Jim Crace - Arcadia

What chance had he? He was the one in the photographs, assaulting policemen with vegetables and fruit. Just the sort to pick on someone middle-class, respectable, like Rook. Perhaps at first he only sought to steal a jacket for disguise, but then — ever the feckless, opportunist thief, so everybody from his village claimed — he’d seen the wallet and he’d killed for it. The prosecution case was clear. Here were two men who’d seen it all. Here was the stolen jacket and the shirt, in halves, on Joseph’s back. Here was a ‘nife’. Here were the black field boots with which he’d bludgeoned Rook. The muddy imprint from them marked the victim’s face. Here was the accused man, fresh from the murder, in Rook’s home, a fortune in his hands. And his defence? Joseph only had deranged and farfetched explanations — the mugging in the underpass, the severed notes, the lighting of the fire — to show why he and Rook weren’t foes, but partners.

VICTOR, AS USUAL, had not gone early to his bed on New Year’s Eve. His night-time wanderings from room to room in Big Vic had distorted fitfully the perfect conifer of lights. Just short of midnight he had gone out on the roof to clear his lungs by jettisoning and melting phlegm in the potting compost of his plants. The country people always cleared their lungs on New Year’s eve: ‘Spit out bad debts,’ they used to say if they were merchants, or ‘Last year’s spit for next year’s spring,’ if they were working on the land. The merchants spat like pellet guns; the farmers dropped their phlegm onto the soil like bakers adding egg to cake.

Victor was not obliged to spit alone on New Year’s Eve. He could have chosen company. There’d been the usual annual invitation to be the mayor’s guest at the businessmen’s banquet. But Anna had sent off Victor’s annual regrets and his donation to the Widows’ Fund. He said he was too old to celebrate the passage of another year.

‘You’re there in spirit,’ Anna said, flourishing the widows’ cheque for him to sign.

Yet being on his own as all the city clocks struck twelve was not entirely to Victor’s taste. He had been tempted to suggest that Anna ought to stop behind and join him for a drink — but why embarrass her. She was not family. Her duties ended at the office door.

On the twelfth stroke he’d almost gone down in his lift to shake the hands of those tall men in uniform who kept Big Vic secure right round the clock. He need not hold a conversation with these men, a modest gratuity would satisfy. For once, he felt regret that Rook had gone. The man was neither honest nor efficient, it was true, but he was more like family. A flippant nephew, say, determined to amuse. And he was skilled — Victor acknowledged this — at catering for veterans. That birthday meal that Rook had organized had been the highlight of the year, just like the village parties he had known and never known. He hummed the march from La Regina which Band Accord had played that early summer’s day upon the roof. The coming year would make him eighty-two. Would he be there to celebrate?

The midnight roof was cold. But then old men are always cold, like fish. It’s heat they cannot bear, and noise, and sudden movements close at hand. He shivered but was glad to be outside — almost the only ‘outside’ in his life, these days — liberated from the humming equanimity of air-conditioners. The wind snatched at his spit and tugged his dressing-gown. He hurried through the darkness to the greenhouse door and found the switch to light two meanly powered orange bulbs, the ‘forcing lamps’ of market gardeners. The orange light expelled the night. The glass leaked wind. It moaned and chattered in its frame. Two liquid-gas heaters kept the winter greenhouse warm. They kept his specimens alive and made the winter temperate for succulents, for palms, for greenfly and for bugs.

He found low staging for a stool. He found the brandy bottle, amongst the liquid feeds and aphid sprays. He spat again. He spat for spring. And then he filled his mouth with brandy from the bottle. Its fierceness numbed his mouth. He drank more manically, determined to gulp down the medicine, the sleeping draught. He held the bottle up against the light. It looked like melted beeswax. He took his medicine until the brandy was lower than the bottle’s label. Enough to make him moan and chatter to himself in unison with window frames. Victor was neither hot nor cold. He was the temperature of plants. He pressed his nose upon the glass, staring out at first towards the outskirts and the hills. There were no stars, just damp and glass and greenhouse algae acting as a screen against the night. He heard the fire sirens at his back. He turned to see the flames, the incandescent trees, the unprecedented sight of car lights on the market cobblestones. At first he could not place the flames. He could not place them geographically or in time. The oblongs of greenhouse glass made the distance two-dimensional. It was a film, a flaring, fading early colour film, the print besmirched by water, algae, fumes. Here was a scene brought on by sleeplessness and drink. Here was a scene that was familiar. He dared not blink. He had to concentrate to bring the memory back. The flames were old and watery. But, at his bidding, people had appeared, and sound. There was an old straw hat. The smell of bread and urine. The disconcerted snufflings of sleepers on bare boards. The sirens were his mother’s screams, the screams of Princesses on fire, of people separated from their homes, the screams of rain-soaked timbers made dry and hot too swiftly by the fire.

He drank more brandy, finished what was left. He stood and looked more closely at the market flames. He wiped the glass clean with his dressing-gown. The film was three-dimensional at last. The flames waved and beckoned to him — the ancient and dramatic call to warmth that is so eloquent at night. The fires seemed close when viewed through dewy glass, so close, he thought, that they could have been candles mounted on the roof-top parapet. Victor blinked the candles into distant fire. He sent them off. He brought them close again. Now he saw his mother in the glass, packing her possessions in a canvas bag and strapping her only child across her chest with a shawl. She threw some grains of maize across the doorstep of their country home. She lit a single candle and left it — for too short a time — standing at the centre of their wooden table. She closed the door.

When Victor focused once again, his mother’s table was alight. The door was orange flame. She could not keep the fire away. She could not stop the timbers cracking. She called for Victor. He was gone. She went down on her hands and knees. She could not breathe. She curled up in the smoke and flame. She did not know if he was safe or dead. They’d find her well-cooked body in the morning, the rain its undertaker. They’d find a blanket for her, a morgue, a box. They’d give her earthen eyelids in the common grave. Victor blinked the fire back into candle. He blinked up tears, but then old men are used to having water in their eyes without good cause. It’s part of growing old. Besides, the heating of the greenhouse let out fumes, and fumes are just as sure as sentiment to make men weep.

By now the helicopters were aloft. Their searchlights left Victor in no doubt — once he had wiped the past away and focused on the night — that there was trouble in the Soap Market. The helicopters sobered him. They were a match for brandy and self-pity and for the apprehension that he felt. He left the orange bulbs to burn. He chanced the rooftop wind and made his way to bed. For once he slept quite readily. He did not dream or need to wake to urinate. When dawn came, his body on the mattress formed an arthritic question mark, his right ear on the pillow, his torso curved, his knees and legs brought up for comfort. His question was — Why do I feel so scorched and dry?