Arcadia (18 page)

The street kids did their best, with threats and brittle charm, to make Victor one of them. They had their gangs. The Moths. The Dross. The Market Boys. The Fly-by-Nights. If Victor meant to
limp with his burden of eggs between the market pitches or sell them to the cafe customers in the Soap Garden, then he at least should make his peace with those tough boys and girls who were the
gangland chieftains or their generals. They seemed so competent at everything from marbles to manslaughter that, surely, they were the natural allies of any child out on the streets alone. But
Victor had been buried for too long. He did not understand the courtesies of life amongst the pack. He did not wish to speak with his contemporaries, or take on board relationships which were not
trading ones, which were not serious, which did not earn. These were the sort of boys who made their cash like tough old men, and blued it all on sweets, and toys, and cigarettes, not eggs. Victor
thought these urchins far too trivial.

At first these gangsters – that’s the word – just circled him and nudged as if he were a goldfish in a tank of orfe. They helped themselves to eggs and pelted him with what
they couldn’t eat. They kicked his shins. They found a name for him. They taunted him with ‘Vic the Prick’, or called him Goose because he walked unsteadily, and had a lot of
eggs. They said he had to join the gang, or pay, or leave the marketplace, or else. Or else? They pressed their fists into his face. They burned his wrist with Chinese twists. They knocked his tray
so that his eggs cracked on the cobblestones. They meant to illustrate what else might happen to a boy, alone, who did not court the approbation of the gang.

Victor did not understand what blows or twisted arms or threats with fists and knives were meant to signify. Their language was not his. What did their violence mean? He only understood that
there was chaos on the streets more urgent than the protocol of gangs. Each day had its uncertainties: that it might rain. That nobody would want to dine on eggs that day. That there might be some
pointless kindness from a marketeer who’d give away a damaged pear, or pay for eggs with too much cash and not require the change. That there’d be holidays when no one came – the
market would be closed, the cafes shuttered, the cobbles and the sky laid close and listless, like sheet and mattress on an empty bed. He took it all. His job was selling on the streets. The eggs
passed through his hands like worry beads. No Chinese burn, no punch, could deflect his armoured single-mindedness. He did not understand the power of cash yet. He was content that when he went
back to Dip’s room at night his pockets were turned out and all the change removed as ‘payment for tomorrow’s eggs’. He had to learn a stranger and a tougher algebra of
trade than the one which fed him berry juice – that is that all his patience and hard work upon the street could be so quickly and so effortlessly transformed into beer and other treats for
Aunt and Dip. He was the middleman, the trading lime – and he was being squeezed.

Of course, Aunt no longer crept at night into the storeroom to steal the eggs for Victor. It had only taken three days for the packing foreman to observe that random eggs had disappeared, and
that they disappeared at night.

‘You think they’re hatching into bats?’ he asked. ‘Or are we being robbed?’

He and the watchman found the loosened board and set a trap. They sat on stools behind the entry board with sticks upon their laps. They shared a bottle of aqua vitae, and suppered silently on
pork and bread. One dozed while one kept watch.

At midnight Aunt arrived, a little slowed and fortified by drink. She had no appetite for foraging amongst the oval ghosts. But it was easy money, and Dip was far too tall and dandified to
forage for himself. They’d been amazed how much their little Vic had earned on his first day. He’d made enough to win himself not-quite-a-hug from Dip. It was not enough to buy good
clothes or meals in restaurants. There was enough, though, turned out from his trouser pockets (the country phrase, again), ‘to oil their throats and grease their bums’.

Aunt was too hurried to remove her hat. Her battered cloche, much loved, cleaved to her head as tightly as an acorn cup. Dip signalled that the lane was clear. Aunt freed the loose board with
her foot and pushed her hat and head straight through the gap. The packing foreman, full of self-esteem and pork, woke up in time to see the watchman’s stick make contact with the straw.
Aunt’s hat fell off, but – good friend that it was – it broke the blow. Her head went back into the town. She tore her chin on wood. She stood. She ran. Though she could have just
as safely strolled away. The loose board was too narrow. The foreman and the watchman were twice Aunt’s size and had to satisfy themselves with that one battered trophy, that old straw
cloche, that disembodied gaiety.

