Arcadia (17 page)

The Princesses were wrong.
Hilarity
was not the word, though laughter was a part of sexual pleasure.
Euphoria
was what she felt. When she and Dip were making, staging love, it
seemed the real world could be kept at bay. She could have kept the world at bay all day! What was the hurry? What was the point in hurtling, like men, through such sustainable pleasures to the
brief and unreliable moment when the bubble shudders, bursts? She could not understand how Dip, at breakfast time, was so easily, so speedily, so undramatically relieved. That was his word,
‘Relief’ – ‘Give me relief,’ he said. For Aunt not-making-love was not the absence of relief, but a muting of that part of her which found its best expression in the
gift of love.

They’d put ‘the kid’ to sleep when they’d first met and kissed. Of course, tired and dispirited though he was, he did not sleep for ever. For Aunt and Dip to live the
life they chose, to play such parts each afternoon, to spend those hours drinking glee, they needed privacy, the privacy of two, not three, bananas to the bunch. A child of Victor’s age was
old enough to inhibit anything beyond a kiss. Both Aunt and Dip had understood, the day they met, that if their passion for each other was to boil and whistle like a kettle and not steam and simmer
like the water in an open pot, they would require time to themselves.

‘We’ll put the boy to work,’ Dip said, when he had suffered inhibitions for long enough. ‘He’s missing his mum and this’ll give him something else to
do.’

What kind of work? Aunt raised an eyebrow almost to her cloche’s brim.

‘The boy can hardly walk,’ she said. ‘And I won’t have him begging on his own. Besides, he’s just a baby, though he’s big. He’s hardly weaned …
He isn’t bright enough. He isn’t tough …’

‘I’ll fix him up,’ said Dip. ‘The streets are full of kids like him, and doing very nicely, too.’

‘But doing what?’

Dip hadn’t thought it out, but now he had to find a scheme and find it quickly, too, before he lost his patience with the boy and showed it with his fists. He settled for the first idea
that came. The boy could build a future out of eggs.

‘What eggs?’ Aunt asked.

‘The eggs you steal from out the back of that big storehouse.’

‘Then what? You think he’ll build a nest and hatch them out?’

‘We’ll boil them up, what else?’

‘What else? It’s juggling that you have in mind, I guess. Or sulphur bombs.’

‘We’ll boil them up. Get the kid a little bag or tray, some twists of salt. He’ll have a business on his hands! When I was little, that was lunch at harvest time, or if we had
to travel anywhere outside the village. One boiled egg. The only salt we had was sweat. My grandma used to tell our fortunes from the broken shell. The shell could show how long you’d live.
Perhaps the kid can trade in fortunes, too.’

‘He’s hardly seven years of age.’

‘Seven’s an old man in this town.’

So it was that Victor first became a marketeer, a soapie at the age of seven. Aunt was his wholesaler. She crept into the storehouse from which she’d stolen – but more modestly
– a dozen times before. It was late at night, after the fresh eggs had been brought from the railway station, sorted, placed in straw-lined trays. She lined a muslin bag with paper, lifted
the one loose wallboard which provided access from the city lane at the rear of the building, and crept into the midnight room.

On that first night she was afraid. She’d stolen eggs before, but only one or two. A watchman, catching her, would not call on the police or his employer for what it took a hen a day to
make. He’d settle for the lecture he could give or, at worst, demand some other recompense.

But on that night she wanted fifty eggs at least, more hen’s work than could be shrugged off as ‘breakages’. If she was caught and put away then Victor would be orphaned once
again. She did not trust her Dip – left as a sentry in the street with Victor sleeping on his shoulder and her hat in hand – to give the boy a home or love. She’d never seen them
touch affectionately. Dip was the sort who having never been a cared-for child himself thought touch and tenderness were simply trinkets with which men could flatter, soften, win their women. But
Aunt – persuaded now against all reason that Victor would be
happier
left on his own, the boiled-egg salesman of the marketplace – had made herself the promise that he would
‘always have a beam above his head at night’. If she could guarantee that he was safe and warm at night, then she could put him out of mind by day.

She was the cheerful type. What was the point in brewing guilt? Who’d benefit if she and Victor caressed and hugged all day, and let their empty stomachs shrink and pucker in the cold? It
seemed to her, as she gained entry to the storeroom, that stealing eggs for Victor was the greatest gift that she could give because these eggs would free Em’s son from her, and leave her
free of him.

