Arcadia (22 page)

Those who’d been on good terms with Rook and considered the pitch payments to be bribes initiated by themselves, felt just as proprietorial now about their ‘man at Victor’s
ear’, despite the fact that their man had been sacked. Indeed, they even felt a little guilty that their market cunning might have been the cause of Rook’s dismissal. They felt a little
fearful, too. What might the old man do? They judged it best to wait and see. But there were one or two – the younger ones, the ones who’d had less coffee and more shot – who went
across to Rook. They shook his trembling hand. ‘A bad business,’ they said, inviting Rook to reveal exactly what had occurred with Victor. And then to end the silence, ‘Let us
know if you need any help.’ Or they put a shot down on the table and invited Rook to stun his bad luck with a little drink.

So Rook still had a welcome in the marketplace, somewhere to pass his time while he decided how to spend his life. He came each morning, exchanged a repertoire of gestures with Cellophane Man,
who stood as usual at the market edge directing people, trolleys, vans, and sat amongst his allies there. If they enquired, ‘Come on, what did you do to get the push?’, he told no lies.
But neither did he tell the truth. He was good at keeping quiet and hinting with his mouth and eyes that he was innocent of blame. Within a few days the market men behaved as if he’d never
been their go-between, or in their pay, or they in his, and just enjoyed his dry sarcasm and his cawing, nasal laugh when he told stories of the boss amongst his cats and insects on the 28th.
Market memories are short so long as debts are settled fast. A lasting grudge is one that’s waiting to be cashed.

Rook wandered through the alleys and the lanes of vegetables and fruit with fresh eyes now. He need not be as watchful as before, noting prices, faces, infringements of the market code. He need
not be prepared to take pitch payments, surreptitiously, or listen to complaints about the price and quality of olives or pears. If he pushed through the crowds to the peaks and canyons of a citrus
stall, no fruiterer would simply click his tongue and shake his head to signify ‘No need to pay!’ He was the public now and he was ruled, like anybody else, by the market creeds which
one trader – tired of scrumpers or being asked for credit – had chalked up on his stall: ‘No Loot, No Fruit’, and ‘We take IOUs, but only in cash!’

Rook was content to be a simple shopper, thumbing, like all the other shoppers there, but with more blatant expertise, the skins of fruit to check their readiness. Or plucking one leaf from
pineapple tufts and judging by its reticence the softness of the core. Or testing whether pod-beans would snap or bend between his fingers. Or lifting melons to his nose and knowing, from the
smell, the reasty from the ripe. Or scratching new potatoes with his nails to see how well the blistered skins would lift. He knew the trick of listening to cabbages: the hearty ones were silent in
the ear. He understood the colours of the carrot, and how the reddest roots were soapiest and only good for stews. You could not confuse him with a waxy pear, or with mushrooms
‘dirtied’ with a spray. A butcher might make a fool of Rook with some false cut, some trick with bone or fat, but no one in the Soap Market had greater, wider skill with fruits and
roots and leaves.

Why waste such expertise? Why couldn’t he return from whence he’d come – the smart son of a marketeer – and become a marketeer himself, a soapie for the second time?
Because of Victor? Because he was a snob, who having laboured at a desk was not prepared to rise at five to bend and lift and sell? Because he was too old to mend his ways? He was not rejuvenated
by the thought of merchant Rook, his thin and greying head peering from behind a gleaming splash of fruit, his fortune measured out in paper bags. But neither was he much seduced by the alternative
– a Rook with nothing much to do except to sit and age and spend. If only he could find the heart – and shamelessness – to lift a pen, a telephone, and answer Anna’s calls
to him, then, maybe, having nothing much to do but spend would seem less mournful.