What should Dip and Aunt do now? What could they steal? Where were there eggs to boil for the next day’s trade? Aunt took the money that Victor had brought home. She did her sums, and
showed Dip how it worked with matchsticks spread out on the floor. They’d buy the eggs from a poultryman like blameless citizens for such-and-such each egg. Cheap eggs perhaps, not fresh
exactly, but not green either. They’d boil them up, and despatch Victor to sell them in the marketplace for such-and-such and such again. Ten matches spent earned fifteen matches back. And
fifteen matches made more than twenty-two. It was safe and legal – and lucrative, so long as eggs were à la mode. If only Aunt could recover her old hat or buy another one, the pair of
them would be content again.

So it nearly was. At first they provided and prepared the eggs, and Victor sold them on the streets. But soon they were too bored with boiling them, four at a time, in their one pot. They said
to Victor, ‘It’s your job.’ And so he got them from the poultryman himself. He learnt to count the money out and pay. He begged for charcoal or found wood to feed the stove in
Dip’s one room. He boiled the eggs himself, and took more care than Aunt or Dip had ever done to keep the shells intact and clean. They shared the profits, but he kept his merchandise well
out of sight. They hardly spoke. They hardly met. When Dip and Aunt came back at night, Victor was curled up with stomach pain and sleep. The eggs he ate each day had made him constipated. His guts
were pumped up with wind. They were as hard and bilious as sated snakes. His farts were counter-tenor monotones, as noisy and as regular as chimes. This was the fiercest smell. But there were
others too – the eerie odours that the eggs released when they were boiled, the badger-pungency of souring, broken eggs, the mawkishness of shells. The three of them had sulphur nightmares,
sulphur in their clothes, brimstone breath. They might as well have slept on Etna or inside the crater of some
soufrière
, decapitated like a breakfast egg. The smell was sweet and hot
and aggravating. Victor’s guts whined like unpunctured sausages in coals. Aunt did not snore, but puffed and hummed all night as if she did not dare to taint her lungs with inward breaths of
air.

Dip hardly slept. He stayed out on the streets all night. He longed to push his hands in strangers’ pockets once again. He had no appetite for sex with Aunt, or drink with Aunt, or hatless
Aunt. One evening he did not return. He’d make his fortunes in some other part of town. Then Aunt – her judgement blurred by reckless loneliness – found some other man. Her
sister’s boy? She left him with her baggage, unattended, in what had been Dip’s room and now was his. These were the first days of a life alone.

When Victor was eighty he could not recall his mother’s face, or Aunt’s, or Dip’s. He could recall the parasol, the broad-brimmed cloche, the patent shoes, the collar studs. He
could recall the painted cart piled high with greens and melons which Em had promised would one day take him and her out to the city edges where the trees began. He could recall his father’s
greying candle stub.

He did not talk about these things – though the bricks and cobbles of the town and marketplace stored all his early life like walls store moss, and the osmotic gossips of the city had
taken in his life and passed it on to anyone with time to spare. Victor himself, when he grew to be a man of consequence, had just one public story from those days of poverty and waifing eggs. It
was the story that he told when he could not escape the duties of the business millionaire and was called upon to make a speech to the Commerce Club or talk to someone from the radio or the
financial press, or write a foreword for the little magazine his staff produced.

They knew he started life with eggs. But then? What was it drove him onwards, up and out of eggs, apart from cramp and flatulence? How was it that a boy so young could have the vision to
diversify from eggs to eggs and fruit and bread and cheese, to upgrade his tray with decoration, then with wheels until he traded off a barrow? Where did he find the energy, the business zeal, to
strip his barrow when the trading day was done and hire out himself and it for bringing produce cheaply from the station, until he had two barrows, five, and twenty-five, and ten boys in his pay,
and fruit stalls of his own, and packing firms and farms, and, finally, before his fortieth year, the Soap Market itself ?

Why not stop when he was crowned the Fruit King of the city? Why battle on to set up import/export firms, and trucking companies, and canneries, to build Big Vic, to spread his fortune round the
city and the world so that each lemon squeezed for tea by anyone in town would have been packeted as seed, and grown in soil, and harvested in plantations, and sent in trucks and trains and boats,
and invoiced out of offices, and sold on market stalls that Victor owned?

