Arcadia (19 page)

‘He’s selling fossils and antiques today,’ he’d said. The neighbour swore this foolishness, these lies, had cost him trade. And more. And worse. He knew for sure that,
while his back was turned, the younger one pocketed the cash for onion clumps which they had purchased as partners and whose profits they should share. He did not listen to his friend’s
defence – that ‘while my back was turned’ meant ‘while I filled myself with drink, while I let the business, onion clumps and all, slide into hell’. There were a
hundred other microscopic aggravations between the men that, in the sudden heat of anger, seethed and thrived like viruses. ‘Go dine on shit,’ one said. The other held his little finger
up, a gesture meant to show disdain, and said, with feeble dignity, ‘I’ll never talk to you again.’

The fat man filled his lungs and put some pressure on his stick. His knuckles whitened. It looked as if he were about to show how he could slay these two with just one etched and silver blow.
But he was only holding tight so that he could stand. Once up – and once the two adversaries had quietened and were watching him – he dipped his hand into the inner pocket of his coat
and pulled out a wallet. He took out one banknote. He unfolded it and held it up, theatrically, for all to see. A blue five-thousand note. A two-month wage. Enough to purchase a good horse, enough
to buy a thousand eggs. The fat man folded the blue note in two, lengthways, exactly as he halved his eggs, and tore it carefully along the crease. What was he then? A conjurer? Would he set fire
to those two halves, or chew them up, then make them whole again? Was this a good note? Was it counterfeit?

There was no movement in the Soap Garden. Even waiters, trays aloft, were frozen where they stood. Victor was not the only one who’d never seen a note as large as that before. What kind of
man would tear such wealth in two?

The fat man flung out and spread his arms, a half-note in each hand. His voice was both bourgeois and everyday. It was, surprisingly, for one so large, a little reedy too.

‘One each,’ he said. He shook the worthless halves impatiently. ‘Come on. Step up.’

The younger man was the first to step forward. He did not look the fat man in the eye. He concentrated on the half-a-fortune and the walking stick, expecting there to be some finger trick or
some low, crippling blow. He need not have feared. The stiff, blue piece of paper transferred to him with just the slightest reticence where the embossed printing snagged on the fat man’s
dampened skin.

The elder of the two was also reticent. He recognized the fat man’s game. He had children of his own and knew how squabbles were resolved by parental trickery. You broke a ginger stick in
half and let the children suck away their moods. Yet half a ginger stick had value on its own. It tasted just as good in pieces. But half a note? He could not formulate exactly what the trick might
be, yet he was in no doubt, as he took in the fat man and his neighbour holding half a fortune in their hands, that he would be a fool to walk away. He might as well take half a note. To turn away
would not look good or wise. Pride would not allow a market man to jeopardize just half a chance of making random, unearned cash.

He did not move. He put his hand out. Palm up. The cussed supplicant. Let Mammon come to him. The fat man was not proud. He did not mind that he would have to move a pace or two. He took three
steps. He spread his weight across both legs and leant his stick against a chair. He rolled the half note in a ball, dismissively, with studied irony. He dropped it on the outstretched, flattened
palm. And then he took the market trader’s hand in both of his and wrapped the fingers round the paper ball.

‘Now talk,’ the fat man said.

Both traders felt more foolish than they’d done since they were adolescents. They did not hang around. They did not walk away, of course, arms linked, their two half lives already
interlocked. They disappeared like cats, their heads and shoulders down, their ears alert, their fur on end. They would not talk that night – but who can doubt that they would trade weak
grins the following day and then handshakes? They’d see the sense in being partners once again.

The fat man did not watch them go. He waited for a moment, on his stick, while three waiters put the chairs and table back in place, wiped up the beer, removed the mushy eggs. The proprietor
himself brought out a replacement beer, the best. ‘It’s on the house,’ he said, thankful for the damage and the mayhem that the blue note had thwarted and thankful, too, for all
the rich absurdities which they had witnessed.

The fat man started on his beer, as unbothered, it would seem, by the spat which he had ended as by the money he had lost. The no-expression on his face said, Five thousand? That’s a
morsel for a man like me. I’d throw a hundred of them to the wind just so long as I can have my beer and eggs in peace and quiet. He looked up, then. The thought of eggs had made him lift his
eyes and run his baby tongue along his lips.