Rook hoped to meet her on the street, by chance. He was alert for her, for any word of her. Anna’s was the only face, he thought, from which he could get pleasure. For sure, he did not
hope to see his mugger once again. The boy – whose ’nife’ he still possessed – had no importance in his life. Yet, on the morning of Rook’s tenth visit to the market
bar, he encountered Joseph for the second time. The youth was barrowing red sacks of onions, three at a time, from an open truck which was parked amongst the vans and cars at the market edge. Rook
was not pleased to see these two adversaries of his in such a partnership, with Joseph working for the man who’d always treated Rook with cold disdain. He was perplexed at first. He could not
think what chance, what scheme, what machination, had brought these two together. But his confusion could not last because the moment that he focused on the strangeness of it all, he realized the
truth. Rook did not need to draw himself a map. The mugging and the sacking of two weeks before now made full sense. Details that had escaped him returned in trusses and in clusters. Rook
remembered now how Con had shaken the sealed envelope of pitch money so tauntingly in his face, a challenge on his lips. Then, within two hours at the most, Joseph – armed with a photograph,
a knife – had tried … tried what? Tried at Con’s behest to resecure the envelope. And having failed to resecure it with a knife, what had Con done? He’d made a call, or
sent an unsigned note, that afternoon to Victor. And here was Joseph, still in Con’s employ. And here was Rook, disinherited, without a job to do. Those five blameless party guests! Those
harmless, dry old men! Rook found it grimly comic that he’d dreamed of tracking down and wiping out such innocents. So now he knew who’d caused this chaos in his life. If he had half a
chance he’d see to it that Con was sent the bill.

But, for the moment, it was Joseph on his mind, not Con. He’d beaten Joseph once before; he’d beat him yet again. So when a few days later Rook spotted him in the Soap Market, he
determined they should speak. It was quite late and dark. It was that summer’s warmest night and the city had its sleeves rolled up and could not sleep. For once, Rook had outstayed the
waiter’s welcome at the market bar. The Soap Garden was becoming his backyard. He and three other men had played domino dice until all the other empty chairs and tables had been stacked and
the bar staff had changed into their own clothes.

The barman closed the shutters and rinsed the final glasses and left the four men in the midnight July gloom to finish off their game. Rook was the last to leave. He was not skilled at dice and
he had chanced his stake on one hot throw. He’d won, against three lukewarm throws from his companions. They’d settled up in thousand notes, and Rook had ten of them, folded in the
pocket of his leather coat, as he set off for home.

The sweep-jeeps and the men with hoses had been at work and what had been a dusty, waste-strewn space, cluttered with dismantled stalls and flattened produce boxes, was now as gleaming and as
scrubbed as a spray-washed shingle beach – except that night-time beaches reflect the white lights of the sky, and smell of medicine, and perform a nocturne, made from water, wind, and stone.
This washed place smelt more of soup. It honked the jazz of traffic horns and voices in the summer night. It was lit by the yellow, oblong constellations of distant windows in offices and rooms
where no one had the energy, in such a heat as this, to pull the blinds or go to bed.

In the summer there was hardly space for all the dispossessed and homeless who came to roost in the dripping troughs and crevices of the Soap Market. Why sleep indoors, in derelicts or hostels
or up against the bricks and tiles of bridges, subways, underpasses? Why squat in dark, abandoned flats – your only privacy an unused mattress up against the window or the door – when
it’s July and there’s no rain and the sun has been so fierce by day that all the midnight, city air is swollen with the heat?

There was no need to light a fire from packing debris, but there were fires because the poor are always cold in spirit and need the optimistic mesmerism of the flames to take them through the
night, to help them kindle just a little desperate joy amongst such misery. Some of the fires would not last long. Their purpose was to shed a canopy like bulbs shed light, making rounded rooms
with walls of melting night for children who could not sleep without the fantasy of ‘home’. Some fires would burn till dawn, topped up by sleepless residents whose thirst for alcohol
could not be blunted by their desperation or fatigue. One fire gave light for noisy games of cards. Another was the fire where spuds and sweetcorn, gleaned from the market floor, were ember-baked
on skewers made from cycle spokes. Another warmed the singers’ throats – the singing broken up by coughs, those two most humble sounds of human life becoming tangled in the mouth. In
this, their simple warmth and light and sound, the night-time soapies were the closest citizens in town to the earth’s enduring elements. They understood what every moth must understand, that
flame is enemy and friend. Some found in it good cause to smile, but others were expressionless or else astonished beyond words by the scalding visions that the flames revealed. But mostly people
sat or slept alone, disgruntled, shamed, made volatile and distant by a life which cast them as the rootless, parasitic clinker weeds amongst the steady stems of native bedding plants. Some slept
on cobbles, statuesque, their heads upon their knees, their arms looped round their legs. Some curled on cardboard mattresses with pillow-sacks, or nested in the timber and the canvas of the market
stalls. Women – rarer, older than the men – looped their arms through plastic bags of clothes and dozed, or pretended to. To seem asleep was their frontier against the raids and sorties
of the town. It gave them some respite from their pain – their swollen feet, necrotic toes, their boils, and coughs, their migraines and their chills. Men talked in voices that were stripped
to wire, or muttered madly to their chests, or carried their misfortune squarely, cleanly, without shame. Until they slept, that is. Who could tell the shameless from the lost, when all of them
seemed just as thin and innocent and urinous beneath the duvet of the night?