‘You tend your tree. You get good fruit,’ he used to say. Or, ‘I was born a countryman – and country people always reinvest their seed.’ These were both phrases he
had taken from his man called Rook. But that single story from his past was not Rook’s work. It was Victor’s own: one evening – he was nine or ten, Aunt and Dip were gone, and he
was still surviving on boiled eggs – he ended up as usual in the cafes and the bars of the Soap Garden. Boiled eggs went well with mugs of beer – but he had learnt there was no point in
offering boiled eggs to those who drank the favoured clay-red wine or ordered coffee. Malt and eggs do not do battle in the mouth – but eggs with coffee or with wine destroy the taste and
smell of both.

There was a man who nearly always bought three eggs and ate them, without pause, whether he was drinking beer or wine or coffee-and-a-shot. He paid a little extra to have his eggs unshelled by
Victor. He did not take a plunge of salt. He dipped his eggs instead into the sugar pot. He halved each egg longways with his teeth and then consumed each half open-mouthed and without much regard
for the spectacle and mess he made. It was not clear what kind of man he was. He sat alone, though everyone who served or passed by deferred to him. He was so fat that he walked with a stick, not
because he lacked the strength to bear his weight, but simply as a means of maintaining lift and balance should he need to sit or climb a stair, or – rarity indeed – to step aside. His
walking stick was tarbony and topped in silver, not ostentatious but smart, and as sturdy as a cudgel. The scroll etching in the silver was made bold in its recesses by city grubbiness and
verdigris and – who could doubt it? – dried blood.

They said he was a landlord of some sort, a pimp, a man who’d been a consul in the tropics and had made a fortune out of gold or slaves or running guns, an impresario, a counterfeiter, an
operatic star who had not sung since some scandal or some love affair had silenced him, an undercover cop. He hardly ever spoke a word. He took his usual seat, at the margins of the nearest cafe.
It was a seat which did not require him to negotiate the narrow spaces between tables, chairs, and customers. He drank his drinks. He ate his eggs. He read his paper or his magazine. He made a
note, occasionally, inside a grey-bound book. He held his stick as if he were a shepherd eager for the chance to drive away a raven or a dog. He staved off fullness with excess.

‘We never knew his name, or what he did,’ said Victor. ‘The only certainty about this man was that he was worthy of respect.’

So Victor was fastidious. He made certain that the eggs he sold to him were fresh and free of shell, and clean. He placed the three shelled eggs, as usual, on the metal bill-and-tip which the
waiter had positioned next to – that balmy night – a glass of beer, and waited for his payment in small change. There was always a wait. A fat man finds it difficult to fish his purse
or coins from his trousers or his coat. His right hand was trapped inside his pocket when someone knocked him from behind. The table shuddered. And the beer? It spilled a little and would have
fallen from the table had not the fat man, with the speed and delicacy of a lizard’s tongue, shot out his one free hand and steadied it. He turned as best he could. His body did not turn,
just his head and neck. His chair and back received another blow and this time the beer and glass were on the ground before his hand could move. The eggs began to slide and arc across the tabletop,
their passage eased and oiled by beer. They jostled at the table’s edge like nervous bubbles at a drain, fell off, and then were split and knocked as tasteless as the cobblestones.

The fat man did not feel the third impulse. Two fighting men, one pushing with stiff fingers and a spittled mouth, another walking backwards and attempting to defend himself with kicks, sent the
table spinning on one leg, then sprawling, legs aloft, above the eggs and beer. So far as one could tell from the stream of threats and imprecations they exchanged, their differences would not be
solved without the death of one.

They were two market traders, partners, neighbours, old-time friends – and what they’d fallen out about wasn’t worth a bead of phlegm, let alone the lungfuls that the two of
them, now out of fighting range, were looping at each other through the air.

The younger of the two had wisecracked with the customers of the older man, the one whose fighting fingers were so certain and so stiff. He’d teased them, half cunningly and half in jest,
that his neighbour’s produce was not fresh.