That night the storeroom was not entirely dark. A late winter moon turned the skylight windowpanes a liquid silver and made the room look colder than it was, as if the ceiling had been tiled in
translucent squares of ice. What light there was picked out the thousand brittle, bony skulls of eggs. The shells absorbed the light, reflecting none onto their bedding straw, like button mushrooms
butting into oxygen from earth.

Aunt walked as gently as fear allows between the egg trays and the light. The odour was strong, and reminiscent too. The chicken dung, the straw, the timber of the room, the salt-and-semen smell
of white and yolk, the moonlight dressing, was farmyard simplified, was field. Aunt took just five eggs from each tray and – counting in a whisper as she worked – filled her bag with
sixty eggs. They were the size and weight of perfect plums. The only sounds she heard were Dip whistling in the lane outside – his warning that there were passers-by – and, far away,
the midnight alarums of the drunks and revellers amongst the final trams and scuffles of the night. There were no rats to alarm her. The watchman slept on undisturbed. But still she was afraid. The
eggs were ghosts. They looked like souls or sins encased in sculpted skin. To steal these icy eggs at night made Aunt feel like a grave-robber. Each one was someone dead and someone loved. Which
were her parents? Which were the villagers who’d been alive when Aunt was born? Which one was Em?

She could not move. Dip whistled without cease, suspiciously and tunelessly. Perhaps there were policemen on the street – then whistling would only bring ill-luck to Dip. But if he
stopped?

Aunt crouched beside her bag of eggs. A moth flew up from God-knows-where. A bat-moth, black, grey, and red. It landed on the back of Aunt’s right hand. It closed its wings and rested on
her warmth. No great weight, no manacle, could have rendered Aunt more still or breathless than that one moth. Then Victor woke. She heard Dip curse, then whistle once again – a slower,
sleepy version of the dance he’d been attempting before. But Victor would not settle to this bogus lullaby. His thin crow voice was raised in protest at the pressure of Dip’s hold, the
darkness of the lane, his orphanage. ‘Shut up,’ Dip said. But Victor knew the power of his lungs and screamed. Nothing would make him happy now. He was alone, at midnight, in the city.
Tomorrow he would earn his living – a marketeer at last. But for the moment, but for ever, Em was dead, the eggs were stolen, packed, and Aunt was crouching in that brittle-mushroom field,
transfixed. She was not certain what had pinned her there – the screaming or the whistling or the moth. She only knew what everybody knew who’d come from village into town, that
midnight is a lonely and ungenerous time when streetlamps blanket out the stars.

She held the bat-moth by the wings and put it on the eggs. She had to take the chance of climbing back into the town. Victor’s screaming, Dip’s slow dance, were loud and strange
enough to bring the army out. She lifted the loose wallboard and looked outside. It seemed safe enough. She clambered through the gap and reached back into the storeroom for the bag of eggs, and
then replaced the board to disguise her entry. Dip had seen her now, and stopped whistling. Victor screamed. Despite the hour the lane was busy. Men, mostly alone, were making for a brothel-bar
where drinks and women could be bought until dawn. They passed between the distraught child and the woman thief without a comment or a glance. Crime and distress were the common starlings of the
street. They could not give a damn.

A
COUNTRY CHILD
of six or seven might work all day at harvest time. Hard work, too; helping with the stacks, or pulling roots, or climbing to the
furthest branches for the remotest plums. At dawn it very often was the child who was sent out to slop the pigs or strip the maize for chicken feed. The youngest daughter had the milking stool. The
smallest son was sent at dusk to gate the herd or flock, and if he came home empty-handed – that’s to say, he’d found no firewood, mushrooms, nuts – then very often supper
was withheld. ‘Empty hands, empty stomach,’ was the village phrase. At lambing or when the fruit was in its fullest blush, some girl or boy would have to keep the foxes or the applejays
at bay. All it took would be a fire, a scare-drum, or a horn. A single child in every orchard or each field throughout the day or night would do the job at no expense, so long as they were vigilant
and did not sleep. Nobody said, That kid’s misused. How could you leave a child so young, alone, for such a time, with so much danger all around? Rather, their childhood seemed ennobled by
the tasks they had. Work made them independent, healthy, spirited. Why, then, the fuss when city children worked? Compared to country kids the poorest city children – homeless, reckless on
the streets – had an easy time of it. At least they pleased themselves. If they were bored with holding carriage horses for small change, or selling matches, papers, sex, then they could take
the time to share a cigarette with friends or join the shoal of sprat-sized thieves and beggars in the Soap Garden. They could vie with pigeons for rinds of bread, or glean the market for discarded
fruit, or splash around in the motherly and greying laundry water of the public washing fountain.

