Jim Crace - Arcadia

It was New Year’s Day and — not for the first time in his life — Victor was plagued by an anxiety which he could not name. Who’s dead? What’s dead? he asked himself. What could the fires and helicopters mean? He had a hollow in his chest that only getting out of bed could displace, that only going out into the town and seeing for himself could fill. He tried to conjure up his mother’s face, but failed. He saw his aunt. But more than Aunt he saw the market as it was when he was young and poor. He sat cross-legged upon the ground. A tray of eggs at his feet. There were no customers. It seemed that this imagined market was piled with produce — but, when he looked more closely, the sacks and bags, the spuds and watermelons, turned to corpses. There were a thousand bodies on the ground. The cobblestones were corpses too, as still and stiff as graveyard flesh, as implacable as eggs.

So it was, when Anna came on New Year’s Day to rehearse his duties for the week, Victor was prepared.

‘You’ve heard the news,’ she said. He shook his head. She showed the morning papers and the police reports. Joseph straddled the front page, ‘The Market Rioter’. And naturally there was an unnamed corpse. A man of middle age, stripped naked to the waist, softened, bruised and split like an old banana by the beating he’d received.

‘I had a dream like this,’ he said. ‘I dreamed this death.’

‘It’s not a dream,’ she said, unnerved that he should mention dreams. ‘It’s pandemonium downstairs. The phones are smoking — traders, press, the police, the architects, the building contractors. Arcadia will have to wait a day. I don’t think we can go in with clearance gangs until they’ve buried that poor man at least.’ She pointed at the sub-heading, ‘Man Dead in City Violence’.

‘Condolences are due, perhaps,’ he said, ‘if he has family. Please organize a cheque for me to sign.’

She made a note. ‘It’s all in hand,’ she said, ‘though there are problems to be solved.’

‘Please specify.’

‘Such as, the market stalls. They are all destroyed. What will the traders use tomorrow when the car-park site opens? The city must be fed.’

Victor did not seem alarmed. It was his view that merchants have to cope. They did not need their trestles to do trade. They were the sort who’d sell fruit off the floor or from their vans and be content so long as money bruised their thighs. He might have been alarmed, perhaps, if fire and riot had reduced Arcadia to rubble on the ground. Yet no damage to Arcadia was done, or could be done. Not for a while at least. The riot was benign as riots go. A riot on an empty building site could do no harm.

He shrugged at Anna, as if to say, Don’t worry me with trifles. But what he said was this: ‘It would be diplomatic, don’t you think, if I went down to show my face?’ The shrug was meant to hide his awkwardness.

‘Down where?’

‘To the Soap Market. Where else?’ And then, ‘I feel I ought to demonstrate concern. But privately, you see. No need for fuss. Or press. I simply want to satisfy myself, with my own eyes, that all is well.’

It was the early afternoon when Victor’s black Panache was backed up to the entrance to Big Vic. ‘The old man’s going out,’ the chauffeur had been told. He hardly had the time to air the car, to polish off the dust. Security held the rubber-neckers back as Victor came out of the lift, with Anna at his heels. Her new winter coat was black and long and astrakhan. His coat was alpine wool, and grey and fifteen years of age. They knew how cold it was on New Year’s Day, and how the wind could grip the knees and thighs, how rain could bounce off paving stones, how colds and rheumatism were unforbearing muggers on the street.

Anna had already lost the final kilo of the three she’d targeted, and so she felt the cold more keenly than before. She wore a business suit beneath the astrakhan, the same creamy colour but a more expensive cut than Joseph’s On the Town . It did not tug across the chest or pinch the waist. Her hair was short and razored still, though her hairdresser had added ‘just a little fire’ by lightening her quiff. She was not the jolly Anna any more, and glad of that. Jolliness is a despairing refuge for women of her age. It tries to take the place of youth and looks, and is not dignified. Anna was now as solemn and as trim as the clothes she wore. She’d had enough of men, and she had vowed, for this New Year, to do without their oily approbation. She would not seek their sexual patronage. She would not be their carrion. Let them fear her for a change. She held the keys to Victor now — and anyone who sought the chance of sitting at his desk, enveloped by his cheesy old-man’s breath, must knock upon her door.

The doormen did not wince a smile at her as they’d once done, as she followed Victor onto the rainy mall. They almost called her Sir, she was so manly in her self-regard. And she herself no longer had the need to smile from 9.00 to 5.00, or be polite, or defer to the men in suits and uniforms. Promotion had redeemed her from the curse of growing old. She had an office of her own, an office staff, the power of command. She’d use that power to the full. She’d not be loose at work like Rook had been, his feet and cake crumbs on his desk. She’d not emulate his lack of gravitas, his office improprieties, his open door. She’d not be Rook, or Mrs Rook. She would, though, welcome just one chance to see the man again, to let him know how disengaged she had become from him. To let him see — and rue — her power and her sleekness and her pride. She’d have him on his knees. He’d be like Victor, like a child.

The old man now was in the car. His door was closed. His face was purposeless and spoiled. He needed her like no man ever had, that is to say he had no need for love or touch. Where should she sit? Beside the chauffeur? With the boss? The doormen knew the protocol. They opened up the front and near-side door so that she could sit in the servant’s seat, where Rook had sat on those rare occasions when he’d shared a car with Victor. But Anna walked round to the driving side, emboldened by her freshly minted resolution for New Year. The chauffeur was too slow to open up the far rear door. She opened it herself and sat down on the same bench seat as Victor, one upholstered metre between their hips. He would not try to hold her hand. He would not try to touch her knees, or even look at them, despite their newly nobled shape, now that they sat as colleagues side by side. She tapped the glass behind the chauffeur’s cap and they set off into the city. When they cleared the mall she spoke for Victor into the intercom. ‘We’re going to the Soap Market,’ she said. ‘We’ll need an umbrella when we’re there.’ Then no one spoke. The chauffeur hid behind his cap, disturbed by the breach of protocol which placed a woman at the boss’s side. The old man closed his eyes and mouth, in disapproval, surely. The chauffeur could not see him breathe or move.

Anna, sitting with her fingers laced across her lap, sucked on a granny mint to make her breath and stomach sweet and anodyne. What would she do if she saw Rook where Rook was bound to be, amongst the soapies in the marketplace? She let herself imagine he was standing there, among the idlers on the cobblestones, with nothing else to do but watch the limousine, with Victor getting out, and Anna hovering behind. She’d look him in the eye if he was there, if she had pluck enough to lift her head and face the crowd. She’d have no need or time to smile. It was too windy and too wet to smile. She closed her eyes and mouth to match the old man at her side. The windscreen wipers sounded like an oxygen machine, pumping air into their lungs. If it stops raining we will die, she thought. Her heartbeat matched the wipers. It pulsed beneath the astrakhan. The black and courtly limousine advanced through the rain. There was no haste. They were like mourners in a hearse, composed, embarrassed, fearful for themselves, grey-eyed, but from weariness not grief.