Jim Crace - Arcadia

I’M IN THE MOOD to take my time. I walk across the last few patterned slabs and cobblestones of Arcadia and head off into town. The Woodgate pavements are old and cracked and buckled. They are ideal for puddles, weeds, and saunterers. I peer down squints and alleyways. They seem more festive than they used to. Perhaps the presence of Arcadia has enlivened them. They are not back streets now, but brisk with bars and antiques shops, and second-storey studios.

You cannot park. The wardens and the police make sure of that. How can they stop the soapies, though? At first it was just one or two — disgruntled fruiterers who’d been displaced from Fat Vic’s corridors. They had to work and feed their families, and so they set up shop in backs of vans and parked across the kerbstones in dead-ends, blind alleys, culs-de-sac, providing low-grade, cheaper fruit for those in too much hurry for Arcadia. Quite soon there were a bunch of makeshift stalls, some coloured awnings set up at the backs of vans, some trays of produce set out on the pavement. You’ve never seen such rugged mushrooms, such unselected fruit, such tattered sugar-snaps, such unwaxed oranges, such blemished pears, such unwrapped chard — poor man’s asparagus — and mulberries and radicchio still moist with country rain, already past their best, so cheap.

Quite soon, of course, the displaced market had a name — Soap Two, just like a film. You think its characters are dead, and then the sequel comes along, as lively as the first. So now we see that it’s not true that ‘cities swallow up the small’, that ‘soufflés only rise the once’. The pygmies flourish on the street. I used to think that buildings were all that could endure in cities. But people, it would seem, endure as well. They hang on by their nails. They improvise. They kick. They leave a legacy which is not brick or stone.

The first to come and trade are well established now. They have their clientele, their daily pitches, their regimens. Some clever spark has improvised some light for dawn, and after dusk. Soap Two trades into the night when Arcadia is shut and under guard. The soapie trading light is pilfered from the streetlamps, by an illegal wire connected and undone a dozen times a day as uniforms approach. Who’ll get the bill? Who cares! Not Cellophane. He does not give a damn. He is untouched by bills. He’s shielded by the corset of his cellophane. He waltzes, as sheenily as a stage sardine, through the market all day and all night long. Sometimes he takes it on himself to direct the traffic as it squeezes past the stalls. Sometimes he lies down in the street to block the passing cars. He begs. He steals. He shouts obscenities. I’ve never heard such words before. He kicks the windfalls from the trading stalls. He’s always at the market’s edge, a cellophane commissionaire. As Soap Two expands then so he moves out from the core, to summon people in. It does not matter what their business is, or if they have no cause at all to pack into the streets. He simply hopes to share — and complicate — the ecstasy of crowds.

Now the Woodgate district, once so lifeless and depressed, is as noisy and congested, lively and unsafe, as the Soap Market used to be. Merchandise is stacked in piles which challenge sense and physics — towers of potatoes, conifers of oranges, trembling with every passerby. The makeshift market flourishes on noise and filth and rain. It would even flourish — and it does — on poverty. ‘All Life is Here’, according to the market chauvinists, a claim no one would make for Arcadia, with its policed doors, its creed of Safety from the Streets, its ban on pimps and tramps and tarts and bag-ladies, street vendors, rascals, teenagers, drunkards, dogs. All life is here, despite the wind, the rain, the airborne dust, the litter at my feet.

The New Age meal I ate at the Buffers’ lunch has left me hungry still. I buy one sleepy pear. Its skin is bruised and weather-beaten like a ploughman’s face. The trader comes down from his perch on the bonnet of his car. He leaves a conversation with a friend, and his meal half-eaten on the metal, his teeth-marks in the boiled egg; the ripped white loaf, the plastic flask of over-sweetened coffee. He wipes my one pear on his trouser leg to take away the marks of harvesting. He pirouettes it in a paper bag. He twists the paper bag a pair of ears. He takes my cash. I take the fruit. I’m free to eat it when I want. I eat it now. My chin is wet. I cannot walk and eat efficiently. I stand back from the crowd, against a wall between a bistro and an odd-job shop to watch the man in cellophane cause mayhem with the cars. I cannot say where I prefer to eat, Soap Two, Fat Vic. The prospect of them both seduces me. I’m free while there is sap inside my legs to make my choice. I am not Invulnerable. Thank God for that. I am not Victor and too old and dry to be at ease down here. He’ll have a book (perhaps) to celebrate his life. Arcadia. A statue, too. But all his pears, I guess, are brought by train and taxi to Big Vic. He takes life on a plate. He has a serviette. He cannot simply — as I do now — toss the sodden paper bag which held the pear to the ground and find a warming corner for himself.

There is a little sun which falls directly on my face, my shirt, the damaged pear. I eat it now. I eat it now. The eye, the core, the stalk are given to the pavement, and flattened by ten thousand feet, as everyone is flattened by the town when they are done, when they are waste.

The sun is fully out for just an instant. It is radiant, then it is gone. The blocking bollard which has kept the weather dry has moved before the wind. The time has come for it to rain. It’s hard and sudden as it always is in our city. It drizzles in the countryside but here the rain is bouncing berries on the roofs of cars. The squints and alleys cannot cope with this. They flood. They overflow. Their drains are blocked with cabbage leaves, handbills, discarded pith and peel. The pavements turn to green and slimy rinks of foliage. To walk on them is to gamble with your bones. What should we do but huddle underneath the awnings that are there, but gather in the doorways to the shops, or sit in cars, or seek refuge — and a drink — inside a bar?

I cannot quite escape the rain, despite the umbrella which my neighbour holds. My suit is sodden at the shoulder. My socks and shoes are wet. My forehead sweats with rain. The entertainment never ends. The weather is a ballet for the streets. But then there is a more substantial dancer too. Cellophane is kicking water in the air. He thinks we’re going to throw him coins for the show. He bows. And as he bows the rainbow arches up, connecting the old town and the new. It is a bridge beyond the wit of architects reflected in the glass of Big Vic and Arcadia. The rainbow relishes windows. There is no need to draw conclusions, though. We all know rainbows start and finish everywhere, that they are simply sun, shining from behind to trick the light from falling rain, if we look east in the middle afternoon towards the dealing shower of the day. They are not omens — but they are signs that it is safe to walk onto the streets again. The rain has almost done.

My face and eyes are wet. I have to frown and squint for focus as I pass between the glare and darkness, as I cross streets and circumscribe the puddles, as I avoid collisions with people and with cars. So many people with so many purposes. Too many people to know well.

I would not wish to be too grand for streets. To be removed from them is to lose the blessing of the multitude. The tallest buildings throw the longest shadows, it is said, by those who spend their lives in contemplation of their monuments, and those for whom the shadow life is better than the real. But most of us who live in cities die and take our shadows to the grave. We don’t outlive the masonry or glass. It’s said that great men have the grandest tombstones, too, and throw the longest shadows even after death. The cemeteries prove the truth in that. But I prefer to think that worms and damp and degradation are open-minded democrats which treat us all the same. We are all citizens at last. At least until we are all soil.