Arcadia (32 page)

The first to warm their faces and their hands upon the flames were the market’s night-guests. Their nests were going up in smoke, but they were cheerful with the light and colours
reflected in all the windscreens of the marketplace. They squatted on their haunches with their bottles and let their faces redden with the drink and heat. They cheered as flames collapsed the
tepees made from wood and canvas. The heat compacted and sent its front-row audience back down the aisles of cars where it was darker, safer, less intense.

The crowd was growing. Late arrivals who had parked on pavements in the Woodgate district and who were too elated by the date and time to go back home, were making for the market bars when they
were blocked by smoke and fire and crowds. They were not alarmed. The midnight fire was not a threat to them. It only marked the closing of the market or the closing of the year. It gave a cheerful
touch to New Year’s Eve. The drunks and beggars pestered them for cigarettes and one or two lit up their cigarettes with embers from the fires.

The fire itself was changing mood. It spat. It was exasperated, and trapped. Fires by their nature sink and spread. They smoulder at their edges and colonize the land around. But cobbles do not
burn. They kept the fire at bay. The heat grew angrier, but it could not do much except startle everybody there with the pistol shot of cobbles splitting underneath the fire and timber
detonating.

There’s a winter city wind we call the Midnight Wheeze. The night-time warmth of city life is dragged up by the moon, and colder country air is sucked in underneath, along the pavements
and the alleyways and the tram routes, and blows till dawn. It and the fires made rendez-vous. They waltzed. Their gowns flew up and sent out puffs of heat. The flames were animated now. They
dipped and reached, they stretched, recoiled, as the wind shadow-boxed the night. The smallest of the fires had stretched the furthest – and, at last, it held on to the leafless twigs of two
snag trees which grew behind a bar. It turned them black. The flames had hardly touched. But those who watched saw fifty airborne smokers draw on fifty cigarettes as the twig tips drew in wind and
glowed as redly as an owlet’s eyes. The cigarettes caught fire. The flames now skipped like elves amongst the branches, feasting on the bark. The revellers in the Soap Garden looked up to see
two trees on fire and giving voice to wind as trumpets do. Already twigs were falling onto roofs, and roofs were chattering with debris and shrugging noisily at the sudden warmth. Already insects
filled the air. And there were rats and bats and cockroaches that sought to flee the flames.

The wind now turned. It let the trees collapse. It blew back on the marketplace where the crowd had grown quieter, less amused. The fires hissed. Flames curled like Chinese waves and broke onto
the bonnets and the windscreens of the nearest cars. A tongue of heat blackened, shrank, a linen football flag that some young man had tied to the radio aerial of his creaky van. It scorched the
chrome on ancient bumpers, drew acrid smells from new ones moulded out of plastic.

Rook saw the trees go up, and he was gripped with guilt and fear and exhilaration. He ran, when everybody ran, to see what happened. He joined in the panic, whipped it up, agreed with, echoed
every shout from every trader who read conspiracy in every flame, in every car, in every stranger’s face. ‘They’ve burnt our stalls!’ Too late to recover anything. Too hot
and dangerous. ‘They’ve set fire to us now,’ though who ‘They’ were, they did not say. ‘They’ were the mayor, and architects, and businessmen, and Victor.
‘They’ were the men who came at dawn to ‘start from scratch’.

Who was the first to overturn a car? Not Rook. He was too small and breathless and had no comrades. Some young men who loved their cars had tried to back them out of danger, reversing into
spaces where people stood, pressing their bumpers against the bumpers of the car behind, attempting three-point turns where there was not sufficient room to turn a hand-cart. Some drivers at the
front tried to clear a path at the fire’s feet. They blared their horns, were more concerned for paintwork than for flesh. They found themselves enclosed by men. Their cars were rocked and
turned. They had to scramble free. One young man – his back tyres melting smoke, his windscreen smashed – sought reparation with a flaming stick. He’d kill to save his car.

