground and skidding on Rook’s skin. They were well trained. It was a rule that policemen who were obliged to assault a suspect on the street would not arrest the man, but leave him to be found by other officers. The two that roughed up Rook were wise enough to roll him on the ground and disappear.

Joseph, split in two, Rook’s wallet on his heart, found a car at last of which the window could be forced. It took him half a minute to get in. Another half to squeeze into the boot. He was appalled at being trapped like that, but hoped that he was safe. Indeed he was. No one was checking boots, while there were people still free in the marketplace. Joseph curled up in the darkness. Once he felt the car rock violently as someone outside was thrown against the frame. He heard one cry. But mostly he heard nothing, except the pulse inside his ears, his nervous breath. He did not hear, six cars away, the cough and splash as Rook rolled over for his last time, his dead face half-submerged on market cobblestones.

WHEN JOSEPH HEARD the ambulance siren, he re-emerged from the warren of the boot. He squeezed into the rear of the car, and peered out on semi-darkness. Dawn was a narrow silver bar across the windscreen. Already it had reached the edge of town and was advancing with the first trams along the boulevards. The upper storeys of Big Vic could not be seen. Low cloud enclosed them. New Year’s Day would be a rainy one.

The few officials and the policemen that remained in the Soap Market had their backs to Joseph. They did not see or hear him open the passenger door and step out onto cobblestones. A pulse of icy light was flung out by the ambulance like an irrigation sprinkler watering a field. Joseph ducked each time the beam swept by, as if he feared a drenching in the light. Joseph thanked St Joseph, the Patron of the Holy Corpse, the Undertaker of Our Lord, that he was well enough to leave the marketplace by foot and not by ambulance. He’d made it through to the new year without the beating he deserved. His only bruise was in the muscles of his shoulder, from throwing too much fruit.

There’d been a thousand injuries between the midnight and the dawn, though some of those had been administered at police HQ, in the privacy of cells. But there had only been one death. The corpse had not been found until the market site was cleared of drunks and revolutionaries. They might as well pump air into a brick as try the kiss of life. Rook would have blushed at being caught like this, flat on his back in water, naked from the waist up, his chest a splintered prow, his stomach just a touch too plump for one so slight and vain. The market boy had died the market death, his back on cobbles, green from Grief, discarded like a bruised courgette, and looking now as dull and common as the stones which were his mortuary. Here was a most unlikely Martyr for the Cause — though, as time would prove, his name was good for martyrdom. Not easy to forget. We all remember Rook.