Philanthropists, of course, would do their best to net the shoal, to place the best and brightest of the girls in houses where they’d be taught to iron and make the beds. They’d do
their best to separate the boys from their bad ways, their friends, their cigarettes, their threadbare clothes, by indenturing them to coachbuilders, factory men, or anybody wanting hard work for
no pay. They thought a hostel was a better place for orphans than the street, yet could not answer why it was that once their orphans had a bed, a schedule for their prayers, once they had work and
food, a change of clothes, they still broke loose to join the starlings again.

The answer’s tough and simple. It is this: that routes to misery and hell are often much more fun, more challenging than routes to virtue and well-being. Why else, how else, would children
such as those who thronged the Soap Garden and the Market, then and now, embrace the destitution of the city streets with such audacity and such appetite? We should not grieve too much for little
Victor, then. Not yet, at least. The market was a warm and busy place, more cheerful than a four-walled room, more sociable, more nourishing than the four dry, sweet breasts that had sustained him
till the fire. He was bereaved, twice over. He was not strong. Or wise. But he was young enough to mistake mischance for the natural order of his life.

He sat, contented, resigned, before his tray of eggs, exactly in the place – where else? – where he had sat and suckled for so long with Em. His back was set against his
mother’s tree. It was a home of sorts. And though his face was not well known (how could it be, pressed up against his mother’s flesh and shrouded, swaddled from the light?), he knew
enough about the tricks of trade to turn his thin mouth up and advertise his wares with what appeared as undesigning smiles. Indeed he was amused. What boy, a few weeks short of seven years of age,
would not delight in sixty eggs of which he had sole charge?

Aunt and Dip were his first customers, pretending to be casual passers-by. They dropped their coins in his hand and made the most of choosing a well-boiled egg. They smelled the shells. They
tapped the shells and held the oval echo to their ears. They ate their eggs exactly where they stood, stooping down theatrically to help themselves to salt.

‘Sweet God, these eggs are good,’ they said, to anyone who caught their eye. ‘Go on. Buy one. This kid has got the cheapest breakfast place in town.’

Victor was glad to see the back of them. It left him free to turn their coins in his hand, to wet his finger for a plunge of salt, to stare into the ranks of eggs, to study all the cracks and
stains that came from boiling them, to wait in vain for someone else to stoop and buy.

It was not until he left this home of sorts to wander on his weakly and untutored legs amongst the cafe tables and the market panniers that he began to sell. He did not even have to smile. He
did not have to cry his wares. ‘Boiled eggs! Boiled eggs!’ was a less eloquent sales pitch than the silent, hardened eggs themselves. Besides, this was a marketplace. No need to state
your business here. Display was all it took to do the trick. By late lunchtime, on that first trading day, the fifty-eight remaining eggs had been reduced to three. The salt was gone.
Victor’s pockets hung like udders with the weight of cash. It was not much in value but volume matters more to kids than value. They much prefer the playfulness of coins to any paper
note.

Victor ate the last three eggs himself. He was not skilled at taking off the shells, and had to spit the bony flakes onto the cobbles and flagstones of the Soap Market. He turned to make his way
back to the garden, to wash his mouth out in the fountain water. But first he was seduced by the clanking, twig-thin man who sold fruit juices out of spouted cans and called out what was seasonal:
‘Berries, honey gourds, oranges. Fresh juice. Fresh juice.’ Victor pointed at a spouted can. He could not tell what juice it held. The hawker rinsed a glass with water from a skin. He
shook the glass dry and clean. With practised shrugs he tilted the can and filled the glass with bluish berry juice. He took a coin out of Victor’s hand. Victor stood, struck motionless. He
was rejoicing in the simple algebra of buy-and-sell which had so quickly and so effortlessly transformed his boiled eggs into juice.