Jim Crace - Arcadia

When Victor’s chauffeur took the car through the Woodgate district to the edge of what had been the Soap Market, all appeared quite well. Much of the debris had been removed, and nearly all the cars that had been parked were claimed and driven off. Already work had begun on the wooden palisade that would enclose the empty oval while Arcadia was being built, and city labourers were taking down the hazardous charred remains of bars and trees. For the first time for six hundred years the fountains and the gargoyles of the ancient washing place were unattended. They were as disused by the city now as pyramids. Soon the trenchers and the labourers would come to harvest cobblestones and box them up like sugar beets for their deployment in Arcadia.

The police had cleared the site of everyone but the workmen and themselves. Detectives had set up a caravan at the market edge to interview those witnesses who volunteered to speak. They looked through the rubbish for evidence of organized disruption and put the charred and broken bottle-bombs in plastic bags together with examples of the fruit and cobblestones that had been thrown. They interviewed the last few young men who came to claim their cars. A fixed-frame canvas shed had been erected above the spot where Rook had died, but no one stood on guard. Inside, placed on the cobblestones, were six or seven lighted candles and a spray of greenhouse blooms, making the inside of the shed a warm and makeshift corpseless shrine. Who’d put the candles there no one was sure. But they’d been left to burn themselves into the ground. Two uniformed policemen controlled all access to the market site. They hesitated when they saw the black Panache, but were persuaded by the chauffeur’s cap and the imperious flashing of the limousine’s front lamps to lift the makeshift barrier. Victor and Anna were driven a further twenty metres. Then they stopped. The chauffeur’s umbrella matched the car and Anna’s coat. Now Victor and his female aide were thigh to thigh beneath the chauffeur’s outstretched arm. She took her boss’s elbow to help him walk. He was no longer used to cobblestones or hazards such as broken glass, wet leaf mush, splintered wood. She let him lead the way, but he was lost. There were no markers in this empty space for him to recognize. Where had the women sat with their shallots? Where had he stood with eggs? Where was the thoroughfare of stalls which seemed, by day, as ancient and as permanent as a Roman road? Who’d start a fire, who’d die, to save a place so empty and so dull?

Victor was not the sort to share his memories. He seemed just like the old, rich man he was — too grand to feel the rain. So this was his diplomacy, to shuffle on the cobbles for a while, and not share what he felt with those two aides who kept him dry and upright. They walked, this threesome, to the public washing square. The trees and shrubbery which had been there were reduced to blackened stumps. The lawns were stubble, stiff and dead and black. But fire could not harm stone or water, and the medieval fountains, with their gargoyles and their pitted scrubbing stones, were just as they had been the week before, the century before. The fountain water, augmented by rain, was like all mountain streams, like every brackish spring, indifferent to every living thing on earth.

They watched the water for a while and then turned back towards the car, but took a slightly different route, enticed by what might be beneath the canvas of the blinking, well-lit shed.

‘That man died here last night, I guess,’ said Anna. ‘They’ve made a shrine for him.’ She knelt and rearranged the flowers so that they made a neater shape between the candles. ‘It’s sad.’

The two men did not speak, so Anna rose and spoke for them. ‘He’s someone’s husband or son or dad. Or else he’s one of those no-hopers who sleep out here. Perhaps they’ll never find out who he was. They’ll put The Unknown Soapie on his grave.’

‘My father’s buried over there,’ the chauffeur said. ‘In the Woodgate cemetery. My mother, too. We used to live round here. I’ve soapie blood …’

They stood like tourists in a foreign church, familiar with the funereal intimacy of candlelight, but ill at ease with dispositions they’d not met before: the flapping walls; the cobblestones; the rhythmic catechism of the rain on canvas. The weather worsened. They could hear it growing sullen. The candle flames curtseyed in the damp, cold air which pierced the fabric chapel. Water made its way between the cobblestones and crept inside to puddle beneath their feet. They might have been upon some Afghan plain, three hundred years ago, pinned in by space and sky and frost. The office blocks and tenements which circled them, though distantly, invisibly, were ancient cliffs, shrinking in the cold and wind and rain.

‘I’ll bring the car,’ the chauffeur said, glad to leave the candlelight. ‘It’s raining pips and pods.’

‘Exactly,’ Victor said to Anna after they had stood still and silent for longer than made sense. ‘It’s pips and pods. Just listen to the rain. I never hear the rain inside Big Vic. It’s pips and pods. She used to use that phrase. You can hear exactly what she meant.’

‘Who meant?’

Victor did not dare reply. He did not wish to make himself seem foolish as the chauffeur had, weak with sentiment. He crouched as best he could to look into the candle flames.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘we’ll take a lighted candle with us when we leave. The fellow who died here won’t mind.’ He broke the waxy seal which fixed a candle to its cobblestone. ‘A country ritual, that’s all. You take a lighted candle from the old place to the new. That way you keep the goodwill of the past.’

‘I’ll carry it.’ Anna held her fingers out. Just as she’d thought, the boss was like a child.

‘No, no.’

‘What “new place” will you take it to? Arcadia? That candle isn’t long enough to burn for two years.’

‘We’ll take it to the car-park site. It’s just a symbol.’

Anna’s nod displayed her patience and obedience, but not a sign of understanding.

‘It’s true you don’t grow rich on sentiment — not in the market trade,’ said Victor. ‘Hard work is what it takes, and common sense. But ritual has its part to play. We should not underestimate …’ He did not finish what he had to say. He was an undramatic man.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘You carry it.’ He held the candle up for Anna to hold. ‘Take care the wind and rain don’t put it out. A rain-soaked wick is bad luck for a hundred years.’

WHO PHONED the Burgher? I can’t be sure. I did not take the call. The chauffeur, maybe. Anna? No. The policeman who controlled the barrier and let the Panache pass into the squints and alleys of the old town? A worker at the car-park site? Some restless, spying spirit of the town? There’s always someone in a city with a tale to tell, and there are always Burghers to dress it up and publish it. Prompted by the memo on my desk from this unnamed source, I wrote a paragraph for the Burgher column. They ran it on the morning after Victor’s market pilgrimage on the usual inside page of the edition which had pictures of both Rook and Joseph on the front. The headline was ‘Soapie Rioter Charged with Murder’. Rook was described as being ‘an executive assistant in the produce-market industry, until his recent redundancy’.

By nine o’clock on the morning of January 2nd, when Anna walked down the mall and entered Big Vic, Rook’s name was known throughout the town. Office workers in the atrium pored over copies of our newspaper, regretting, relishing the fate of one so popular as Rook.

Anna sat before her untouched desk. She breathed as evenly as her tightened ribcage would allow. Could she now make more sense or less of what had happened in the canvas shed, of the strange journey in the car protecting that small flame as they sped through the town? The day before, the words she’d used had seemed too strong. ‘It’s sad,’ she’d said. But now ‘It’s sad’ took on a fugal note. She could not find the words to go beyond ‘It’s sad’. She could not comprehend the burden of the news expressed so solidly in print.