Victor was standing where he always stood. Hypnotized. The fat man held three fingers up. Victor selected three more eggs. He cracked their shells at their thick ends and peeled them white and
bare. He brought the sugar from another table. He stood and took the coins from the fat man’s hand. He hoped that he would tear a note in half for him as well. He was not old enough to fully
understand what he had witnessed: the fickle, slender contrivances, the artifices, the stratagems of wealth, its piety, its fraudulence, its crude finesse. But – given time – he’d
understand it all and make a scripture out of it.

‘The fat man taught me,’ Victor explained, to those who wished to hear or read the complex moral of his anecdote, ‘that money talks.’ He did not know that such an insight
was old hat and crassly simple. Or that his variations of this insight – such as ‘Money is the peacemaker’ and ‘Money’s muscle’ – were simple complications
of the truth. What the fat man had displayed was cynicism, if cynicism is the trick of seeming to engage with chance and danger but without taking any risks. Money has no moral tact. It’s
true, the rich have power to intervene, to heal and damage as they wish. Toss money in the ring and see the drama that it makes of other people’s lives. But, more, they have the power, if
they choose, to stay more silent and discrete than monks. The rich – and here was Victor’s unacknowledged dream – can simply make a wall, a fortress shield of wealth, beyond which
the dramas of the world can run their courses unobserved.

Victor so far – he was nine or ten – had led a life not free of drama of the tragic kind. The misfortune of his father’s death. The journey into town. The nights beneath the
parasol. The fire. The days with Aunt and Dip. The liberation and the tyranny of eggs. His was a moral tale, an exemplar of how miserably the small fry of the world can fare. Someone could write a
book on his first years and make it stand for all our city’s woes. No wonder, then, that Victor now wished for something more mundane than poverty. He wished to be a fat man, too, protected
from the city by what his wallet held. In this, he sought what Joseph, decades later, sought. And that was privacy. He saw himself, an older, wealthy man, alone and dining in a public place. At
times it was a city restaurant, at other times a trestle in the countryside, with chickens and with trees. There was no noise, except the sound of cutlery on plates. He was quite calm and unafraid.
No one around was close enough to disappoint him or betray him. A waiter, paid to do his job, was all he needed. He did not need or want a family, or friends. He did not need the warmth of company
or conversation, or the reassurances of praise. No one could come and give him Chinese burns. No one could let him down or disappear. There was no comfort which could not be bought. There was no
problem that he could not solve by tearing notes in half. What is more eloquent and reassuring than a shield of private wealth?

So Victor now – and almost by design – became an undramatic boy. He had his room, his job, his street routines. He had ambition, too, but nothing to make good grand opera from. He
set his sights painstakingly on targets within reach – more sales of eggs, a market stall, an orchard and a field, a motorvan, some staff, some ledgers and a desk … He told himself
that when he was more safe and certain, he would test the magic of the torn banknote. Not five thousand, naturally. He was the timid sort. A hundred note, perhaps. But that day never came, despite
the money that he made. Because he never felt that he was safe or certain? Because he was mean and unadventurous? That was the judgement of the town. No one expected such a man – and so late
in life – to lower his defences for a while and toss his money in the ring.

I
T WAS THE
M
ONDAY
after Victor – pent up all his life, between the nipple and the purse – had celebrated being old
with a birthday lunch of coddled fish, fresh air, accordions. It was the Monday after he became engrossed in his last, his first, his only civic fantasy, to publicly display his private wealth at
last by building a market worthy of a beggar woman and a millionaire. A damp and windy morning, just short of nine o’clock – and Victor the Insomniac, a boss who normally was at his
desk a little after dawn, was nowhere to be seen.