Rook walked as quickly as he could between the starvelings and the vagabonds, the gangrels and the drunks. He was an easy target for their wit or for the begging hands which waved at him or
tugged his trouser cuffs, or for their savage mutterings. He did not like the market when the awnings and the stalls were felled, and when the ripe and appetizing daytime colours of the crops were
replaced by the moistened greys of night. He did not look when he heard oaths or offers. It was not wise to be waylaid by their ill-luck. If he gave cash or time to one, then all of them would rush
to him like mallards in the park, pecking for a crust.

Ahead he spotted three young men, as awkward on their legs as day-old foals. They called him to them, but he did not go. He could not quite unscramble what they said. But he was certain he knew
what they held inside their paper cups, their shallow plastic trays, their makeshift dishes. These were what people nicknamed the Taxi Cabs, clumsy, noisy, slow, and fuelled by petrol. They sniffed
whatever petrol they could steal. They did not care that nowadays the petrol contained an Anti-Sniff. ‘Danger’ warned the stickers on the petrol caps. ‘Ethyl Mercaptan’. It
smelt of skunk. So what? The boys smelled just like skunks themselves. It did not dull their appetite for fuel, not even if the Anti-Sniff made them nauseous, hyperactive, violent. It blocked their
tongues, and caused them to tremble like crones and greybeards made helpless by a stair or kerb.

Rook did not lift his head to face the Taxi Cabs; or even to trade signals with Cellophane who was still on his feet and summoning Rook, ‘This way. This way. Then right. And straight
ahead,’ as if Rook were a van that’s passage blocked the marketplace. He chose a route which took him to the market’s edge, near the house where he had lived when young. He liked
to walk those streets and look up at the cluttered windows of the carpet salesmen. Was that cracked glass the same that he’d pressed his face against, what? thirty years ago and more? for
private, hawk-eye glimpses of the local girls? His mind was already set on women. The July heat, the weeks since he’d last slept with Anna, made him wonder what he’d do if some young
woman bedded down on polythene amongst the cobblestones asked for money in return for sex. He did not trust himself. He was afraid.

He walked a little quicker now, the touch of panic and arousal at his heels. He almost stumbled over Joseph, sleeping at the market edge amongst the padlocked carts and barrows. The
mugger’s face was busy with its dreams. It was not proud or shy in sleep, but blinked and gaped and made no secret of its missing tooth, the cherry birth-stain on its cheek, the pitted
craters on its nostrils and its chin, the meagre, ill-advised moustache, the crusty scar above the eye where he’d been wounded by a key. The skin was just as cracked but not as bronzed as it
had been when he’d fled the countryside by Salad Bowl Express. The city life had whitened him. He looked as harmless and as dull as bread.

What made Rook feel again as tough and sentimental as a movie star? Was it the triumph of his fists, that time so long ago? Was it the residue of how he felt about old Victor, Anna, Con? Or just
his dreadful appetite for girls transformed to violence when he saw the sleeping boy?

He thought he’d wake him with a kick. But what if Joseph yelled? The mob would come. He’d have a tottering circle made from drunks and Taxi Cabs. Rook was tempted to drop a coin in
the open mouth and creep off to watch the boy awake, or choke. Instead, he searched his pockets for the knife. He sprung the blade and squatted at Joseph’s side. Just like a father with an
oversleeping child, he squeezed Joseph’s ear lobe, a parent’s trick to open up the eyes. He waved the knife across his face, and said, ‘It’s Joseph’s
“Nife” – without the K. Is this your property?’ He lay the flat blade on the young man’s nose.