The Soap Market did not have enough exits for all the vehicles that were parked. Besides, the narrow roads and pavements which led away were blocked by other cars and more crowds, drawn to the
place by noise and light and smoke. What chance then for the fire brigade? Their engines could get no closer to the fires than the hydrants at Tower Square and on Saints Row would allow. The hoses
that they ran could not reach the market rim. The firemen did not care. This fire was self-contained. It could not leap the cobbles to the town. Besides, at dawn, as everybody knew, the demolition
would begin. So ‘Let the fire burn out,’ the police advised. ‘We’ll clear the marketplace of people. We don’t want injuries.’ But try to separate a drunken crowd
from fire, or owners from their cars, or market men from what was left of all their working lives. No one would budge, though the captain of the district police made announcements with his
megaphone.

It did not take long for those two trees to burn. The flames climbed down the trunk and sped along the ground. They jumped like cats across the roofs of outhouses and drink stores and kitchens
at the back of bars. The drinkers and the beggars took their chance to loot before the fire drank all the beer and wine. They dragged out cases, smashing open bottles. They helped themselves to
anything to eat or spend or sell. They fought the fire with German lager. They egged it on with Scotch and rum and wooden chairs. The bars and gardens had no time to bargain with the flames. There
was too much wood. Only the burgher laurels were reluctant to join in. Their leaves seemed proofed, their branches far too flexible for flames. But when they burned at last, their molten marzipan
hung in a cloud of country cooking which settled on the night like frost on fields.

The city police are not as patient as their country brothers. It seemed to them that this was a market protest which had gone mad. They well remembered what the market traders had done to the
traffic when they marched on Big Vic, and – years before – the mayhem of the produce strike. The soapies had a reputation for independence, for cussedness. The police had little time
for marketeers. And they were not fond, either, of the ‘dross’, the down-and-outs, who slept out there. Now these two groups were teaming up with young drunk men. A fearsome trinity.
And there was fighting, looting, fires. Already there were pockets of disturbance on the streets beyond the Soap Market. Young men attacked big cars, blocked trams, uprooted shrubs in the
Mathematical Park. They took revenge on everything and everyone as if violence was the only way to make the city notice them. They knew instinctively that they were invisible unless they rioted and
smashed and stole. And then their faces made the television screen.

The local police – exhausted, shocked – did not need a permit from a priest or mayor to draw their truncheons, raise their shields, and bruise the crowd. What was the point in
holding back, in softening their blows? If they did not put an end to this disturbance now, then who could tell where it might lead and what it might achieve?

S
O FAR, SO GOOD.
A little local trouble, nurtured at the festive chest of New Year’s Eve. But though the cobbles held the flames at bay, the heat
and passion spread. Emptied bottles soon were filled with fuel from cars and stopped with rags and lit and thrown. What had held beer arced through the night like fairground comets, falling short
on cars, exploding in the air, or showering the firemen and the police in flaming rain. In other times the older traders would have called for calm for fear their pitches might be destroyed, their
customers abused. But what had they to lose now that the marketplace was stripped, their trestles and their canvas already up in flames, their stomachs full of drink? It shouldn’t end like
this, they thought, but not with sufficient certainty to interfere. Instead they raised their arms and voices with the mob. Midnight made them brave, eloquent, and loud.

What wisdom caused the captain of the police to radio for help? Why did he lose his nerve? Was he alarmed he could not stop his men from cracking heads? Was it the flaming bottles? Was it the
cars? Or was he simply calm and procedural, judging that his men were now outnumbered by a mob and that diplomacy and night would not damp down its fire?

He radioed for help at five-past one on that first, smoke-filled morning of the year, though what he said to his superiors is in dispute. The public enquiry that was held could not unravel truth
and lies. But this is sure, his plea for – so he claimed – another fifty policemen at the most, disturbed the brandy and cigars of the city’s powered notables. The chief of
police, the mayor, the owner-publisher of all three city newspapers (my remote, rotund boss), three of the city’s four leading financiers (no Victor, naturally), their partners and their
consorts (my boss’s blatant wife), had all been top-table guests at the businessmen’s annual dinner. They’d made their annual speeches, dispensed their annual handshakes and their
pledges. They’d joined in the choruses of New Year songs. (Once more the buxom sisters of the Band Accord were wheezing music for a fee.) And now they were alone, except for waitresses and
cocktail staff, in a private suite.