Rook, with Anna at his side, walked the two kilometres of cobble, stone, and asphalt between his apartment and the tunnel below Link Highway Red. Her hand was on his arm. They seemed as fearless
as lovers half their age, made adolescent by the comfort – unexpected, overdue – of flesh on flesh. No one would think these two – this sparrow-chested, greying man, this woman,
warm and pouchy as a pastry bun – were husband and wife. Such wooing, binary displays belong to fledgling romances. Maturer ones are more abashed, less startled and enraptured by the luck of
love. These two fledglings on the street were not the married kind. Their circumstance was clear: here was an out-of-season
grande affaire
between two people almost old enough to be too old,
too sleepy for such public love. ‘Sleepy’ is the word the growers use to specify a pear, and other soft-fleshed fruits, which have matured but, though they have their colour and their
shape, will soon begin to brown and rot and lose their flavour and their bloom. To taste such fruit is to taste the gamey pungency of middle age.

As they cut diagonally across the town, between the rush-hour traffic and the crowds, beneath the ochre-coloured eiderdown of clouds, Rook and Anna seemed misplaced, late Sunday revellers caught
by the Monday morning light. The hastening single people in the street, toothpaste and coffee on their gums, a day of labour summoning, a desk, a loom, a till, gave way to them, as if a couple so
engrossed and casual had passage rights, like yachts, to an unhindered channel at the pavement’s crown. We all defer to couples, do we not? A man and woman hand in hand can make the toughest
of us step aside, can stop a tram.

This couple were not rushed. They were not hungry for their desks or eager for their colleagues and their phones. They held each other by the hand, the upper arm, the elbow, and the wrist. They
held each other’s waists. And when they reached the walkers’ tunnel – just at the spot where Rook had used his keys and fists and where the mugged and flattened laurel leaves
still lifted in the draught – they took advantage of the solitude and gloom to kiss. Once they reached the windy mall, however, they separated by a metre, and walked in parallel. The weekend
spent in Rook’s apartment had been refreshment for them both. They’d hardly left Rook’s bed by day, and then at night they’d taken to the streets and bars to fuel
themselves, with the reckless alcohol of crowds, the aphrodisiacs of drink, for more lovemaking. Yet now they walked demurely, chastely, along the coloured marble flagstones. It was not wise to
love too publicly. Who knew who might be watching from the greenhouse on the 28th, or through the tinted windows of his office suite? Who knew if Victor – that unimpassioned, loveless man who
seemingly had never tried the luxuries of pressing skin to skin, who could not understand the pleasures of the thigh, the tongue, the abdomen, the breast – might take against two lovers in
Big Vic.

The mall was cunning preparation for the lobby of the office block. It cooled and shrank pedestrians. It echoed with the click of heels, and the heavy doors of taxi cabs, and sighing ventilation
ducts. The shiny brick-veneers, the mirrored colonnades, the fish-trap cloisters leading to the finance palaces and the trading brokerages which were the tenants there, did not invite
ill-discipline or dawdling. The mall’s misanthropy struck Rook and Anna dumb, just as the deep, cool shade of conifers will silence those who exit from a field. They did not speak. They even
blushed a little, as if they guessed their weekend intimacy could not be hidden here. Their entry to Big Vic was self-conscious, too, Anna’s face a little too composed and Rook’s
– unanswered – greetings to the lobby staff, the uniformed commissionaires, too hearty for the time of day. They shared – a shade too clumsily – a segment of Big Vic’s
rotating doors. They shared the lift for twenty-seven floors. But once they reached the office lobby they headed for their desks as if the only love they shared was love of work.

Rook was in the best of moods, and with good cause. He was relieved to find his desk was, for the moment, clear. Normally by that time on a Monday, Victor would have sent his Fix It list –
a sheaf of notes, queries and instructions, recriminations. Victor himself did not like to deal with people on the telephone, or even speak to clients face to face. What was to blame for that? His
hibernating temperament? His hearing aid? His shield of wealth? He read reports. He scanned accounts. He watched the share and stock prices dance banking quicksteps round their decimals on the
office VDUs. If there was anything to be
done
, then Rook could do it. He had younger legs and ears. But on that Monday, there were no tasks for him, no estate manager to intimidate by
telephone (‘We note that field beans are a trifle mean this year. And late’), no groundless tension to diffuse amongst the market traders, no thin letter of regret, refusal, to be
composed and sent, no group executive meetings to be called and chaired while Victor claimed some old man’s malady as pretext for staying in his room or on the roof.