The chief of police was trying hard to understand an anecdote the mayor was telling when a waitress brought him a folded note on an enamelled Persian tray. He read: ‘H
APPY
N
EW
Y
EAR
, and to celebrate the occasion there is organized rioting in the market area. Briefly: arson, vehicles and property
destroyed, incendiary devices, injuries (fatalities?). The district captain is flapping like a scorched moth. Requests urgent help. What action?’ The ornamented B.L. below the note was the
signature of the chief’s uniformed aide.

‘At last, the Revolution,’ the chief said, and read the note out loud.

His wife raised her eyebrows. ‘I suppose this means we have to leave,’ she said. ‘Who’d be married to a policeman? I never get to finish meals. Or drink. Though duty
never calls so loudly during working hours. Oddly.’

‘We stay,’ her husband said. ‘That is my resolution for the New Year. Never leave a party before you’ve smoked the butt and drunk the dregs.’

‘And what about the Revolution, dear? That starchy little man who calls himself your aide won’t give you any peace until you’ve done his bidding. I’m never sure who works
for whom.’

The chief preferred his wife when she was sober, and out of sight. He passed her comments off as family jokes. ‘I do not need to leave the room to settle this,’ he said. He took a
ballpoint from his jacket and added just two words to his aide’s short note. ‘Deploy URCU.’ His signature, attempted with a flourish, pierced and tore the paper. He held the paper
up dramatically.

‘That should do the trick,’ he said. ‘Revolution ends before cigar, I think.’

On public holidays, such as New Year, he explained, it was not easy to solve problems of this kind. District policemen, it seemed, were in short supply at such a time. The ones that were not
working on the New Year’s shift were either out of town or drunk or celebrating on the street. But there were young men in the barracks who’d been on duty all night long, denied a
drink, denied cigars, denied festivities. Let loose a bored detachment from the Urban Rapid Control Unit, the chief assured the other guests, and there would be – he sought a phrase which
could be both manly and dispassionate – ‘sudden order on the streets’. How simple it felt, amid such comfort and such company, to settle revolutions with a phrase. He called the
waitress. He placed his two-word note upon the tray and sent her off whence she had come to activate his aide and URCU.

The district police had been extemporary. Their blows had been offhand, and improvised. Their strategy was unrehearsed. They were the jazzmen of the law. But URCU were the classicists,
contrapuntal, harmonized, notated, drilled. Their last note was implicit in their first. And their first note was this: a barrack klaxon call that in less than four minutes filled the barrack yard
with two hundred and twenty men, selected for URCU duties because their deference, their height, their eagerness to please suggested they were loyal to orders and to masters rather than to class.
Kitted out in Impact Hats and blue-black riot overalls and keen to stretch their limbs after an evening spent crouched over dominoes, letters home, and boot polish, they listened to instructions
(‘Suppress, contain, arrest’) with the queasy eagerness of footballers at a pre-match briefing. Defenders had been issued with long transparent, perspex shields. The strikers, divided
into eight snatch-squads of six, had short shields, nightsticks made out of toughened PVC, and lighter boots for running swiftly and for kicking with numbing accuracy. The specialists had
short-barrelled weapons, or plastic-baton launchers, or canisters of gas, or dogs – and – perks for the elite – hip-flasks of rum to keep them warm and reckless until their
specialities were called upon. Someone set up the URCU ‘anthem’ beating on his shield, the unforgiving sound of PVC on perspex. In seconds every shield was shivering in unison. Dum dum
dum-dum-dump. Dum. Dum. Dum-dum. Dump!

URCU rode across the city in their Sweepers – blue-black riot coaches (to coordinate with overalls), their fishnet windows grilled, their foremost fenders prowed and aproned like
snow-ploughs. Soon there would be field toilets, civilian backup units, refreshment vans for officers and ranks, the paramedics, the parasites. Already trams and traffic had been stopped from
entering the older parts of town. Already marksmen with infrared night-sights were seeking out the attic rooms in those offices and homes which looked down on the fringes of the Soap Market. Camera
crews, from police and television, buzzed and hovered like carcass bees. Police radio wavelengths were as overloaded and as chattering as a telephone line sagging with its swifts and swallows on
summer’s last warm day. Here was a city at full stretch, able – as only cities are – to Suppress, Contain, Arrest the chaos of the human heart as if it were as fettered and as
mindless as a tram.